4 ms·

I had two thoughts when I read it. First, I am currently reading Zvonkin's Math from three to seven, and he included an essay where he talks about "language su

I had two thoughts when I read it. First, I am currently reading Zvonkin's Math from three to seven, and he included an essay where he talks about "language support" when solving math problems. Hypothesis was, that to use language, we often need to process complex rules to use the nuanced meanings of words often based on context, which means that if we formulate a word-problem in right way, language can do a lot of heavy lifting, in a simmilar way, you might transform your numeric problem to vector-operations to be able to run it on GPU. The example he referenced was his attempt to get boys in his math-circle to figure out some abstract notation to discuss complexity of something they built out of blocks. One of the boys attempted to just to replace words he used to describe the build with symbols. This might show that word as a concept is pretty powerful abstraction you can build on top of, and it is already built in to the language we are using :-) The other thing this reminded me of, w.r.t. of learning the meaning of "or" and "implies", is that (at least in my language), colloquial meaning of "or" is 99% of time synonymous with "either, or", and "a implies b" is often used as "b happens if and only if a already happened". This explains a lot of struggle I had when learning the boolean algebra/predicate logic, where "or" as well as "implies" have different definitions.

jacobolus 8y ago
“Or” is also regularly used to mean an exclusive choice, especially when asking questions. “Would you like the red shirt or the blue shirt?” Or whatever. My just-turned-2-year-old hasn’t quite figured this one out yet. He just repeats the whole thing back, “red shirt or blue shirt”, without making a choice.
- a-saleh 8y ago
  I have been told, that when I was ~2 to ~5 years old, making these sorts of choices was hard for me, and I often copped out i.e: Q: "Do you want jam or honey on your bread slice?" A:"One half jam, one half honey?" :D
- vorg 8y ago
  > “Would you like the red shirt or the blue shirt?” You're writing it wrong -- it should have a comma in there to denote the pause: “Would you like the red shirt, or the blue shirt?” Are you also speaking it wrong? The part before the pause should be spoken with tone going up, and the part after with tone going down. If you're not pausing and changing tone, then the correct answer is either "yes" or "no", or repeating the whole thing back to mean "yes".
  - onli 8y ago
    There is no correct way to do that. Stuff like that is not properly defined, just like language is not logic.
  - jacobolus 8y ago
    > You're writing it wrong Adding a comma would be non-standard (“incorrect” if you ask a pedantic grammarian) in conventional English prose. Commas don’t always match verbal pauses 1:1. > The part before the pause should be spoken with tone going up, and the part after with tone going down. This is a learned cultural convention, not inherently known at birth. I am sure that within another few months my kid will figure it out. It’s also hard for me to tell sometimes whether he is repeating both because he doesn’t understand that a choice is being offered, or because he wants to repeat strings of words, or because he hasn’t made a choice, or .... He doesn’t know how to say e.g. “neither one; give me the green shirt” or “you decide for me”.

jacobolus 8y ago

“Or” is also regularly used to mean an exclusive choice, especially when asking questions. “Would you like the red shirt or the blue shirt?” Or whatever. My just-turned-2-year-old hasn’t quite figured this one out yet. He just repeats the whole thing back, “red shirt or blue shirt”, without making a choice.

a-saleh 8y ago
I have been told, that when I was ~2 to ~5 years old, making these sorts of choices was hard for me, and I often copped out i.e: Q: "Do you want jam or honey on your bread slice?" A:"One half jam, one half honey?" :D
vorg 8y ago
> “Would you like the red shirt or the blue shirt?” You're writing it wrong -- it should have a comma in there to denote the pause: “Would you like the red shirt, or the blue shirt?” Are you also speaking it wrong? The part before the pause should be spoken with tone going up, and the part after with tone going down. If you're not pausing and changing tone, then the correct answer is either "yes" or "no", or repeating the whole thing back to mean "yes".
- onli 8y ago
  There is no correct way to do that. Stuff like that is not properly defined, just like language is not logic.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  > You're writing it wrong Adding a comma would be non-standard (“incorrect” if you ask a pedantic grammarian) in conventional English prose. Commas don’t always match verbal pauses 1:1. > The part before the pause should be spoken with tone going up, and the part after with tone going down. This is a learned cultural convention, not inherently known at birth. I am sure that within another few months my kid will figure it out. It’s also hard for me to tell sometimes whether he is repeating both because he doesn’t understand that a choice is being offered, or because he wants to repeat strings of words, or because he hasn’t made a choice, or .... He doesn’t know how to say e.g. “neither one; give me the green shirt” or “you decide for me”.