What do we know about the use of slang and the shifting meaning of words in languages before Antiquity?

And how does this shape our understanding of ancient cultures? I sense that we chronically underestimate the tackiness but also the sense of humour of ancient people.

8 points · 6 comments · view on lemmy.world

6 Comments

givesomefucks@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 46d (2 replies)

This is a terrible question because of it's vaugeness...

Just Google an article if you want to know the super general basics, then if you have more specific questions, that's when you would bother making a post asking for someone to explain what you're haven't found answers to.

schmorpel@slrpnk.net · 1 pts · 46d (1 reply)

I was hoping to invite people to elaborate on their favourite topics or contribute interesting facts. What brought me to this question is that yesterday someone commented about the shifting meaning of the words "nice" and "mean" - from there I went pondering about youth language of today of which I understand little because I lack the cultural context, and then thought about the Sumerian bar joke ("I can't see a thing, I will open this one"). So I decided I'd just throw something vague out here and see what else people would come up with around this topic. And I prefer to initiate a discussion rather than googling an article. Edit: typo

givesomefucks@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 46d

Well it's definitely easier on your end this way...

You just get less information and what you get might be made up ramblings.

Have fun with that, I want see anymore of these if this is just normal posting for you.

JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social · 2 pts · 26d (2 replies)

LATE REPLY

Our man PJ seems to have retired from the Fediverse about a month ago, but... here's some thoughts from your local doofus--

  • spoken human language seems to go back around ~175Kyrs ago in terms of best-theory
  • slang, shifting, morphing and evolving of language has almost certainly been happening ever since, with language likely originally evolving in multiple places, upon multiple timelines, upon multiple human species (there were ~six of us a mere 50Kyrs ago!)
  • If there's one thing that I consistently observe about us naked-apes, it's that we share a crushing-psychological urge to normalize absolutely everything we can. To me, that arguably stems from the "Existential-dread Toolkit," boom-yadda and boom-ayay!
  • That "normalisation" (to my mind) can lead to a landslide of outlier beliefs, outlier behavior, outlier expectations, and all kinds of crazy shizzle (like religion) that has nothing necessarily to do with real life as we know it. For example, given Natural Law and the sciences.

tackiness but also the sense of humour of ancient people

Again, I'd argue that those things have been around since even Homo sp. (humans) pre-language, with all variety of other animals demonstrating such things even today. The implication being that language and the various things you mention actually go back millions of years!

schmorpel@slrpnk.net · 2 pts · 24d (1 reply)

Now I want to learn all the nasty words for 'human' in different animal languages.

Hmm, I don't really see the link between existential dread, normality and normalization ... care to elaborate?

Too bad PJ is gone, fediverse seems empty without them and I crave my daily historical randomness!

JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social · 1 pts · 24d

Hmm, I don’t really see the link between existential dread, normality and normalization … care to elaborate?

It was too wide-ranging of a comment and not nearly as focused as a proper response should be. Deserves a re-write, altho with this community being kind of stillborn now, I'm not sure there's much point. :/

Too bad PJ is gone, fediverse seems empty without them and I crave my daily historical randomness!

I still post a couple times a week to the various history places, but that's certainly a drop in the bucket compared to PJ's former output. One thing you can always do is just pick a community and page through the older posts. I think each place has at least a thousand or two!