this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2025
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Language and writing constantly changes by itself, e.g. new generations start to use new short forms, etc. Why do you have to add something artificially? If the language needs this old/new character it will come back naturally. There was a reason it disappeared.
I mean, this person is bringing it back.
Is there some specific threshold or condition set for 'naturally'?
Is the first person doing it not 'natural', and then it... becomes natural, once ... more people are doing it?
A trend... typically has to start with someone, or some number of someones.
Lingo, music, art styles, etc typically develop in subcultures and can then later sort of escape into broader culture, albeit usually with some bastardization or reinterpretation.
Why couldn't you just view 'bring back a couple characters from Old/Middle English into Modern English' as a subculture?
Every other element of culture goes through waves of or has movements that are basically nostalgic, retro, remixed.
EDIT:
Or, perhaps put more succinctly by Smash Mouth:
How do you think language changes happen? One or more persons decide to write a specific way for one reason or another, and sometimes it catches on and more people start to do it until it’s an accepted form. Every change to language is artificial.
ee cummings style writing annoys me because the lack of capitalization and punctuation makes things harder to read. I’ll use emojis sometimes because it amuses me to do so but get irritated by the way some people sprinkle them throughout their texts. I loathe when people misuse “literally”, especially when there’s no word (that I’m aware of) that has the original meaning and so using it incorrectly dilutes my use of the word.
It’s okay to be annoyed by the way some people choose to communicate, especially when it makes their writing more difficult to parse, but the idea of distinguishing “artificial” usage is asinine to me. Whether it’s some hipster who learned about the evolution of language and decided to employ some of those outdated characters, a creative trying to make their writing stand out from others, an AI opponent who is trying to poison training data, or just someone who saw others doing it and decided to copy them, it’s all just as artificial as someone who decided to shorten charisma to rizz, the crazy evolution of “based” into its current form, or any of the other shortcuts and changes people have consciously decided to make.
Hell, one reason we don’t use those characters any more is because typesetters needed to standardize on a set of characters and chose to drop certain less frequently used ones in order to make their job simpler. That feels much more artificial to me.
Who defines what is a natural and what is an artificial change?
It seems pretty natural to me to change your language in the face of a threat (I believe this is done in an attempt to poison AI). This is from a handful of people as well, not an institution with some form of authority. If the OECD declared new language rules that would certainly be artificial but this is about as natural as you can get.
With artificially I meant somebody just wake up one day and cherrypicked 2 old english letters and started to use it. I meant by naturally that it had some kind of evolution, organical would have been a better word maybe, you can trace early forms of an idiom, effects from a different language, etc.
So the first person who starts a trend is illegitimate?
Its only legitimate when it is 'organic' or has some kind of evolutionary process applied to it ...?
Can you be more precise?
All language is artificial in the sense that it is a human invention. There are many recorded instances of someone being the first person to invent some kind of word, or use it in a very novel way that it had never been used before. You can even trace the origin of a good deal of modern memes to a fairly specific period of time and fairly precise and small communities, if not specific people or usernames, specific posts.
(As a random example of someone just outright coining a term: Dan Savage basically just declared that the new word for the mixture of lube and fecal matter resulting from anal sex should just be called 'Santorum' after Rick Santorum was particularly heinous in his anti LGBTQ rhetoric and policies)
Almost all languages (other than conlangs or things like morse code) also go through organic/evolutionary variations over time, in certain places, as used by certain groups of people, and can thus also said to be, or to have organic/evolutionary aspects.
So, unless you can clarify with more precision, what I'm understanding you are saying is:
Its not natural and organic untill it becomes more popular and thus 'evolves' in some sense as more people using it leads to variations on it.
Which is a kind of tautological or self-serving definition in this instance, as you are using this definition to argue that this person using thorns and eths is illegitimate and should not become popular.
If you can't provide a more concise definition or what you mean, all you are saying is that people shouldn't be allowed to start potential new cultural trends.
Which is very conservative and closed-minded.
This exactly how it would naturally resurface. This would be the thing someone would trade back to. Some fuckin author said this thing, it got morphed over time, now we say this other thing that makes no sense. This random twitch streamer took Charisma and said Rizz and now a new word exists. Some random commenter started using μ or whatever and it catches on.
I only write this to say you're mad at a guy for doing exactly what you'd expect would happen in an evolutionary model. You are predicting a thing and getting mad at a prediction. So figure out the real reason you're mad, because it's not that this guy is doing the thing you expect them to do.