A neurological quirk? I’d like to hear more about that. But it does seem pretty harsh to ask them to change, if that’s the case; I’m with Selkie. (Her annoyed faces are great, too).
P.S. minor typo: last panel says “it’s” instead of “its”.
I forgive that minor typo. To me, the most difficult bit of English grammar to remember is that “its” is the possessive of “it” rather than “it’s”. The applicable rule is that the possessives of pronouns are not apostrophized, although contractions such as “it’s” for “it is” and “she’s” for “she is” are. This is obvious with “their” and “his” because there is no place for the apostrophe. I guess “hers” is easy to remember because “her’s” is never used as a contraction, and these days it would be consistently flagged by on-line spelling checkers. “It’s” cannot be pronounced incorrect by just a spelling check, but requires parsing the sentence to see if it is a contraction or a possessive, which spell-check software sometimes gets wrong.
I just like Strong Bad’s Rhythm n’ Grammar
“Ohh if you want to be possessive, it’s just I-T-S,
but if it’s more like a contraction then it’s I-T-apostrophe-S
… scalawag!”
Actually, it is contracts to ’tis, and it’s is the correct possessive. This whole its being possessive is a post-Shakespearean thing. One that feels (and probably is) incorrect.
I speak Hindi, Bengali, English, a smattering of Oriya and French. I’m talking about Hindi. The state where I come from it is common to refer to oneself using the plural pronoun. It is incorrect grammatically but that’s how it is. I’m trying to unlearn it.
Ooh, there’s a language where it’s normal to refer to the self in plural?
I do it a lot in English, either in my head or in writing to myself or in speaking to myself aloud (which I do). But that’s because I’m basically discussing things with the future self who will (presumably) be doing them.
“We need to hit the gym, and we’ll need to pick up milk on the way home.”
“Is it really that hard for us to show a little self-control? Honestly!”
“All right, we can do this thing! Just sit down and write!”
I have done this… and then I read that there are cultures where there is no difference between present and future, and that people in those cultures are less likely to procrastinate. Being a huge procrastinator, I started saying “I can do this”, or “I am going to the gym”. It has helped me get stuff done. It has not stopped the procrastination, but instead of procrastinating for half the day, I procrastinate for an hour. I get a lot more done when I only procrastinate for an hour, before each task, rather than 4-6. x.x
The world in general, and America in specific. I travel a lot, and in most countries if you at least make an attempt to speak the language, the vast majority of people are happy and encouraging. In America, if your grammer and accent are less than perfect, chances are good someone (not everyone, but someone) is going to mock you for it, despite the fact that it’s your second language. I had to explain this fact to my Taiwanese students. They were appalled.
Being able to speak in another language and to work within or without an accent is part of joining another culture, and the *ability* to should be taught, so they can then choose to.
There are a lot of quirks that come with what language you grow up in! For example, how you hear bugs/wildlife/machinery, and what part of your brain processes that information, can be associated with languages and developmental processes. For some people, bugs are “noise”, and is processed as background sounds, especially in the west. But for the Japanese (among others), bugs are processed as “voice”, and are more in the forefront of the brain.
More modernly, things like chiptunes and other tech/mechanical sounds have been shown to have people react differently to them based on their upbringing/surroundings. I was a case study for these things. While I don’t process dogs, babies, or bugs as having “voices”, I do process cats and technology as such(, and am an extreme outlier with a *very* fucked past).
But I’ve learned to pay more attention to various sounds as I grew older, and alarms/technical noises are more functional to me and less anxiety-inducing than they were as a kid, so it’s absolutely something I’m happy I had the ability to train for.
Even ignoring the social side of things where it’s murky, there are neurological benefits to being able to suppress these things if it’s desired.
I have long wondered if kids who were raised by animals but later (while still fairly young children) taught human speech have some level of understanding animal communication that kids who were raised by humans don’t have. Obviously, there’s no way to properly test this, and kids in such situations tend to be traumatized anyway, but I’m quite curious.
Wonder if a kid raised in a Deaf household, but able to hear and be around several cats, would pick up some level of cat language that most humans never do.
Speech impediment when I was young, spoke so little I was always horse. I picked up a LOT of body language regarding territorial things and aggression. The kids on the playground were not aware they were even doing the same things, so it did not help with communication. I realized young that humans are ordinary animals!
I grew up speaking English so when learning to speak Japanese I had the neurological “quirk” that it was exceptionally difficult to put the verb at the end of a sentence, or process the meaning of a sentence without explicit plurals (Japanese has few), or omit the subject of a sentence.
But, given enough time and work, I now can do those things, as well as contort my tongue into positions for which my brain and mouth-muscles were unprepared, so I sound more intelligible and natural than I did 25 years ago.
