• ArbiterXero@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    The chart is backwards and it’s driving me nuts.

    0 (close) has a limit and should be on the left.

    Infinite ( far) should be on the right

  • sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip
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    2 months ago

    I’ve never understood why people baby talk to pets, or children for that matter.

    Didn’t figure out that I am autistic until 2 years ago, but that only explains why I’ve always found this odd, not why people do it.

    • RebekahWSD@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Human children should be talked to as though they are small adults so their language grows.

      Kitties are to be told they are babies and little smoochie faces to keep them from taking over the world and enslaving us all.

      • sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip
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        2 months ago

        At this point I think I am going to get a kitten and read the classics to it and hope it leads to a brood of its children taking over the world, they’d probably do a better job than almost any people I have ever met or heard of.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      2 months ago

      It’s instinctual. The theory is that it helps children learn language in some way maybe by making the syllables very clear.

      When you think about it when we talk we essentially just sort of mumble, especially in English. Which is why speech recognition is such a difficult task. There are videos online of people who cannot speak English emulating the tones and flow of the language and it really is just us going, hur mayus apparry mar son mor.

      • sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip
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        2 months ago

        We must have different definitions of babytalk.

        You are describing very clear annunciating. Clearly and distinctly pronouncing syllables.

        To me, this is instinctual, and mumbling, which you say is the norm, well I find that to be greatly off putting.

        I can, and do, as a joke, just speak Simlish, out loud.

        Ah, hawarbageebno! Do wah? Sey wotsnugish jot gareemo!

        I can easily make up some gibberish like that on the fly, and I annunciate it concisely.

        Anyway, to me baby talk is gaa gaa goo goo, using an extremely simplistic vocabulary, dramatically simplifying sentence structure.

        Baby need diapy change? Baby want milk?

        That kind of nonsense.

        • Darohan@lemmy.zip
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          2 months ago

          To an extent, things like “baby want milk?” also help with language acquisition. We could say “would my baby like to have a drink of milk?”, and that would give exposure to a lot more vocabulary early on, but it also uses much more complex grammar and abstract concepts like “would”, whereas the former phrase uses only a subject, an object, and a verb which corresponds to a thing that the baby can easily conceptualize because they “feel” it (the feeling of wanting something). It’s similar to learning a language later in life - you usually start with things like “I am a boy” or “This cat likes fish”, rather than “My good sir could you please enunciate better so that I might understand your foreign tongue”, because it helps our brains take on the basic “shapes” and “sounds” of the language, which make learning the more complex and abstract parts easier later. As for why people do it with pets, who aren’t learning a language? Idk, I guess small cute thing kicks the baby instinct into gear whether it’s human or not 😂