this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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I study linguistics and a lot of different languages, and what you said made me think of how the difficulty in learning a second language depends on how different it is to our native tongue, or how accents within our own language are difficult to understand depending on how different and unfamiliar they are to us. Yet people tend to insist that certain languages are 'simply' hard, and insist that unfamiliar grammar or pronunciation 'make no sense', no matter how many millions of people use them naturally since childhood. I think it's very difficult to imagine things which are instinctive to us being anything other than immanent truths about the universe, and anything contradicting those instincts feels wrong. What is familiar feels simple and obvious, difference feels complicated and somehow malicious; it's 'unnatural'. What is natural is ourself, everything else is crazy.