As the doctor pointed out, very early.on, this can be a problematic thing when he told someone they removed kidneys. It could end up causing many problems in different scenarios.
as someone who used to have a really bad lisp, i can totally relate…..annoyed the heck out of me when everyone was always going on about ‘say it again, but *propper* this time’…..ironically, it resolved itself when i lost my front milk teeth – turned out one of them was slightly crooked and thats what caused the lisp.
I am an English teacher and personally I see no problem with her speech impediment.
If it was severe enough that it would’ve caused others to be unable to understand her I would see the need to work on it.
But people seem to understand her just fine, and it is more important (to me at least) to be able to communicate effectively instead of master a language.
It’s more about integration with broader society outside of the classroom. Speech patterns can have a strong impact on future success. Certain accents and speech patterns, even among native speakers, are associated with inferior mental performance and can inhibit social interaction and employment. While we can say others shouldn’t stereotype, it’s more reliable to adjust yourself than expect broader society to magically change overnight.
Given that Selkie sounds like she gained about thirty IQ points when she said the last sentence without plurals — and I know perfectly well that the character’s not dumb — this is a valid point. Not particularly *fair*, but then: neither is the universe in general.
Pohl’s “kidneys” story demonstrates why it can potentially lead to understanding problems. Especially if she really does end up as a scientist of some kind.
I’m aware of a decent number of such differences (such as the one A.Beth mentioned about the rear end/other parts, or the word for a ciagarette that means something wildly different in modern US English), but that’s a new one to me.
Having gone through speech therapy myself, that deserves more — a heck of a lot more — than a ‘good effort Selkie’.
First time effort, complex sentence structure, perfectly executed while *not* accidentally removing the plural on pants… That was an incredible performance, even if she required multiple pauses to pull it off.
Of course, the proper response really is just “Great job Sophie! Wonderful! Now, lets try it again, without the pauses…”
(To be fair: I can’t imagine one therapist handling three people at once, there may be some differences necessary as a result of that)
She’s spoken without the accent before, when reading , and I think in one or two other occasions. She can do it with a little effort, she’s just been refusing to because she doesen’t really care (and she’s not too wrong).
I’m looking at Selkie’s “too cool for school” face in the second panel, and I think she tried to show off with the first sentence and said it fairly quickly all three times.
Working to retrain a social quirk – which is what every language is – makes complete sense. Human frequently adopt new speech and behavior patterns in order to fit into new groups.
As a left-hander with a left-handed grandparent who was forcibly retrained as a right-hander, the idea of forcing the brain to go against against healthy, normal-for-the-species neurological wiring makes me a bit ill.
Yes! What does Kin Ro mean by “neurological quirk”? How unpleasant *is* it for sarnothi to use English language rules, rather than tensei ones? Maybe this isn’t too bad for them, but it sounds like it could be. Your example of left-handedness is a good one; it doesn’t *seem* important which hand one writes with, until you try to change it. Then you realize you’re messing with your body’s natural wiring for no good reason. Fixing their accents seems like the easiest way to avoid problems like Pohl and the “kidneys”, but if it’s torturous to change, then humans learning to recognize a sarnothi accent is a perfectly good alternative!
A neurological quirk? I’d like to hear more about that. But it does seem pretty harsh to ask them to change, if that’s the case; I’m with Selkie. (Her annoyed faces are great, too).
P.S. minor typo: last panel says “it’s” instead of “its”.
I forgive that minor typo. To me, the most difficult bit of English grammar to remember is that “its” is the possessive of “it” rather than “it’s”. The applicable rule is that the possessives of pronouns are not apostrophized, although contractions such as “it’s” for “it is” and “she’s” for “she is” are. This is obvious with “their” and “his” because there is no place for the apostrophe. I guess “hers” is easy to remember because “her’s” is never used as a contraction, and these days it would be consistently flagged by on-line spelling checkers. “It’s” cannot be pronounced incorrect by just a spelling check, but requires parsing the sentence to see if it is a contraction or a possessive, which spell-check software sometimes gets wrong.
I like the mnemonic:
Possessive its
Never splits.
I just like Strong Bad’s Rhythm n’ Grammar
“Ohh if you want to be possessive, it’s just I-T-S,
but if it’s more like a contraction then it’s I-T-apostrophe-S
… scalawag!”
I cannot tell you how many times I have sung that song.
Actually, it is contracts to ’tis, and it’s is the correct possessive. This whole its being possessive is a post-Shakespearean thing. One that feels (and probably is) incorrect.
