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.
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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.

http://www.onmilwaukee.com/buzz/articles/canceledblog.html
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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.
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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. 

http://walkinthewords.blogspot.com/

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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. 

http://walkinthewords.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2011-01-19T06%3A56%3A00-05%3A00&max-results=10
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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.

http://walkinthewords.blogspot.com/

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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. 
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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.

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Regard to vs. Regards to

These types of articles have been catching my eye lately. I feel these types of questions are going to arise in my future classroom. The words regard and regards is often used interchangeably. Webster’s dictionary used regard to as the meaning of  “with respect to”. It did not use regards to. I believe this to be one of those words that belong in morphologic misanalysis. The words seem to be said so fast that the d starts to sound like a z. So for future reference I will know to use in regard to instead of regards. Another word that I misuse so often is used to and use to. I thought that they had two different meanings but after talking with a professor, I realized that it is how I say it. The only one I should be using is used to.
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Post- 13

New York Dialect

I visited New York City on winter break. My friends and I crowded in Times Square to hopefully watch the ball drop, but arriving six hours early was only enough to get us six blocks away, where the ball looked like a tiny dot. Anyways, we all consulted talking like a New Yorker while we were there. We are all from Ohio and probably sound more like hicks than any New Yorker. The one thing that everyone knew was that they didn’t pronounce their r’s. When I think of people in New York, I think of the rich businessmen who make millions of dollars a year. It is not a surprise that those upper-class people were looking up to the people in London. Thus, New Yorkers borrowed their pronunciation of words to make their own dialect and sound like the elite.

http://www.tutorgig.com/ed/New_York_dialect#Geographic_factors
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Midland Dialect

Based on the image given, that I could not for some reason get to load on here, I live a little below the Northern region but go to school in the Northern region. My whole life I have grown up in the Midland region but I say words on what seems to me the Midland region. The article talked about words like cot and caught and how they are annunciated the same in the Midland region. I know that I say them the same and when we were writing them in class I kept going back over them to hear a difference, but all I could find was that I aspirated more on the second one than the first. There was an activity in the articles that wanted people from the Midland region to see if they could correctly identify a couple words from the Northern region. The first word was guess but I thought it was gas. I hear words strung out more than when I say it. Like I would say guess and it would be very short, but they drew it out making it sound like an a. The other word was fatch but I thought it was fetch. They also gave examples of bed and bad. From this I got how closely connected the e and a sounds are.
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Post-11

Is This a Word?

“affluence test, artspeak, barfsome, beefcakeosity, blubsome, bodywhomping, campylobacteriosis, clamorous reed warbler, cyberwidow, depurpleise, earwitness, Education Action Zone, fibroephithelial, hamburger junction, horseburger, japeful, jelly-bagging, middle youth, Othello syndrome, pancuronium bromide, Patagonian toothfish, People’s Monarchy, petrol-head, portfolio career, pre-millennial tension, quantum computer, rocktabulous, schlockbuster, story arc, stylephile, telangiectasia, Teletubbified, trammel-netter, truncus arteriosus, woo-woo book, xenozoonose. “ –The Guardian

This article talked about if some words we read are actually indeed words. As we learned earlier in the semester about coinage, blending, compounding, etc., we know that there are many words in our language now that weren’t there before. I’m sure a word like blogging was not heard of back in the 1800’s because they didn’t have blogs then. Now with the increased technology, we are creating new words. While those words originated in Britain, I’m sure that we use some of them here. What I found more interesting was the ending of the article. It introduced me to some other morphological formations than we studied in class. One was extending set phrases. This is a two or perhaps more word phrase that keeps base words and changes the modifier. The example that the article gave was road rage could be changed to phone rage. They also talked about playing with language. The funniest example was black-water rafting instead of white-water rafting. We could do that with a ton of our words because we apply gender biased or here color biased terms. Some people may disagree whether certain words are actually words and the article related that lexographers can’t fit every word in a dictionary. They have to draw a line somewhere, so even though a word might not be in the latest dictionary, it could indeed still be a word. 

http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/isthisaword.htm
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Post 10

Affect vs. Effect

        Affect and effect are so often used interchangeably, even though they do not mean the same thing. Affect is a verb, while effect is a noun. People should consider thinking about the difference before putting one word down. I viewed two different posts talking about the Weather Channel using the wrong meaning. They said, “Feeling the affects of Ike”. It should instead be “Feeling the effects of Ike”. If they wanted to use the word affect they could have written something like “Ike brought on a horrible storm that affected many people.” Although, when talking about the aftermath, as the station was, those are effects of the storm. It’s a tricky concept, but remembering one is in most cases used as a noun and the other a verb, helps to clear the confusion.

http://www.takeourword.blogspot.com/

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Post- 9

Boys' language skills

“Vallotton and Ayoub found that language skills -- specifically the building of vocabulary -- help children regulate their emotions and behavior and that boys lag behind girls in both language skills and self-regulation” (ScienceDaily staff member)

          I was pleased to see that building language skills would improve boys’ behavior. I never have considered that the way they acted was in relation to language; I more or less thought that it was their genes or how they were raised. From personal experience, it seems that girls are more attentive to their outside surroundings and pick up more on what they hear and see. Boys on the other hand, seem to rather have tunnel vision and are only focused on what they want to see or hear.

 I know schools are pushing more and more for student’s entering Kindergarten to have a higher level of knowledge. This study shows that could in turn help the teachers manage to teach more lessons. If the student’s know more when they come in, then the teachers will have to spend less time working on their behavior skills and more time learning, so we could improve from the 13^th leading education country.

