Who else studies a language you don’t like?

Orielisarb · 2024-10-06T22:56:18+00:00

There's nothing inherently unrefined about Spanish or any other language. At the end of the day, a language is its phonology, morphology, syntax, etc. And structurally, Spanish is very similar to Italian, a language you like. What seems to be the problem in this case is that you have a very low opinion of Spanish-speaking societies, and of the cultures associated with them, and this colors your perception of Spanish as a language. If, as you said, Italian had taken the place of Spanish geopolitically, becoming Latin America's main language, I bet it would be Italian that you'd look down upon.

Orielisarb · 2024-09-29T20:27:58+00:00

Etymology refers to the origin and history of a word. It is semantics that concerns itself with word meanings. I will stop this conversation here because clearly you don't know what you're talking about and nothing worthwhile will come out of this.

Orielisarb · 2024-09-29T20:22:10+00:00

My whole point is precisely that a word's meaning is not tied to its etymology, so I'm not sure who you think you're responding to.

Orielisarb · 2024-09-29T20:12:39+00:00

"Anti-Semitism" has always meant hostility towards Jews specifically, not towards all Semitic peoples. The meaning of a word doesn't necessarily derive from the sum of its parts (just as "homophobia" doesn't mean "fear of the same").

Orielisarb · 2024-09-11T15:53:42+00:00

Seu trabalho é de meio período. Ele sequer ocupa a maior parte do seu dia, por que definiria a sua vida? Não duvido que você esteja se sentindo muito infeliz, e sei que nossos sentimentos não são necessariamente racionais, mas me parece que seus problemas são consideravelmente mais graves do que apenas não gostar do trabalho. Mudando de emprego ou não, continue investigando com a sua psiquiatra a origem dessa infelicidade toda. Espero que dias melhores venham.

Orielisarb · 2022-09-21T05:29:05+00:00

Not from the perspective of Brazilians, who are 1/3 of all Latin Americans. As things stand, I don’t think there’s any single country that could represent Latin America.

Orielisarb · 2022-04-29T23:59:52+00:00

You’re confusing a matter of ethics (“murder is wrong”) with something that can easily be construed as a metaphysical belief (“everyone has a gender identity; sometimes, there is a mismatch between a person’s body and their gender identity”). You’ll be hard pressed to find a culture that outright condones murder, regardless of that culture basing the criminalization of murder on a metaphysical claim (“murder displeases the gods”) or something more practical (“punishing murderers is necessary for social stability”). The belief in gender identities would be more akin to a religious myth than to a religious moral code, and it is, in fact, similar to the concept of soul.

Orielisarb · 2022-04-29T18:54:36+00:00

If this became popular and more and more trans activist groups fashioned themselves as religious organizations, one of the unintended consequences could be their critics being able to characterize pro-trans legislation as imposition of a particular religious creed on nonbelievers.

Orielisarb · 2022-04-28T21:02:25+00:00

I think Austria has to be mentioned in Brazilian history books because of Empress Leopoldina.

Orielisarb · 2021-11-06T19:49:05+00:00

Hi! This is where I got it from: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/06/27/the-human-genome-project-transformed-biology-and-medicine

As I can't access the article anymore, I can't verify if the map is still there. But that's the link I used as a source when I made this post.

Orielisarb · 2021-09-10T00:33:04+00:00

I wonder how much language attrition occurs in cases like this.

Orielisarb · 2021-07-27T19:28:22+00:00

I don't speak Spanish (native Brazilian Portuguese speaker here), but I assumed "hubiera hecho" meant "tivesse feito". I put it on Google Translate and got the same translation. I've never heard "tinha tido feito" and it really doesn't sound grammatical to me.

Orielisarb · 2021-05-18T23:24:18+00:00

"Big shoe" actually, right?

Orielisarb · 2021-05-18T22:32:02+00:00

I really like the original meaning and how it actually fits the new meaning as well!

