this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
95 points (86.3% liked)
General Discussion
12036 readers
146 users here now
Welcome to Lemmy.World General!
This is a community for general discussion where you can get your bearings in the fediverse. Discuss topics & ask questions that don't seem to fit in any other community, or don't have an active community yet.
🪆 About Lemmy World
🧭 Finding Communities
Feel free to ask here or over in: [email protected]!
Also keep an eye on:
For more involved tools to find communities to join: check out Lemmyverse!
💬 Additional Discussion Focused Communities:
- [email protected] - Note this is for more serious discussions.
- [email protected] - The opposite of the above, for more laidback chat!
- [email protected] - Into video games? Here's a place to discuss them!
- [email protected] - Watched a movie and wanna talk to others about it? Here's a place to do so!
- [email protected] - Want to talk politics apart from political news? Here's a community for that!
Rules
Remember, Lemmy World rules also apply here.
0. See: Rules for Users.
- No bigotry: including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
- Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
- Be thoughtful and helpful: even with ‘silly’ questions. The world won’t be made better by dismissive comments to others on Lemmy.
- Link posts should include some context/opinion in the body text when the title is unaltered, or be titled to encourage discussion.
- Posts concerning other instances' activity/decisions are better suited to [email protected] or [email protected] communities.
- No Ads/Spamming.
- No NSFW content.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That's one of the interesting things about language. It's all just sounds that we agree represent ideas.
But, because language use is such an intrinsic part of our brains, the rules around language are picked up much faster than we realize. This test is generally done with very young children that haven't had much (if any) grammat traint. They just pick you that adding s to the end of a noun means that there are multiple of if. They'll use that rule even when the noun is nonsense.
But that rule is arbitrary to an extent. We could collectively agree that adding k at the end means plural. It doesn't even have to be at the end, it could be anywhere in the word.
Some words don't follow the normal rules. Like mouse, and mice when talking about the animals. Or the exceptions I mentioned earlier.
If we apply those exceptions to a nonsense noun like wug, it is no more or less "right" than adding s. But the test is about showing how language develops, not how a given language functions.
English is an odd language sometimes though. We borrow words from other languages, sometimes adopting the grammar and rules, sometimes not. But English is built on multiple older languages to begin with, so the rules it has can be mind boggling.
I also wanted to add another aspect to this test:
The difference between wug-s (voiced fricative, sounds like z) and wug-s (unvoiced, sounds like s).
As an example:
Dogs (dog/z/)
Cats (cat/s/)
The same pluralization rule is applied to both words, but the actual sounds made are different depending on the voicing of the previous sound/letter. You can feel the 'voicing' (vibration) of different sounds by putting your hand on your throat while saying these words.
Also fun fact I have a tattoo of a wug :)
Yeah. Norwegian is also borrowing a lot of words from other languages like that. Lots of our words are in English as well. Our grammar is similar that way that we have differences in the ending structure for some of those borrowed words, but I only think we do that for verbs.