User:Victorhlpenn/sandbox

Article Review (11/21) - Word order #Hungarian

I chose to review the Hungarian section of the article "Word order," because I had previously heard that Hungarian is one of the very few "free" word order languages that doesn't necessarily need to conform to SVO, SOV, or other word order rules as such. The example shown in the particular article is very interesting, which displays seven different phrases that can mean "Kate ate a piece of cake," with varying emphasis depending on specific word order. My native language of Korean is sometimes free word order, where there are multiple ways to say a sentence with different emphasis points.

This is in contrast to Latin languages, that usually conform to a SVO or a SOV format fairly strictly, save a few literary exceptions. The article could use slightly more academic discussion and historic context behind Hungarian's relatively unique word order system. The example, along with Albanian, also illustrates the difficulty in linguistic typology when it comes to particularly confusing languages.

Article Review - Language Acquisition

I specifically reviewed the section titled "Neurocognitive Research," which explains the scientific background of the neurological aspects of language acquisition. This was of particular interest to me, since I myself went through the process of acquiring English myself.

It's massively intriguing that the processes of producing and comprehending language are separated to two dedicated areas of the brain. The production of language is processed by the Broca's area in the frontal lobe, while the comprehension of language is done by the lateral cortex's Wernicke's area. It was also interesting that both are done in the left side of the brain - although logical by nature, I had thought the artful aspects of language might involve some right-side processing as well. It was also intriguing that children tend to use wider areas of the brain to process language, until they develop these specialized areas fully.