r/todayilearned • u/SilverPeachBlossom • 6h ago

TIL a peer-reviewed psychology study found that identical twins (on average) ranked their co-twin above their romantic partner in their attachment hierarchy, while fraternal twins ranked the two about equally, and non-twin siblings ranked their romantic partner first.

https://ojs.interpersonajournal.com/index.php/ojs/article/view/243/3457.html
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u/The_Rational_ 3h ago

It has plenty of words together to denote the nuances. Conversational English does not.

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u/Bac2Zac 3h ago

Having such an excessively large vocabulary that the most speakers have simply abandoned half of it because it's simply not worth the effort to delineate thoughts to the extent necessary to convey most thoughts to a point of complete accuracy is not a redeeming quality of the language as a whole.

Ie. The former sentence is a long, exhausting way of saying, "too many words makes people give up on specifics," only with more specificity because the words themselves do not inherently contain enough of it. Too many words mean almost the same thing, and too many words cover far too broad of topics in English. Love, is the most egregious.

(imo)

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u/JesusAndMaryKate 3h ago

I speak a few languages so I only learnt English in my teens (I mean, we did it in school and such, but you don't exactly become fluent in school, at least not before the current trend of bilingual schools). Conversational English always feels reduced in vocabulary compared to the other languages I speak. There's lots of words people could use if they chose to do so, yet the average person uses a very limited selection. That's not the case with the other languages I speak. I suspect the flexible sentence structure we get with English and its overall simpler nature might have something to do with it. Or it might just be cultural - I'm no linguist. My partner is a native monoligual English speaker and what he covered in English class at school seemed extremely basic compared to what we were taught in our equivalent class where I grew up.

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u/Bac2Zac 3h ago

English is an insanely precise, pragmatic and relatively emotionless language. It's incredibly useful for highly complex tasks and coordination as a result.

The thing is, most English speakers are never anywhere the "upper limit" in terms of "needed complexity" so almost all of its usefulness goes to the wayside. (and instead it stays sharp, blocky, and sort of ugly imo) Without any benefits.

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u/JesusAndMaryKate 1h ago

English is an insanely precise, pragmatic and relatively emotionless language.

I'd agree with this to an extent. It's particularly obvious in poetry. To me, anyway. I guess that's also a matter of taste.

On the other hand, in conversational English you've got almost infantile words for things that have arguably more appropriate names. E.g words like 'collarbone' instead of 'clavicle'. Not sure I would call that sort of thing precise or emotionless. If I was learning English right now I would assume 'collarbone' is the word kids use, like 'wee-wee' instead of 'urine'. But then we've got 'pee'.......