Not on lemmy.ml there isn’t!

Eh, letter’s height to width ratio looks better.

Since you’re getting blasted here, I just wanted to hop on the downvote train to let you know that I think you’re exactly right on all counts.

We really need to stop using lemmy.ml for main subs like “memes”.

Like go ahead and argue for an end to misandristic violence if you’d like.

Nah, I’ll go ahead and argue for an end to all violent crime, and not exclude the victims who aren’t lucky enough to have their gender be the reason they were murdered.

I’ve never understood this prevalent idea that murder victims are only worth caring about if their gender played a role. Like, how horribly fucked-up is it to say that some murder victims are more worthy of concern than others, especially when those victims only comprise a small minority of murders?

Being killed because of your gender and being killed because you were in the wrong place or because you looked like an easy mark are all equally bad reasons to murder someone. They’re also all phenomena that could just as easily be addressed by government programs like in the OP, and yet all we ever hear about is the “violence against women” epidemic that only affects a minority of victims.

Plus, even if the numbers of women murdered for their gender is going up (which is obviously horrible and inexcusable), that number still has a long way to go before it even approaches the much higher number of men who are already being killed every year. Like, of course it’s a horrible thing that the number of murdered women is increasing, but I fail to see how that’s so much more important than the much higher number of men who are already being killed, but that nobody is doing anything about.

I mean, the reason for it is the same as it always is - men are seen as disposable by society and therefore issues affecting them are ignored - it just sucks to constantly be inundated with evidence of just how deeply ingrained this misandry is in our society.

This but unironically. Please, please stop demonizing men and actually think about them for once.

The incredibly tiny proportion of the population who are murderers, I’d assume (less than 1 out of every 10,000 people in the US per year if my math is right).

Both sets of victims are equally dead, of course, just with a much higher percentage of those dead victims being men, and a much smaller percentage of those dead victims being the ones stories like this always seem to focus on.

I betcha ten bucks the number of men violently killed in Australia so far this year is significantly higher, just like it is every year. Weird how I can never find any articles about that though.

“A language is just a dialect with an army and a navy” -Max Weinreich

Starts typing gibberish in Microsoft Word because the magic hand still hasn’t told me how to get started coding.

It’s on purpose to force you to use their shitty app.

Buddhism in a nutshell

This has “mah bucket” sea lion vibes.

Fleming himself was a British agent, and knew SMERSH so well that he put this foreword at the beginning of From Russia With Love:

"Not that it matters, but a great deal of the background to this story is accurate.

SMERSH, a contraction of Smiert Spionam–Death to Spies–exists and remains today the most secret department of the Soviet government.

At the beginning of 1956, when this book was written, the strength of SMERSH at home and abroad was about 40,000 and General Grubozaboyschikov was its chief. My description of his appearance is correct.

Today the headquarters of SMERSH are where, in Chapter 4, I have placed them–at No 13 Sretenka Ulitsa, Moscow. The Conference Room is faithfully described and the Intelligence chiefs who meet round the table are real officials who are frequently summoned to that room for purposes similar to those I have recounted.

I. F."

Spoken language is acquired, not learned. This is a formal distinction in the literature, used (in general) to distinguish unconscious behaviors from conscious ones.

Learning involves something you have conscious knowledge about - you can learn how to build a birdhouse, and then you can teach me how to build one as well, because you’ve consciously learned the rules for doing so.

Acquisition is involuntary, and unconscious. Children don’t try to learn languages - any human infant given language input from any human language will acquire that language over time, seemingly without effort.

Also, the knowledge we gain from language acquisition is unconscious knowledge - as an English speaker, you can’t tell me why “John hit the ball” is a sentence of English and “John ball the hit” is not, other than to give an explanation that will eventually boil down to “because it just isn’t”. You don’t know why your language is the way it is - you just implicitly know exactly how it is, and how it isn’t.

So, acquisition being distinct from learning requires no magic - just an understanding of the differences between these two processes, in the same way as we can also understand the differences between writing and language, one of which is that language is an unconscious, acquired behavior, and that writing is a conscious, learned behavior.

Writing isn’t language at all, for reasons discussed in my comments below.

Which is part of what makes linguistics work on ancient languages so difficult - we’re having to use these imperfect symbols, which themselves aren’t language, to try to glean as many features about the actual grammars they’re intended to represent, which are language.

This is why we know much less about ancient languages than we do modern ones - because we have actual recordings of modern languages (the recordings themselves are also not language, of course; they just encode language much better than writing does), so we can get at many more features of the language in question.

Fair enough.

What would you say about a dog growling at you, communicating its displeasure at how close you are? If you back away, understanding what the dog intends to convey with its growl, does that make the dog’s growl language?

Is a honeybee secreting a pheromone to get the hive to swarm language?

If so, how is language meaningfully different from “communication”? And, is human communication with each other the same type of phenomenon as the cases you and I mentioned, or is there some sort of categorical difference there?

(Also, this definition isn’t classical - it’s quite modern. The tendency to conflate writing with language in cultures that have writing is as old as writing is, and disentangling the two is a relatively modern discovery.)

Written Chinese could arguably be considered its own language.

Sure, by someone other than people who scientifically study human language, for the reasons outlined above. The study of orthography is its own separate (though closely related) field for good reason, though it’s nowhere as big as linguistics, since it’s not as scientifically interesting.

There are several spoken languages in China which are unintelligible to each other, but that look the same when written down since the written language doesn’t codify phonemes or even spoken words, but concepts.

You do understand why this supports my argument, right? Writing is just a largely arbitrary system of (imperfectly) encoding/representing human language, which must be learned, and is not acquired the way human language is. For this reason, it makes perfect sense that what is effectively a “code” for language could be used to represent multiple languages. You could just as easily do the same with written English. Heck, formal logic is specifically designed to do this for all human languages, but that doesn’t make it a language itself.

Here’s a pop article talking about the distinction, reflecting the discussion above (spoilers for the movie Arrival, which I highly recommend if you haven’t seen it). I can’t point you to any peer-reviewed articles on the subject, of course, because this has been decided science since the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure’s 1913 Course in General Linguistics.

I hate referring to Wikipedia (again however, there are no articles on this because it’s century-old settled science), but note that the article for Writing system correctly identifies writing as representing human language and not actually consisting of it.

That depends on your definition of “language”, where some definitions are much more scientifically useful than others. Defining language as “a system of communication” is not very useful, since there are important defining characteristics most people, and especially most linguists, believe that language possesses that other more general forms of communication do not.

Under the definition used by most linguists (for the kind of object we’re talking about here, that is - there are many other relevant objects of study that can be called a “language”), spoken/signed human languages have all of the characteristics of language, while “body language”/animal “languages” do not.

Sign language is language, since it has a systematic, unconscious mental grammar that meets all of the characteristics above, and writing is not considered language, since it’s just a means of encoding/preserving a language that already exists.

Another way of stating this is that writing is not itself the output of a mental grammar - it’s the output of a translation algorithm that acts on the output of a grammar, and so can’t be considered language itself (again, under one of the most common definitions of “language” used in the scientific study of human language).

Writing isn’t language, otherwise the thousands of unwritten languages wouldn’t be considered languages.