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Replying to @SousPlage @agraybee
I was writing in English, not German. It's fairly common for words to shift meaning as they over time, especially if they move across languages. Would recommend Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct if this confuses you.
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As someone w/ an advanced degree in Ling, I would not necessarily recommend that book. Also, if you read beyond that book, you might realize that linguistic shifts aren’t universally applied between popular language use & more esoteric borrowings from academiapic.twitter.com/hgByak3voL
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With all due respect, I'm going to trust Noam Chomsky, who endorsed the book and knows a thing or two about linguistics, over you.
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Setting aside basic issues that (a) Chomsky's "endorsement" of the book was 25 years ago, (b) it was not a straightforward endorsement, (c) Chomsky's views have changed significantly since then, and (d) linguistics has changed significantly since then... 1/2
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All the changes in linguistics in the last 25 years are not pertinent to the point about shifting usage that Pinker described in book, which are in fact still how this subject is understood.
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No, it's not. It isn't even consistent with how Chomsky, Pinker, and other semantic externalists understood changes in use 5 years after TLI was published: see Chomsky's New Horizons (2000).
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Replying to @thephilosotroll @HeerJeet and
Of all the people bodying you here over your shallow understanding of linguistics, I might be the most sympathetic (because I'm cool with really weak conventions governing use), but you're making it hard by insisting 25-y/o-Pinker-on-dev-ling is definitive on semantics.
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Replying to @thephilosotroll @HeerJeet and
And at this point, most of us are just cranky at you getting condescending with an actual expert (
@magi_jay) with an appeal to a 25-y/o book that wasn't even intended to offer an account of semantics (much less, more narrowly, changes in semantics).1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
I apologize for citing Pinker but I'd say my tone was rooted in the original tweet which said that my diction was "pretentious" and wrong and further arguments that I should defer to academics (as if vernacular English language usage wasn't often defined outside academia).
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Ok... I’m still not sympathetic to being shitty to someone who is actually an expert in the field. If I were shitty to you on foreign relations having read some shit in my dad’s library that’s decades old... I’d be suitably embarrassed.
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Replying to @thephilosotroll @HeerJeet and
But there’s a reasonable question re: who owns “gestalt” as a matter of convention. I’m open minded. Just don’t be a sh*thead about it with actual linguists.
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