r/askscience

"Um" seems to be used as a placeholder for when the person is thinking of what to say, and "like" is sort of like a placeholder, but I'm not sure how to describe it exactly. But we've all heard it: someone's talking and they're saying like every 10th word.

I'm wondering:

Do other languages have equivalents to those two words?

Is there a term for those types of words?

In the other languages, is their version of "like" a direct translation of "like", or is it something else?

Thanks

Like europeans' language are related to indians' languages, and the separation / migration between/from Indians and Europeans are sirca 10k years.

For the American Native, it's looks like even from north to south we can't find a commun origin.

So is it because not enough speaker or not enough linguistic research made or they are so distinct that the relationship between them are inexistant ?

Thanks for your response

Hi everyone.

As the title says, and this might be a very stupid question: how do we process numbers in the context of longer texts or conversations?

AFAIK, there's quite a lot written on shorter/longer/bigger/smaller multi-digit numbers from the perspective of mathematical cognition. However, they're studied in isolation from the usual contextual information you'd have if you'd encountered such a number in a 'normal' context, e.g. in conversation.

Are numbers just processed holistically, somewhat like semantically-meaningful words? Digit-by-digit? How does it work? How are they linked to measurements expressed verbally, e.g. 5 pounds of...? In short, how do we get from digits to meaningful phrases?