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Just my two cents, not having a go at you:

This is why I’m a pragmatic prescriptivist, I want people to follow norms for ease of communication, unless their innovation fills a need/fixes something about the language.

Stupid english with its stupid verbs.

We’ve got “to” and “from” why do we need to have two differently spelt verbs for basically the same thing.

Sure, you could argue that you can just say “they are emigrating” to imply people are leaving the country permanently, but let’s be honest, not providing any other context it’s practically unheard of. You’ll at least be saying where they currently are, came from, or going to, unless you’re being very abstract. Even then, you couls say “the migrants were immigrating” to be very vague about it. Both immigrating and emigrating involve moving, wtf is the point?

I’m glad few people “properly” use “emigrate” these days. Let’s kill it, it’s redundant!

I may have even gotten the difference wrong, but I’m not gonna look it up since I don’t want to use it anyway haha

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Illecors@lemmy.cafe ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I, personally, like a language being rich. Nothing wrong with not knowing all the ins and outs, but calling for simplification on what is already an very simple language is odd.

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- milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I just have to point out, in an argument about language pedantry,
  
  an very simple language
  
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  - Illecors@lemmy.cafe ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Point taken :D Coffee must kick in at some point.
    
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- Bloomcole@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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- MisterFrog@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I wouldn’t call English simple haha
  
  To me the richness comes from interesting cultural quirks of why we say something, but I’m not really feeling that for emigrate, personally, so would prefer we speed up it being forgotten. Words falling out of use is very common, so I’m happy to lose ones that are annoying
  
  I should also specify, I’m just getting into the spirit of enjoyable nitpicking, also
  
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scholar@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
How about just ‘migrate’ and ‘migrating’?

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- MisterFrog@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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- Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  In my view, “migrate” according to Etymonline originates from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *mei which means “to change, go, move”.
  
  I don’t believe this term refers to moving in or out of something, or any other preposition.
  
  As we’ve been discussing in this post, immigrate and emigrate represent inverses of each other. It makes sense to look for logical ways to combine those.
  
  I think the best prefix for this would be trans- for, according to Etymonline, this means “across, beyond, through, on the other side of; go beyond”. Specifically, I would refer to trans- as meaning “out from and in to”, which gives us the word “transmigrate”. Etymonline has a dictionary entry for “transmigration”.
  
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  - scholar@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    From wiktionary: Verb migrate (third-person singular simple present migrates, present participle migrating, simple past and past participle migrated)
    
    (intransitive) To change habitations across a border; to move from one country or political region to another. To escape persecution, they migrated to a neutral country.
    
    This is already common usage and I don’t see the need for any prefixes to the word. The Etymonline definition is giving the definition of the root, not the current english word.
    
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    Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    This is already common usage and I don’t see the need for any prefixes to the word.
    
    As we’ve already seen in this thread, sometimes prefixes are needed to help establish the arrow of causation when people do migrate. Did they come to or leave from this or that country? Etc.
    
    not the current english word.
    
    Good thing language can change over time :)
    
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- faythofdragons@slrpnk.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  But this is the digital age, so it’s clearly e-migrating.
  
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milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I think there’s a richness in being able to shift or emphasize perspective like that. And a poetry, for want of a better word, that comes with that.

‘Coming’ and ‘going’ do the same shift. “I’m coming to Europe; they’re coming from Europe,” feels just a bit stilted to me, though that’s subjective I suppose.

If you want to get rid of immigrate Vs emigrate, maybe we just talk about ‘migrate’.

And scrap ‘coming’ and ‘going’ for ‘moving’.

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