Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Last night, I was saying some sentence involving "Imma" for some reason. (E.g., "Imma have to hit you if you keep on doing that!") A woman sitting near me remarked "That's not English!" I bit my tongue and smiled. But her remark is nonsense: English is what English speakers say. Languages are created and transformed by their users, not by a committee declaring what is and isn't "English." And varieties of English, like Black-American English (BAE), are "inferior" only in the sense that many people look down their nose at those who speak that variety of English. I was making this point online once, and someone objected: no, the person claimed, a "simple" dialect like BAE cannot express "great thoughts" such as contained in Hamlet or the Declaration of Independence. But this is just piling rubbish on the garbage heap: modern English is a very, very simplified language! Here is John McWhorter describing ...

In learning a foreign language, there comes a weird point where you find that you haven't been translating your new language into your old one, and you may find yourself thinking, "How, then, do I understand what is being said?" Good question, and one that applies just as much to your first language. It is very strange that anyone ever seriously forwarded the idea that all thinking is in words, because it is obvious that the words themselves must be understood, and one can only do that with other words to a limit, without entering into Peirce's "unlimited semiosis." At some point what one needs is not another word but Frege's Sinn , or the idea behind the word. And at that point we get a little glimpse at the mystery of what we really are.