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
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Learning 1st Language vs. Learning 2nd Language
A common belief is that learning a foreign language when you are younger is easier than when you are older. That statement is in fact true. Like anything else, people begin to learn a language by starting at the bare basics. They listen to people who speak that language and then try to imitate those sounds, building into words and then sentences. The reason that learning a language so young is easier is because that child is immersed into the language. They spend their time hearing the different sounds and words all day long. When a person tries to learn a second language they are not hearing that second language all the time, so it’s harder for them to catch on because they also continue to hear their first language. A second difference is that children want to learn the language that they are hearing around them because they want a way to communicate. Until they learn that language, they have no real way of communicating to their parents except through things like crying and showing what they want. The person learning it as a second language already has a way of communication, so for them it’s not like life or death. They can rely on their other form of communication, even though it might be nice to have a second form. A third difference is that an adult knows so much already that a child doesn’t that gets in the way of their learning. For the adult to learn the new language they have to essentially forget everything they know about their first language. This is a complicated process, and that on top of not having a muscular plasticity doesn’t help them. Children have that plasticity, which allows them to understand pronunciations and memorize more words. The ability of knowing more ends up hurting the adults because they tend to want to look more into the language and why it is the way it is than a child would ever be able to. We know that the differences are there, and it might not be as easy, but people still try and succeed in learning languages when they are older. One of their beginning steps might align with that of a child, and try to immerse themselves in the language.
Words- 380
Posts-56-58
Monday, April 11, 2011
Clash of Civilizations
We have all heard the terms Franglais and Frenglish. Before this article, I thought they mean the same thing. In actuality they are different and today they are calling these clashes more of a clash of languages because inside that language they hold different descriptions for plants, animals and food.
The general break down of Frenglish is French words being used in the English language. The material regarding the Indo-European branches and their break downs helped me to understand some of the connections that this language talked about. One of those was that while English is Germanic, it resembles French so much because of all of the original French words that we use. Some of those words include par excellence and déjà vu. Another category would be those words that sound French, but Americans think they are English because of how prevalently we have used them. They include boutique, detour and entrepreneur.
Frenglish on the other hand is the usage of English words in French. It also includes AngloSaxon roots that were turned into nouns. These roots often added –ing. So, in French un parking would be a parking lot and un camping would be a campground. They took this form of making the roots into nouns a little further and made words in French that do not really align with our words in English. It would be like un relooking meaning a makeover and a lifting meaning a face-lift. One point to mention is that regardless if there is a direct translation or not people that speak a different first language may have trouble understanding the meaning of the word. One example would be the misalignment of word order in something as simple as walkie-talking being switched around. English is so widely used that many times its words are adopted by the French people before they can make a real decision on whether to use the English word or make a French word for it.
Another area that uses both French and English is Canada. Franglais is used in most parts of Canada. It is made up of equal parts of both English and French words. More than likely, it will be pronounced like its French, but used English words. You should not be surprised to find Franglais and Frenglish in literature. It is used in Shakespeare as a humor scene. Surprisingly enough the English word foot sounds vulgar in French, so he decided against the normal English word.
Regardless of which form we use, there can be misusage in both. Originally I thought of Franglais from my high school French class. There would be times that we knew some French words, but couldn’t complete the sentence, so we would add in English words as well. Our teacher could understand what we were trying to say, but clearly it was not the right way to say it. The cultures of both languages are intermixing so often that it is hard to keep one out of the other.
Words-502
Posts-52-55
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
1st Language Acquisition vs. 2nd Language Acquisition
When I think of first-language acquisition, I think of learning sounds and letter when you are a baby. Everything is new to them, so they pick up on what they are around. This article talked about a group of people who were deaf when they were born and learned American Sign Language. Signing was their first language. The other group of people could hear for awhile, but lost it in childhood. Then, they learned sign language, basically as a second language. What was significant was that the people who learned sign language as a second language did better than those who learned it as a first language. The so called test was done by recall of long and complex sentences as well as signed digits. The problems that the ones who learned ASL as a first language was their ability to identify lexical and grammatical meaning.
