Weblogs. The Old New Thing. One of my colleagues, a native Chinese speaker, asked me whether I was still learning Mandarin Chinese. I told him that I had given up. He was baffled by this. "But Chinese is such a simple language. It has no grammar! " Now of course, Mandarin has a grammar, because every language has a grammar. This is one of the curses of being a native speaker of a language: You don't even realize how hard your language is. As far as you're concerned, your native language is as easy as falling off a log.¹ Now, it's true that Mandarin has almost no inflections, unlike most European languages.
Sidebar: David from Popehat lays out some of the simplifications, but I think he oversimplifies the use of the completion marker 了. One of the consequences of "your own native language is simple" is that native speakers are sometimes the worst choices for explaining their own language, since they simply fail to recognize how weird their language is. That conversation with my father went something like this. Joel on Software. Jim Medding’s Blog. What’s your opinion on these public policy issues? Do you believe that shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gaining political power to manipulate our societies, or not? Do you believe that the exhaust seen in the sky behind airplanes is actually chemicals sprayed by the government for sinister reasons, or not?
OK, they really aren’t public policy issues, they’re conspiracy theories. And, thank goodness, almost 90% of the American public doesn’t believe in them. It’s good because the problem with conspiracy theories is that they can’t ever be disproven to the believer’s satisfaction. So why would Public Policy Polling, a company founded to “address inefficiencies in public policy surveys,” be asking these kind of questions in a recent poll ? Do you believe the Bush administration intentionally misled the public about the possibility of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to promote the Iraq War, or not? The outlier is question 14 which is:
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