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Try asking if B is a letter or a word. (Pronounce it as 'b', not 'bee', or you'll just make it more confusing.) Seems a lot of these basic classifications are

Try asking if B is a letter or a word. (Pronounce it as 'b', not 'bee', or you'll just make it more confusing.) Seems a lot of these basic classifications are an early stumbling block. Even if they can count or rattle the whole alphabet, they haven't learned the meaning of the words "word", "letter", or "number" as terminology. Initially sentences/words/letters/numbers are all just 'sound'. "What's the sound of this?" is equivalent to "Read this."

morsch 3y ago
Once you get into academic linguistics, determining what's a letter and what's a word gets very murky again. And you mostly just don't use those categories and talk about phonemes and utterances instead, ie. sound.
hnlmorg 3y ago
My wife is a primary school teacher and I assure you, UK kids are taught terminologies. I don’t think they were when I was a kid but curriculums change.
- kaetemi 3y ago
  It is taught in primary school, yeah. I remember learning pseudo terminology like "do-words" for "verbs" in first and second grade. Pre-school they try to teach "reading" letters nowadays, but then they get drilled in that "A is for apple" and now the shape A could mean the sound apple, and they have even less of a clue on what letters are. (Even though in the 90s research already pointed out that reading should be taught with complete lowercase words instead of by letter picking.)
  - hnlmorg 3y ago
    No, they get taught terms like verb, digraph, as well as the difference in sounds between an and A. They don’t even teach uppercase letters until long after kids have mastered lower case. The whole “Annie Apple” thing went out of favour years ago. UK primary schools are very jargon heavy these days and phonics is all about teaching lower case letters. My wife is a primary school teacher, a few of my friends are teachers, and I have two kids in primary school. So this is a topic I’m very familiar with. What people forget is that the curriculum changes. It changes frequently. When I was at school the curriculum was very different to what it is like now. For example I actually learned the term “digraph” from my kids, not my own schooling. I mean, I always knew what digraphs and split digraphs were, but I never knew they were called digraphs.
    - kaetemi 3y ago
      UK curriculum sounds good, then. Where I live a lot of the pre-school kids are excessively exposed to YouTube, which is primarily still drilling on the uppercase alphabet songs.
ben_w 3y ago
Indeed, but even the standard definitions are flawed. When I fist was interested in NLP, I thought "word" was easily defined as "sequence of letters bounded by non-letters". But we don't normally pronounce spaces, do we? AndyoucanwritewithoutspacestoindicatespeakinglikeYahtzeeCroshawonZeroPunctuation. And when we've got a contraction, is that "we've" two words or one? Compound words in general, for which German is famous ("Antibabypille") but that's also present in English ("antidisestablishmentarianism", or less severely "internet" and "smartphone")? What about single nouns with spaces in the middle like "remote control" or "mobile phone")? And as my original definition was letters, what about the apostrophe in "we've" or "O'Neil", or the hyphen in older posters saying "to-day"? If all names are words, what about numbers in product names such as "iPhone 15"? And all those pedants complaining about "to boldly go" in Star Trek because of the split infinitive; I'm told that's because infinitives in Latin were single words and therefore un-splittable, but should admit that I don't know Latin and I don't care to learn it.
- mostlylurks 3y ago
  > antidisestablishmentarianism This is not actually a compound word, merely a word which stacks several layers of derivation on top of a single stem. > What about single nouns with spaces in the middle like "remote control" or "mobile phone")? These are compound words, identical in their nature to the stereotypical long German compound words, regardless of the fact that they're written with a space in the middle. The difference is merely orthographical. > When I fist was interested in NLP, I thought "word" was easily defined as "sequence of letters bounded by non-letters". There's an additional problem with this view which you didn't mention, which is that written language is merely one possible encoding of the actual underlying language, which is not merely a theoretical concern, but also a practical one. After all, even in English the encoding is far from 1-to-1, since you have multiple differing spellings for what would generally be considered to be the same word (e.g. "color" and "colour"), as well as identical sequences of letters which would generally be considered to be different words (e.g. "lead" and "lead").

morsch 3y ago

Once you get into academic linguistics, determining what's a letter and what's a word gets very murky again. And you mostly just don't use those categories and talk about phonemes and utterances instead, ie. sound.

hnlmorg 3y ago

My wife is a primary school teacher and I assure you, UK kids are taught terminologies. I don’t think they were when I was a kid but curriculums change.

kaetemi 3y ago
It is taught in primary school, yeah. I remember learning pseudo terminology like "do-words" for "verbs" in first and second grade. Pre-school they try to teach "reading" letters nowadays, but then they get drilled in that "A is for apple" and now the shape A could mean the sound apple, and they have even less of a clue on what letters are. (Even though in the 90s research already pointed out that reading should be taught with complete lowercase words instead of by letter picking.)
- hnlmorg 3y ago
  No, they get taught terms like verb, digraph, as well as the difference in sounds between an and A. They don’t even teach uppercase letters until long after kids have mastered lower case. The whole “Annie Apple” thing went out of favour years ago. UK primary schools are very jargon heavy these days and phonics is all about teaching lower case letters. My wife is a primary school teacher, a few of my friends are teachers, and I have two kids in primary school. So this is a topic I’m very familiar with. What people forget is that the curriculum changes. It changes frequently. When I was at school the curriculum was very different to what it is like now. For example I actually learned the term “digraph” from my kids, not my own schooling. I mean, I always knew what digraphs and split digraphs were, but I never knew they were called digraphs.
  - kaetemi 3y ago
    UK curriculum sounds good, then. Where I live a lot of the pre-school kids are excessively exposed to YouTube, which is primarily still drilling on the uppercase alphabet songs.

ben_w 3y ago

Indeed, but even the standard definitions are flawed. When I fist was interested in NLP, I thought "word" was easily defined as "sequence of letters bounded by non-letters". But we don't normally pronounce spaces, do we? AndyoucanwritewithoutspacestoindicatespeakinglikeYahtzeeCroshawonZeroPunctuation. And when we've got a contraction, is that "we've" two words or one? Compound words in general, for which German is famous ("Antibabypille") but that's also present in English ("antidisestablishmentarianism", or less severely "internet" and "smartphone")? What about single nouns with spaces in the middle like "remote control" or "mobile phone")? And as my original definition was letters, what about the apostrophe in "we've" or "O'Neil", or the hyphen in older posters saying "to-day"? If all names are words, what about numbers in product names such as "iPhone 15"? And all those pedants complaining about "to boldly go" in Star Trek because of the split infinitive; I'm told that's because infinitives in Latin were single words and therefore un-splittable, but should admit that I don't know Latin and I don't care to learn it.

mostlylurks 3y ago
> antidisestablishmentarianism This is not actually a compound word, merely a word which stacks several layers of derivation on top of a single stem. > What about single nouns with spaces in the middle like "remote control" or "mobile phone")? These are compound words, identical in their nature to the stereotypical long German compound words, regardless of the fact that they're written with a space in the middle. The difference is merely orthographical. > When I fist was interested in NLP, I thought "word" was easily defined as "sequence of letters bounded by non-letters". There's an additional problem with this view which you didn't mention, which is that written language is merely one possible encoding of the actual underlying language, which is not merely a theoretical concern, but also a practical one. After all, even in English the encoding is far from 1-to-1, since you have multiple differing spellings for what would generally be considered to be the same word (e.g. "color" and "colour"), as well as identical sequences of letters which would generally be considered to be different words (e.g. "lead" and "lead").