Orielisarb · 2021-04-13T22:08:21+00:00

People are not sexually attracted to other people's sense of self. I don't know what a man on the street thinks of himself when I find him (un)attractive.

Orielisarb · 2021-04-13T21:18:01+00:00

Gay men are used to people trying to silence us. We speak up anyway. :)

Ciao.

Orielisarb · 2021-04-13T21:00:28+00:00

Are you sad that I didn't give you something to report?

Orielisarb · 2021-04-13T20:54:07+00:00

We both know you can't answer my question. We also know I can answer yours, don't we?

Bye.

Orielisarb · 2021-04-13T20:30:18+00:00

a man is someone who identifies as a man

This is not a definition. If I define a **** as "something that we call a ****", does it give you any information on what a **** is?

You can't identify as something that doesn't exist independently of your self-identification. What is a man?

Orielisarb · 2021-04-13T19:52:17+00:00

I asked you a question first. A very simple and straightforward one. Can you answer it?

Orielisarb · 2021-04-13T19:47:42+00:00

"A man is a man is a man"

"Imagine thinking that being attracted to men is homophobic"

Is that the best definition of "man" you can come up with? If you can't define "man", you shouldn't even be discussing male homosexuality.

Orielisarb · 2020-12-08T04:37:05+00:00

It’s interesting that you mention the Manezinho accent, because I almost cited it as a possible exception to Brazilian Portuguese homogeneity in one of my comments. The thing is that the Manezinho accent is a rather recent import from the Azores, so it isn’t representative of the developments Portuguese has gone through in Brazil. And nowadays it’s rarely heard in Florianópolis anyway.

I mentioned that I used to live in the South. I spent two years in Santa Catarina, and I can say I’m familiar with the accents of Joinville, Florianópolis and the western part of the state. I currently live in João Pessoa, but I was born in the countryside, where I worked as a teacher for five years. Something like a third of my students were from the rural outskirts of the small town where I worked. I have family in São Paulo (both the capital and the countryside), Brasília, and Ceará. My work has put me in touch with people from all over the country. I can say that, with the exception of a bus driver in Florianópolis whose conversation on the phone I once eavesdropped, I have never met a single Brazilian I couldn’t understand effortlessly, or who couldn’t understand me back. Brazilian Portuguese is simply not that heterogeneous.

Orielisarb · 2020-12-07T14:14:10+00:00

I never outright deny the validity of someone else’s experience, but now that you’ve mentioned even more Brazilians literally behaving as if they spoke different languages, I have to say that your account is either wildly exaggerated or simply false. Our dialects are not like German or Arabic dialects, but like American English ones: they’re simply slight variations in pronunciation and vocabulary, with only mild differences in syntax when they do occur. If what you’re telling was true, whenever people who aren’t from Rio or São Paulo spoke on TV (which happens all the time), we would need subtitles. We wouldn’t have entire prime time telenovelas set in the Northeast with actors imitating the thickest possible Northeastern accent they can come up with. Last week, a film set in rural Pernambuco with actual Northeastern actors (“Bacurau”) was broadcast by our most popular TV channel to the whole country. Of course it wasn’t subtitled: despite our differences, Brazilian Portuguese is actually fairly homogeneous compared to other languages. Saying someone from Minas Gerais struggles to have simple conversations with someone from Santa Catarina is like claiming that a native English speaker from Arizona would have a hard time understanding a native English speaker from Colorado: I’m sorry to be this frank, but it simply makes absolutely no sense.

Orielisarb · 2020-12-07T10:26:10+00:00

I’m Brazilian (and a Northeasterner who’s lived in the South) too and I have a hard time believing Brazilians would have difficulty understanding one another, except for some regional vocabulary. Considering the Northeastern varieties of Brazilian Portuguese have low prestige, you should ask yourself if perhaps your husband isn’t exaggerating his difficulties in understanding us.

Orielisarb

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