Phoebe and Her Unicorn by Dana Simpson for July 11, 2014
July 10, 2014
July 12, 2014
Transcript:
Phoebe: I dunno how I feel about just making up words. I'm really proud of having a vocabulary above my grade level. It's sort of meaningless if everybody can just make up words. Sue: It there a word for "you two are boring; let's go set something on fire"? Marigold: Yes!
There probably is a word for “You two are boring; let’s go set something on fire,” in certain Eskimo languages of the type that linguists call “polysynthetic”. In such languages, it’s rather difficult to tell the difference between the concepts of “word” and “sentence”.