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[-] BakerBagel@midwest.social 35 points 4 months ago

All languages are stupid. Japanese has 3 different scripts, with the kanji having made up characters that don't even mean anything. Chinese has a coherent grammatically poem where every word is just shi making "Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" look like child's play. Romance languages felt it necessary to give every noun a gender that you have to memorize, and German decided that wasn't complicated enough so they added a third gender. Welsh and Gaelic use the latin alphabet, but just made up their own rules so the language doesn't sound anything at all the way it looks to other languages that use the Latin alphabet.

All languages are messy and illogical since they evolve over time to accommodate the needs of the speakers at any given time, and then you end up with weird holdovers that no longer make sense, but that's just how things are done so we keep doing it that way. Artificial languages have been created to maintain a logic, but no one uses them, and if they were adopted universally they would lose that logic as people use the languages in ways that were never intended.

[-] Tarquinn2049@lemmy.world 11 points 4 months ago

It's the whole reason science stuff tends to use latin as much as possible. It's a dead language that is relatively easy to learn, but won't evolve over time as no one is casually using it.

[-] samus12345@lemmy.world 9 points 4 months ago

Scientific terms describe very specific things in a very specific way. It's the "no one's casually using it" part that keeps it more consistent, not the origin of the terms themselves.

[-] BakerBagel@midwest.social 7 points 4 months ago

Show me any science paper that is using latin outside of scientific names of animals or anatomy. No one is publishing their research in Latin

[-] Trail@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

Hey, the three Japanese script make actual sense though.

this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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