Interesting Links for 26-08-2019

[andrewducker]

What The Code of Hammurabi Can Teach Us About Hardware and Software Liability

(tags:responsibility history software viaFanf )

Do American Writers Think Irish is Public Domain Elvish?

(tags:Ireland writing fantasy language viaNWhyte )

Some lovely photos from The People's Vote Rally, Edinburgh

(tags:uk europe photos )

The Wug Test (I had no idea we made three noises for the plural s)

(tags:language English children viaSwampers )

A flawed idea is teaching millions of American kids to be poor readers.

(tags:reading USA viaFanf )

Moscow's blockchain voting system cracked a month before election

(tags:russia blockchain voting )

Association of Restless Legs Syndrome With Risk of Suicide and Self-harm

(tags:self-harm suicide )

Sun boycott reduced Euroscepticism on Merseyside

(tags:media UK Europe )

Comments

[cosmolinguist]

You definitely did know that we make three noises for the plural s, because you'll have been doing it since you were five or something. :) You just never thought consciously about this knowledge; that lack of conscious access to our native speaker intuitions about a language is one of the things I'm most enjoying about studying linguistics.

[andrewducker]

That's what I meant by "know". To consciously understand something.

There's tons of things I've done by rote but not known what I was doing.

[cosmolinguist]

The whole point of the wug test is that it proves we're not doing it by rote though. We can greet novel situations with known rules. It's pretty cool. :)

[rmc28]

I was amused/intrigued by the rules I didn't know I knew about ways to address people in my recent post about that. Like which are older-to-younger only and that kind of thing.

[andrewducker]

How does "adding an s on the end" prove we're not doing it by rote?

[cosmolinguist]

Given a made-up word, so one that the kid can't have heard before and learned from copying others, the kid can accurately use the correct form (like the /z/ with "wug"). Hardly anyone can explain that this is because the voiced final consonant requires the voiced alteration of the underlying plural, but everyone is applying that rule when they make the plural of a word they haven't heard before.

[andrewducker]

"When you see X do Y" sounds like almost the definition of "rote" to me.

[cosmolinguist]

Hm, okay, I was using "by rote" to mean memorization by repetition of examples. It teaches you the examples, not the underlying rule.

[naath]

ah, unknown knowns. Such a large category.


I don't know at what age I could do the wug test, these days I would probably stoat it up questionably deliberatly, I man the plural of box is clearly boxen right? and tass (a creature|) could clearly be tass in the plural (see, sheep, fish, deer)

[fanf]

I think my favourite unknown known is adjective order, which is taught in ESL classes but not reified for native speakers https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/english-grammar-reference/adjective-order

[channelpenguin]

Yup, that is awesome. I must remember to ask my German BF if it is he same in German (I think so)

[channelpenguin]

apparently not! He feels that you can put the adjectives in any order before a noun