Yeaaahh… I’m going to need you to come in to work this Saturday.
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You’re missing my point.
Esperanto was designed from the ground up to be mutually intelligible to speakers of many different languages, and in theory it can be learned by more people in the world more easily than any other language.
Klingon is (to my understanding) a complete mess culled together from bits and pieces designed for isolated usage on television episodes and a few movies based on those episodes.
The fact that the number of speakers of each language is even remotely comparable is what I find striking. A language constructed to be a universal language isn’t that much more widely spoken than a language that was constructed to be a TV prop.
That tells you something about what draws people to choose to learn a language, and it isn’t that they find the language to be a jewel of intelligent construction and forethought, but rather that they have a personal connection with it.
I’m not talking about the raw numbers of speakers, or even works produced. I’m talking about how a language which intuitively seems like it should be wildly popular is not, while another which arguably should be the last language anyone ever bothers to learn nevertheless has a significant speaker-base despite its glaring flaws because it resonates personally with the those who do learn it.
An interesting note, my small kidlet refuses to believe me that firemen aren’t there to make fires. The folks who tool around on those big red trucks are obviously “watermen” because they use big hoses with water to put out fires.
Strangely enough the trucks are still firetrucks (maybe because they go to fires?), but the people on them? Watermen, and there’s no convincing her otherwise.
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oh man. just the opening lines of Genesis killed me. Someone please tell me a Laugh-Out-Loud Cats illustrated bible is in the works…
The prescriptivists do not know English language history. English has always had a certain flexibility with singluar/plural. The pronoun “you” was once plural, and is now either singular or plural (singular “thou” is archaic at best). Collective nouns can often take singular or plural verbs (the committee have/has decided), although preferences are different in the UK and the USA. Using “they” as a singular pronoun is well-advanced; it is just not part of literary dialect yet.
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“Staff” refers to a collection of people. So, using “wait staff” for one person is using the same singular/plural ambiguity that “they” uses. If you object to using “they” because you say it should only be plural, then you should also object to using “staff” to refer to one person.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Note that the post you responded to also mentioned genderqueer people, a non-trivial group of folks. There are also those who prefer to not reveal their gender online.
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