Today's Fun Observation: I Know My Campus Is Huge And A Lot Of People Go To My Uni But It Is So Incredible

Caleb is so so so Boy In Luv coded??? Drives me insane tbh

everything looks like a nail when you've got a hammer and every song is actually about the character when they're on your mind 24/7

What is a ‘wug’?

If you’ve been to linguist tumblr (lingblr), you might have stumbled upon this picture of a funny little bird or read the word ‘wug’ somewhere. But what exactly is a ‘wug’ and where does this come from?

The ‘wug’ is an imaginary creature designed for the so-called ‘wug test’ by Jean Berko Gleason. Here’s an illustration from her test:

“Gleason devised the Wug Test as part of her earliest research (1958), which used nonsense words to gauge children’s acquisition of morphological rules‍—‌for example, the “default” rule that most English plurals are formed by adding an /s/, /z/ or /ɨz/ sound depending on the final consonant, e.g., hat–hats, eye–eyes, witch–witches. A child is shown simple pictures of a fanciful creature or activity, with a nonsense name, and prompted to complete a statement about it:

This is a WUG. Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two ________.

Each “target” word was a made-up (but plausible-sounding) pseudoword, so that the child cannot have heard it before. A child who knows that the plural of witch is witches may have heard and memorized that pair, but a child responding that the plural of wug (which the child presumably has never heard) is wugs (/wʌgz/, using the /z/ allomorph since “wug” ends in a voiced consonant) has apparently inferred (perhaps unconsciously) the basic rule for forming plurals.

The Wug Test also includes questions involving verb conjugations, possessives, and other common derivational morphemes such as the agentive -er (e.g. “A man who ‘zibs’ is a ________?”), and requested explanations of common compound words e.g. “Why is a birthday called a birthday?“ Other items included:

This is a dog with QUIRKS on him. He is all covered in QUIRKS. What kind of a dog is he? He is a ________ dog.

This is a man who knows how to SPOW. He is SPOWING. He did the same thing yesterday. What did he do yesterday? Yesterday he ________.

(The expected answers were QUIRKY and SPOWED.)

Gleason’s major finding was that even very young children are able to connect suitable endings‍—‌to produce plurals, past tenses, possessives, and other forms‍—‌to nonsense words they have never heard before, implying that they have internalized systematic aspects of the linguistic system which no one has necessarily tried to teach them. However, she also identified an earlier stage at which children can produce such forms for real words, but not yet for nonsense words‍—‌implying that children start by memorizing singular–plural pairs they hear spoken by others, then eventually extract rules and patterns from these examples which they apply to novel words.

The Wug Test was the first experimental proof that young children have extracted generalizable rules from the language around them, rather than simply memorizing words that they have heard, and it was almost immediately adapted for children speaking languages other than English, to bilingual children, and to children (and adults) with various impairments or from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Its conclusions are viewed as essential to the understanding of when and how children reach major language milestones, and its variations and progeny remain in use worldwide for studies on language acquisition. It is “almost universal” for textbooks in psycholinguistics and language acquisition to include assignments calling for the student to carry out a practical variation of the Wug Test paradigm. The ubiquity of discussion of the wug test has led to the wug being used as a mascot of sorts for linguists and linguistics students.”

Here are some more illustrations from the original wug test:

Sources: 

Wikipedia, All Things Linguistic

EU: illiberal mini-Putin in Hungary using the reactionary momentum for rollback of civil rights, LGBTIQ rights, women's rights, intersex rights, and rainbow families

euronews

Hungary's clampdown on Pride march sparks backlash

The Orbán administration has said that the country 'should not tolerate' the public event this year.

Constitutional reform in Hungary passed earlier by illiberal government. Veering further and further from checks on their authoritarian control of party structures, institutions, etc, these hypocritical right-populists, in Putin's pockets, believe women should also earn less than men.

Adoptions by same-sex couples were already banned I think, and women will now also have little protections from traditionalists who see them only as stay-at-home mothers- because the constitution adds bioessentialist language.

If this continues, Hungary should have no influence in European politics, and there are devices. And the same thing could have happened in Romania, happened in Poland, for a shorter while. European core values are threatened by people who don't respect freedom and human rights.

As Budapest Pride said- there was pride, there is pride, and there will be pride. Queer rights are human rights, now, and always.

can your pathetic elon musk bird site do this?

Me: "With the new semester, there's this tenses within me, a worry, a fear of falling behind (again) like last semester"

Me, smart: "Okay, so you should, like, try to get ahead, y'know, look at lecture slides before class, read the must rea-"

Me, or rather, the anxious goblin in my head: "HOW ABOUT WE REARRANGE THE FURNITURE INSTEAD???"

Don't you just love it when the prof who holds the 8.30 class cancels said class barely and HOUR before it starts?

Don't you just love it when said class is your ONLY class of the day and you got up at 6.00 to do your makeup and get dressed only to receive the news right as you got ready???

Uni ain't shit, guys

Having to clean the shower is so fucking annoying. It’s clean in there. That’s where I go to get clean. It’s clean dude trust me. Stop fucking growing bacteria and stuff man this is the clean locale. You’re embarrassing me in front of the sink

learning music theory taking me places i don't feel safe in