The Language Next Door

The article “Listening to and saving the world’s languages” is about the diversity of languages that can be found right here in New York City. The article discusses the fact that linguists are now realizing that they didn’t need to go to remote locations all over the Earth to discover rare languages. Some of the languages they are looking for are already here in New York being spoken by many immigrant families. I never realized that the melting pot that is Queens had so many rare languages to be found.
I always assumed that most of the languages I heard on the train or in the street where fairly common languages. However, now that I think about it, perhaps there was a time when I heard someone speaking a language and it might have been a language that was never documented before. Or a language that some linguist professor has been trying find for many years. Is it possible that the two old men I sat next to on the train last week were the only speakers of the particular language they were using? This article makes me believe that it is. Why don’t the people who speak these rare languages teach it to younger generations? Or they themselves make it known that they’re language is dying and instead of having linguists look for them, they look for the linguists?

Me Talk Pretty One Day

The sentence “Making sex with the womens of the world” in David Sedaris’ s “Me talk pretty one day” is quite interesting. Although it is very eye catching, grammatically it is flawed. First off, one cannot necessarily “make sex” so the verb “Making” should be “Having”. Secondly, the noun “women” is already plural so there is no need to add the “s” at the end. Therefore the correct statement should have been “Having sex with the Women of the world”
Having been born and raised in New York City, I have been around a lot of different cultures and ethnicity's all my life. For most of my life, I can remember meeting people on the street who did not speak English and I always wondered to myself “what’s so hard about the English language? It’s not like its Japanese”. I can honestly say after taking this class that I have become more sympathetic toward people who did not have English as their first language. Learning about how sounds are produced in some languages and not others, the complex order words, how they differ from other languages and the like has been an eye opener for me. I never realized how complicated English was and I can now see why it would be so difficult for someone to learn it coming from a language that may only use glottal sounds, or have feminine and masculine phrases for inanimate objects or even just have one long word for the equivalent of one of our sentences. Thus, having learned about morphology, prescriptive grammar, syntax and numerous other things I have learned that English isn’t necessarily the easiest language in the world and I should be more sympathetic to those who have a difficult time learning it.

Chapter 9 Summary

Chapter 9 in Yule’s Textbook discusses syntax and the various different ways it can be applied. The text states that “linguists have attempted to produce a particular type of grammar… that would have a lot in common with the types of rules found in mathematics”. Yule then describes a few of the structures involved in “generative grammar”. One of the first structure’s Yule writes about is the “deep and surface structure” otherwise known as the “abstract organizational level of the sentence” and the “syntactic form of the sentence”. Yule then goes on to the part of syntax I found the most interesting which is “structural ambiguity”. The reason for this is because I never realized that a sentence such as “Annie whacked a man with an umbrella” could be so vague. Did she whack a man who was holding an umbrella? Or did she whack a man with her umbrella? The text then goes into detail about the “symbols used for syntactic description” and how they are incorporated into the tree diagrams and structure rules. The preceding two discuss the organization of words in a certain order to create the structure of a phrase. Finally, Yule brings up the topics of recursion and transformational rules which put simply would be the combining of multiple sentences and how you can rearrange them.
I never realized all of the detail that goes into the making of our language and how deep a sentence like “John knew that Mary was with Kate” could really go. However a question that I would have is “could you really use a tree diagram to make an endless sentence?” “Would that really be practical?”

Where Words Come From

The Chapter entitled “Where Words Come From” in Bill Bryson’s “The Mother Tongue” discusses the origins of most the words in the English language. Bryson states that “English retains probably the richest vocabulary and most diverse shading of meanings, of any language”. Bryson then goes on to describe the five ways in which he believes words in the English language were created. The first of these is through error. Bryson states that many of the words in the English language were created due to incorrect transcriptions, such as the words “message” and “sweetheart” (originally “ménage” and “sweetart”). The second way words were created was through adoption. According to the text, “even in the sixteenth century, English had already adopted words from over fifty languages”. This means that most of the words we used today were taken from languages such as “shampoo” from India and “sofa” from Arabic. The third way was that the words were simply created. For words such as “dog” and “numskull” no one really understands why these words came to be. Only that they started being used at some point in time and they stuck. The fourth way words have come to be is by having nothing done to them. The text stated that words such as “counterfeit” and “manufacture” have had nothing done to them but the meaning of them has changed over time (“counterfeit” originally meaning “authentic” and “manufacture” meaning “using hands”). The fifth and final way words in the English language were created was through the adding or subtraction of something. The way this was usually done was through the adding of prefixes and suffixes as in the words “invaluable” and “priceless”. I found this whole section of the text quite fascinating regarding the origins of the English language.
Reading this chapter, I remember that Queens is the most culturally diverse place on the planet. I find it very intriguing that most of the people we meet on the street speak a different language other than English and we don’t even realize the impact their language might have had on our own. Because even though sometimes we may not understand them, the roots of the words we use everyday might have come from their language. My only question would be “Is the evolution of the English language dependent on the changing of other languages?”

