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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   35886 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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I don’t get it. Is this some kind of political analogy?

...

English has an enormous vocabulary, much like French and unlike far cruder highly-inflected languages. Latin, Russian, Spanish- they all just come out and say things. English and French use a variety of expressions and innuendos.

Anyone know how welsh or Gaelic talk? Might be an areal feature for the northwestern fringe of Europe.

Latin, Russian, Spanish- they all just come out and say things

Classical Latin had a rather small vocabulary (and little direct ability to discuss the abstract, instead personifying or loaning from Greek) but Russian and Spanish are very rich and less direct than English (though many are functionally illiterate, though if anything that means Spanish speakers have more room for crude innuendo...)

’sexual innuendo’

Ok, now you’re just being pointlessly obscure. Mods! Mods! This man is violating the rule that everyone must speak plainly!

Is this "post like a 14-year-old boy" day?

It seems like a pretty obvious joke to me (leading in a straight line from Hoffmeister25's joke and No_one's getting wooshed).

👉👌

We have somewhere, somehow, but not somewhy nor somewhen.

If we had all of them, they would stop being words, with separate dictionary entries!

Holding uncouth, unnumbered unwords like amniocentesis as English vocabulary to call it richer is but a tawdry lie. (Indeed, the artificial medical vocabulary is a shared system used by many languages, with consistent prefixes, roots and suffixes.) While it is good and noble, that English speakers ventured around the world and named its bounties and wonders, perhaps a more interesting metric is how many given groups of speakers now, how many are used in day to day communication or literature etc.

A Rebuttal to Which Language has the Most Words

But it's easy enough to go through another language's dictionary and make Hungarian versions of everything. That's how most languages were modernized during 19th century nationalism in Europe and Asia. Translators of scientific documents may coin even newer words etc. But most people do not know them. I don't know all the bones of the body, various tissues or really ...biology. I do not know fancy woodworking terminology nor native English plants from our ancestral homeland, various brandles and burndlebushesand eeroughberries and what have you.

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