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Sep 17, 2023Liked by Brad Weed

Enjoying reading

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Another point to raise is that English itself it also diverse. Check out: World Englishes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Englishes): "World Englishes is a term for emerging localised or indigenised varieties of English, especially varieties that have developed in territories influenced by the United Kingdom or the United States. The study of World Englishes consists of identifying varieties of English used in diverse sociolinguistic contexts globally and analyzing how sociolinguistic histories, multicultural backgrounds and contexts of function influence the use of English in different regions of the world."

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I love languages which is why I minored in French and almost got my masters in linguistics instead of design. Although...design is a language, too, albeit a visual one (there’s a great paper by Ellen Lupton where she uses rhetorical writing devices as a framework for designing identity systems). But anyway...one thing I learned from speaking French: they use passive phrases to the English direct ones. You can see the results of this in shampoo bottle descriptions, for example. The French text is often twice as long as the English text. Their vocabulary is smaller, too: the English vocabulary, no doubt large because so many from most cultures contribute to it –mixing, matching, slicing, dicing, adding, subtracting– allows very nuanced descriptions that aren’t available in French.

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