Looks like I moved to proton drive just in time!

deleted by creator

I really liked minutes to midnight. A lot more introspective and mature.

(on mobile, so sorry for any formatting weirdness)

English teachers will only give you an arbitrary, subjective answer about whether it’s a word - you want a linguist if you want an objective answer.

Since we’re dealing with two different “words” (roots) here, factory and overclocked, the first thing to look for is compound stress. Many compound words in English get initial stress: compare “blackbird” and “a black bird”.

This isn’t foolproof, however. For some speakers there are compounds that don’t get compound stress - some speakers say “paper towel” as expected, while others say “paper towel”, but it’s still a compound either way.

So how can we actually tell that paper towel is one word? See if the first member of the potential compound (the non-head) can be modified in any way.

For example, we know doghouse is a compound because in “a big doghouse” big can only refer to the house, and cannot refer to “the house of a big dog”. Similarly, blackboard must be one word because it can take what appear to be contradictory modifiers: " a green blackboard".

So, in the same way, paper towel and toilet paper are one word because “big paper towel” can’t mean “a towel made from big paper” and “pink toilet paper” can’t mean “paper for a pink toilet”. (Toilet paper also gets compound stress.)

Yet another way to test is by semantic drift (meaning shift). As mentioned earlier, blackboards don’t have to be black, so the meaning of the compound doesn’t perfectly correspond to the pieces of the word - instead, the fact that it’s a vertical board you write on in chalk is much more important to the meaning. This is because once the pieces combine to form a new word, that new word can start to shift away from the meaning of the pieces. Again, however this process takes time, so it’s not a perfect test.

So, back to the original question: is “factory-overclocked” one word?

Well, it doesn’t get compound stress, and for me I can still say things like “it’s home-factory-overclocked” to mean that it was overclocked in its home factory, so the first member can take modifiers. And, the whole thing still means what the pieces mean.

So, in my grammar, “factory-overclocked” is two words. But for some of you “home factory overclocked” may not be possible, which would indicate that it’s started to become one word for you. Everyone’s grammar is different, but we can still test for these categories.

If you instead mean by your question, “can factory and overclocked be combined with a hyphen?”, however, I can’t help you, because language-specific writing conventions are subjective and arbitrary, and not something that linguists usually care very much about.

Linguists are still divided on this topic, called the “Critical Period” hypothesis - the question of whether there is a “Critical Period” during childhood when children naturally acquire language better than adults.

The data in favor cited in pop articles often comes from “feral children” like Genie, but as Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world mentioned, how much of this inability is due to natural brain development and how much is due to years of unimaginable trauma is hard to know.

Other research has cited brain plasticity differences and brain matter changes that occur during puberty that seems like it may be linked to language acquisition.

Again, however, the counterpoint of “It takes ten-ish years of pure immersion for children to learn a language, and how many adults actually do that” is pretty frequent.

I’m still undecided about what I think - maybe something in the middle, like “humans do lose some neuroplasticity during puberty that may inhibit language acquisition a bit, but adults acquiring native-like fluency is still possible with enough immersion”.

If you took away the majority of the bacon this would be a really good breakfast 👍🏽

Just bought $50 of merch off their website – this is the sort of journalism we should all be supporting.

I just use hyphens for everything.

Upvoted for the appropriate Salt and Sanctuary reference.

I switched my four home computers to Linux Mint this week. Windows is just more trouble than it’s worth nowadays.

Sometimes I do so because the gender is irrelevant

This seems to be part of the pathway of change that has led to the widespread adoption of specific singular “they” among younger speakers, and there’s some empirical evidence supporting this.

What I don’t get is, how can knowing the gender suddenly make it difficult to use a neutral term, if it worked before?

This is just one of those arbitrary rules that often exist in language, like how in many languages neuter/inanimate nouns can’t act as the subject of a sentence due to what’s called an “animacy restriction”.

For this specific phenomenon (the “older” ungrammaticality of definite singular they vs. the “younger” grammaticality of it), this recent paper argues that this is due to a difference in obligatoriness of morphosyntactic gender features. The paper is a bit technical if you don’t have a linguistic background, but the basic argument is that in older varieties of English, gender features must be obligatorily expressed in the morphosyntactic derivation if they are known, while in younger varieties, this expression seems to be optional, and therefore free variation between he/they and she/they is allowed by the grammar.

So, “It’s John’s. They need to come get it” is ungrammatical for older speakers for not obligatorily expressing the gender feature once it’s known, while it’s perfectly fine for younger speakers for whom expressing that feature seems to be optional in the grammar.

Maybe this analogy will help: Let’s say you meet someone, and you ask them “Do you have a cat?”. Note that you’ve used the singular here, though it’s acting number-neutral in this context. If they respond “I have two”, then it will immediately become ungrammatical for you to continue to use the number-neutral singular and ask “Does your cat like fish?”

Once you have access to the information that there’s more than one cat, then the arbitrary rules of English grammar require that knowledge to immediately be reflected in the morphosyntactic structure of your sentences from then on. And this makes no independent, logical sense, because there are tons of languages out there that don’t have plurality distinctions. But, English does, and so to speak grammatical English (for now), you have to use plural morphology to refer to more than one entity.

