Studying Modern English Changes

The thing that I thought was the most interesting about this video and this chapter was the fact that English has changed mainly because of wars and dominate cultures. Although I think that this is interesting to study when we look into the past, it is far more interesting when we see this in the present.

Next week in Chapter 13 there is a very short section at the end of the chapter called "Languages in Contact". These 5 pages deal with concepts such as nativization, pidgins, and creole languages. I think that a whole chapter could and probably should be done on concepts such as these because of the affect English currently has on our world. When I traveled to Australia I met a girl from England who said that almost all of the English history they learned in High School was from ancient times and not the present. I know it is important to know where your people and a language come from, but since the English Commonwealth makes up such a large part of our world I thought that they would be interested in paying more attention to how English is changing our world now. It could be said that phenomena such as nativization are more like unimportant dialects, but I would argue that they will one day change parts of our language since they will increase the amount of borrowing from other languages that English hasn't historically borrowed from. This can already be seen in our language by how many words we have borrowed from Asian languages and I think that this will only increase as our cultures become more dependent on each other. Although these kinds of dramatic changes have historically come from forces such as war and religion, I think that some modern changes in world languages will be affected just as much by financial aspects because the countries that currently have a lot of world influence are the countries that have the largest affect on the world economy. It would be very interesting to do a study and see how much of correlation there is between language and the world economy.

Another interesting thing about the video was how they compared the metaphorical changes in the language. They said that the concepts such as love, intuition, and strong feelings that we now associate with the heart were once associated with the bowels in Middle English, but I was wondering if this also changed from Old English since the video didn't say. Although the end of the Old English text seemed much more literary then the modern English text does (probably because of who the intended audience was).

Colorless Green Ideas

The video that we watched for this week, "Colorless Green Ideas", was really interesting to me. One of the more interesting aspects was the idea of Universal Grammar, or how all human languages have more commonalities than differences. I think this is very true despite the fact that they can sound so different because when you hear someone speaking or see something that someone has written you know that it is a human language even though you may not understand it. It's like the example of a frog, you know when you see/hear one even if you don't know anything about that particular kind of frog. Although, before I started learning a second language many other languages sounded like gibberish, but now that I have learned another language and bits of others I can begin to see their similarities in the patterns that each language uses (and even in some sounds).

On a side note I wanted to mention this week's book exercise about slang. I thought that this activity was very engaging and fun because it allows us to talk about things that are usually taboo in the classroom setting. I do think that this activity could be much larger though. I think that since many students are either interested in learning English slang or are motivated by making slang an academic focus then it could be a great source for a research project (even researching other English cultures such as England, Jamaica, Australia, India, etc.). I've always been interested in how cultures such as Jamaica are taking the English language and changing it to their own (Creole and Pidgin forms) and we really haven't discussed that this semester (I had been introduced to it in my Intro. to Linguistics class in my undergraduate studies).

I'm going to own Disney World!

I thought that the video we watched for this week was both informational and entertaining. I liked how she started off by explaining some of the main differences between how girls and boys communicate in general. You could argue that it is over simplified, but I think that in general most men and women are great examples of what she was explaining.

One of her most interesting points was how our society, in general, tends to adopt a masculine form of communication. I thought this was interesting because of the points she made to back this statement up, but it was also interesting to me because my best friend is a woman. We've known each other since we were 2 years old and while growing up we communicated and acted like how Tannan said little boys act and communicate. We were competitive about almost everything. About when we turned 14 years old she started spending a little more time the girls in our neighborhood and I started spending more time hanging out with the boys, whereas before we all hung out together in a group and spent our time doing competitive activities like hide and go seek, sports, teasing, and mock fighting activities like shooting water guns. So even though our neighborhood's culture mainly communicated and acted with what Tannan describes as a masculine form of communication and action, the genders eventually adopted their generic styles of communication and action (They talked more and we kept competing. Of course that's simplifying it, but that's basically what it boils down to). That's not to say that we became distanced from each other and unable to communicate, interact, or understand each other, but we just gravitated to what we were most comfortable with while still interacting with and keeping in communication with the opposite gender.

Syntax

This has always been a dreaded subject of mine ever since I've studied linguistics (I've had one other linguistics class in my undergraduate studies). I dreaded it mainly because I don't usually think of English being split up into these different parts. I am able to recognize verb and noun phrases rather quickly just because they help to provide much of the meaning when it comes to sentences, but simple things such as prepositional phrases and determiners always threw me off. This is because my knowledge of syntax wasn't explicitly learned. In my last linguistics class I studied a lot for the final exam and I got an A, but I didn't really try to understand these tree diagrams because they annoyed me so much.

The thing that I liked about Finegan's chapter 5 on syntax though was that it explained the tree diagram slightly more explicitly than my previous linguistics text and class had. I think that many teachers assume that native speakers have this grammatical knowledge consciously (we have it subconsciously, but rarely remember what determiners are because we already know how to use them). This assumption allowed my previous teacher to skip much of the important information about tree diagrams (although we studied syntax in general more explicitly) and this is what caused me to dislike the kinds of exercises that we we're assigned for today. Since I was able to get an A in my previous course without the knowledge of the tree diagrams I assumed that I was home free and would never have to encounter them again in my life. I guess I was wrong.

