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!
Posted on August 4th, 2009by Michelle
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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.
Posted on July 9th, 2009by Michelle
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I was searching for some information on Spinvox (the company that converts voicemail to text), and it appears they’ve been keeping researchers, and the Great British Public, busy.
In addition to a poll they’ve conducted about grammar, which showed that almost half of Britons have trouble identifying the correct use of apostrophes, another survey revealed that the word “phenomenon” is the biggest tongue twister for a lot of Brits. (It’s pronounced ‘fen-om-e-non’).
Other words in the list include “anaesthetist” which comes in at number 2; “prejudice” (at number 17), and “February” (number 12).
You can see the full list here, along with the phonetic pronunciations of each word.
I have a slight problem with these pronunciations, the first being those for “anaesthetist” and “anonymous”. They show both words being pronounced with the sound “uh” at the beginning, whereas I have always pronounced them with the “an” sound, as this is how they are spelt.
Further, with “hereditary”, the sound I make at the end of the word is something more akin to “tree” than the “ter-ee” that is shown. And “prah-awr-i-tahyz-ing” sounds downright American if you sound it out, rather than the British “pry-orr-it-hyzing”.
So, I turned to the trusty Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for validation. It shows the pronunciations thus:
Anaesthetist – /neessthtist/ – (the funny upside down ‘e’ is an ‘a’ sound such as in ‘apart’)
Anonymous – /əˈnɒn.ɪ.məs/
Hereditary – /hiredditri/
Prioritise – /praɪ’ɒr.ɪ.taɪz/