 I’m not exactly sure of the correlation, but perhaps if boys can process more information and understand language better, then they would be able to handle situations by themselves more often. One issue that brings up some discussion in schools is vocabulary tests. A lot of people see it as memorization and recitation, but if they listen to what Vallotton and Ayoub found, then maybe they would be more apt to use them. Showing an impact on more than just knowledge could prove vocabulary tests to be a solution to a number of problems. There is also many other ways to gain vocabulary than by just having a test.
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Posts- 7 and 8

Bidialectalism

One thing I found of interest that I had never thought of before was bidialectalism. Obviously bi most times refers to two and so this means having more than one dialect. “Since the 1960s in the US, bidialectalism has been seen as an educational goal for vernacular English speakers in the US” (Hazen). As our country develops it seems that we want to be part of more things. So it really is not a surprise that people want to have more than one dialect. For some groups it would be easier than others. If you grew up in a town bordering two dialects or lived in an area with one dialect and then moved to another, it would be easy to have two. It seems that it would be a challenge if you were older because you have to learn the rules of the dialect and forget the rules of your old dialect, while at the same time be able to remember later when you want to use it. 

http://www.as.wvu.edu/dialect/varres/varres.html
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Post- 6

Appalachia

I was surprised to see that where I’m from is in the Appalachian region. When I think of Appalachia, I think of the television show I saw on ABC of the children living in the mountains, drinking Mountain Dew for breakfast and living in trailers. I’m from the country, but where I live is not not like the show I saw. I don’t think how I talk differs from anyone else, but I guess so because my roommate  when I went to Otterbein College use to make fun of different words I said. I never realized till that point that at times I do draw words out or cut them of. It’s not consistent though; I think it depends on the circumstance. One word was Ohio State. A lot of times I say Hia State. I drop the o at the beginning and then the second o becomes an a. After reflecting on it, it makes me sound lazy. My grandpa was grand at shortening everything or saying it how it wasn’t supposed to be said. It could be from where we live or that he grew up on a farm. Two of his famous words were schaar for shower and feesh for fish. I was looking through the vowel differences chart in this article and I think that I found out why he said those two words. Instead of being [fIS] he made the i sound tense and thus made it sound like [fiS].  Shower’s dipthong is lowered and makes it an a sound rather than an i sound.  Reviewing the chart now, it begins to make sense why some of his words came out the way they did.
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Posts- 4 and 5

40 Banned Words and Phrases- Pt. 2

I decided to make the ban on certain words and phrases into two sections. It’s funny how angry some people get over certain words. I’m always correcting people in my family and they can’t stand it. It’s not that I think I’m better than them, but it gets so annoying when you hear the same words not pronounced correctly or used in the wrong context. I’m going to college to learn these types of things; I think using it in my everyday life will only help me get better. Below are three words on the banned list.

1.      1. "Bust instead of burst. NBC’s Matt Lauer was a notable offender in talking about the “busted” BP oil well. Journalists should know better." -George Bulanda and Rebecca Powers

·         I believe this is in the one hundred common misusage problems that we went over when I was in high school. Some of these words are tricky but like the magazine said, you would think journalists would know better. I went to the dictionary to look up the difference and under the definition of bust it had to burst. These words are supposed to be different, yet they use the other word in the definition. So, I went to the origin and found that bust was to be the verb of “to burst” and it originated in 1806. ("bust." Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper, Historian. 03 Feb. 2011. <Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/bust>.)

1.       2. "End result. Because there’s no beginning result, there’s no need to differentiate. The result automatically comes at the end." -George Bulanda and Rebecca Powers

·         English is wordy and my media writing professor keeps repeating to us that journalists want to get rid of the extraneous words. End result would definitely fall in that category. A result is an effect of what happened previously, so obviously it is an end result but that’s just redundant.

1.      3. "Lay is for placing. Lie is to recline. Lie down." -George Bulanda and Rebecca Powers

·         Another pair of words that are in the 100 common misusage problems. I remember a teacher telling me that lay is to lay an egg and lie is to go to bed. That is the way that I keep these two straight. 

 

http://www.hourdetroit.com/Hour-Detroit/December-2010/40-Different-Words-and-Phrases-Not-to-Use/

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40 Banned Words and Phrases

As a country we are becoming quite lazy. I’m sure that is no surprise to anyone. The least physical or mental work that we have to do, the happier we are. I read through this list of 40 banned words and phrases that the Hour Detroit Magazine published. It was published shortly after a nearby university put out their list of banned words. As I read, I laughed thinking how many times I have heard these being used. Below I have listed a few of them along with my comments.

1.      1. "Male nurse. Why the need for a modifier?" -George Bulanda and Rebecca Powers

·         This is something that I never thought of before my media writing class. Many professions are excluding people who perform it. For instance instead of mailman, they want you to say mail carrier. So in certain cases I can see why they would be specific and say male nurse because the nurse was actually a man. 

2.  "All’s, as in “All’s I know is …” This substandard abomination sounds like something out of Green Acres. The word is “all.”- George Bulanda and Rebecca Powers

·         This sounds like it could be intrusion. People are adding the “s” sound instead of going straight to the [aI] sound. 

3. " Pronunciation problem No. 1: Ex-specially. (Like the common expresso/espresso confusion, forget the x.)" -George Bulanda and Rebecca Powers

·         This could be a dialect or it too could be intrusion of bringing in the sound of x.

3.     

http://www.hourdetroit.com/Hour-Detroit/December-2010/40-Different-Words-and-Phrases-Not-to-Use/
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