Hi everyone

[sunlit_stone]

So I decided to try out Dreamwidth, because there's been kind of a revival on Tumblr and also... To be honest I'm looking forward to trying something that's a little more slow-paced than Tumblr, which always makes me feel a little overwhelmed (at the ripe old age of twenty-three, ha).

I guess we'll see how it goes!

First step: poke at themes.

Comments

[sunlit_stone]

Well, it's nice to be able to do something :/

Okay, yeah, huh, that makes sense. *frowns at companies* God I hate that shit. It just makes it so ridiculous and tiring to try to get to the truth, and it's not like nutrition's not a complicated enough subject even without people actively obfuscating about it--which, I mean, I realize that's the point, but, ugh. It's just so tiring.

What, really?? I can buy the math thing, but the language thing just seems bizarre--do you remember where you saw that? Now I want to go check it out.

I suppose I could just limit myself to Quebec twitter, which at least if it's mean will be a familiar, homegrown meanness.

I don't know much about Swedish racial politics, but yeah, I've seen a lot of posts from people in non-American countries--even England and Australia!--saying basically "guys our racial history is just not the same, which means our racialized *groups* are not the same, you can't just assume that a paradigm that makes sense in America makes sense everywhere else..."

I have uploaded the graph! It, uh, doesn't have the names of the countries, but they're basically just in the reverse order they were in she Washington Post sugar-eating chart; the x-axis is just the countries ordered from least to most sugar-eating, the y-axis is math scores. http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=16gl5ee&s=9#.WUnAUdopDqB

[lusentoj]

No idea where I saw it, it was ages ago that I read it D : But it might've also been in Swedish, I seem to remember it was discussing why Finnish kids are better than Swedish ones in school despite that the Finnish school system is the same as the (older - it's now been changed to be much more like America's) Swedish one. I know you can find some mentions of it if you read about Chinese kids and math, because they always say the "American kids have to learn how to multiply, like two times ten is twenty... Chinese kids have it built-in to their language already, two ten - two times ten - is twenty, so they start first grade already being able to multiply basic numbers... not to mention the names for all the math terms, like no American kid knows what a matrix, quotient, exponent means the first time they see those words but other languages have instantly-understandable names for these things..." The point just being, English kids always have to first memorize the terminology (and spelling of that terminology) before they can even start learning the actual subject, where most other countries don't have to. I mean like, it's exactly the same in linguistics. In other languages, an "accusative case" is a "whom-case", "genitive" is "whose-case", dipthong is "two-vowel", suffix is "word-tail" etc so even an 8-year-old can read linguistics papers without a problem. I've studied like 10 languages and still can't read linguistics papers without a problem, LOL.

Thanks, I see the chart now haha!

[sunlit_stone]

Yeah it's not the world's best graph :/ But, I mean. It contains numbers! It contains lines! It contains an attempt to verify something empirically! That's /practically/ science :)

Huh, that makes a lot of sense! (I can't read Swedish, though, so oh well.) I always liked the whole Greek-and-Latin roots thing (because they were fun to decode and, uh, you may have gathered by now that I like languages) but I can see that they make it a lot harder if you didn't, not to mention making it much harder to get into a new field/learn the jargon. I wonder if there are any advantages? Maybe it protects against drift of meaning, since they're usually used fairly technically? Hmm.

[lusentoj]

Honestly I haven't ever heard of any advantages. It seems like it's just the same old "I'm elite so I can speak 3 fancy languages and you peasants can't so you can't read my scientific writing, stay out of my department!" stuff.... Of course now it's pretty unintentional, but still. Drift of meaning is more likely to occur when it IS a borrowed word, I think. Think of how often we borrow words wrong from the beginning (ex. "smorgasbord" actually means "sandwich-table", and people constantly mis-borrowing linguistics terms), and then think of words like "drink, child, water" which still have the same meaning today even thousands of years later lol.

[sunlit_stone]

I'm not sure if that's true, about meaning drift I mean? I mean yeah words can get borrowed to mean different things than they did in their original languages but I meant within a language, not between languages, like bio- as a prefix meaning 'life'. I wonder if anyone's studied this? Maybe there's a paper.

Mind you even if there is an advantage I really don't think it's big enough to make up for making things harder to learn. Not even just for attracting people who go on to become scientists, increasing scientific literacy for everyone is an important problem.

>"I'm elite so I can speak 3 fancy languages and you peasants can't so you can't read my scientific writing, stay out of my department!" I love this description of that attitude (I mean obviously I'm a fan of multidisciplinary learning but I really don't think you should have to master an entirely unrelated discipline before studying the things you... actually wanted to study...). Also now I am imagining some sort of attempt to rate languages on a scale of fanciness. "English: Can't seem to decide whether it wants to be French or German. Lurks around other languages and steals their vocabulary while they're not looking. 1/10."