It’s the same for “older” speakers of English - just like it’s ungrammatical for you to continue to use the number-neutral singular once you know that there’s a “plural number feature” in the linguistic context, for older speakers of English it’s ungrammatical for them to continue to use the gender-neutral “they” once they know that there’s a “masculine gender feature” in the linguistic context.

Also, it’s important to note that this term “ungrammatical” is descriptive, not prescriptive - it’s not saying that it’s not “proper” or “correct” according to some arbitrary standard that someone decided on in the 1800s, but rather that’s literally not how those speakers’ mental grammars work. While it may seem illogical (and even regressive from a modern political perspective), every natural human language is composed of arbitrary rules that often seem illogical. Like how the past tense of “go” is the completely unrelated past tense of the older English verb “to wend”, “went”. Or how the past tense of the verb “can” isn’t “could” anymore – that’s reserved for modal usage now in most English dialects – it’s the completely awkward phrase “was able to”.

That doesn’t mean that we can’t, or shouldn’t, try to accommodate non-binary people of course, as is unfortunately often argued, but it does mean that, contrary to what I commonly see people say on the internet, doing so for these speakers does require a constant, concerted effort to consciously override their mental grammars.

What a weird distinction to make that it’s talking about an abstract gendered person rather than concrete. I don’t know why the grammar would make that distinction (nor do I think it does).

Then you’re gonna be absolutely gobsmacked by the other grammatical distinctions that exist across the world’s languages.

It doesn’t matter if you know why the grammar would make that distinction or not - the distinction exists, and is widely accepted in the linguistic literature (as cited above) whether you think it does or not.

The argument that is almost always made is that “they can’t be singular.”

I’m not sure what that has to do with our conversation, since I’ve never made that claim (and neither did Thymos). If that’s what you’re basing your argument on here, then that’s a pretty egregious strawman of my position.

Sure, maybe it historically hasn’t been used for a particular subject, but that’s a fairly minor grammatical shift.

And yet it exists nonetheless, rendering your “correction” of my original comment (and your “correction” of Thymos’s comments in the other thread, for that matter) inaccurate and misleading.

If we’re going to argue that’s wrong because it isn’t historically accepted then we probably need to speak a totally different version of English than we do because it has made much larger shifts than that in the past.

I haven’t argued that anything is “wrong” other than your description of the historical use of English pronouns. Linguistics is descriptive, not normative, which means that the historical facts of English have no bearing whatsoever on what we “probably need” to do.

That’s not relevant to our conversation here - we’re not talking about how language should be used (which linguistics, as an empirical/rationalist science, has nothing to say about), we’re talking about how it is used.

I already mentioned that we can get grammatical “they” with non-definite/unknown referents (your first and third examples), and in the second example Shakespeare is clearly referring to all mothers with “them”, so none of these are counterexamples to my generalization above. I think you’ll be hard pressed to find many examples with a specific, definite antecedent (though it is possible, of course - grammaticality is a spectrum, after all).

This distinction, as well as the fact that modern speakers are showing various innovative uses of “they”, has been well known for decades in the linguistic literature.

It kinda grinds my gears when people intentionally (or maybe just ignorantly in this case) misconstrue linguistic data to support their political positions, and that includes all of the boneheads acting like singular “they” isn’t a thing at all for their own nefarious purposes as well.

It doesn’t matter that English hasn’t had specific singular “they” until Gen Z. That’s just a fact of history and language, and has (or at least should have) nothing to do with the rights of non-binary people.

Stop using bullshit linguistic data to try to justify your political positions! All of you! This is how we get Hindu nationalists justifying their oppression of Muslims with ridiculous claims that Sanskrit is the original human language. Language is just language!

Edit: I just went and read your other thread, and it does appear that you’re just being disingenuous at this point, or at least doubling down after being proved incorrect. Your own source pointed out that Shakespeare would not have used “they” with specific individuals. Thymos is completely (and demonstrably) correct.

Since nobody has mentioned the actual reason for this phenomenon yet, the difference here is usually one of known vs. unknown gender/referent. (At least for practically all older speakers of English. Some younger speakers do seem to be able to use “they” grammatically to refer to known people. Changes in progress, woo!)

Your example is a perfect one: in a question like “whose umbrella is this?” we have no idea what gender the owner is, and so “they” is grammatical for the vast majority of English speakers.

Once the gender/referent is known, however, for many/most speakers of English (myself included), “they” becomes ungrammatical and the speaker must switch to “he” or “she”:

“Whose umbrella is this? Did they already leave?”

“That’s John’s.”

*“Oh, they need to come get it then.” (The asterisk here is the common linguistic notation for ungrammaticality. This also assumes that both speakers are familiar with who John is. You can still get grammatical “they” after responses that refer to unknown people, especially with common gender-ambiguous names like Pat.)

So, for anyone wondering why many speakers, probably including themselves (if they’re honest enough to admit it), seem to find known-gender singular “they” to be awkward/ungrammatical when supposedly “it’s been grammatical for a thousand years”, that’s why!