Speak English? An unlong, ilusual survey just for you

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    English Survey
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The discussion revolves around a survey designed to explore preferences for negating prefixes in English, specifically "un-" and "in-." Participants are asked to choose between two options for each word and rank their acceptability, reflecting on their thought processes. The creator of the survey aims to understand how speakers perceive these prefixes in terms of meaning and sound. Insights reveal that many respondents prefer "un-" for adjectives, while "in-" is more common for nouns. The survey serves as an informal exercise to gather opinions and patterns in language usage.
  • #31
honestrosewater said:
See, this is where I thought biographically native speakers would differ from non-native speakers. I imagine that a native speaker, who learned the language mainly by listening to other speakers, could rely more heavily on whether a word 'sounds right' to them. While non-native speakers, who learned the language primarily by being taught rules, could rely more heavily on rules. Additionally, natives don't necessarily know the rules (not consciously anyway), as non-natives don't necessarily know the 'right' sound.
Did you learn English as a child, i.e., grow up speaking English, or were you taught it formally later, in school or such?
I learned English as a child and grew up speaking it more than my native tongue. I learned the language essentially as a native speaker would. And as I mentioned before, I didn't know of the existence of rules for the correct choice of affix. When I saw a word on the list, I went through words of (i) similar meaning (or at least part of speech), and (ii) similar sound, to make my choices by pattern matching.

It was this process that lead me to notice certain "rules" and how strict some rules were and how some weren't so. For instance (speaking of the unstrict rules), un- seems to be used mostly on adjectives and rarely on nouns, for which, in- is more frequently used. In fact there are some adjectives, like 'unjust' (this came from thinking about 'legal'), for which the noun form uses in- (as in 'injustice'). I noticed several more of these : unstable, undecided, undivided, etc.

Let me not go on and on about all the exciting discoveries I made during the course of this exercise. :rolleyes:
 
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  • #32
1u 2u 3i 4u 5u 6u 7u 8u 9u 10i

1munlr 2unmlr 3munlr 4munlr 5lumnr 6rulnm 7umlnr 8umnlr 9munlr 10umnlr

Native language - English (American dialect, no geographical influences). Have not read further into thread.

So what did you think - easy, difficult? Did you notice any patterns? Have any guesses about how or why you came to any of your decisions? I'll post how and why I made up the survey in a little while.

A little awkward at times. The "ir" on the second part sounded really odd on all of the words, so the only one that wasn't last on that one was 6. Most of mine were a combination of "u" and "m" sounds.
 
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  • #33
Gokul43201 said:
Let me not go on and on about all the exciting discoveries I made during the course of this exercise. :rolleyes:
Heehee, I think it's quite fascinating. I'm starting my morphology chapter now - I'll let you know if I discover anything exciting. :biggrin: