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
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