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

[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."