Selkie did quite well in the last sentence. As a speaker of a language where I use the plural when refering to myself, I know it’s difficult.
Now I’m curious. What other language do you speak?
I speak Hindi, Bengali, English, a smattering of Oriya and French. I’m talking about Hindi. The state where I come from it is common to refer to oneself using the plural pronoun. It is incorrect grammatically but that’s how it is. I’m trying to unlearn it.
Ooh, there’s a language where it’s normal to refer to the self in plural?
I do it a lot in English, either in my head or in writing to myself or in speaking to myself aloud (which I do). But that’s because I’m basically discussing things with the future self who will (presumably) be doing them.
“We need to hit the gym, and we’ll need to pick up milk on the way home.”
“Is it really that hard for us to show a little self-control? Honestly!”
“All right, we can do this thing! Just sit down and write!”
I have done this… and then I read that there are cultures where there is no difference between present and future, and that people in those cultures are less likely to procrastinate. Being a huge procrastinator, I started saying “I can do this”, or “I am going to the gym”. It has helped me get stuff done. It has not stopped the procrastination, but instead of procrastinating for half the day, I procrastinate for an hour. I get a lot more done when I only procrastinate for an hour, before each task, rather than 4-6. x.x
I’m actually kind of proud that selkie managed to do that last sentence.
That’s kind of funny to me, because my second language is Japanese, a language with (almost) *no* plurals.
My native-speaker spouse still regularly omits plurals where they’re needed after coming up on three decades of studying and speaking English.
Plural when referring to self? I and I have never heard of such a thing, mon.
Quick search seems to say that “I and I” is closer to “we” than to “I.”
We are surprised you have never heard of the Royal We.
Exactly this!
I agree with you, Selkie, but the World is very childish sometimes.
Nice speech bubbles, Dave, really conveys the struggle.
The world in general, and America in specific. I travel a lot, and in most countries if you at least make an attempt to speak the language, the vast majority of people are happy and encouraging. In America, if your grammer and accent are less than perfect, chances are good someone (not everyone, but someone) is going to mock you for it, despite the fact that it’s your second language. I had to explain this fact to my Taiwanese students. They were appalled.
If it’s a “neurological quirk” then that’s even worse than forcing a kid who doesn’t have a problem with their accent to get rid of it.
Being able to speak in another language and to work within or without an accent is part of joining another culture, and the *ability* to should be taught, so they can then choose to.
There are a lot of quirks that come with what language you grow up in! For example, how you hear bugs/wildlife/machinery, and what part of your brain processes that information, can be associated with languages and developmental processes. For some people, bugs are “noise”, and is processed as background sounds, especially in the west. But for the Japanese (among others), bugs are processed as “voice”, and are more in the forefront of the brain.
More modernly, things like chiptunes and other tech/mechanical sounds have been shown to have people react differently to them based on their upbringing/surroundings. I was a case study for these things. While I don’t process dogs, babies, or bugs as having “voices”, I do process cats and technology as such(, and am an extreme outlier with a *very* fucked past).
But I’ve learned to pay more attention to various sounds as I grew older, and alarms/technical noises are more functional to me and less anxiety-inducing than they were as a kid, so it’s absolutely something I’m happy I had the ability to train for.
Even ignoring the social side of things where it’s murky, there are neurological benefits to being able to suppress these things if it’s desired.
Facinating! I didn’t even know there was a difference in processing various sounds.
I have long wondered if kids who were raised by animals but later (while still fairly young children) taught human speech have some level of understanding animal communication that kids who were raised by humans don’t have. Obviously, there’s no way to properly test this, and kids in such situations tend to be traumatized anyway, but I’m quite curious.
Wonder if a kid raised in a Deaf household, but able to hear and be around several cats, would pick up some level of cat language that most humans never do.
Speech impediment when I was young, spoke so little I was always horse. I picked up a LOT of body language regarding territorial things and aggression. The kids on the playground were not aware they were even doing the same things, so it did not help with communication. I realized young that humans are ordinary animals!
*picked up from animals- same things as animals
Honestly, *language* is a neurological quirk.
I grew up speaking English so when learning to speak Japanese I had the neurological “quirk” that it was exceptionally difficult to put the verb at the end of a sentence, or process the meaning of a sentence without explicit plurals (Japanese has few), or omit the subject of a sentence.
But, given enough time and work, I now can do those things, as well as contort my tongue into positions for which my brain and mouth-muscles were unprepared, so I sound more intelligible and natural than I did 25 years ago.