Words- 145
Post-51
Monday, April 4, 2011
English is Evolving
As we are learning in class about how Old English became Modern English, this article talks about how Modern English is evolving now. English is being so called “globalized” as the article conveys. More and more people are learning English and taking it back to their hometowns. There it may take on a life of its own. An astounding fact is “by 2020 native speakers will make up only 15 percent of the estimated 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language” (Erard). As Americans who have grown up with only English, we may think this is our language, but there are many more people who are using it. In turn, English is probably going to become more like the languages that the other non-native speakers speak.
An interesting story was about the Chinese people and how they have a hard time getting native speaking teachers in China. For that reason, The Chinese have to teach the English language. They might be able to read and write it, but it’s hard for them to speak it correctly. So, English there starts to sound like Chinese. It offered a couple examples of how the English language is already taught differently because of how the Chinese learn. One of the ways was that certain th sounds became f, v, t, or d.
The most confusing part of all of this to me would be not turning certain nouns into plurals. For a lot of groups of animals we do not add s. Instead we keep it the same as the plural form. So it would be like asking, “how many deers are outside?” That just sounds weird to us because of the formation we are used to.
One good thing is that it most likely will not replace English. It most likely will just become its own separate group. In turn, I could guess that English might take some aspects of this newly formed Chinglish into consideration for our own language. We might eliminate more words, so our language is not so wordy. Until then, were stuck with the confusing language that it is and I can only be thankful that I grew up learning English because I would never want to learn all of the rules to it.
Words- 380
Posts-48-50
Posts-48-50
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Old Words and New Meanings
One of the suggested topics on our paper was new meanings for old slang. I found some slang words, but also some just ordinary words that we have changed the meaning. As the article related, words are going to continue to change as the generations grow. What one word meant 50 years ago it probably doesn’t mean today. We may change the spelling of the word or we might just change the meaning. It’s along the idea of what was popular long ago is no longer popular today. In time everything will probably become popular again. I have learned some old slang from being around my grandparents. Over spring break I was talking with my grandma about her childhood. She was telling me how she took commercial shorthand, and you could just see on her face how proud she was. I guess commercial was very big back in her day and when I told her we don’t have that anymore, she was sure we did. While we do have typing in computer class, I’m sure it’s not the same because time has evolved. This is the same way with old words that the article mentioned that we don’t use any longer. “Dag-a dirty tuft of sheep’s wool” and “jobler- one who does small jobs” were words that I had never heard of (Neas). For one, we don’t hear much about people spinning wool and making their own clothing, so that’s probably why dag is not used very often and jobler must have just become outdated. These words are similar to my grandma’s shorthand class that just became outdated, so schools started offering more relevant classes to the day’s age.
Another set of words in the article was new words. Two of the words were friend farming and netiquette. I’m sure we all know about the etiquette of using the Internet because we are growing up in a time where the Internet seems second nature to us. Some of the words didn’t seem new to me because they have been used so frequently in my life. The former word was one that I was not aware of. I thought it had something to do with one of the supposedly wonderful games on Facebook. To my surprise, it was about adding contacts to your site based on using another person’s friend list. I guess I didn’t realize that we had a word for doing that. I’ve done it and I know many other people who have, but I just thought it was to connect with friends that I didn’t know had Facebook. It’s amazing the words we continue to come up with, actually it’s kind have embarrassing.
The last category was recycled words. These are words that used to have one meaning and now have another. The words were spam, mouse, and stream. I was not surprised with these words. They do not seem as extravagant as the others. They do have multiple meanings and it would be important to let someone know which meaning you were talking about, so they don’t get them confused.
Words 518
Posts 44-47
Posts 44-47
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Perceptual Vigilance
This article related the perceptual vigilance that infants can acquire at just six months of age. Babies that grew up in a household that spoke Spanish and Catalan had the advantage of telling the difference between English and French on the basis of facial cues. The children had never been introduced to these languages before, but still could differentiate them. I am astounded at this capability. I know they say that children have an easier time learning a language the younger they are. I did not know this would go back to a baby. I wonder how they could tell that the child could see a difference in the language. It’s not like the baby could tell them they see a difference. My guess would be that they watched the brain activity of the babies. If a baby is around two languages, they are going to have to distinguish between those two, which might ultimately allow them to tell a difference between others. I am sure that the babies compare all of the other languages that they are around to their own. It seems that it might be a category thing where all languages unknown to the babies get placed in their own category in their mind. After so many repetitive hearings or showings of something I assume that the babies can see the similarities and differences, thus picking up on the languages. The babies are now able to grow up and distinguish multiple languages and do not have to grow up with just a single language.
