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).