13 lines
1.4 KiB
Plaintext
13 lines
1.4 KiB
Plaintext
How…does this even work?
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<p>Here is a curious fact.</p>
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<p>My wife Cathy is using Duolingo to learn German; she wants to be able to read sources on Iron Age and Viking costume in the original.</p>
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<p>Duolingo takes her through a <em>lot</em> of pronunciation drills.</p>
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<p>I’ve learned something by listening to her – which is that somehow, somewhere, I have internalized a very precise understanding of German phonology and phonotactics. As in, I not only know right pronunciation from wrong, I give her detailed advice on how to match Duolingo’s model speaker that we can both tell is correct.</p>
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<p>What makes this weird is that I don’t speak German. At all. Nor have I ever lived where it’s spoken; I’ve visited Germany once, German-speaking Switzerland once, and that’s it.</p>
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<p>This raises questions in my mind:</p>
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<p>1. How the fuck? I mean, I suppose it’s related to my knack for generating names in the style of any specified language, and I could handwave about Markov-chain models, but…how the fuck?</p>
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<p>2. What dialect of German have I templated on? Could there be any way to tell?</p>
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<p>3. What other entire language phonologies have I swallowed … without … me … actually … noticing …</p>
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<p>4. Does this happen to other people?</p>
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<p>The human brain is a very odd thing.</p>
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