throwaway41968
I said almost lost, and I'm choosing to believe out of charity that you didn't notice the extra word.
> But you were originally stating that subjunctive in French lost its semantic value. Now you making it narrow and added "compared to Spanish".
Yes, that's the crux of my argument, comparing use cases in French with that of other Romance languages in order to show how far the subjunctive use cases in French drifted from their original purpose and meaning. How else am I supposed to demonstrate it without a couple of reference points to compare with?
> It was meant to say that misuse of tenses and moods may alter causality and in general events chaining is not commutative (poop o wipe != wipe o poop).
I did take your point a little too literally, sorry. Still, the fact that mood and tense use across Romance languages is inconsistent, yet:
-People who speak either Romance language have no trouble distinguishing the actual from the hypothetical within their language, and
-People who speak multiple Romance languages have no trouble switching from one mood to the other according to the use case/language combination at hand,
shows how unlikely your "poop o wipe" situations are in practice. People "misuse" tenses and moods all the time (which is the prescriptive way of saying tense and mood usage evolves all the time) yet they still manage to communicate clearly somehow. This shows that these are not actually central to convey meaning and there are other avenues that do not use this system (context, adverbial cues, etc.).
>I said you can do it in any language, but the formulation at some point will become cumbersome.
Do you have any evidence for this? Like, can you showcase foreign languages that do not feature this system and whose formulation of the hypothetical would prove consistently more cumbersome and verbose than that of Romance languages? I'm not sure if you realize how far-reaching that statement is.
Alright I have my trusty Grammaire espagnole (Beschrelle) at hand, and here are the differences in use of the subjunctive. The following cases involve the indicative in Spanish and the subjunctive in French:
-A concessive clause, whose opposition relies on a reality-grounded fact (aunque està lloviendo/bien qu'il pleuve)
-A relative clause after a superlative or similar adjectives expressing the idea of "first", "unique", uses the subjunctive in French. The comparison point being grounded in reality, Spanish always uses the indicative. (la mejor secretaria que hemos tenido/la meilleure secrétaire que nous ayons eue).
Conversely, here are cases where Spanish uses the subjunctive and French uses the indicative:
-Expressing a condition, hypothesis or hypothetic comparison after si (si vinieras conmigo/si tu venais avec moi)
-Expressing a supposition (quiza ella esté al tanto/peut-être qu'elle est au courant)
-Temporal clauses in the future (Cuando venga/Quand il viendra)
I can go on if you like. Very clearly, Spanish's use of the subjunctive very closely follows the hypothetical/unrealized aspect of the content, whereas French's use is less consistent with that aspect, and mostly depends on the locution being used.
>I even miss Spanish’ subjunctive future in French!
And yet I'm sure you don't have any problems expressing the hypothetical and/or fictious in Spanish, do you? At least hundreds of millions of Spanish speakers don't.
>Wiping your butt after pooping is overrated too, you should try the opposite.
Seeing how mood use is inconsistent from one Romance language to the other, I guess Spanish and Italian speakers aren't wiping their butts according to your point of view (and you aren't wiping yours according to them). Or...we could just stop adopting such a normative attitude and admit usage changes across countries and time periods without anything being reprehensible about it?
>That’s what makes a language more or less concise and elegant. You can express countless shades of meanings in pure arid arithmetic too, but yet...
Are you seriously arguing that languages that lack the tense and mood system of Romance languages are somehow less elegant and concise, or less able to express countless shades of meaning somehow?
Generally speaking, proper use of tenses and moods is overrated; it is inconsistent across Romance languages yet speakers of either have no difficulty making themselves understood, or learning others' systems. Many non-Romance languages dispense entirely with this system and yet their speakers don't encounter any difficulties expressing the same shades of meaning as they would in French.
And if you want to do it, and do it quickly, you've got to do your Anki reps. Acquire lots and lots of vocabulary so you get through the boring part and start enjoying the use of the language.
That doesn't make any sense. Maybe they're not good according to the normative institutions attempting to control the language, but that doesn't have any bearing on the ability of billions of people to communicate with their peers using their mother tongue. Just because an institution says a certain form is "incorrect" doesn't mean people are going to stop using it and make themselves understood with that form.
The past conditional, maybe. The future, really? Do you actually say things like nous nous verrons demain or il l'aura fait avant in casual speech? Well I don't know if you do, but the vast majority of French speakers would say something like on se voit demain et il l'a probablement fait avant. Instead of using specific verb forms to convery meaning people instead rely on context and adverbial cues, as do the speakers of the dozens of languages that do not use the byzantine tense and mood system of the Romance languages (see: Japanese, Chinese, etc.) and are certainly not the worse for it.
>I've noticed that the subjunctive is used less in writing since some change to 'simplify' (i.e. dumb down) the language.
You're aware that the argument you're making about the language getting "dumbed down" is literally millennia old, right?
>Understand strongly accented speech. I understand essentially all the “standard” French without subtitles, but very little of the Quebecois.
Most European French speakers have trouble understanding Québecois as well, especially if it delves into slang, so I wouldn't fret much. High level (and written) speech should be ok though.
>Understand very slang-heavy speech. I know a good chunk of argot but there are still plenty of informal vocab words and expressions I don’t know. Especially that damn verlan.
