779: Understanding Language (Over Time) Jan 25, 2017

Children first learn to talk from mimicking the way that people, and parents in particular speak, evidenced with "hold you"—uttered sometimes as one single word—based off of phrases like, "do you want me to hold you". Later on, children learn to drop this and follow patterns, to a fault even; it would not be uncommon to hear one say, "I holded it"—not realizing that 'to hold' is a strong verb and conjugates to 'held'. As people grow older, a combination of both is adopted in order to understand more words. As such, rather than needing to learn every form of every word, people can gather what newer words—even invented words—mean, and terms like, 'Finlandization' which was only created fairly recently are still comprehensible without needing to be explained or formally broken down, as people assumedly know 'Finland', and that the suffix, '-ization' means 'quality of'.

For more on how babies talk click here

For more on strong verbs, click here