Words- 257
Posts- 42 and 43
Words- 257
Posts- 42 and 43
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
The Opposite of Tip of the Tongue
No matter how bad our memories are, there always seems to be a word that we say we have on the tip of out tongue, but still can’t seem to recall it. I didn’t know that it actually had a title and that it was called Tip of the Tongue. After finding that out, it was not a huge surprise to find out that there is something the total opposite of that. The idea of a phonetic representation to a lexical item being repeated so much that it loses its semantic meaning seems to be those words that we continually use over and over, only to step back one day and think what is that. I am a frequent watcher of Grey’s Anatomy and the article I got this from referenced a recent episode where Meredith related that the word spoon had lost its meaning to her. I’m not sure if a word I’m thinking of could be used in the same way or if it’s just an ongoing change of definition that gives this word so many meanings. The word gay to me when I use it or hear it from others doesn’t reference the sexual manner of a person. Instead, I think of it as being dumb or silly. When I say the word I’m not even thinking about a meaning because it has been said so many times. From that, I think it could be placed in the same category of a word being used so often that it loses its own meaning.
Words-256
Posts- 40 and 41
Posts- 40 and 41
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Bible Changes Words
The New American Bible has brought about some changes just in time for this Lent season. If any of you have read the Bible before, then you know it can be quite a challenge. Not only is it hard to comprehend the extravagant things being said sometimes, but it’s also hard to understand the language. We have to remember that this was written thousands and thousands of years ago, so the words might not have the same meaning they do in today’s world. Without having a dictionary inside the Bible it would be easier to use modern words in place of some of the older language. One of the words that were changed was booty. Instead, now they will call it spoils of war. One change that I’m not so sure I agree with is the virgin becoming the young woman. I think virgin has more of an impact and a different than a young woman. A young woman could or could not be a virgin. Aside for that, I really think this will help out a lot of people. The Old Testament, which I am currently reading, is quite confusing and vague at times. These changes may increase the reading of the Bible. The only disadvantage to it, is I’m afraid all of the changes may eventually take things out of context. Certain passages may end up meaning something else because of our new words. A lot of people know Psalm 23 and I hate to see it be changed after so many people already have it memorized. It’s like taking away tradition, but I guess it is better for more people to know about the word than to know the same reading of it.
Words-289
Posts- 38 and 39
Posts- 38 and 39
Monday, March 7, 2011
How Does a Cow Moo?
Research in London is pointing to the accent of farmers having an affect on how their cows moo. The research said that the cows pick up the accent of their owners and put it to work in their own cow language. This could be related to how we talk based on who we are around. In class we have learned how language changes over time and how one thing being said wrong can make a totally new word. I don’t think very many people walk around thinking about how a cow moo’s, but it’s not so farfetched as to think that they could differ based on the country where they were raised. Potentially if a farmer draws out his word, perhaps the cow would lengthen the moo sound. This would just be a conditioned response because over time the cow learned what the farmer was saying and what he did after saying that. If you think about it, dogs do this in a way. You can train them, but they don’t react just to what you trained them. They know things by what you say and repeatedly do. They will become conditioned if you repeatedly ask them if they want dinner and go to the can and dish out their food. The way you say dinner rings a bell in their head, and they remember what happened the previous 20 times that you said that. In the same way, cows could react and moo based on the sounds that they hear from their owners. I don’t do a lot of traveling, but if I’m ever in the country in London, I’m going to have to listen for cows and see if there might be a difference.
Words- 286
Posts-36 and 37
Words- 286
Posts-36 and 37
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Color Relations to Language
Surprisingly many languages share the same primary color terms. It was interesting to see that the colors in Tahiti and southern Mexico were found to be like English with only one exception. They both did not have blue and green, but put them together to make grue. Is it a coincidence or something beyond that to have three languages with almost the exact same colors? There must be something within a color that points it to certain words. The researchers did have a theory, but it was proved wrong, but they still are looking for more similarities. They did find that universals across languages could have something to do with it. The article also talked about the way that a language builds their color words is restricted; this could show why there are so many replicas. This makes me wonder what they would say about the hues that we have in America. We might only have 11 colors, but if you go to the paint store or get a box of crayons you will see that there are hundreds of thousands of colors. Those new colors don’t seem to follow any pattern for naming. It would be interesting to find an article on the naming of hues in other countries because ours seem a little wacky. Even nail polish has different names; where do they come up with something like “Friar Friar Pants on Fire” and would that be allowed in other countries? While we do see many similarities in color, there are other languages that differ so greatly even though they do have similar colors. At the end, they talked about giving directions is based on your language. I already did a post on that with a previous article, but I did want to say that it really relies on the type of language and how it’s formed to what all things are similar and what varies so greatly.
