Rules no one teaches but everyone learns | Hacker News Reader

Rules no one teaches but everyone learns

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91 pointsquoderat26 comments

"I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon. I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say 'a green great dragon', but had to say 'a great green dragon'. I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language."

-- J.R.R. Tolkien, from a letter to W.H. Auden (7 June 1955)

This is the kind of thing that should be picked up by statistical parsers which presumably use patterns like this to choose the "correct" parse of a sentence from the multitude of possibilities. Of course it is more meaningful when a human points it out.

The "Opinion :: size :: age :: shape :: color :: origin :: material :: purpose" hierarchy should enable inferences about the meaning of words which have never been seen before. It would be really interesting to see if someone could construct something like wordnet from inferences based on patterns like this.

If you enjoyed this article, check out the book _The_Language_Instinct_ by Steven Pinker, which is all about the cognitive basis behind language.

He has a good followup that I haven't quite gotten through yet, called _The_Stuff_of_Thought_ that's a bit more about how rules of language serve as clues to how the brain processes information.

A couple of his other books are less related to language, but equally good: _The_Blank_Slate_ and _How_the_Mind_Works_.

They're all pretty accessible (certainly to a crowd like the one that reads HN), if not exactly light reading.

The Language Instinct should be required reading for all hackers.

It's a very important book, but I don't know about "required reading for all hackers"

Let's put it another way: If you are a hacker, and you have not read The Language Instinct, you are missing out.

Pinker has a good 'atgoogle talks' vid on youtube that summarises his thoughts on the topic well.

I just finished _The Blank Slate_ a few weeks ago. I had the overriding impression that it could have been 50% shorter had he been a little less defensive. Too much of the book seemed to be pre-emptive explanations to defuse potential criticisms or misinterpretations of some of his arguments. I've never read a book like this before, so maybe that style is common to the genre and I just didn't know to expect it?

It's probably defensive because most folks in the sociology / humanities departments _hate_ evolutionary psychology, sociobiology etc. and call it fascist, racist, elitist. Trust me on this, I know their reactions on such topics.

Yeah, considering that the evolutionary psychologists don't actually understand evolution, their defensiveness is expected: http://www.slate.com/id/2124503/

I would actually disagree that these rules are not "taught" - I believe they are taught and learned, just as language is taught and learned, and the order in which you place adjectives, and in fact the entire language "structure" will in large degree depend on your primary language, and how your parents talked to you as an infant/toddler/child.

I'm not sure that I agree with the notion that "layered" adjectives don't require commas. "His battered old canvas fishing hat" certainly seems as though it could use a pause. But then, I tend to think of commas as as indicators of verbal pacing more than strict grammatical constructs.

"His battered old canvas fishing hat"

Sans-comma Questions:

  Is it a battered old hat used for canvas fishing?

  Does he have two battered canvas fishing hats of which this one is the older of the two?

PLEASE don't indent unless you mean to show code samples line-by-line.

I don't think its that big of a deal in this case; it didn't cause the window to stretch (Unless your browser is < ~650px). And it was a good example to have laid out like that.

> Is it a battered old hat used for canvas fishing?

No, that would be his battered old canvas-fishing hat.

> Does he have two battered canvas fishing hats of which this one is the older of the two?

No, that would be his old battered canvas fishing hat.

It was very interesting to read the hierarchy. I hadn't seen it before. In some case it may be more statistical than universal.

For instance, even in the case of the old canvas fishing hat, what if it is both "battered" and "large"? Do we call it a battered large hat (which sounds odd, but follows the rule), or a large battered hat? (which sounds better, but then does "battered" take on the new role of material?

Ah, the endless possibilities for quibbling grammarians.

Still, it is nice there are such rules to fall back on to get it right most of the time.

If you add "old" to large battered hat, where would you put it?

If battered comes after age, perhaps it is material, or at least not opinion.

I used to think of commas as verbal pacing cues as well, but they have more in common with parentheses or semicolons in code. The rule I remember now is "Commas are for parsing, not rendering."

Commas are for both. There are few hard-and-fast rules for comma placement; mostly it's a matter of style.

Unlike commas, there are only a few situations where semicolons are correctly used.

I was wondering what color "antique flame-red" was.

Folks who study certain rules of grammar may tend to parse sentences differently than others. For example, assuming that adjectives modify the words they immediately precede.

I bet most people assume "antique" is modifying "racing cars", and no one wonders what an antique Italian would drive.

BTW, why couldn't one say "21 green large tables" and not be understood? It suggests that the defining quality is the color, not the size (i.e., not the red large tables, but the green large tables).

I didn't know I knew that, but now that I know I know it, maybe my words wont step on each other any more.

This is pretty cool. I remember once joking with a friend, and I offhandedly described her office as being in a "little crappy building". As soon as it came out of my mouth, I realized it should have been "crappy little building" (opinion precedes size).

A little crappy building would be a building which contains small amounts of crap, I think.

I'd parse it as (a (little crappy) building), i.e. "little" becomes an adverb modifying "crappy" instead of an adjective modifying "building".

This axiom could serve as a great launch-pad for introducing set theory.

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