Danny
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Massachusetts
You know, I am relatively new to solving, so maybe I’m missing something here. It seems from reading these comments for several weeks that whenever a solver does’t get the theme, or there were several clues that were “obscure” from the solver’s perspective, that is somehow the creator’s fault? Someone tell me if I should continue to enjoy learning new information, or if the true spirit of crossword puzzles is that I should just become a curmudgeon and blame the creator every time it takes me longer than my average to solve the puzzle.
Just wanted to share another tidbit about the English language that I haven’t seen yet! The clue 28D “Ye OLDE shoppe” not only fits this theme well because of the spelling, but the pronunciation as well. In Old English and into Middle English we had a letter called a thorn (þ) that was pronounced “th.” I can’t remember exactly why (though it may have had something to do with the invention of printing), but eventually the thorn started being written as a Y, so what we all typically pronounce as /yee/ would actually have been pronounced /thee/ as in the /thee/ (The) Olde Shoppe.
I really wanted GENETICALLY MODIFIED once I caught on, but one of the more enjoyable Sundays in a while
My only gripe with this is, IIRC from my studies in phonetics (I have degrees in linguistics), MAMA is easier to say than “dada,” not the other way around. This is why a) mama is much more common a word across languages and language families for “mother” than “dada” is for “dad,” and b) mama is more commonly a baby’s first word rather that “dada.” I think it’s so fun that these words came from babies just making sounds and the adults assigning meaning to them!
@Patrick I was going to make this same comment—-horrendous layout on the app—I want to be able to see the three bar graphs side by side to compare the stats— not sure why we make updates that just make it worse.
@SP it’s certainly an interesting topic— I’m not an expert on this particular topic or group of learners (I primarily deal with second language learners), but have a lot of coursework around general speech and language development, and I was always taught that all of the bilabial sounds (/m/, /b/, and /p/) typically develop first. There’s a lot of people commenting that my assertion was wrong— I don’t know if I would concede that, but I’m sure that despite this being typically the first sounded to develop, it almost definitely not a hard and fast rule. There is so much variability with babies and the speed in order in which they learn new things!
@Solverado part of what I am saying is that the very reason “mama” is common is because all of these cultures did not just randomly decide that that would be the word for mother—“mama” is often the first if not, one of the first sounds that a baby produces, and as a result, a mother would react to that and assign meaning to it that the baby must be talking about them. /p/ and /b/ are some of the next most common and early sounds for babies to produce, which gives us a lot of papas and babas in a lot of other languages in addition to the others you mentioned! So what I mean by interesting is that it wasn’t that we created a word and then taught it to the baby, but rather baby made a sound, and we reacted to the sound and continued to reinforce it and thus assigned meaning that way!
@Sharon I commented the same earlier; many disagreed with me, but I stand by what I said! The bilabials typically come first!!
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