A linguistics blog covering word origins, slang, grammar quirks and language trivia for a general audience.
HN links it for linguistics curiosities such as anti-shibboleths ("friscos"), color words like orange hair being called red, and the word "lox."
Yes, of course your "right mate" example is also grammatically correct. The point is that people routinely and naturally do the complicated transformation to "will the man who has written the book be followed?", and that transformation can't be done by simple pattern matching. Hence, humans who are able to do the complicated transformation must be mentally parsing the sentence. The fact that there is an alternative simple transformation to form the yes-no question is irrelevant because the ability to use the complicated transformation still exists.
> given how humans have no trouble parsing "invalid" sentences
I think you misunderstand slightly - the claim linguists make is not "humans are unable to understand invalid sentences because they can't parse them", the claim is that when you see an invalid (cannot be parsed into a proper tree) sentence, you have a gut feeling that it "sounds off", and if you're a native speaker you would never accidentally produce such ill-formed sentences. You can still understand the meaning of a sentence like "I this morning fish eat" but you also immediately notice that it's "off" - and that's the phenomena that syntax tries to explain.
Furthermore, the way you understand sentences like "I this morning fish eat" is different from the way you understand "I ate fish this morning", in the former it feels like you're guessing. It could work for communicating simple thoughts, but I doubt an english non-speaker who has an english dictionary could…
Affirmative action programs are controversial because people who have privilege generally don’t like other people getting that privilege (because then they are no longer special).
As an analogous situation, men often claim that women talk too much. There’s fairly strong evidence that the claim is merely sexist nonsense[1].
So forgive me if I’m unwilling to give a crap about whether people who look like me (white men) feel like they’re getting the short end of the stick because there are people like me working to end the special privileges that they have gotten literally for decades. Especially since so many of them really aren’t all that. The London School of Economics makes it clear that gender quotas actually improve meritocracy by squeezing out mediocre men[2].
Your rephrasing is mostly correct, but I would go so far as to say that if you don’t know how to see your own biases, you cannot design a meritocratic interview process that doesn’t inherently have bias against women and/or minorities. As this entire discussion on the firing of the author of the screed shows…there’s a lot of people who can’t see that they have biases.
(And yes, I have biases. I have to work very hard to prevent those biases from causing me to discriminate. This is largely why I involve my team in hiring and constantly discuss the problems with bias blindness with them, too.)
[1] http://thejunglenook.tumblr.com/post/75517868909/do-women-talk-too-much-hint-science-says-no … but also see [3] as…
Reddit[1] made me aware of 2 specific examples:
"pin" == "pen" : http://allthingslinguistic.com/post/81929757765/cather-wren-catherine-fangirl-and-the-pinpen
"soda" vs "pop" vs "coke": http://popvssoda.com/
All the examples I've seen overlap closely with the Southern belt of states.
For a more HN-flavored survey, I wonder if there's a clear regional boundary for "tuple". I've heard it pronounced "too-pull" (sorta like "pupil") and "tuppel" (like "couple"). Don't know if that's an East vs West coast thing or a Cambridge/Oxford/England vs MIT/Stanford/USA thing. Maybe it's just random based on who you heard it from first.
(But let us stay away from discussing "gif". There are standards of civility here.)
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/14y6tc/til_most_southern_us_english_speakers_make_no/
Yes I was kind of wondering if this is a new thing, like because[0,1,2] or if it's canonical English. I was looking for an analysis like [0] on this, but I couldn't find any.
0: http://allthingslinguistic.com/post/72252671648/why-the-new-because-isnt-a-preposition-but-is
1: http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/because-as-a-preposition
2: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2013/11/13/because-has-become-a-preposition-because-grammar/
An excellent example of an anti-shibboleth, also known as a "frisco":
https://allthingslinguistic.com/post/45448571632/the-opposite-of-a-shibboleth-is-a-frisco
These signal words act as a silent, passive test of competence in that once you hear them, you can be assured of the speaker's ignorance and discount their opinions accordingly.
“Lox” is also one of the oldest words in English. It is a proto-Indo-European word that has retained the same meaning and sound for thousands of years.
https://allthingslinguistic.com/post/185617923376/the-english-word-that-hasnt-changed-in-sound-or