As the doctor pointed out, very early.on, this can be a problematic thing when he told someone they removed kidneys. It could end up causing many problems in different scenarios.
as someone who used to have a really bad lisp, i can totally relate…..annoyed the heck out of me when everyone was always going on about ‘say it again, but *propper* this time’…..ironically, it resolved itself when i lost my front milk teeth – turned out one of them was slightly crooked and thats what caused the lisp.
I am an English teacher and personally I see no problem with her speech impediment.
If it was severe enough that it would’ve caused others to be unable to understand her I would see the need to work on it.
But people seem to understand her just fine, and it is more important (to me at least) to be able to communicate effectively instead of master a language.
It’s more about integration with broader society outside of the classroom. Speech patterns can have a strong impact on future success. Certain accents and speech patterns, even among native speakers, are associated with inferior mental performance and can inhibit social interaction and employment. While we can say others shouldn’t stereotype, it’s more reliable to adjust yourself than expect broader society to magically change overnight.
Given that Selkie sounds like she gained about thirty IQ points when she said the last sentence without plurals — and I know perfectly well that the character’s not dumb — this is a valid point. Not particularly *fair*, but then: neither is the universe in general.
Pohl’s “kidneys” story demonstrates why it can potentially lead to understanding problems. Especially if she really does end up as a scientist of some kind.
interesting that she used the word “pants” – does she perceive it as a plural or a singular?
Maybe its the eel. I mean, I’m good with “put on an eel and get over it”. It’d make Christmas with in-laws so much less drink-inducing.
She means the American pants=trousers; not pants=underwear
I was not aware that “pants” = underwear in any language other than Japanese.
What English dialect does that come from?
That’s British English, isn’t it?
British English, yeah. Pants = underwear.
Also, while “fanny” is the buttocks in American English, it’s far ruder in British!
Ahh, that explains where Japanese got it then.
I’m aware of a decent number of such differences (such as the one A.Beth mentioned about the rear end/other parts, or the word for a ciagarette that means something wildly different in modern US English), but that’s a new one to me.
Having gone through speech therapy myself, that deserves more — a heck of a lot more — than a ‘good effort Selkie’.
First time effort, complex sentence structure, perfectly executed while *not* accidentally removing the plural on pants… That was an incredible performance, even if she required multiple pauses to pull it off.
Of course, the proper response really is just “Great job Sophie! Wonderful! Now, lets try it again, without the pauses…”
(To be fair: I can’t imagine one therapist handling three people at once, there may be some differences necessary as a result of that)
She’s spoken without the accent before, when reading , and I think in one or two other occasions. She can do it with a little effort, she’s just been refusing to because she doesen’t really care (and she’s not too wrong).
It’s especially impressive that she managed to do it perfectly, immediately after failing THREE TIMES to avoid a superfluous “S” on a CONJUNCTION.
I’m looking at Selkie’s “too cool for school” face in the second panel, and I think she tried to show off with the first sentence and said it fairly quickly all three times.
“Sophie” is a great choice of words if you want her to spite-plural so hard your room floods.
Working to retrain a social quirk – which is what every language is – makes complete sense. Human frequently adopt new speech and behavior patterns in order to fit into new groups.
As a left-hander with a left-handed grandparent who was forcibly retrained as a right-hander, the idea of forcing the brain to go against against healthy, normal-for-the-species neurological wiring makes me a bit ill.
Yes! What does Kin Ro mean by “neurological quirk”? How unpleasant *is* it for sarnothi to use English language rules, rather than tensei ones? Maybe this isn’t too bad for them, but it sounds like it could be. Your example of left-handedness is a good one; it doesn’t *seem* important which hand one writes with, until you try to change it. Then you realize you’re messing with your body’s natural wiring for no good reason. Fixing their accents seems like the easiest way to avoid problems like Pohl and the “kidneys”, but if it’s torturous to change, then humans learning to recognize a sarnothi accent is a perfectly good alternative!
The adult sarnothi’s attitude doesn’t seem to imply unlearning it being torturous at least.
Of course, the proper response really is just “Great job Sophie! Wonderful! Now, lets try it again, without the pauses…”
Except, don’t get her name wrong!
And she didn’t try that hard because she was asked. She tried because Doctor Terrorhammer is not going to be defeated by any neurological quirk.
The Royal We!
Except for Sarnothi, its the”Royals Yous.” And their adjectives have plural forms too.
MAXIMUM SASS!
For some, speech therapy is less about bad habits and more about physical or motor-neural issues.
I had a pretty heavy sylabant ‘s’ lisp thanks to the size of my tongue.
(Think Cobra Commander, not Greenwich Village.)
Almost correct, except the author made an “its”/”it’s” error in the transcription! That should be “put on [its] big kid pants”.
If you can’t expand it to “it is” or “it was”, it should probably be “its” 😉