this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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As an ESL: English is a fucking minefield.
minefield? your field? my field? field of mines? mine? field? mine field? minefield? field mine? fieldmine?
I can only imagine. On the other hand, most other languages don't have such an awesome and powerful array of offensive words. I mean, there's such a VARIETY of them, all offensive for different reasons. Racial words, toilet and bodily function words, words that are literally related to being cursed by God, offensive words exclusively about stupid people, words related to sexual intercourse, words specifically made to offend genders and sexual orientations, etc, on and on. It's impressive, even to a native speaker, when you really sit and think about it.
I think it comes from the sheer number of other languages that are related to English, as well as the fact that we'll just steal words from any other language, faster than just about anyone else.
EDIT: I'm not at all implying that other languages don't have words for all those things I listed. It's just that most other languages don't have the same categorization of "these words are swear words" that English does. As I understand it, most other languages have a much shorter list of words that are specifically taboo for anyone to say, in a polite context.
Rudeness in many other languages is more defined by the manner of speech, the degree of formality, etc. But we English speakers have this lovely category of words that are both nominally "forbidden," yet also used all the time, by almost everyone.
Lemmy is so weird man, I have no idea why you're being downvoted while the people replying in agreement aren't. Is anybody actually reading/comprehending these?
That sounds like people going through their profile and just mass downvoting everything
lol
Well, you understand wrong.
Please don't attempt to make these kinds of linguist generalisations when you have next to no knowledge about anything else but your native language. Again, this is not exceptional to English at all.
Languages aren't based of English as far as I've understood. English is a germanic language, just like German (obviously), Dutch, Danish and many others. So it's shared origins but not based of English.
Also I at least know Dutch actually full on has swear words like you describe. I've never heard of another language having something like the N-word though. That seems to be unique.
Lmao I think most people believe this about their native tongue.
Yeah other languages normally get their swears from words for things that are considered taboo but english just has such a variety. We have swears/slurs that are related to:
But also not all words from those categories are swears and not all of those swears are always swears. We also have words that sound/look like swears but aren't.
edit: it would appear that I am incorrect
A typical take by a monolinguist. All of the examples you mention are typical in most other languages as well. English is not exceptional in that regard whatsoever.
I'm Dutch, we do basically all of these with the exception of go to hell. But we also curse with diseases such as typhoid and cholera.
I'm sorry to say but your curses aren't anything special.
Aw man :( You mean we english-speakers aren't the only ones with overly sensitive ancestors?
Exactly! You immediately came up with several categories that I completely forgot about, when I was listing categories of swear words. And yeah, the different levels of swearing are fascinating. And then, of course, the whole levels-of-familiarity-and-politeness-and-formality thing that other languages have? English still has that shit, it's just not built into the formal structure of the language, the way it is in, say, Japanese.
Those politeness and familiarity levels are just based on the context of every individual, and their particular social group. Some people swear a lot in their own family setting, some people NEVER swear within their nuclear family group. Some workplace environments are RIGIDLY anti-swearing, while others are totally informal, and everyone has a potty-mouth, all the time. And any of these contexts can have their own specific house rules, in terms of which categories of swearing are more taboo.
Like: "hey, fuckface! Don't say the fucking R-word around here, or I'll break my foot off in your ass." Totally a thing that I can imagine someone saying.
You neglect the versatility of our tabboo language, too!
Take English's favorite swear: Fuck.
Fuck is:
It can be used to express:
And that's just scratching the surface!
Fucking hell, this fucking fucker has fucking fucked it.
My English teacher was right. Fuck is lazy. Lol
much useful
so versatile