Bing-o !!!!

1. External Reality: slide 53

People acquire a set of words to speak about things that exist around them, which can vary depending on the language spoken.

2. Career Man: slide 80

Career man relates to the slide on language and gender because "career man" doesn't exist in English whereas career woman does. In our society men are expected to have a career and/or work so there is no need to have a word to specify that.

3. Piraha in Brazil: slide 56

The Piraha of Brazil are a tribe that has a very limited sense of the past.

4. Social gender: slide 78

We use social gender when we use words to classify individuals according to their gender roles in society.

5. money slide: 64

Contemporary English has many words for "money" because it is very important to our culture.

6. remember "borrowing?": slide 66

Borrowing is an example of language change.

response to "Talking Hands"

This chapter was about a group of four linguists that are studying a language deep in the deserts of the Middle East. The language they are studying is a sign language that developed all on its own and which surprisingly is spoken by all the inhabitants of the remote village. The sign language is of immense interest to them because it developed in isolation and they believe that by studying it new information will be revealed regarding the relationship between language and humans.

Throughout this course, I have learned that language and culture are intricately woven together and that one cannot exist without the other. Language can function as the "keeper" of culture, so to speak, and many people would go to extreme measures to protect both. That is why the linguists had to go to extreme measures to establish trust with the inhabitants of the village. After establishing trust they proceeded with discretion and in the writing of the book Talking Hands the author had to change names and even the exact geographic location of the village. By doing this, the linguists are ensuring that the inhabitants will not be bombarded by outsiders who might change the insular and remote life that allowed the language to thrive in the first place.

It amazes me, that even now, in the era of globalization, that people are still living in almost virtual isolation. The language of the Bedouins discussed in the chapter could have lived and died and no outsider would have ever known about it. Luckily, the linguists were able to stumble across it and will most likely devote their whole lives in documenting it. In our never-ending search for answers, their research will bring humanity one step closer in understanding how language works.

City of Dying Languages

It's funny that we tend to look in all the wrong places and then are surprised when we find that the thing we were looking for was right in our backyard. Something similar has happened to linguists when trying to document dying languages. The NY Times article Listening to (and Saving) the World’s Languages, describes NYC as a modern Babel, where rare and dying languages have found refuge. Now instead of traveling to geographically remote regions to find dying languages that more than likely will have died by the time of their arrival, linguists are on a search to document the rare languages that add to the linguistic diversity that is New York City's heritage.
I've lived in Queens all my life and I never knew that Bukhari is an endangered language. There must be countless other languages that city residents take for granted that are barely surviving on a global scale. Being able to conduct research right here in NYC must be exciting. The mere fact that minority languages have been able to thrive in NYC neighborhoods is remarkable and will offer invaluable access to linguists to be able to study and document them.

The Linguists

The Linguists is a documentary that follows two linguists in their search to document dying languages. They travel to remote areas of the world that have been subject to colonization or linguistic suppression by a "killer" language, to search for native speakers. What drives the linguists to conduct their study is the hope to not lose a way of seeing the world by letting languages become extinct.

What I liked the most about the documentary was that the linguists know the importance of "living" a language. They immersed themselves in the target language's culture and shared in rituals and festivities.

One question that I have is why has it taken so long for people to appreciate linguistic diversity? And what will it take to remove the stigma surrounding minority languages?

"Me Talk Pretty One Day"

"People start love you soon."

This sentence is grammatically incorrect for two reasons:

1) The sentence is missing the auxiliary verb "will."

2) The verb "love" is missing an infinitive marker.

The sentence should read: "People will start to love you soon."


When learning new languages people often have trouble with grammar, phonology, morphology and syntax. I remember getting frustrated with my classmates in Spanish class when they would pronounce Spanish consonants with an aspiration. It would drive me crazy and I would accuse them of not trying hard enough to sound Spanish. I started thinking that maybe they were just lazy but now that I understand phonology a bit better I understand that Spanish phonemes might be difficult to pronounce for some people. Another phoneme that caused a lot of problems was the /r/ but I was a little more forgiving if they couldn't pronounce it. Another feature of Spanish that they had to adjust to was placing the adjectives after the noun.

As a native English speaker who is fluent in Spanish, one mistake that I commonly make is translating idiomatic expressions in English directly into Spanish. For example, in English you can "throw" a party. In Spanish the verb for "throw" is "tirar" but you wouldn't say "Voy a tirar una fiesta" but rather "Voy a tener una fiesta."

Another feature that I have noticed about people who are bilingual is that whichever language they are stronger in usually affects the way they speak the second language. The direct translation of idioms is one example but my Bengali friend tells me she sometimes says things in Bengali which are grammatically in English and she also uses simple verb conjugations and tenses to express herself.

Syntax

Chapter 9 is about syntax which is the analysis of the structure of phrases and sentences. Interest in this field has produced what is called a generative grammar or a set of rules defining the possible sentences in a language. These rules, should be able to generate an infinite number of grammatically well-formed sentences.

One part that I found interesting was the part about structural ambiguity which is when a sentence can have two interpretations. Sometimes this can lead to confusion and clarification will be needed but both interpretations will have the same surface structure.

Where Words Come From

Bill Bryson's chapter was a humorous attempt to explain how words are formed in English and where they come from. English has borrowed heavily from many languages, most noticeably Latin, Greek, and French which has given it its unique sound, immense vocabulary and myriad of meanings. Just by reading the first paragraph I noticed how English has a word for everything like the fear of peanut butter sticking to your mouth: arachibutyrophobia. I wonder if every language is as colorful. I think its inventory of words is what helped English become so universal. English has borrowed so heavily that it can have a noun with a Latin derived synonym as in sneezing and sternutation (p69) where as other languages only have one word (i.e. Spanish: estornudar).

One major difference in the origin of words in English is that new words have mostly been the result of the information age and technology rather than of poetry. (76).

English is so versatile and adaptive that words are easily assimilated into its vocabulary and native speakers would hardly be able to guess at the words' etymology. For example the word breeze is from the Spanish briza or that bankrupt comes from the Italian expression bancarotta (p74).