Perhaps this is why so many people are confused by the multiple uses of "yield" in programming. For example, in a generator context, the metaphor is that the generator yields (produces) an element. In a threading context, a thread yields (concedes) to other threads.
Thanks for this. I've always been a little perplexed as to why an enumerator in Ruby uses 'yield' when it seemed like it was really the caller that was "yielding" to the enumerator. I ought to have been thinking of an enumerator yielding (as in giving) a value to the block provided by the caller.
English having a few words with multiple if opposite meanings doesn't make it hard to learn. It's hard to learn due to the inconsistency in letter sounds, especially vowels, from word to word. Other languages such as Spanish are easy to pronounce because they use the same rules for letter sounds for all words.
Title was changed to be a bit less inflammatory now, or is it flammatory? I think they both mean the same thing...
Does most people who learn English as a second language learn both how to read and speak at the same time?
Native English speakers (as with all languages) learn how to speak years before they learn how to read. This makes inconsistencies in letter sounds irrelevant to having good conversational English and leaves learning the inconsistencies later, where you learn common rules that cover most of the language and absorb all the rule breakers while reading.
One thing he notes was that originally there was no spelling consistency because there was no need due to limited written communication. Then as reading and writing became more widespread there became a need for consistency. This took something like 40 years to complete. Unfortunately half way through that period newspapers and dictionaries came out which resulted in some words being consistent and some not.
Another confusing one: inflammable, which means capable of being set on fire but follows the same pattern as other words in which the prefix in- connotes negation, e.g. inflexible.
Flammable was invented precisely because people assumed "inflammable" meant its opposite. At some point, language consistency becomes less important than random fires being started accidentally.
Definitely interesting... but is anyone else finding some of these to be a stretch? "Fast" wasn't very convincing for me since the latter is part of an idiom. "Moot" I'm just straight up disagreeing with.
Thus is common for most of these. They originally had one meaning, but were then corrupted by people misunderstanding them.
For example "moot" originally referred to a meeting of a local (town) council http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/moot-point.html
After looking over the link, I agree. In most of these cases, it's not really comparing the words, but their usage.
For example, when you say something is "fast" you can only mean that its speed is high. If you say it's "stuck fast", fast is being used as a modifier (? my grammar lingo is rusty) of "stuck", and not as the actual descriptor.
I'd still recognize both meanings for the verb "moot": to propose something for discussion (to moot a proposal), or to render further consideration of something unnecessary (to moot a court case).
My dictionary says that "moot" as an adjective also has both meetings, but I don't recognize the 'suitable for discussion, under consideration' meaning. Wiktionary says that that meaning is current in the U.K. and "dated" in the U.S.; I'd never heard it before.
...and yet, a child with no prior experience of human language can pick it up without much fuss. So what advantages does a child have over a stereotypical adult learner? I'd say these are the key points:
1. Lack of assumptions. Words often have multiple meanings, don't assume you know all ways a word is applied, instead pay attention to how context alters the meaning(s) you are already aware of.
2. Immersion, a.k.a. throwing yourself in at the deep end.
3. Openness to new information. Could also be highlighted with the word 'playfulness'. Enjoy your progress.
4. The plasticity of a human child's brain is far greater than that of an adolescent or an adult. And humans have among the most protracted childhoods in the animal kingdom.
It's not only immersion, but also sheer duration. That child takes _years_ fulltime to learn a language. Few adults are willing to make such an investment.
Language learning in children is one of the hardest to explain phenomena in psychology, linguistics and neuroscience. Trying to sum it up in three bullet points doesn't do it justice and is a gross oversimplification.
What do you find hard to understand about it? We have limited understanding of how our brains work, that I grant you, but if you're looking at the progression we follow in learning a language (i.e. at a more top level view than at the neuroscience level) then the process is much simpler to understand, it's all to do with recognition, association and conversation. Recognition in both the sense of copying sounds we hear and in recognising facets of the world around us. Association in learning to attribute certain sounds to what we experience. Conversation in learning that by making specific sounds and noticing the reaction of others, we show ourselves that the sounds have purpose in the world around us.
As our skill with language develops, so too does our self awareness, which is a whole other can of worms, but the skills we take to start off are simple to summarise, in my opinion.
Sometimes a view can be so high-level that you don't see anything meaningful anymore.
All three steps you mention are not nearly understood from either a philosophical or a biological view.
We don't know how an infant recognizes sounds: Is that some innate ability in humans or is that something that has to be learned as well? If the first, what are the basic building blocks of recognizing things? If the later, how is it learned? Think about that what we perceive as language is highly post-processed. A lot of filtering is done on sound before it becomes conscious language. Are those filtering rules innate? Are they learned? How does an infant know the difference between language and other sounds?
