Language Museum

Quite some time ago on this blog, I admitted to not being completely au fait with apostrophes.

Nothing much has changed in the intervening time, mostly because I don’t have the time to sit down and memorise the rules. I still have no problem with contractions (“it is”, “it’s”) but struggle sometimes with possession.

I have a feeling that this will change though, as I’ve discovered an excellent new resource. This comic from The Oatmeal is both handy and amusing – the best kind of reference tool! An example: “I saw two kittens riding a goat. Goats are great for transportation.” Very cute illustrations too. Take a look!

I think it’s a given that this blog loves languages. And being a lover of languages, I love reading blogs about languages.

Over at the Mental Floss blog, Miss Cellania has complied a list of some great blogs dedicated to the English language. I particularly enjoy blogs that point out the many mistakes people make (Apostrophe Abuse is a great example), but if you prefer to celebrate language instead, there’s a few links for you too.

Mental Floss invites you to share more blogs in the comments, and so do I!

Bad news if your grammar is terrible – even monkeys can recognise your mistakes.

Well… sort of. Researchers have said that a particular kind of monkey are able to hear if the order of syllables in a word is “wrong”.

The cotton-top tamarins were first familiarised with two-syllable terms, and then tested the following day to see how they reacted to familiar and unfamiliar word patterns. The study found that the monkeys “looked to the speaker” when unfamiliar words were presented.

Of course, the researchers weren’t merely having fun playing with monkeys, the results have implications for humans also:

Marc Hauser, who was also involved in this study, told BBC News that the results showed how human language had incorporated memory processes that were not “language-specific”.
“Simple temporal ordering is shared with non-human animals,” he said. “This has an important role. In bird song or whale song, for example, there’s a temporal ordering to the notes and that’s critical for communication.”
And it goes beyond that. “In primates, this ordering is vital for learning,” explained Professor Hauser. “In tool use, primates learn from each other that you do this first, then you do that, then it’s that.”
Professor Hauser described how evident this innate ability is when a child learns language.
“As a child learns to use the past tense,” he said, “they may generalise and use a suffix wrongly, but they will never generalise in the wrong direction. “You never hear them say ed-walk instead of walked.”

Read the full article here, or the full research paper here.

I am happy to admit that I am occasionally confused by apostrophes, something I attribute to spending my formative years at schools where calligraphy with the headteacher was sometimes more important than grammar.

Anyway, now that I’m all grown up and like to see writing that is grammatically correct, I’ve been working hard to make sure I always put the apostrophe in the right place. Apostrophes have two uses, and one of them I am fine with: showing the omission of letters (e.g. “it’s”/”it is”). It’s the other that I, and probably most others, stumble over.

The other use of the apostrophe is to show possession (“the girl’s pen”). The most useful (although a little childlike!) way I have found for remembering the correct grammar is thinking of the tail of the apostrophe pointing to whoever has ownership. So:

The pen of the girl = the girl’s pen. There is only one girl, so the apostrophe is pointing to the word ‘girl’.
The pen of the girls (more than one girl) = the girls’ pen. There is more than one girl, so the apostrophe is pointing to the plural of girl, ‘girls’.

Try testing your apostrophe knowledge here.