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this boeotian figurine of a woman cooking while her dog tries to see what's going on is so relatable....like thats just what trying to eat when you have a pet is like

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it's kind of crazy how many physical books universities have. like i'm pretty sure a lot of them go just untouched for years at a time. but they're just waiting there for the right obscuritan to come along. like cinderella

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A painting of some edible flowers ~

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What is a ‘wug’?

If you’ve been to linguist tumblr (lingblr), you might have stumbled upon this picture of a funny little bird or read the word ‘wug’ somewhere. But what exactly is a ‘wug’ and where does this come from?

The ‘wug’ is an imaginary creature designed for the so-called ‘wug test’ by Jean Berko Gleason. Here’s an illustration from her test:

“Gleason devised the Wug Test as part of her earliest research (1958), which used nonsense words to gauge children’s acquisition of morphological rules‍—‌for example, the “default” rule that most English plurals are formed by adding an /s/, /z/ or /ɨz/ sound depending on the final consonant, e.g., hat–hats, eye–eyes, witch–witches. A child is shown simple pictures of a fanciful creature or activity, with a nonsense name, and prompted to complete a statement about it:

This is a WUG. Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two ________.

Each “target” word was a made-up (but plausible-sounding) pseudoword, so that the child cannot have heard it before. A child who knows that the plural of witch is witches may have heard and memorized that pair, but a child responding that the plural of wug (which the child presumably has never heard) is wugs (/wʌgz/, using the /z/ allomorph since “wug” ends in a voiced consonant) has apparently inferred (perhaps unconsciously) the basic rule for forming plurals.

The Wug Test also includes questions involving verb conjugations, possessives, and other common derivational morphemes such as the agentive -er (e.g. “A man who ‘zibs’ is a ________?”), and requested explanations of common compound words e.g. “Why is a birthday called a birthday?“ Other items included:

This is a dog with QUIRKS on him. He is all covered in QUIRKS. What kind of a dog is he? He is a ________ dog.

This is a man who knows how to SPOW. He is SPOWING. He did the same thing yesterday. What did he do yesterday? Yesterday he ________.

(The expected answers were QUIRKY and SPOWED.)

Gleason’s major finding was that even very young children are able to connect suitable endings‍—‌to produce plurals, past tenses, possessives, and other forms‍—‌to nonsense words they have never heard before, implying that they have internalized systematic aspects of the linguistic system which no one has necessarily tried to teach them. However, she also identified an earlier stage at which children can produce such forms for real words, but not yet for nonsense words‍—‌implying that children start by memorizing singular–plural pairs they hear spoken by others, then eventually extract rules and patterns from these examples which they apply to novel words.

The Wug Test was the first experimental proof that young children have extracted generalizable rules from the language around them, rather than simply memorizing words that they have heard, and it was almost immediately adapted for children speaking languages other than English, to bilingual children, and to children (and adults) with various impairments or from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Its conclusions are viewed as essential to the understanding of when and how children reach major language milestones, and its variations and progeny remain in use worldwide for studies on language acquisition. It is “almost universal” for textbooks in psycholinguistics and language acquisition to include assignments calling for the student to carry out a practical variation of the Wug Test paradigm. The ubiquity of discussion of the wug test has led to the wug being used as a mascot of sorts for linguists and linguistics students.”

Here are some more illustrations from the original wug test:

Sources: 

Wikipedia, All Things Linguistic

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ok well this blew my mind

This is also true with filmmakers. Western filmmakers pan their cameras mostly left to right and Iranian filmmakers do right to left.

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atla hyperfixation come back... get me out of here i miss my cats 😭😭😭

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getting into ☝️ emoji... phrases like unless ☝️, except ☝️, actually ☝️ ... adds a bit of flair......

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Dezider Tóth (Slovak, born 1947)

Sheet music LXIV. Weeping (Lamentácia), 1976–1978

Paint on paper, 45 x 62.5 cm

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the culture writers at rolling stone have invented the concept of doing drugs

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obsessed

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looking for shirt braces online and I saw this and thought tumblr would appreciate it

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If your hair doesn't fit into one of these categories, or if you do not have hair, select whatever you think is closest– unfortunately there's no room for an "other" option.

Descriptions are taken from the Andre Walker Hair Typing System wikipedia page.

We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

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I should really find out how hard I can punch.

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phenomenon

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For Years my brother has been fucking with me by periodically texting me to say Jimmy Carter had finally died. Today the bit has paid off.

The response to my reaction at work was “what do you MEAN ‘for real this time’?????”

I fucking hate it here I’m crying