Words-320
Posts- 34 and 35
Words-320
Posts- 34 and 35
Grammar Comeback
The Washington Post did an article on how grammar is starting to come back to school classrooms. Their main focus was on a sophomore class, whose teacher is demanding they spend time on grammar every day. The students were not thrilled because for most of their schooling they weren’t taught grammar. The articles related, “Grammar lessons vanished from public schools in the 1970s, supplanted by a more holistic view of English instruction. A generation of teachers and students learned grammar through the act of writing, not in isolated drills and diagrams” (de vise). This is not any wonder to me. I did learn grammar in school, but I don’t think it was enough. I especially do not think Kent State does a good job of this. My major is integrated language arts, so I will be teaching student’s grammar in the future; yet I’m not required to take a grammar course here. I do not understand that at all, especially when a lot of schools are putting new teachers in charge of grammar lessons for freshman and sophomore students. A survey in the articles stated that not even 2/3 of students had ever studied grammar before taking the SAT (de vise). It’s no surprise then that so many students did so poorly on the grammar part. It was a good enactment by the board of the SAT to put together a third portion focused on writing, assembling, and disassembling sentences. I think the more pressure that we put on students to keep them accountable for grammar will make schools put more emphasis on teaching it. We use our language every day and if we don’t know how to use it correctly, then that will affect so much more of our lives than just an English test. Diagramming sentences are by no means fun, but I actually learned and still use the notes from my teacher that taught me how to do it, to figure out certain sentences today. Grammar requires building blocks. After a year, students should have improved and will learn that it won’t just gain them points on the SAT, but also on obtaining a job in the future.
Words- 319
Posts- 32 and 33
Posts- 32 and 33
Saturday, February 26, 2011
How Your Language Shapes How You Think
"This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about." -Guy Deutscher
All of our native languages have little quirks that set us apart from one another. Based on the rules of our language, it tells more or less about the subject you are talking about. It’s not that the language doesn’t allow us to think about certain things, but in some languages certain things are pointed our more directly because of the set up. When reading the article, the example helped more than the actual definition. So for example, someone asks you who you are going to the game with. In English, we could say a friend, but in French they would say une amie. The article before amie and the spelling of amie let’s you know that it’s a girl. English is not that specific, so there is room for more questions to be asked, where in French they wouldn’t have to ask the name of the friend to find out if it was a male or female.
I do not know anything about the Chinese language and was surprised to find that they do not have to tell you about the timing of a situation. In English we have the past tense, present tense, past participle, etc. to specifically tell when you are doing something or were doing something. This is not so with the Chinese. They can use the same infinitive to say all of that. It seems to me that they must speak a lot more words in a day than we do. How would you know when anything was happening unless you asked a series of questions?
The article talked more about genders of words. In my high school French class, I always wondered why certain things were masculine and others were feminine. What about the objects made it seem more girlish and why did they have to relate everything to masculine and feminine. What I found is that more than just French and Spanish does that. We, English speakers, are the odd ones. The gender of the words relate to how some people not only see it, but how they pronounce it too.
The next area of interest was space. I learned that there are two ways to give directions. Egocentric is that way that most of us give directions to someplace close. We use terms such as left and right, but there is also fixed geographic. This is what a GPS does, giving cardinal directions like south and north. We tend to use the egocentric and think that when someone uses fixed geographic that they are just trying to sound smart. That is not always the fact. There are certain languages, like those in Australia, that do not use the egocentric way. All of their directions are based on cardinal directions, even when saying “give me the paper to the right of the computer” they would say “give me the paper to the east of the computer.” That definitely sounds out of line to me, but that’s because I grew up hearing and using the egocentric way myself.
