Let's talk about something else in this thread, and what I actually thought it would be about before I clicked on it to discover it was about tone instead. It should dovetail into the primary topic as well.
Let's talk about language. Or in other words:
Why English is a Shitty Language, and Why American English is Even Worse
As a monolingual speaker of English, the national language of Gotwoot, I fully respect and appreciate the nuances of English and all the baggage associated with it. Other members of our lofty forum and IRC channel possess English as a second language, with all the advantages of their other language to rely on...or be confused by.
At the core of it, English is a language where ambiguity reigns supreme. It relies on word order, punctuation, and appropriate grammar to make sense. To that point:
- Let's eat, Grandma
- Let's eat Grandma
Pretty straight forward, except they have two very different meanings. The comma has to be included to indicate a verbal pause, resulting in the clear difference between the two phrases. But of course, this is English, so we can make it much worse.
Capital Letters are the difference between helping your Uncle Jack off a horse and helping your uncle jack off a horse.
And then you have all the fun words like read and read, bear and bear, sow and sow, wind and wind, which are actually all two completely different words.
It is here that we get to the crux of the problem. English is a really, really, really shitty written language. It is meant to be spoken. It is reliant on being spoken. Inflection, tone, emphasis are all critical to conveying the accurate meaning of a phrase in English to another individual.
None of that is carried through when you write something down in English. Many other languages do not have this issue. They have declension and case endings, additional words, proper syntax, etc. It is solely up to the reader to interpret the intended emphasis and tone of a written passage, or the burden on the writer is increased dramatically to prevent that level of confusion with context and uncommon vocabulary. Formatting helps, something I've used here from the beginning, but it isn't a cure-all.
Why?
Because American English is even worse.
There are two major flaws with American English, and unique spelling unfortunately, isn't one of them. American English relies extensively on idioms, and hypotheticals.
Idioms make zero sense to non-native speakers, or those who are initially unfamiliar with English. You take an completely unrelated set of words and create an abstract thought with them. British and Australian (and to a lesser degree Canadian) English don't utilize these nearly as much as American English does. I've intentionally used one already to illustrate the point.
A "dovetail" isn't the tail of a bird, obviously. It's already messed up, because it actually describes this. A woodworking joint. And in turn that idiomatic noun is then turned into an idiomatic verb meaning to joint two separate pieces together. Even as a native speaker looking at it from a slight distance, that's fucked up. How would a non-native speaker ever understand that? Nouns? Fuck nouns, we use them as verbs whenever we feel like it.
The second grand flaw of American English is the usage of hypotheticals, or in other words, the wholesale murdering of pronouns. Let's use another example to illustrate this:
Quote:
If someone is unable to take criticism objectively, and takes it personally, they've lost the capacity to reason. A person is not being insulted when someone else says, "I disagree and here's why." One can't participate in an intelligent discussion when they've lost the capacity to reason.
This is what I wrote last post, but this is how I wrote it initially:
Quote:
If you are unable to take criticism objectively, and take it personally, you've lost the capacity to reason. You're not being insulted when someone else says, "I disagree and here's why." You can't participate in an intelligent discussion when you've lost the capacity to reason.
In American English, these two paragraphs mean the exact same thing and carry the exact same tone. But the latter version can be viewed as far more confrontational and potentially as a direct attack on the reader. I had to carefully rewrite this so that shinta wouldn't take it the wrong way, despite the fact that the two paragraphs are identical. The latter way is how it is naturally spoken in American English. The former paragraph is actually incredibly awkward when spoken. It is wooden and stilted.
American English doesn't give a shit about pronouns in their intended use. 3rd person plural "they" can mean a single person, "you" doesn't always refer to the 2nd person addressee. It's all random. When making an argument, American English will naturally fall into a Socratic method. The speaker will address a hypothetical "you" when directing the discussion at the listener, with both parties fully aware that the hypothetical version is not the listener.
That's also pretty fucked up when you think about it. There's no possible way that can be conveyed in writing to a non-native speaker, so it can immediately be perceived as an insult or an attack, despite it never meaning to be.
So to connect this back to the initial subject matter, at Gotwoot we use English, and a large portion of Gotwoot uses American English. A language infamous for its ambiguity, shitty reliance on spoken inflection, tone, and emphasis, and gets worse from idioms and other barely understandable quirks.
American English (and English as a whole) is set up from the start to have an inherent ambiguity when written. The tone will be set by the reader, no matter what tone was intended by the writer. Does the reader believe the writer is hostile toward their ideas? Then they'll read it with a hostile intent when the writer was meant to express a conciliatory tone.
So yes, a post on this forum can be deemed insulting by the reader without ever being intended as such.
tl;dr: English is quite possibly, one of the worst written languages of all time, and using it to convey a particular tone is just asking for trouble, because the bias of the reader will invariably cause problems.
