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).

Chapters 6, 7, and 8

Chapter 6 was about words and word-formation. It described the many ways that languages form words such as coinage, borrowing, compounding, blending, clipping and backformation among others. The word-formation process that interested me the most was the forming of acronyms which are new words that are formed from the initial letters of a set of other words (57). When I read that radar, laser, and scuba, were acronyms I was surprised. I had never known their true origins as words or how they were formed.

Chapter 7 was about morphology and which elements or morphemes are used to form words. Free morphemes are elements that can stand alone whereas bound morphemes need to be attached to another form (63).

Chapter 8 was about grammar and the words used to describe grammatical functions/categories of the words in phrases as well as 'number', 'person', 'tense', 'voice' and 'gender' which need to agree.

Yes and No

After reading Yes and No by Amy Tan, I couldn't help but agree with the statements or rather her observations that Americans tend to think that the Chinese are modest and polite. It is a stereotype that I have heard and know that many people hold. In my opinion anybody who is learning a new language and hasn't gained linguistic performance can fall into this generalization of being polite and modest. I know many Hispanics who know English solo para defenderse (only to defend themselves) and they manage to get through situations by being polite due to their limited vocabulary and/or their lack of comfort with the English language. Similarly, I have a habit of being overly polite in Spanish due to the fact that most of my interactions in Spanish while I was growing up were with adults and because of my limited vocabulary. It's hard to be rude or assertive if you can't find the right words. For me English is a very informal language and even though we might clean up our speech in formal settings English loses out by not having both formal and informal pronouns which affect our behavior and I feel is a part of culture.


We as people tend to make generalizations about other cultures. I've heard people say that Arabic is a harsh sounding language or that Hindi is ugly based off of how people are represented in the media or because of their "funny" accents when they speak English. I feel that exposure plays a huge role in how we perceive others through language. I think Arabic is beautiful once you develop an ear for it and Hindi can be very romantic.

When comparing languages, (p30) language difficulty and complexity is relative to the person making the comparison. Sometimes I wonder what English sounds like to foreigners and I've even asked my friends who don't know Spanish to describe what it sounds like to them. Even though we might not know a language we usually have the capacity to label it by recognizing the sounds as belonging to a specific group or language.

raul mɛndozə

raul mɛndozə

raul- voiced alveolar liquid

mɛndozə- voiced bilabial nasal

A lot of people have trouble saying my first name. Some common mispronunciations I've been called are "Rawl", "Ravu", and "Raoo". South Asians tend to call me Rahul and one elementary school gym teacher even called me Rowland. (Don't ask me how). In Spanish where my name comes from the "r" is rolled unlike in English.

As for my last name, the letter z is pronounced [z] in English, [s] in Latin American Spanish, and [θ] in Spain.

Based on what I've learned about phonetics people pronounce my name using the sounds with which they are most comfortable pronouncing and which exist in their native language. For example, most Americans have trouble rolling there r's.

When it comes to pronouncing words in new languages such as Arabic, the difference between the sounds represented by the letters ﻙ ,ﻕ where hard for me to distinguish. Other sounds in Arabic were hard to pronounce but luckily my professor and most Arabic speakers are pretty forgiving and were able to understand my best attempts at Arabic pronunciation.

An approach that I use when learning new languages is trying to mimic the sounds of a native speaker and it has worked fairly well.

Response to "The sound patterns of language"

Chapter 5 in The Study of Language by George Yule was about how sounds change when we speak and which sounds are allowed to follow each other in any given language (phonotactics). Since no one talks like robots and articulates every single sound in a word, this chapter is a more accurate description of spoken language. Topics covered included phones and allophones and minimal pairs and sets. Allophones are varieties of a single sound or phoneme which only affect the pronunciation of a word and not its meaning whereas minimal pairs are words that are almost the same except that they have different phonemes occurring in the same position. The chapter also talks about syllables and consonant clusters and my favorites: assimilation and elision (p48-49).

I tend to speak really fast sometimes and depending with whom I am speaking I'll leave out certain letters without realizing it(elision) and slur certain sounds together (assimilation). When in school or in a new place, I'll be more conscious of the way I speak and I try to articulate my words more. But when I'm around friends and family I take a more laid-back tone and my pronunciation changes. A good example for elision would be how words that end in "ing" tend to lose the g and for assimilation the pronunciation of you and me (p49).

My Language Story

Growing up in Queens, I have been fortunate enough to have been exposed to many different languages. Junior high was when I first started to really appreciate the variety and beauty of language. I had friends who represented all the corners of the globe and each one proudly carried and shared their heritage with me, through language. By the end of eighth grade I had already learned phrases in over ten languages, not to mention the numbers one to a hundred in Cantonese. (My friends got a real kick out of this when they heard me counting.) Language for me became my identity and I began to use language to define my culture and as a medium to learn about other cultures.

As a child I was raised bilingual. The first realization of this was when I was in kindergarten. I remember using an anglicized pronunciation of the Spanish word frisa for blanket as an English word. Now I can make the distinction between English and Spanish and even Spanglish. Interestingly enough, although I am bilingual, I speak only English at home. My mother came to New York when she was 4 years old and is fluent in both Spanish and English. At times she’ll speak to my sisters and me in both languages but we answer in one; English. I became fluent in Spanish through a combination of personal interest, school, my grandparents and exposure to a large and varied Hispanic community.

My personal interest in Spanish and all languages have helped mold me into the person I am today. Through my contact with different languages I can now say I enjoy watching foreign films, listening to Italian music and a multitude of other hobbies that involve language. Joining my interest in language with my interest in history I have read a lot about Spanish and how it has evolved throughout history. Through my research I have come to understand that language and history go hand in hand. Every time I would research a language I inevitably would come across pages and pages on the history and culture of the speakers of that language.

After taking Spanish in school I decided to take other Romance languages. I love seeing the connections they all share and I took classes in both French and Italian in high school. I already know Spanish and contrary to what people thought about taking two languages at once, I feel that they actually improved my Spanish and my knowledge of Spanish helped me to excel in my language classes.

My love and passion for language has grown so great that I "google" languages on my spare time but my search doesn't end there. From that initial curiosity I learn volumes about different cultures, their histories, traditions and the evolution of their language through time. Language for me is everything. To put it simply I am fascinated by language and I look forward to studying more languages in the future.