This brought some expectations to the Guugu Yimithirr language. They can’t rely on a compass to tell them the direction they are headed toward. Instead, they must know where every direction is at all times. I can definitely explain why America doesn’t do this because it would take too much work at the beginning that people would give up. It’s like bred into the children. They have to pay attention to more of the environment around them and that seems like it would be productive. Later when they go to learn other things, such as the direction of the wind, they will already know which direction it blows because of having to look at the wind to tell directions.
This also allows them to see things differently than we do. We see things in way of being beside, behind, and adjacent to, but they could tell from the set up of a room that things aren’t exactly as they were in another room because they are on different sides of a house. So while a room might be set up the same, they would see it as being different because of its reference to cardinal directions.
These differences are important to know if you were to travel or report on a different country. One would want to figure out the ways of the language, so they wouldn’t feel like an outsider and would be able to communicate with the locals to get accurate information.
Words- 750
Posts- 26-31
Words- 750
Posts- 26-31
Canceled or Cancelled?
I used to hate seeing or writing this word. Every time I went to write it I would stare at the word and wonder if that was the correct spelling. Recently I had noticed the closings on the bottom of the televisions screen spelling the word as both canceled and cancelled. That definitely didn’t make sense. Why was it that one school was canceled and another was cancelled? Then one of my friends on Facebook made a post, saying if you are going to use the word, then you use it consistently. This sparked me to find which one was actually correct. What I found was that both spelling are correct. Canceled is the American version and cancelled is British. One of my professors sent me an e-mail canceling class this week, but used it with two l’s. For myself, I will stick with the American form of canceled.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
German Humor
I was enthused to see an article about British humor because I have a British professor this semester. When I got to reading the article, it was about Germans and their sense of humor. Perfect! One of my best friends is from Germany. She was an exchange student and will be coming back to the states at the end of February. Immediately all kinds of thoughts ran through my head. At times I will write things to her, not thinking that she won’t get my sarcasm and then I get a reply back asking what in the world I was talking about. I wish I could think of the sarcasm I used, but I’m sure more will come up when she comes back over, so I can save those for another journal entry.
I recently heard The German Child joke and didn’t even know that was what it was called. Thinking back I can’t even remember where I read it, but it was just last week and I thought I guess there really is no sense saying anything if you don’t have anything to complain about. We, as Americans, are good at complaining, so that is probably why we have so much to say.
The article related that one of the ways that we relate humor is by talking about a certain subject and then changing that subject at the very end. So we go about making people think about one thing, and then boom change to something else. This is called “pull back and reveals” and the Germans don’t often have that in their language, so that it why they don’t understand it in ours, thus most of our jokes wouldn’t seem like jokes at all in their language.
Another aspect is that English is confusing and we use other words to modify nouns and verbs that can be used in more than one form. The Germans, on another hand, don’t use separate words, but push them altogether, so it’s less confusing. A third thing I learned was that Germans don’t find jokes about our bodies comical. If you make a comment about a girl’s breasts in a eighth grade boys’ classroom, they will laugh their tails off. As well, older married guys always seem to be getting smutty text messages about girls or pictures of girls. For some reason Americans like this type of humor, where the Germans seem more serious to me.
The end of the article talked about the geographical advantage of jokes. We by chance got born in America and have grown up accustomed to the humor we have heard here all of our lives. If we would have grown up in Germany, then their sense of humor would seem right to us. It definitely is by chance of what type of humor you develop. There is no right or wrong humor; it just depends on your location. As we become aware of the different countries and languages that surround us, I think we will become more accepting of the processes they go through.
Words- 509
Posts- 21-24
Words- 509
Posts- 21-24
Friday, February 18, 2011
Watson
I saw this being advertised on the television multiple times while watching the playoffs. I didn’t think anything of it, just thought it was a new computer that they were going to use to check people’s answers on Jeopardy. Reading through the article, I found it is instead a computer that will act like a contestant on the show. The article began by talking about vagaries. I had never heard that word before but it explained it. Vagaries of language means that the question can be interpreted in a number of ways. It’s not like the computer just registers what is being said, it first makes a list of all of the potential answers and then decides which seems to be the best fit. I was surprised at how fast the computer does that since the first few questions it seemed to answer instantaneously.