This time I decided to go through Finegan's chapter and make sure that I built some conscious knowledge upon my already existing subconscious knowledge. Once I was able to do this the exercises became relatively easy and straight forward, whereas before they almost seemed like a complicated math problem. I think that these were good exercises because not only does it make sure that we know much of this syntactic knowledge consciously so that we can make our ESL/EFL students aware of it, but I think for those of us who don't pay much attention to grammar (usually native speakers) this exercise allows us to empathize with our potential students because the language must look like a complicated math problem or a puzzle at times and this can become frustrating. It is our job as teachers to give them the tools to be able to unlock and understand the language at many different levels and once this happens I think that students become heavily engaged with language learning because they now are beginning to learn the coding of the language.

हिन्दी स्क्रिप्ट, A note about Feb. 26th

(For some reason this thing started typing in Hindi!). Last week we spent most of the class preparing for our quiz that was due on Saturday. We did this by going over exercise 2-12 & 2-14 in Finegan. 2-14 proved to be easy and 2-12 wasn't too difficult, but 2-12 did create some interesting discussions in our small group at the beginning of the class. I think that some of these subjects are easy and interesting to discuss, but since many of us in this class are very knowledgable about the subjects we tend to prolong some of these discussions over many minor details that may or may not matter. This is sort of a pet peeve of mine but I have to accept it now that I am in a graduate program. It's also kind of funny when we find ourselves arguing about words and then we come to find out that both people in the argument are actually saying the exact same thing, but just in different ways. Sometimes the listening aspect of English is even disregarded by those who are proficient at it, haha.

Orthography and the duel between Phonics & Graphophonics

I liked the refresher on the subject of orthography because I had forgotten some of the basic information about the logographic system (especially how it has developed in China) and the syllabic system. I think that it is really interesting (I use that word waaay too much in my blogs I think) that even though both of our texts contain a ton of information we still are only scratching the surface of these subjects. It just goes to show how complicated language studies really are.

I especially liked the Freeman chapters this week because much of this information was new to me. Some of the spelling "rules" that were displayed I had never heard of before, but I think that is because my knowledge of English orthography is mostly from graphophonics instead of the phonics based learning style. Because I was not taught with the phonics method I have a large bias against it as well as the "scientific" approach that was described in Chapter 5. I know that a little bit of phonics teaching is ok, but I don't think it should be the main focus. Many native speakers do not learn this way, so I was wondering if it has ANY advantages for non-native speakers of English or if it's just a simplified way of explaining the English spelling system because it seems to bypass language acquisition and just head straight for language learning? I like the quote from Smith on page 135 when he says phonics, "may seem obvious, just as it is obvious that the earth is flat... Obvious, but false". The chapter then goes on to discuss how we read in chunks instead of each individual sound and I think that it is important for non-native speaking students to understand this because if they go solely with the bottom-up approach (phonics) then I think they will have a very difficult time acquiring a good reading rate, which would also include the top-down approach.

Finally I'd like to mention the rule on page 138, "When to vowels go walking. the first one does the talking". The reason why I wanted to mention this is because this was the only "rule" that the Freemans mention that I have encountered in my English studies. I was amazed to find out that, "Clymer found 309 words, like bead, that followed the rule but 377 others like chief, that do not" (that's less than half the time when the rule actually works)! I was amazed, but not surprised. I feel as though Graphophonics wins this fight no contest, but that phonics and some investigations into spelling patterns has its place even if it is sitting the remote corner of the room with its dunce cap on.

A note about Feb. 5th

Last week we covered the subject of phonology. We started the class by deciephering a text written in the IPA format in small groups. This activity was challenging because we only recieved chunks of the text, but most of the class did pretty well. I thought all the the activities that we did were interesting (even the ones before class) because they were close to the same exact activities that I did in my 'Introduction to Linguistics' class when I was an undergrad. I think that taking a second linguistics class will only help me to better understand the English language because much of the information that I've forgotten will come back to me. We also addressed some of the problems and difficulties that students were having during our class, but I still don't think that everyone is on the same page. Being that this is an online class makes things even harder, but I hope that we'll all be able to learn a lot in this class.

Phonotactics and general phonology

In the two chapters that we read this week I thought that the phonotactics portion of chapter three was interesting because I had never heard of it before. I knew that as a native English speaker I had acquired many of these rules (such as the no word starting with the /ng/ sound rule), but I never really thought about how I know if a word is correct or not because I just knew it instinctively. Somehow this made me remember a show I had seen many years ago called "Ripley's Believe it or Not". On this show they had the world's fastest speaking woman (according to the Guinness Book of World Records) who had the ability to recognize chunks of words/phrases together instead of each word separately. This allowed her to speak them much faster, especially after she eliminated the pauses between words. To me it sounded like gibberish but after they slowed it down on a computer you could tell that she was in fact speaking each word (although she had no pauses). Even though this had little to do with phonotactics I looked up a video of her online (her name is Fran Capo) and found that it had a lot to do with linguistics so I wanted to share the video: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM6zPikfOEs

This video had more to do with the tongue twisters portion of the chapter because since Fran's brain has the ability to deal with many patterns at once she is able to speak much faster without too much distortion of her pronunciation. The only problem here of course is that at her top speed no one but a computer can understand her. I'm curious as to whether or not this is the similar skill that many poets, musicians, and rappers possess since they are able to speak more rapidly or in a more patterned way than we do in normal speech. I assume their skill has something to do with this ability to recognize and produce complex language patterns but maybe there is something else that is going on as well?

Blog change

My first two posts for this course are at this address: http://ace27227.blogspot.com/. I decided to change blogs because if i started to mix my blogs for different classes they would get confusing. The first two entries are under the date of Thurs. Jan. 22nd 2009.