"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.