Well, I personally don’t know much about the variety itself, so I can’t tell you about it’s history or speaker population or anything.
But the way modern linguistics would approach this is, as you said, descriptively (there are basically zero prescriptive linguistics anymore and if they do exist you can bet no one takes them seriously). There is no “right” way to speak. No variety is better than any other. There is simply the ways people use language, and the ways they don’t.
If a group of people is speaking Spanish with a pronounced “h,” then they’re not wrong. That’s the way they use language. They’re just a rarer variation. Which is interesting! Its an opportunity to study where the difference comes from, and what others there may be! Where do they pronounce the “h”? In what contexts? What characteristics do the population share? What does this tell us about Spanish as a language? Things like that!
And same as there’s no “right” way to use language, there is no way you “should” use it or pronounce things. Linguistically, people saying you “should” use language any specific way because it’s “better” (prescriptivism) are wrong.
Historically, the “correct” ways to use language that people tout or get on other people’s cases about are the ways the elite and privileged use language. White people, rich people, men, abled people, etc. Because they have more social power, the ways they speak are considered “better”, are taught in schools, are perpetuated. It’s a cycle.
Disparaging the ways people communicate, perpetuating linguistic bias, is a tool of social power and control. Linguists don’t take descriptive approaches to be neutral, but because prescriptivism is actively harmful.
So, Spanish with a pronounced “h” is completely and entirely valid. It is equal to all other variants, and to every other language in existence. Speakers who pronounce the “h” are not wrong, and should continuing using their language as they please :)
Ok, so confusion abt grammatical gender is pretty normal, and I happen to think it’s at least in part due to teachers oversimplifying. So I’ll try to demystify it a bit:
Grammatical gender does not mean that the object or concept a noun refers to is gendered. Table in Spanish being la mesa does not mean that Spanish speakers think tables are like women, and it being der Tisch in German does not mean German speakers think tables are like men. Also, if the object/concept were gendered, languages with gender would not have synonyms with different genders, for example French’s le vélo (masculine) and la bicyclette (feminine), both meaning “bicycle”.
Grammatical gender simply takes the noun itself and puts it into one of many groups of nouns which require different words to change form to agree with it.
Oftentimes, the way a word sounds or is constructed also takes precedence over its meaning when it comes to its gender. For example, das Mädchen “the girl” in German, which is neuter, not feminine, because all nouns ending in -chen are neuter. Or, for another couple: la barba “the beard” in Spanish is feminine because it ends in a, and el vestido which is masculine because it ends in o. [Generally in Spanish nouns ending in -a are feminine, and ones ending in -o are masculine, altho there are exceptions.] There are also other examples.
There definitely are issues when it comes to grammatical gender, like making it harder to talk about non-binary or gender non-conforming people. However, the languages do not gender objects/concepts, they gender nouns.
I hope this makes sense and makes grammatical gender a bit less confusing. [It’s still hard to learn though, unfortunately.]
hola, una pregunta para les que usan el pronombre “elle”: ¿qué hacen ustedes cuando tienen que usar un título? O sea, ¿cuál es el equivalente neutral de señor/señora/doctor/doctora/profesor/profesora?
gracias de antemano por contestar!!
the lamb da calculus is a juvenile sheep that bites all the meaningful leaves off the syntax tree and half-digests them into a sort of semantic cud, which can be chewed further at a later time to extract the rest of the semiotic nutrition
if one more person tells me braille isn’t a language im decking them in the face. this “different alphabet” actually meets just about all the requirements for a language. i swear to god its like saying written english or sign language isn’t real
i don’t know what i’d add to English. Maybe evidentials? I’m not sure though. I think English works fine enough as is (grammatically speaking), so I don’t think there’s much I’d want to add.
For a fact abt syntax: Nearly every Germanic language (English being one of the major exceptions) has a thing called V2 word order, which means that the verb is the second constituent [not word] of a declarative sentence (i.e. not a question or imperative usually). [English has some remnants of this, for example the phrase “never have I ever” as well as English allowing for subject-verb inversion in certain contexts, but generally English uses SVO nearly exclusively.]
But a fun thing is that Germanic languages tend to not allow V2 word order in relative clauses and subordinate clauses, with two exceptions: Yiddish and Icelandic. Both of these languages allow any declarative clause to be in V2 word order, unlike every other Germanic language.
my favorite thing ever is when people get confused between bilingual and bisexual (real thing that happens almost embarrassingly often even for america) because im neither bilingual nor bisexual. im queer as fuck and i study four languages so yes but actually no and im gonna tell you my gender is toki pona
also, to anyone who actually might be confused (lets face it there’s a jillion people on this platform there’s gonna be one of ya): bilingual is when you speak two languages. bisexual is when you are sexually attracted to two genders.
in intro to ling classes we sometimes talk about whistled languages as another modality, or drummed languages¹; but i think in actuality most linguists you ask would say that those modalities are a language technology, just as writing is. writing is a technology that enables us to language through an alternative modality, but it’s vanishingly rare (or maybe nonexistant) for anyone to acquire writing as their first language modality. signed and spoken (and tactile-signed) languages, however, are acquired by babies as their first languages.
[1] This wiki article is not very well-cited and could be improved.
what the fuck is up with this classmate who Always makes the comment about “not being affected by social media.” My brother, this is a linguistics paper from the 1960s!! What the fuck are you talking about???
hi tumblr! i wrote a brief little substack article about the relationship between language and gender if u wanna go read it :3 i’m very proud of it teehee
why can’t i just Become Fluent by listening to the language via music or something. they really need to make a cheat code for that or something
Source: Maier, E. (2023). Emojis as Pictures. Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy, 10(n/a). https://doi.org/10.3998/ergo.4641
Source: Maier, E. (2023). Emojis as Pictures. Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy, 10(n/a). https://doi.org/10.3998/ergo.4641