Divers can't unsink a ship. It doesn't feel like a proper verb. But in the context of time travel, I feel that "unsink" sounds like it's correct. "Let's go back in time and unsink the Titanic"

@gaurabrown382

Жыл бұрын

But can you sink and unsink a submarine? They are designed for that...

@samanthamorrow9684

8 ай бұрын

Wouldn’t it be unsunk?

@OH-pc5jx

8 ай бұрын

it might be true that “you can’t unsink a ship” - but you know what that verb means in that sentence!

1:09:00 "Joe lost his lunch. I will never be able to unsee that." Two things about this: 1) Unseeing is not changing Joe. [Though it is changing the viewer]. 2) This statement is deliberately breaking the rule (of when "un" can be applied to a verb) for humorous effect, so it's not truly an exception to that rule. Regarding Polish spelling, a Polish monk told my father that there are no spelling bees in Poland. That's because the pronunciation and spelling are so regular that all of the contestants would be able to spell every word. Further proof that Polish is not English. ;) What a wonderful teacher.

Polish linguist here, there are mistakes around 1:00 in Polish examples: for debt, it is „dług” and „długi”, for pot, „garnek” and „garnki”… besides, a very instruktorem lecture

Thanks

If the result of the verb’s action is irreversible (such as sinking, burning, wetting, etc)… then you cannot use “un-“, unless you’re pointing out the impossibility of the reversal, such as “you can’t unsink a ship”. Un- means to “reverse”. You can amend some actions, but NOT reverse them. Example, “submerge” desn’t carry the meaning of the change in the state of the object. Submerge is only a description of its position within the water. As such, you can then actually say “submerge” and “unsubmerge”.

I've noticed there might be a typo in the subtitles at 12:04. An unpredictable change like the 'go-went' change mentioned in the video should be called suppletion instead of depletion.

@mitocw

10 ай бұрын

Thanks for your note! The caption has been updated.

The plural of "garnek" i "garnki", the "e" is dropped.

I would argue that "-s" is a free morpheme in the language of cats. They understand "-s" all by itself. 😄

I'm enjoying these lectures a lot. But man, I was thinking "Just move on already!!" when the students couldn't drop the idea of verbs that can't be undone. 🙄😂

Unsink is not the reverse process of sink in the way that unlock is of lock: you don't bring the cannon ball back the other way through the hole and wait for the ship to rise to the surface - it's a completely different operation involving salvaging equipment rather than weapons. Might just have to turn a blind eye to some paper getting torn, for example, when something is unwrapped, but I think even the most violent unwrapping would still at least be recognisable from a main part of wrapping played in reverse. Similarly, for me, "unbreak" (if we accept it as a verb) describes the specific process (e.g. in a film) of something breaking in reverse, but it's not the same as mending something in the real world (with our current technology!)

There might be a meta or auxiliary attribute of morphemes along the lines of 'superpositional', 'poetic', or 'hypothetical'. The reason that 'unsink' seems to work in some contexts but not others may be that 'unsink' doesn't have an established meaning, but has a sort of illustrative meaning based on a combination of our understanding of the morphemes 'un' and 'sink' that it contains. In the simplest case, rejecting the new word (e.g., "You can't unsink a ship") is the easiest to accept, because the speaker is effectively declaring that 'unsink' is a nonsense word. There seem to be different levels of appropriateness to this sort of morpheme combination, because in some cases, even the negation statement sounds bizarre (e.g., "You can't unbear a loss"). In other words (!), this mode of morpheme combination occupies a liminal space between being a word and not being a word, maybe giving some insight into how morpheme combination can lead to the invention of new words and ideas.

On the whole "unsink" topic: "unsink" already exists as a verb: dredge

(don't mind this) 35:16

Hello bro

I would love to watch this but too many "uh's" for me.

@jw7863

5 ай бұрын

Thank you for that deep, thought-provoking comment.

With "unsink", which does NOT exist as a verb, we are simply venturing into poetic license territory, where everything and anything goes. That is why it sounds right to say "You can not unsink a ship", as you are being creative with the language to the extent of intrinsically stating things that can not be from a linguistic point of view.

Thanks