603
School district bans the dictionary to comply with Ron DeSantis’s book-ban law
(www.lgbtqnation.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
603 points (98.4% liked)
News
35821 readers
2055 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious biased sources will be removed at the mods’ discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted separately but not to the post body. Sources may be checked for reliability using Wikipedia, MBFC, AdFontes, GroundNews, etc.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Clickbait titles may be removed.
Posts which titles don’t match the source may be removed. If the site changed their headline, we may ask you to update the post title. Clickbait titles use hyperbolic language and do not accurately describe the article content. When necessary, post titles may be edited, clearly marked with [brackets], but may never be used to editorialize or comment on the content.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials, videos, blogs, press releases, or celebrity gossip will be allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Mods may use discretion to pre-approve videos or press releases from highly credible sources that provide unique, newsworthy content not available or possible in another format.
7. No duplicate posts.
If an article has already been posted, it will be removed. Different articles reporting on the same subject are permitted. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners or news aggregators.
All posts must link to original article sources. You may include archival links in the post description. News aggregators such as Yahoo, Google, Hacker News, etc. should be avoided in favor of the original source link. Newswire services such as AP, Reuters, or AFP, are frequently republished and may be shared from other credible sources.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I've heard of that research. Very cool. Some words definitely do have a shape don't they. I like the explanation of the 1984 bit.
My medical friends had the understanding that differences between languages in structure and syntax, even like, differences in conjugation, were correlated to physical differences in neuroanatomy. I pictured such things honing out certain neural pathways, and theorizing how it could have the effect of making certain rhetoric or logic more or less natural to learners of one language over another, perhaps. Thinking it might also effect how one might think about and perceive numbers or music.
Ah yeah, I have heard of similar things, particularly with differences in word order (subject-verb-object vs subject-object-verb, for example), and I don't doubt that there are some minor effects there. Ultimately though, my general understanding of the research is that any effects from this are quite small and don't really rise past the point of being little curiosities. In the grand scheme of things, all human languages are of essentially equivalent expressive power and all do essentially the same things, even if in different ways. This is perhaps not terribly surprising really, given that they're all running on the same hardware of a human brain.
I would note that there may be something of an slight over-correction in linguistic orthodoxy with topics like this, since efforts to prove the inferiority and simplicity of "savage" languages was a big effort in late 1800s and early 1900s scientific racism. I remember my professor once showing me a book written by the chair of Harvard's Linguistics Department talking about how the noble Sanskrit was corrupted by being mixed with too many "Orientals" until it became watered down into basic and dumb languages like Hindi. Hell, the entire theory of the Aryan race originated with linguistics, the term itself originally just being a (ultimately incorrect) term for Proto-Indo-European, the theoretical ancestor language of Greek, Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit, and some others, the idea being that any group of people whose descendants became all those great civilizations was obvious the pinnacle of humanity. It was of course noted that Hebrew does not belong to this family. The entire field - along with sociology in general - had a massive course correction after WWII for obvious reasons, and while this does align much closer to the actual truth, it has lead linguists to generally be quite reluctant to ever pursue the idea of any language being "better" in some way than others.