I have a good friend that loves Sporcle quizzes, I personally am horrible with most of these quizzes because they range from geography to sports. The only ones that I am pretty good at are word ladder quizzes. It fascinates me that you can start out with a word such as "line" and ending with "cake" by only changing one letter at a time. linguistically it also fascinates me that languages have words that sound similar but have drastic differences in meaning such as "like" and "lake". Not only is it neat that we can detect the slight changes in sound to tell these words that are slightly different apart, but also being able to connect them together by only changing one letter or changing one small sound in the pronunciation within the word. This goes to show how advanced our speech organs are as well as the advanced communication sections of the human brain. While we are born with these physical adaptations for speech, such as the mouth, but the brain is almost a total mystery. It is possible that we are born with the ability of language, but it is also possible that we learn language on our own without any advantages that we are born with. This “simple” everyday task displays an immense amount of complexity within the human brain and this is just a small section of humans, this is why it fascinates me.

Comments

  1. Ian CookeMarch 28, 2018 at 11:00 PM

    Really neat example here. The English language is a good example for words similar to this (through, though, thorough, etc.), but I wonder if it happens as consistently in other languages.

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