Lots of drama over in r/badlinguistics over whether or not use of double negatives is "uneducated". (np.reddit.com)
SubredditDrama
24 ups - 14 downs = 10 votes
51 comments submitted at 03:46:17 on Apr 6, 2014 by NegaNote
Lots of drama over in r/badlinguistics over whether or not use of double negatives is "uneducated". (np.reddit.com)
SubredditDrama
24 ups - 14 downs = 10 votes
51 comments submitted at 03:46:17 on Apr 6, 2014 by NegaNote
IIT: No one didn't get not one upvote.
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So let me get this straight, there's a guy criticizing a bunch of people for using improper English, so a linguistics sub attacks him for being racist, then classist, and provides no explanation why what he's saying is bad linguistics, just that he's a horrible person for disliking certain dialects, and continuing to taunt him without even bothering to calm down and explain politely?
That's my problem with bad-whatever subs, they don't really work to fix or help correct bad whatever, just attack and make fun of people for not having the same degrees as them.
> improper English
This is the problem, the fact that he made himself the arbiter of what is proper and improper English. No linguist takes that seriously.
And the problem I see with that is no one cared to explain that to him.
How? If you scroll down there are lots of explanations. It's also a not a hard concept: don't judge people by their cultural background.
They never really said that directly to him, just kept saying he was racist and being dodgy about the questions except for one or two people.
What part of the explainations was missing though? I thought it was clear enough.
I just interpreted it as no one really explaining there's no such thing as proper English, and the people he's criticizing just speak a different dialect than him. They did imply it, but I felt they were acting as if he knew why he was wrong.
Hmm. I thought that was made pretty clear in both threads.
Here I think it's pretty clear, and over there I understood what they were saying, but I think it would be confusing to someone who doesn't already have a basic understanding of it.
I just think the poster is really deluded about the definition of racism.
When people show up here to defend themselves generally we don't explain why they're in the drama....we usally just make fun of them. Another guy showed up and they explained the negative concord to him.
Well /r/subredditdrama doesn't exist for criticizing anything specific, and we don't call ourselves experts on the topic. When historians or linguists are experts on the topics they're attacking others for not understanding, and rarely put any effort into enlightening the person they're targeting, just make fun of them in the comments. Props to that guy for being a greater person though, it's a shame the other 75 comments weren't as helpful.
Historians and linguists are being oppressed by privileged stemlords and their anger is justified, stemlord!
linguistics is a stem field.
Who the fuck cares? It's pointless to argue about whether "linguistics" is a "stem" field. It's an incredibly diverse field that includes people doing stuff that spans from formal logic to cultural anthropology to experimental psychology. Lots of different people are doing lots of different things, and people who declare loudly and rudely "lol linguists aren't stem" are as wrong as people who reply "nuh-uh!"
This. The study of language is necessarily a natural science. Language is a biological, cognitive object of study.
[deleted]
> Incorrect. I was using pretty much every English textbook in the country as the arbiter of what is proper and improper English.
And, honestly, English might be the most incorrectly titled class name ever. It should be called literature.
There is a standard way to speak and write, but it's not any better than any dialect. Also, /r/badscience is a thing.
[deleted]
How about treatments for adult aphasics or developmentally delayed children? How about better-informed pedagogical methods in second-language classrooms? How about helping speakers of minority languages to document and revitalize their languages?
[deleted]
You do want to be the arbiter, but you refuse to do the work to provide a reasoned decision.
> Incorrect. I was using pretty much every English textbook in the country as the arbiter of what is proper and improper English.
English textbooks deal with a specific register of language primarily as applied to writing, which leads me to:
>Linguistics is a narrow viewpoint with a limited field of interest and few participants.
It's actually getting funny how consistently wrong you are. Linguistics is a natural science, the study of the biological human language faculty and how it's used by speakers. It's actually a very broad field, and to describe it as having "few participants" is an outright fabrication, and it's definitely approaching absurdity to describe it as trivial. Of course, if you knew the first thing about linguistics or even science in general, you'd realize how ridiculous of a position this is. Conversely, the kind of language dealt with in schools and writing is a subset of the object of study in linguistics. A very narrow one, at that.
But you'll pull out all the stops to feel smugly superior to people. I get that. It's all you've been screaming this entire time. You have to have your right to judge, condescend, and otherwise belittle people you see as inferior, regardless of actual reason or logic, regardless of what people who actually understand what language is and does say to you. The amount of sheer cognitive dissonance is incredible.
> Linguistics is a natural science
now you just want to start a fight ;)
Not particularly. I don't see as there's much to fight about.
Many don't think you should take a narrow view on what linguistics is. Sure, there is a natural science aspect to it, but thinks like discurse analysis and linguistic anthropology don't really fall into that lable.
Do you consider linguistic anthropology to be part of linguistics? I ask not because of "ewww linguistic anthropology," but because at my school they are under a separate department and what they do is mysterious to me.
I don't see any reason not too. Some I know like to describe cultural uses of language, how language works in the society in different settings.
[deleted]
I don't think you actually understand what science is—even generally. I'm starting to understand that now.
Tell you what, though. I'll answer your question if you can answer mine: what was the contribution to "the general populace" made by other "trivial scientists." Y'know, schmucks such as Plato, Socrates, Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Gould, Sagan, Hawking, etc.?