Words- 144
Post-20
Post-20
Store Signs
One person was blogging about the sign above. A friend had taken the picture for him so he could ponder why the store decided to spell the name as shown. He referred it to a burger chain called In-N-Out. Both of the names relate a sense of speed for their customers. The man was still concerned about the spelling of the first store, so he looked up when and how they got the name for it. He found that the name was brought about by its owners W.A. Krause and T.S. Gentle. They developed this name in 1969, when people were trying to use catchy names to show that their business would later lead to success. If this store decided to become a chain, I think that the word could become an eponym if people decided to start saying kum instead of come.
Spanish Alphabet
This posting reminded me of our class and the phonetic alphabet that we learned. After reviewing the Spanish alphabet, I found some similarities between it and the phonetic alphabet. The ch letter seems similar to the tS symbol in the phonetic alphabet. When I looked it up they both do indeed stand for the sound “ch” as in church. A letter that stumped me was the LL. I could not come up with a word that differed in the sound of one or two L’s. So, I searched a little further and found that the single L sounds like our L in English, while the LL sounds like our Y. Most alphabets seem to be similar in the letters and sounds that they offer. This would make translating words easier on people that speak different languages.
Words-137
Post- 18
Post- 18
Sit Stay- Part 2
Also in the article Sit. Stay. Parse. Good Girl! by Nicholas Wade, where a border collie learns to recognize words, I learned about the words that children pick up and how most of the words that we learn in our lifetime are known by the time we leave high school.
“Children pick up about 10 new words a day until, by the time they leave high school, they know around 60,000 words. Chaser learned words more slowly but faced a harder task: Each sound was new and she had nothing to relate it to, whereas children learn words in a context that makes them easier to remember. For example, knives, forks and spoons are found together” (Wade).
I also learned that there is some controversy in this matter relating children to how these animals spoke. “Chaser learns to link sounds to objects by brute repetition, which is not how children learn words. And she learns her words as proper nouns, which are specific labels for things, rather than as abstract concepts like the common nouns picked up by children” (Wade).
When I think of talking with a child I think of them talking about less specific nouns as in bread or chair not saying pita or rocking chair, respectively. They learn the bare basics and then build off of that, which is not what the dog does. The dog might build off of the sounds but most of his words are proper nouns, so it’s like learning a bunch of names of people to a child.
It would be interesting to conduct an experiment with a dog and a child. The dog could probably learn the words the child does with enough repetition but it might be hard when a lot of the sounds start sounding alike since it seems that they recognize things through the sounds and not exactly the word.
Words- 255
Posts- 16 and 17
Words- 255
Posts- 16 and 17
Sit Stay
I found it remarkably interesting that a border collie could learn up to 1,022 nouns in the article Sit. Stay. Parse. Good Girl! by Nicholas Wade. I remember people talking about how much smarter pets are than people. To an extent I really do believe that. It’s almost like they have another sense that we do not. They can see things in the future that we technically might not know about for a few hours to a day later. My dog, Snowy, can sense a storm about a day in advance. We always know when a storm is coming because she doesn’t want to leave the perimeter of the house and even tries to get inside by budging the screen door with her nose.
“John W. Pilley bought a border collie in 2004. He would show her an object, say its name up to 40 times, then hide it and ask her to find it, while repeating the name all the time” said Nicholas Wade of The New York Times. I think repetition is the key here. A dog can hear and I believe that once you say something they can recognize the sounds that you are saying. It’s not so much that I think they know each word but they remember if it was a t sound as in treat or a p sound as in pen.
We did not train my dog, but she knows certain words that probably most dogs know like treat, sit, shake, and pen. It’s funny how if you say “do you want to go to your pen” and she doesn’t want to or knows there is a storm coming, she will go straight to the corner of our garage and lay down and not even look at us. From that, I really do believe dogs can hear us. We have said pen so many times and once we said it we walked up to her pen. From that experience I believe she learned that the sounds she hears out of pen means where she sleeps.
Dogs are interesting animals and by our actions they link words together with what we participate in. Also in the article Wade related, “The psychologist Oskar Pfungst discovered that Hans would get the answer right only if the questioner also knew the answer. He then showed that the horse could detect minute movements of the questioner’s head and body. Since viewers would tense as Hans approached the right number of taps, and relax when he reached it, the horse knew exactly when to stop.” This seems to be totally true; the closer someone gets to something the more eager they become. Dogs would be able to pick up on this type of movement and relate the movement to sounds that they hear.
Words- 355
Posts- 14 and 15
Posts- 14 and 15
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