Again, seeing how most people over 35 don't understand any of that stuff either I wouldn't worry too much. Especially because this stuff evolves like crazy and new slang/verlan words keep popping up all the time. I'm in my late 20s and can already feel the divide in the slang I and friends in their early 20s use.
>Write error free text. I can get the message across pretty well without relying on a dictionary, but I often phrase things a bit unnaturally and make minor grammatical errors.
Like I and another poster said, most of the mistakes aren't really mistakes. Only the most extraordinary pedant would object to these.
>Quickly use less common verb tenses. While I know how to construct the past conditional and future perfect, I still can’t use them very fluidly. >Recognize all the weird literary tenses. Imperfect subjunctive? Yuck.
Yeah no one uses these. In fact if you did attempt to use these in a normal conversation there's a good chance you wouldn't be understood. Even in writing, modern authors are more and more switching to present and past perfect. Even tenses like the future are getting increasingly uncommon, people instead use the present and rely on contextual clues or markers, like in German (" we'll meet tomorrow" -> "we meet tomorrow").
What I mean to say from all of this is that even native French speakers are not completely at ease with these pain points so it's no use worrying about them too much.
>Their strategy doesn't work if other options are available.
Maybe they should rethink their strategy then (by the way, what a lovely word to use when dealing with romantic interests).
>they do not support consensual BDSM, viewing porn, or having sex before commitment has been established in a relationship
>Similar conservative guidelines (“don’t rush into sex,” “let him take the lead”) were promoted as dating advice in books of the ’90s and 2000s such as The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right.
>Like pickup artists, Female Dating Strategy often objectifies the opposite gender and turns dating into some sort of game to be won — just in their case, it isn’t having sex that’s the prize, but finding a High Value Male.
Yeah this is basically redpill/PUA crap combined with a hearty dose of American puritanism. Maybe both men and women who believe in this stuff should find each other instead of trying to give advice to the rest of us.
In practice, this means that two individuals are said to belong to a different (resp. identical) species if everyone in the community agrees that they do. That's what it means to be a "social construct", not that the differences per se aren't real.
Justifying other statements on the lines of "X is a social construct" similarly, where X ranges across a variety of more-or-less controversial concepts, is left as an exercise to the reader.
>It's really only Google and Facebook that get the vitriol.
The way I read it, it seems as though it's unfair that they get away with doing questionable stuff when "others do worse". Why yes, if you have nefarious intentions but no power to act them out, people are going to throw less "vitriol" at you than if you do act them out.
Also, using slang isn't as frowned upon as it can be in America. Again, idk your experience but mine is that people swear left and right in casual conversation without anyone giving them a side glance. Of course in formal contexts such as addressing strangers in the street or greeting your baker you don't want ot, but the moment familiarity sets in you can be sure swearwords are going to pop all the time.
The phenomenon is also accelerating, even the most trivial and shortest words are getting commonly reversed: là (there) -> al, pas (not) -> ap, moi/toi (me/you) -> ouam/ouat, ça (that) -> ass, bien (well) -> ienb, pied (foot) -> iep, etc. Lots of fun to be had when explaining all this stuff to other non-French speakers.
-It's basically a HBD blog. HBD proponents love to pretend they're doing "science" by posting huge walls of texts that masquerade as papers but would be thrown out of any respectable peer-reviewed popgen journal. (popgen, not psychology.). Here's an example of titles on this blog: "The Catholic Church and Western Genetics", "Racial Ancestry and IQ", "Population Differences in IQ-Related Genes", "Expert Surveys on Race and IQ". Note that at no point in any of those posts, any actual geneticist is mentioned, only "intelligence researchers". Many of these, like Lynn, Rushton and Kanazawa were found to be guilty of conducting absolute trash science or outright fraud (https://medium.com/@evopsychgoogle/a-critique-of-rushton-and..., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3332228/, http://risk-resilience.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/jour...). Many of these researchers also get funding from very shady sources like the Pioneer Fund. This alone should send all kinds of warnings about the motivated agenda of the people putting forward arguments here.
-It does nothing to address any of the points raised by Taleb, such as nonlinearity and convexity. This sentence right here shows how mathematically illiterate the author is: >I’ll say more about this below, but here note in passing that Taleb never explains why a non-linear trend would invalidate IQ in the first place. The author also doesn't seem to understand that covariance between a fat-tailed distribution and a gaussian one isn't well-defined in the first place and as such measuring samples' covariance makes no sense. You don't need "a study" to prove it, it's just math.
-It basically parrots the same points over and over again, distorting the word "predict" to the point of meaninglessness: IQ predicts this, IQ predicts that. Well of course when we live in a society where many of your life outcomes are somehow tied to your ability to sit down and take a pen and paper test, IQ is going to correlate well with these! "An artifact number that drives a bunch of correlates" is not what normal people (read, people outside the Pioneer Fund buddies) mean by intelligence! In fact, nobody really agrees what is meant by intelligence, which is why AI isn't a thing and likely won't be within our lifetimes.
-You're basically a one-reply account, who posted just so that challenges to your debunked notion of IQ wouldn't get the last word. Again, let me doubt good faith is involved here.
HN is good when it comes to technology, and that's what I browse it for. When it comes to genetics or biology...not so much. Engineer's disease runs definitely stronger than coronaviruses here.
In a way NNT reflects the original hacker ethos in all of its pristine and glorious ugliness.
Sarcasm aside, that title is waaaay loaded. It sort of insinuates sci-hub users are the burden and not the journals.