[deleted]
>I just consider it a useless one taken by those who can't comprehend higher math.
One of the predominant research types in modern linguistics (across various sub-fields) involves high-level mathematical abstraction, so once again, you demonstrate how little you know.
>I believe it is still your turn
If you can't answer my question, then your question is meaningless. The value of science isn't measured in who it helps the most. That's not what validates an area of inquiry. Which again leads me to think you don't actually understand science. You've said nothing to indicate otherwise so far.
If you're taking "what helps people the most" to be the metric for the value of a science, then surely the huge majority of disciplines throughout history are, at least in your view, "useless," right? Is that a position you're willing to take?
As far as benefiting society, that would be what the applied sciences are for, and since you don't seem to care to do even the most basic amount of research (because again, if you had, why would we be here?), here is a short list of things covered in the purview of applied linguistics.
As a member of the general populace, I sure enjoy the fact that things like Google Translate exist, as well as the fact that computers are getting better and better at natural language processing.
[deleted]
>the use of those dialects gives forth information about the speaker.
>It is a piece of data that, combined with other information, can be used to make an educated guess about the subjects background.
Right, so you hear a person speaking a dialect that's non-standard, and you get a sense of their ethnicity. That allows your prejudices to take over and make an "educated" guess about their background, namely that you think they're an uneducated degenerate.
Did I get that about right?
[deleted]
I'm not going to get into a debate about the value of culture. There are certain cultural practices that might be evaluable in such a context, but you're leaving the realm of science to do so.
Language is not a cultural feature, though. Language is a universal human propensity, a natural part of human cognition and biology. And Language cannot be evaluated as good or bad, as there is no empirical or rational basis for doing so. The surface variations of the language faculty are trivially different, as the underlying mechanism is the same.
So yes, if you want to evaluate the way people talk in such terms, you are bigoted for doing so, just like you're bigoted for being an apparent social Darwinist and "Culturist." Your worldview is warped beyond rationality, and the sooner you see that, the better off you will be.
> I can hardly imagine physicists and chemists making a troll sub named /r/Bad_Science
hue hue hue
Prescriptivist view of language = shitlord
I think it has been difficult to find a replacement for William Safire.
Creationist view of the Universe = shitlord
That comparison sounds more like someone believing in the Tower of Babel rather than someone trying to influence others to speak his own dialect.
Technically they're right because according to linguistics there's no "proper" and "improper" English. But people who use linguistics to bash other people who like "proper English" are making their own judgments on "proper" and "improper" by treating linguistics as the "proper" viewpoint on language. Linguistics is a scientific way of looking at languages, and therefore is descriptive and doesn't make value judgments because a science can't be prescriptive. But that doesn't mean prescriptivism can't exist or can't arise 'naturally', because people complaining about proper language is constant and just as natural as any aspect of communication.
It's bad linguistics, but not everything needs to be about linguistics in the first place. Linguistics hobbyists are the ones applying their descriptive linguistics point of view to everything and then getting upset when people overapply the word linguistics to justify their ideas on language. They could just say "Actually linguistics doesn't judge good and bad language, so you can't defend your views with linguistics," and move on, but they want to make fun of people.
> Linguistics hobbyists
Actually a number of people in that sub, like myself, are ‘card-carrying’ linguists with graduate degrees in the field. I’m a PhD candidate, for example.
And the /r/badlinguistics sub is explicitly for making fun of people. It says so in the sidebar. There are perfectly good subs for non-circlejerk discussion about linguistics, namely /r/linguistics and /r/asklinguistics. The meta bots drag people into /r/badlinguistics unfortunately, where we would rather just be left alone to wank in peace.
In official Real Life linguists don’t particularly give a shit what language peevers, language mavens, and other self-appointed defenders of languages think about things. The subfield of sociolinguistics does get into things like language ideology and language politics, but most other subfields in linguistics don’t have much truck with opinion. They are empirical fields where testable facts reign supreme and models are routinely destroyed by uncooperative data.
But linguists do get personally annoyed with constantly hearing stupid things said about language. It’s the same way that biologists get annoyed by constantly hearing bullshit about ‘toxins’ and ‘genetics’ for example. So we have a sub for circlejerk bitching about it where we can let off steam. If other people don’t like it, tough shit. People who come into /r/badlinguistics and proceed to defend themselves are treated like trolls, since they’re almost certainly looking to pick a fight and stir up shit.
Yeah, I dithered over the wording for that because I didn't want to just say "linguistics experts" and generalize in the opposite direction about /r/badlinguistics users' credentials. I know badlinguistics has actual linguistics scholars, I was just speaking broadly in terms of people who use linguistic grounds to correct people online, not specifically linguists.
Is there an /r/badbadlinguistics? There should be.
> Being a native speaker of a dialect with negative concord I think it's safe to say that your worldview is wrong and you're most likely making up for your own unsuccessful existence.
> Regardless, enjoy the ban
Unlike SRD, you can go full circle and link /r/badlinguistics threads on /r/badlinguistics
/r/badpedantry
/r/badlinguistics is a complete shit hole on per with /r/circlebroke
Thank god you're here to fruitlessly whine about it.