Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Another Hilarious Linguistics Moment, brought to you by the letter C

Tonight, at final review for my syntax class, I heard an adult native English speaker ask, "So, I can't say, 'I saw cat the wet?'" The study of syntax is making us question things that we should never question! Haha! We were talking about how you can't separate constituents and move them to other parts of the sentence. It was pretty funny.

The more I study linguistics, the more I realize that it is a miracle that little children learn to speak.

1 comment:

Geneil said...

Today across the top of my Gmail inbox: Dictionary.com Word of the Day - ablaut: vowel change. I vaguely remember that word, but I went to m-w.com to read the whole definition anyway: a systematic variation of vowels in the same root or affix or in related roots or affixes especially in the Indo-European languages that is usually paralleled by differences in use or meaning (as in sing, sang, sung, song)

Pretty sweet. :D