There are certain phrases we have grown up saying and will probably continue to say throughout our lives. The problem is a lot of those phrases are not correct in what we want them to mean. One phrase that I say and didn't think about it until my media writing professor brought it up in class is "I could care less". In actuality it should be "I couldn't care less". When you are fed up or annoyed with something, you don't want to know more about it, so you don't care about it. "I could care less" only makes you sound like you care about it a lot. Americans tend to use the "I could care less" phrase more than the couldn't one. Even bringing light to the subject might not help. It seems like it's a habit for a lot of people and rather than break that habit, they would just as well go on saying the wrong thing. Most people know what they mean when they say it anyway.
There are a lot of these phrases and words. Some change over time, while others last for decades. One example is dirt. It originally meant filth, but now we use it to mean soil more than anything else. A phrase that troubles many is "taller than me" or "taller than I". I believe the correct usage would be "taller than me" because me would not be the subject of the sentence. These types of incorrect usages have been around for years. It's not likely that they will change anytime soon.
Words- 261
Posts- 69 and 70
Friday, April 29, 2011
Thursday, April 21, 2011
English Spelling
Most people know that the spelling in the English language is not consistent. We have words where we drop the y and make it an I or double n’s. It clearly is not a simple explanation to why some words are spelled the way they are. Spelling of English arrived in the 7th century. At that time, 84% of the 17,000 words were spelled consistently. That soon changed. In 1066, as we learned in class, the Normans invaded England. With them they brought their language, Norman French. They started applying their language to the courts and administration. That began the first change in English spelling. After that words started getting printed in 1465. The printing machines were run by Dutch technicians. Those technicians got paid by the letter. To get a better wage, they would make words longer by adding letters. Their excuse at times was that they didn’t understand how English worked. A third way that English spellings got so out of control was that people wrote how they spoke in their regional dialects. So there could be multiple ways to spell shower. If you were from the country, you might spell it schaar. Latin and Greek words and spelling of words were included into the English language around the 16th and 17th centuries. They were deemed equal to English and because there were no spelling guidelines, people could copy a book however they wanted. Many books probably got re-published based on a regional dialect or the addition of letters by the Dutch technicians. There was no easy way to separate the languages back into their original forms, so English just kept its new form. It is now a mix of Norman French, Latin, Greek and Dutch. Through printing the English language was able to bring about a standard that they could compare other writings and printings to. The London dialect became the standard and we now had a way to compare and contrast our language.
Words- 327
Posts- 67 and 68
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Chunking
I have found a lot of articles on learning the English language. I think this is because more people are coming to the United States and want to learn our language. The newest method of learning a language I found out about is chunking. We go back to the sense of children picking up on a group of words easier than just a word at a time. This is also true for adults. They do not have to break down the words, but can get a general gist of the meaning by the phrase. A combination of words that you regularly see is known as a collocation.
Studies have been made by computer analysis of usage patterns in large databases of texts, which are called corpora. English as a Second Language teachers use this to determine the common chunks in English. This helps them teach the students, who learn a lot of their second language based on chunks of the language.
Some people are for this new form of learning a language, but there are still others who do not agree with the new method. A British writer talked about how grammar, pronunciation and other skills get shafted when using the new method. He also related that there are many ways to say one chunk. It would be very hard for a person to learn chunking and expect to sound like a native speaker in the future. I think he is getting at the fact that English is so wordy that there are multiple ways to say one thing and while English speakers know that, many non-native speakers don’t.
Words- 270
Posts- 65 and 66
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Speech vs. Language
Speech and language is not the same thing. Speech is the physical ability of saying something, while language is intellectual. The article showed this difference by asking a child if this was their fish and the adult pronounced the word fish wrong. The child knew that the way fish was said was not right, so they said “No, it’s not my fis.” They could not come up with the accurate speech for fish, but intellectually they knew it was not right. This helps to explain why some children get upset when older people mock them. They know that their speech is inaccurate, and doesn’t want someone to repeatedly state what they are pronouncing wrong.
So language does not impact speech and speech does not affect language. The two are separate entities, and a person can have trouble with either of them. They both can improve with time.
Words- 147
Post- 64
Monday, April 18, 2011
Surgery Just to Speak English
Who knew that a parent would get surgery for their child, just so they could learn to speak English precisely? Parent in South Korea are now have a piece of skin snipped from under their tongue, so the children can make their “l” and “r” sounds sound like they should. Not only are some getting their children surgery, but some families are allowing their children to live in the United States, so they can be surrounded by the language and learn it easier and better. These “goose fathers” are men that work in South Korea but fly to America to unite with their children a couple times a year.
English is becoming like a universal language with one out of every six people using it in some form. What is even more surprising it that China and India have more people speaking English than we do in the United States and it’s our language.
One problem I can already see is that the culture of the United States is transferring with the language. A professor at National Taiwan University said that the younger children that are learning English are now being friendlier with people and saying things like OK to answer questions. While the country might want their people to learn the language, so they are better equipped for jobs and functioning in society, they probably don’t want their own people to start acting 100% like Americans.
Even a country like Cuba has replaced teaching Russian with English. I could not believe the comment from Fidel Castro. He said, "Although we might not like it, it's a universal language, much easier to learn than Russian and more precise above all in technical matters" (Richard Lederer).
It seems that even the people who don’t like us as a country have come to terms with the popularity of our language. What’s sad is that English is taking over in other areas, but other languages are taking over in the United States.
Words-297
Posts- 62 and 63
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Christmas- What it Really Means
I always associated Christmas with Christ. For me, the reason we celebrate is because of Christ, so I didn’t really ever think more of the word. Before reading this article, if I would have thought about it, I would have come up with Christ- meaning Jesus or holy one and -mas must be a suffix meaning day or full of. Christmas is Christ’s day or a day full of Christ. In actuality, Christmas came from the Old English words Cristes maesse. That meant the festival masses of Christ; through time the words were pushed together and now we see it as just one word.
Christmas is one of many holidays. The word holiday has been changed over time. In Old English it was haligdaeg and meant holy day. No longer is it really translated as holydays, so we have holidays that are not necessarily holy, like Labor Day and Halloween.
Interestingly enough, the term gospel means the same as godspell. We talked about the translation of this in class, so I knew it before reading it. Originally I thought godspell meant good luck, but actually godspell and gospel originate back to good news. This makes sense because the gospel brought the good news to the people. Manger in French means to eat, so Jesus was born in a manger, which originally was cow’s box to eat out of.
Last is the difference between Xmas and Christmas. I always thought Xmas was taking Christ out of Christmas. Little did I know that Xristos in Greek means Christ. This is just a way that the Greek’s say Christmas based on their language and is actually used in the Greek Orthodox Church.
http://www.verbivore.com/archolid2.html#xmas09Words- 280
Posts- 60 and 61
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Old English Profanity- Is there any?
Comparing and contrasting regular words in Old English from today’s language may not seem easy at first, but it’s a lot easier than finding profanity. We learned in class how to form words like blod and sendan. Most of Old English was written in a more professional manner. There was not much profanity. For example, our saying “to shit” could have come from scitan, but we don’t know how related they actually are. Scitan could have had a different meaning than it now does. Another curse word for us, fuck, doesn’t show up until the 15th century. They question whether it comes from the Middle English word fike, which means to fidget. Again, this is not known because for all we know the word could have been used, but not just kept track of. Profanity used to align with more religious words, but that has changed and now we have more words that don’t relate directly to a religious symbol. Modern curse words are now being used as interjections. It started with “zounds” in Shakespeare and has now led to “shit” being used the same way.
Words- 186
Post-59
Words- 186
Post-59
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