Good morning everyone,

What's the news! Hope everything is great with you. It's about to become even better because I have a Fem Fri about linguistics for you. Plenty to enjoy here so let's dive right in.

This was inspired by reading a mini-obit of Lila Gleitman in The Economist. She was a vanguard woman scholar who built her career in the sixties when she had some fairly small children, one of whom inspired her research into how children learn and process language. Check this out, it's very cool:

As the learning process goes on, children deploy some remarkable strategies. They often seem to correctly guess what a word means after hearing it just once. The physical environment is an obvious spur (as when they hear “dog” and see one at the same time). But how would a child guess the meaning of the verb in “I believed that he lost his keys”? Gleitman noticed that the sentence structure is identical to those with other verbs that mean similar things (ie, refer to states of mind): saw, remembered, imagined, forgot, worried and doubted. More broadly, it turned out that verbs which are similar in meaning tend to turn up in similar sentence structures. This intuitive aid helps children learn astonishingly quickly, a process she called “syntactic bootstrapping”.

https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/08/21/what-do-children-know-about-language-and-when

Jane Setter works in phonetics, and has written a book you would enjoy called Your Voice Speaks Volumes. Here, however, she tackles something that has bothered me for a long time, which is whether the sort of bready cake thing you have with cream and jam is pronounced "skoan" or "skon". My parents moved from a very-skoan place to a very-skon place and i was h o r r i f i e d when as a family we shifted from saying skoan to saying skon! I'm still not in love with it tbh. Here's a map and an interview:

“Our language continually reshapes itself,” she says. “New words appear. In addition, pronunciations of existing words alter. The word trap used to be pronounced more like ‘trep’, for example. Similarly pat was pronounced more like ‘pet’. Changes like these have been tracked in our dictionary for a century now – though very often when we detect changes, we really don’t understand why they have taken place.”

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/apr/23/how-do-you-pronounce-scone-answer-says-a-lot-english-language-day-shakespeare-birthday

Lots of love,

Alex.