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How the words we teach English language learners changed

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Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#181

Post by fragmede »

mmooss wrote: post #119
PsylentKnight wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And animals have evolved perceptibly in my lifetime, they still don't believe in evolution. I grew up in a culture of Jesus Freaks. The way they place faith above evidence and logic is so disturbing and irritating to me

> animals have evolved perceptibly in my lifetime ? Which animals? Evolution requires orders of magnitude longer time spans. I doubt we're perceptibly different (in any genetic sense) than Homo sapiens from 200,000 years ago. I'm not sure the change from that point is perceptible. > Jesus Freaks That people accept that language on HN would seem to tell us a lot about the population here.

There's a whole industry of cat breeders going from wild cat servals to domesticated house cat, giving them an F number for how many generations they've been bred away from wild cat.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#182

Post by Gander5739 »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #174
adrianN wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also a whole different language used to talk to toddlers and small children that native speakers know but very few adult learners ever pick up. And slang used among teenagers and young adults that often times not even their parents understand fully.

I recently discovered that even high-level non-native speakers do not know the term "fraidy cat."

Well, I didn't know the term until I looked it up just now (though the meaning was obvious enough). It appears to be a US term.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#183

Post by abainbridge »

mmooss wrote: post #119
PsylentKnight wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And animals have evolved perceptibly in my lifetime, they still don't believe in evolution. I grew up in a culture of Jesus Freaks. The way they place faith above evidence and logic is so disturbing and irritating to me

> animals have evolved perceptibly in my lifetime ? Which animals? Evolution requires orders of magnitude longer time spans. I doubt we're perceptibly different (in any genetic sense) than Homo sapiens from 200,000 years ago. I'm not sure the change from that point is perceptible. > Jesus Freaks That people accept that language on HN would seem to tell us a lot about the population here.

There are many well documented cases of rapid evolution: a population of African elephants became 50% tuskless at birth in a single generation, urban fox anatomy diverged from rural, frogs in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone turned black, the Peppered Moth turned black in the industrial revolution.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#184

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

TFNA wrote: post #176
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it unethical to record what people say in public settings, like a cafe, transcribe it, and then throw away any identifying information? You could go even farther and only store the individual set of words spoken without any ordering, so it would be impossible to reconstruct the actual content of anyone's conversations.

Universities in certain countries have strict ethical standards that require consent and crediting informants. These standards were often inspired by working with indigenous informants, who were viewed as having been historically exploited in the collection of data, but they apply now to anyone eliciting data from anyone.

What is the practical harm that is actually being avoided here?

When people speak in public, they assume that other people around them can overhear what they're saying. This is just gathering anonymous statistics about word use. It's hard to imagine how there's any real downside for anyone here.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#185

Post by tdeck »

Gander5739 wrote: post #180
tdeck wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English uses a lot of prepositional phrase idioms. Now that I'm learning Japanese, I find there are relatively few like that (although not zero, compare "と相談" to discuss with and に相談" to consult). But it instead uses many, many compound verb expressions that are often not intiutive to a learner and just have to be memorized, so the effect is similar. It also has words with opposite meanings like 断る (kotowaru, to reje…

> [Japanese] also has words with opposite meanings These are known as contronyms ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contronym ).

Thank you! It's funny how I have never thought of most of these. The only similar word I could think of was "biweekly".

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#186

Post by smelendez »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #173
retrac wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, while it's easy to calculate word frequencies for stuff like newspaper articles, there aren't any good statistics (last I checked) around just normal everyday conversation. Because that stuff isn't getting recorded and transcribed. Linguists have resorted to spying on people in parks and shops and restaurants, to get "natural" language unperturbed by observer effects, audience tailoring, the filter of writing…

Why is it unethical to record what people say in public settings, like a cafe, transcribe it, and then throw away any identifying information? You could go even farther and only store the individual set of words spoken without any ordering, so it would be impossible to reconstruct the actual content of anyone's conversations.

The word set is enough to identify some people based on speech patterns or interests. The inclusion of other words in the set — cocaine, divorce, abortion, merger, lymphoma — would make many people uncomfortable.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#188

Post by NorthSouthNorth »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #173
retrac wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, while it's easy to calculate word frequencies for stuff like newspaper articles, there aren't any good statistics (last I checked) around just normal everyday conversation. Because that stuff isn't getting recorded and transcribed. Linguists have resorted to spying on people in parks and shops and restaurants, to get "natural" language unperturbed by observer effects, audience tailoring, the filter of writing…

Why is it unethical to record what people say in public settings, like a cafe, transcribe it, and then throw away any identifying information? You could go even farther and only store the individual set of words spoken without any ordering, so it would be impossible to reconstruct the actual content of anyone's conversations.

In a perfect world, it wouldn't be. Personally, if I knew an infallible person was recording my private conversation and anonymising it to an acceptable degree, I wouldn't care. For example, by removing personal identifiers and aggregating the data across a topic such as "conversations at cafes in central Paris in 2026".

But the second there is doubt about security across any link in the chain from raw recording to anonymisation and storage, I would no longer consent.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#189

Post by onraglanroad »

ccppurcell wrote: post #163
alex_akimov wrote: post #161

I still cannot get my head around what is "lunch", "supper", and "dinner" - and how this was explained to me at school was different from reality, also depending on the country where you are in :-) No English school teaches you this, only real practice.

Dinner originally had a meaning like "biggest meal of the day". That used to be midday, culturally shifted to the evening. In some places and some contexts the language followed but not in every case. In southern England dinner is typically in the evening but we still say "school dinners" for subsidised lunches and "dinner ladies" for the women who serve them. Supper has always meant evening as far as I know but refe…

I'm not sure the folks down the chippy ordering a "fish supper" were trying to be pretentious!

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#190

Post by eudamoniac »

fragmede wrote: post #179
eudamoniac wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English has more words than any language on earth. People don't learn or use use most of them because they will be labeled pretentious.

Sounds... load bearing. Worse than being called pretentious, someone's gonna come along accuse you of being an LLM if you use words that aren't part of the normal lexicon.

Utilizing a breadth of vocabulary won't evince your being an LLM. None have such a habitude. You'll merely attract invidious barbed tonguelets.
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