Chapter's 6,7, and 8

Chapters 6, 7, and 8

Chapter’s 6, 7, and 8 in Yule’s text discuss a variety of things such Words and Word Formations, Morphology, and Grammar. In Chapter 6, Yule brings up the different ways words have been formed in the English language throughout history. He talks about things such as etymology, coinage, blending, and infixes. Each of these terms has played a vital role in the formation of the modern English language. For example, Yule educates on how the words “smoke” and “fog” were blended to create the word “smog”. These terms and ideas carry over to many languages all over the world. The book then goes on to Chapter 7, which delves into the world of Morphology. The Chapter goes into great detail about different types of morphemes such as “Free” and “Bound” morphemes, which are morphemes that can stand by themselves as words and morphemes that cannot. There are also “derivational” and “inflectional” morphemes which are the two types of “bound” morphemes. The chapter then goes onto to implicate the rules of morphology into languages such as Tagalog and Kenuri. Chapter 8 finally goes on to the grammar of the English language and the arguments between the “prescriptive” and “descriptive” approach. The Chapter describes the structural analysis of sentences and also gives us the tools to “analyze the constituent structure of it”. I found Chapter 6 the most fascinating because I never realized the multiple ways the words of the English language came to be, as well as how English has influenced other languages around the world.
After reading Chapter 6, I can now understand why certain “new” words are very similar in most languages. It is because other languages are just “borrowing” the route of the word and having it make sense in their own language. An example would be the word “football” and how the Japanese incorporated that word into their language as futtobōr or sakka (soccer). The only question I would have is “Is this process still taking place of borrowing words from other languages?”

Amy Tan's "Yes and No"

Amy Tan’s
Yes and No

Amy Tan’s Yes and No discussed what is was like for Tan to grow up in a bi-cultural household. Tan was raised in America by her parents who her Chinese immigrants and she explains the stereotypes from each of the cultures she is a part of. Tan goes into detail about the stereotypes of Chinese natives first. She states that they are known to be “discreet and modest” as well as very “comprising”, due to the fact that there are not even words in Chinese for “yes” and “no”. She then relays that technically there are no words for saying “yes or “no”, but that does not mean there are no other means to express these words. For example, later in the story she gives an example of a phone conversation between her and a telemarketer, she wonders if it was the stereotypical “Chinese patience and respect” that kept her on the phone with the telemarketer for so long. However, Tan then discussed her “American” side when the telemarketer called back one week later stating she had “missed her appointment”, to which Tan replied in a way she claims was “aggressive and blunt”. To me, this narrative was about the dichotomy of a woman who grew up in two cultures at the same time. She can see both sides of the stereotypes that plague her two cultures because she has lived with them her whole life.

Coming from a tri- cultural family, I can empathize with Tan when she wonders if it is her “Chinese” or “American” side when she reacts to certain things. I too have wondered from time to time whether or not I have certain attributes that come specifically from one of the cultures I was brought up in. Did I get my “toughness” from my Greek Father, or accepting personality from my Spanish mother, or maybe even aggressive attitude from being a New Yorker? It is a very difficult question to answer. I also found the underlying tone of the story which is “you cannot base culture on the vocabulary a certain culture shares” quite fascinating as well. If I could, I would like to go more in depth with Tan and talk with her more about her experiences of growing up in a bi- cultural household. I would also ask her if f she would bring her children up leaning more towards the American or Chinese culture.