Webster's dictionary

4chan will though.

 

No, I'm just arguing that your every day office working anglophone is no where near the cultural refinement of William Shakespeare. Texting may not turn us into simpletons, but it's hardly helping matters. I make it a point to text people in grammatically correct sentences, despite what they send me in contracted dumb fuckery. Unfortunately, even my girlfriend uses "u" to mean "you." I don't bother correcting her because I think it's cute how she misspells words and implies that letters can be functional parts of a sentence without being part of a spelled structure.
But everyone else, forget about it. I go on rants toward everyone who misuses "than" in the context of "then", and vice versa. If language is only going to be maintained by those with bones to pick, the grand majority of people speaking the language will fall short of the high expectations of the angry, grammatically correct minority.
On the positive, my two and a half year old nephew can read.

 

Texting, no. But AIM might (AOL Instant Messenger). I was grading essays for a class of seventh grade students and more than half of them used "u" for you, "ne" for any, and "da" for the. Not to mention the 1 gigantic run-on sentence that was the essay for 3 of the students.

I think they are turning into troglodytes. Now roll your save versus the troglodyte's stench.

 

Oh come on, people. The written form of a language has no bearing on the development of the spoken form. These alternative spellings contain just as much linguistic information as the traditional spellings, they are only used because they are more concise. The main reason you don't like them is because you aren't used to them.

Geez, wayne, do you ever meet anyone halfway? Debating with you is like trying to play chess with a balrog.

 

Ants communicate, termites communicate, elephants communicate, dolphins communicate, to name just a few.

Language is older than apes. I say it because it's obvious.

 

I have no doubt that you agree that it's absolutely reasonable to ask someone to first back up their objections with an understanding of what they're arguing against, and then to ask them to give reasons for their objection (assuming they do understand what they're talking about).

Again, I don't think I need to point out (except maybe to Smuel!) that language is a naturally arising concept, as ytzk said, and so must be able to be said to mean something without anyone having to have synthetically add meaning to it, if words, shapes, sounds, gestures, &c., are to represent what they attempt to.

 

Crows and ravens demonstrate regional "accents" with their most common calls. It's hard to maintain said accents without having a language, whether it's rudimentary or highly defined. It was shown that the birds when mistreated by humans, will remember their faces, and warn other birds about those humans. To this effect, humans wearing masks mistreated several crows, and upon their release it was found that everyone wearing those same masks was attacked by every crow, regardless of whether or not the birds themselves were mistreated.

 

Yeah, at a very basic level. We're talking maybe 10 or 20 gestures and grunts that might be universally understood without having to actively learn what they mean. Beyond that, it's all convention and synthetically added meaning. If it weren't then foreign languages wouldn't be so difficult to understand.

No it isn't - accent in this context just means variation. All it requires is that any given crow mimics the sounds of the crows around them. There doesn't need to be a "language" for that to happen. It could even be entirely at the genetic level with no learning component at all.

I doubt this happened the way you imply. It would mean that birds have a method of describing human features to each other. I doubt they even have a way to describe their own features to each other.

 

Tracing the etymologies of words means that they were derived from something; this can't be arbitrary, or it wouldn't be derivation. You have yourself admitted that these elements of language weren't arbitrary; thus, a language is logically derived from logical fundamentals. In answer to your claim that difficulty in learning foreign languages disproves this in any way, I point out that reading Euclid's Elements beginning with the complex theorems, and working your way back to the axioms, postulates, and definitions, yields the same difficulty; but it would be ridiculous to presume that if the theorems are derived, and the foundations aren't arbitrary, that the theorems have no meaning, objectively.

 

Well okay - I'll trace the etymology of the word "homogenous" for you:

- Take the etymology of the word "homogeneous"
- Add: this got confused with the existing word "homogenous"
- Add: now the old meaning of the word "homegenous" has disappeared and it means the same thing as"homogeneous".

There - problem solved. Homogenous was derived from homogeneous in a non-arbitrary way - because, according to you, the act of tracing the derivation makes it non-arbitrary.

See, what you're missing is that there are infinite possibilities in the derivation. Each step in itself may be "logical" according to you, but there are many possible steps at any given moment, and the choice of which one is used is arbitrary. We can't predict which of the words in use today will still be in use in the year 2100, because the evolutionary success or failure of individual words is entirely dependent on circumstance.

 

Thus, 'homogenous' does not mean 'homogeneous'.

 

Homogenous does mean the same as homogeneous now. The now archaic form of homogenous has been replaced by homologous. The end.

 

And I suppose, according to you, "gay" does not mean "homosexual" either.

 

I actually have nothing to say about this, since I know nothing about why people use it.

 

Well I can guarantee you that it's not because they looked into the Latin or Greek origins of the word and decided that it would be suitable to derive a new meaning for it.

Anyway, if you accept that gay is now a valid word for homosexual then you must accept that homogenous is now a valid spelling of the word homogeneous. And if you don't accept that gay is now a valid word for homosexual then I'm going to give up on this conversation.

 

I half-heartedly looked it up, and you're absolutely right as far as English is concerned: it came from French into English; not Latin or Greek (though I imagine that at least some French came from one or both of these; but I don't pretend to know anything regarding this particular word); but, unfortunately, this is evidence on my behalf.

 

No it isn't. The word used to mean happy. Then at some point in the 20th Century, people started using it to mean homosexual instead. There is nothing about the origins of the word that has anything to do with homosexuality, so by your standards it is the incorrect usage of the word, and everyone who uses it today to mean homosexual is wrong.

If you find a way to justify the change in usage of the word "gay" to mean homosexual, then the same justification can be used to validate the change in meaning of the word "homogenous".

 

Take the time to look it up: I did.

What a ridiculous thing to say.

 

How else do you think I know about its change in usage? Perhaps you should look it up and then explain how you think it came to mean homosexual.