Association is even harder. We cannot really start to imagine how association and memory work.
Conversation is less tricky but still struggles with the question: Is it a priori knowledge we use to recognize a reaction?
All your three steps require seem obvious, but are incredibly hard to explain in full. I think you are oversimplifying the problem and only look at the most obvious parts of it. Consider a simple question: Why can infants learn language but not arithmetic given the same process you just described? Basic arithmetic is arguably a lot simpler and about as natural as language, but still won't be learned by most infants. If your answer somehow includes language as a fundamental building block of what makes us human, then you are also taking a stand on some of the things I pointed out earlier and have to unite your theories.
"Sometimes a view can be so high-level that you don't see anything meaningful anymore."
High level abstractions are valid tools for building a map of a specific domain. Please understand that having a high level map does not prevent you from exploring deeper if you find the subject interesting, nor does it rob you of the tools to do so... all you need to do is keep on asking 'Why?', 'How?', 'When?', etc... until you're satisfied.
"We don't know how an infant recognizes sounds: Is that some innate ability in humans or is that something that has to be learned as well?"
"How does an infant know the difference between language and other sounds?"
"Why can infants learn language but not arithmetic given the same process you just described?"
I grouped these questions, as I wish to answer them all together. Firstly, I would propose that the recognition of sensory stimuli is innate, which includes sounds. The roots of recognition can be traced back to the sensory stimuli we experience early on. Consider the sound of a baby screaming, which is typically the first sound they make after being born. A baby screaming in pain will typically be physically comforted shortly afterwards. Linking screaming with a subsequent response of comfort could easily be the start of our understanding of language, the senses working in tandem helping our early understanding of the world grow.
Arithmetic is more complex than the relationship between scream and comfort.
"We cannot really start to imagine how association and memory work."
We can 'start to imagine' that though, through neural networks, brain scans, etc....
Please understand, if you are interested in this subject, I appreciate other approaches (such as neuroscience) can help build a fuller picture, but high level approaches are still valid when building up intuition for a subject.
English is a lumpy mishmash of West German, Scandinavian, and Old Norman, leavened with generous helpings of Latin, Greek, and borrowed words from dozens of other languages. That makes for a big basket of grammatical, spelling and pronunciation exceptions held together by vestigial declensions and duct tape.
All in all, a delightful language to read and write if you know it, but a tar pit if you're trying to learn it.
I've heard that English speakers are far more tolerant of sentences that don't follow the rules and can still understand what is said (eg "the mat cat sat upon"). A French friend said that it can be difficult to understand if the speaker merely gets the gender wrong.
When I played with constructing my own language, one of my concerns was how much poetry and wordplay that a logical semantic consistency prevented. For instance, "I pick... you!" is impossible in a language where the direct object comes earlier in the sentence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_irregular_verbs
Is possibly a better indication. Many other languages also has irregular verbs, but I think the number of extra rules and variations that English employs there are a bit more dramatic.
>i'm not sure if there's a language where there are _no_ words with 2+ different/opposite meanings?
They exist, but AFAIK they are all constructed languages. lojban is one example of a language where every word has exactly one meaning (as well as having audio-visual isomorphism, completely regular grammar, etc.)
Auto-antonyms exist in many other languages. Also the examples are mostly very unusual, or so context-dependent that I'd be surprised if anyone actually made a mistake because of them. Most have a different usage based on the meaning - like "to yield [to sb]" / "to yield sth".
Actually English is rather easy compared to most languages. No genders for objects, no declination, very minimal and rather consistent conjugation, no cases, etc. I wouldn't say it's confusing to learn (relative to other choices).
I've heard (from non-native speakers) that English grammar's really easy, but it's the pronunciation and conversely spelling that sucks. It's 90% phonetic, but that other 10% is pretty wild.
Ironically, this is because English likes to drag other languages into dark alleys, beat them up, and rifle through their pockets for loose vocabulary. That vocabulary tends to come with a different pronunciation.
I would disagree with "cleave" also. "Cleave from" means the opposite of "cleave to", but I would argue that that's because "from" means the opposite of "to", not because "cleave" means the opposite of "cleave".
"Cleave from" isn't a valid construction. A little boy cleaves to his mother's leg, but you wouldn't say he later cleaves from it. Similarly, you can cleave a log with an axe (notice no preposition), but you can't cleave it again with all the nails in the world. (Though you could cleave one piece back to the other.)
Notwithstanding the verbs' transitivity, they also have distinct etymologies. From the same Wikipedia article:
> For instance cleave "separate" is from Old English clēofan, while cleave "adhere" is from Old English clifian, which was pronounced differently.
