[ExI] aside: xenophobia

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg
Subject: Re: [ExI] aside: xenophobia


>...Still, Poul Anderson showed how it might have looked if it had at least
kept to being a Germanic language:

https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language.artificial/ZL4e
3fD7eW0/_7p8bKwLJWkJ


Cool, thanks Anders!  That was a fun romp.



On 2015-10-29 02:48, spike wrote:
>>... Oy, we sat here and did nothing as the English language became screwed
up beyond recognition.

>...You are not that old...  Dr Anders Sandberg


Anders, I have been messing with AncestryDNA for a while and developed
software which helps a prole use his cousin list to figure out and prove who
are her 6 to 8 generation back ancestors.  When one does that, it causes a
slight adjustment in how one thinks of the term "we."  Now we think of "we"
as those who are our internet kindred spirits, and I certainly do that
still, an always will.  But doing the AncestryDNA thing causes one to think
of an orthogonal we, one that is pi/2 from the usual one, where 'we' is
always a term referring to one's contemporaries.

Once one gets a family tree trued up and proven by DNA, you can think of an
8 generation we stretching back a couple hundred years, and one that
includes actual Germans and English and Swedes, my cousin Anders.

Once that happens, xenophobia makes little sense, for the foreigners are
part of we.  The comment "...we did nothing as English became screwed up..."
does make sense, for part of we were there.

spike