The big language quiz Lesson 40 of the language course of Mova's primary school: 15 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: the lesson at school .
0 This is the last lesson of the language course: a big quiz that visits everything, from word classes and plurals to British and American words, Vikings, Mandarin tones and Ukrainian cases. 1 Think of it as a family quiz night: Grandad shouts the questions from the kitchen, everybody grabs a pencil, and every answer can be checked, letter by letter or rule by rule. 2 Along the way you have seen that every language and every dialect is a full, working system: "arvo" in Sydney, "craic" in Dublin, "cwtch" in Cardiff, "Мамо!" in Kyiv and "mā" in Beijing all do their job perfectly. 3 Languages keep changing, borrowing and playing, so the best language skill is curiosity: notice odd words, ask what they mean and enjoy how people talk. 4 An adverb describes a verb, often telling how something happens: in "She ran quickly", "quickly" is an adverb. 5 Some plurals don't add -s: goose becomes geese, mouse becomes mice, child becomes children, and sheep and moose stay the same. 6 "Its" with no apostrophe means belonging to it ("The dog wagged its tail"); "it's" means it is or it has. 7 Some verbs have irregular past tenses: bring becomes brought, catch becomes caught, and swim becomes swam. 8 British biscuit, pavement and lift are American cookie, sidewalk and elevator. 9 "They", "sky" and "egg" came from Old Norse, the language of the Vikings, who settled in England from about 800 AD. 10 "Arvo" means afternoon in Australia, "craic" means fun or a good time in Ireland, and "cwtch" means a hug or cuddle in Wales. 11 A comma can save Grandma: "Let's eat, Grandma" talks to Grandma; "Let's eat Grandma" sounds like she is dinner. 12 In Mandarin, "mā" (high, flat tone) means mother and "mǎ" (dipping tone) means horse; the tone makes them different words. 13 Ukrainian has seven cases; the vocative is the case for calling someone, so you call your mum "Мамо!". 14 "Emoji" is Japanese: "e" means picture and "moji" means character; the likeness to "emotion" is a coincidence. ← previous Talking well: politeness, listening and saying sorrynext → Alice's word games: puns, parodies and nonsense↑ back to Language This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/40-the-big-language-quiz/