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).