Little treasures in a big city

Whenever we hear the word 'endangered,' we usually think of animals or perhaps plants. However, in the New York Times article "Listening to (and Saving) the World's Languages," Sam Roberts writes about efforts made to save endangered languages. Globalization, assimilation, and a failure to appreciate the value of language, have all played part in discouraging speakers from carrying on their language to future generations. As a result, when the older generation dies off, the language also dies off. Luckily, some speakers are taking steps to revive their languages by starting classes and creating programs to promote the use of their native languages.

I found it particularly interesting that native speakers would see no value in continuing to speak their native language. In my own experience, I grew up not speaking spanish and regret not taking an initiative to learn the language earlier. Now, as I build my spanish speaking ability, I find it difficult to separate the rules of English from those of Spanish, which makes me wonder: Can linguists truly capture the ideas and concepts of these endangered languages without slipping a bit of their own understandings of language? What does a linguist do to record an idea that does not exist in their own native language and is it even possible to record such an idea if the linguist cannot express it in his or her own language?

Chapter 9: the reading log

I found this chapter inspiring. This chapter inspired me. These two sentences are worded quite differently and yet, they can be interpreted very similarly. George Yule describes these examples as having different surface structures but a common deep structure. Moreover, the chapter itself defines surface structures and deep structure, along with other numerous syntax (the structure and ordering of components within a sentence) terms. Among these terms are structural ambiguity, recursion, syntactic description, phrase structure etc. Yule uses these terms to describe the rules of syntax and enhances these descriptions with tree diagrams, phrase structure rules and lexical rules.

I found it interesting to see such a simple sentence like “the small boy saw George with a crazy dog recently,” broken down piece-by-piece and sorted in a tree diagram to expose its true complexity. This sentence consisted of a mere nine words and yet seemed absurdly complicated when broken down; can you imagine a longer sentence? In fact, seeing syntax broken down raises my awareness of how advanced our understanding of language is, how do we construct sentences without thinking once about the structure? Yule’s chapter on syntax put me to think about our knowledge of language and how oftentimes we take it for granted.

Bill Bryson’s chapter on “Where Words Come From,” was powerful in its ability to portray English’s gift and curse: an array of vocabulary. Bryson talks about how some words like aposiopesis, a word for describing a sudden breaking off of thought (something I experience often), are specific in “describing the most specific of conditions, the most improbable of contingencies, the most arcane of distinctions” (68). In contrast, he also discusses some extreme gaps between other words like hard and soft or near and far. He eventually speaks about the theoretical processes between how these words come into the language.

I found the part about these gaps between words to be profoundly interesting. In writing about this phenomenon, Bryson exposes a link between language and society. Why is there a word to describe a person who has an urge to look through the windows of the homes he or she passes, but no words to describe the feelings between love and hate? Why is there a word in English to distinguish between brain and mind, but no such words to separate the two in Japanese? In English today, we have words like family and friends to separate our relationships with others, but in ancient Greece, they solely used the word philia. Language seems to change with societal concepts.

In another class I am currently taking, “The History of Medicine,” we were discussing some scientific research in biology. As we were reading an article by Anne Fausto-Sterling, the article mentioned how the language in the biological field promotes a certain direction in scientific inquiry. Thinking in this way, can our language condemn us in a sense? Take the word philia from ancient Greece for example, in the time of ancient Greece when philia described the relationships between people (whether it be between friends, family or even lovers), would it be possible for a person to separate the types of relationships? Even today, in terms of race, doesn’t this word promote a class system that becomes engrained in the society?

This chapter has put me to question our responsibility when creating words. If narrow-minded ideas create narrow-minded words, what impact will this have in our world?

In chapter 6 of his book “The Study of Language,” George Yule discusses the various types of ways in which words form. Yule describes how neologisms, or new words, come into our language through ten individual or combined possibilities: etymology, coinage, borrowing, compounding, blending, clipping, backformation, conversion, acronym or derivation. Interestingly, some of the ways neologisms form are clear, like through acronyms and coinage, while other ways are not as apparent, for instance, through blending or etymology.

Yule uses chapter 7 of his book to discuss the study of morphology (the basic forms in language) and the ‘elements’ of messages in a language. He introduces the reader to terms used by linguists to organize these ‘elements,’ also known as the morpheme, which is the “minimal unit of meaning or grammatical unit.” It was remarkable to see Yule’s chart on the various types of morphemes and understand the purpose for each term, like functional morphemes that serve largely as prepositions, conjunctions, articles and pronouns. The idea of morphemes in itself struck me as I read the chapter and I can see how understanding morphology can help a person predict the purpose of a word through the understanding of morphemes.

Finally, in chapter 8, Yule discusses grammar and its function in languages. He explains numerous rules in grammar adopted by languages, such as the traditional grammar used in English or grammatical gender as it is used in Spanish. In addition, Yule talks about the role of agreement as it applies to the grammar of a language. The structure of a language changes depending on categories like the number of nouns, the person (first-person, second-person or third-person), the tense (past, present or future), the voice (active or passive), and the gender (natural gender or grammatical gender). I found it most appealing when he discussed the range of ways to show the descriptive approach of analysis is used to describe the way a language is used.

These chapters struck me as I thought to myself how minimally I analyze language. I think back to elementary school, when we learned the proper ways to construct a sentence, and how I apply grammar instantaneously or use some of the rules of word formations to predict the meanings of unfamiliar words. Even as I came across the structural analysis approach, I recall practicing these “test-frames” in elementary school. These chapters remind me of many of the ways I, myself, have learned English. It was a welcomed reminder.

My Language is Better Than Yours!

In her story “Yes and No,” Amy Tan tells a story about a time when she crossed a New York Times article that criticized the Chinese culture as being overly modest and passive. The author of the news article draws this criticism because the Chinese language does not have words that directly represent “yes or no,” which the author infers is a result of the Chinese culture’s passive nature. It was not the first time she has heard such assumptions and because she is of Chinese heritage, she felt frustrated by other people’s perceptions of Chinese people as being abnormally polite.

I found it most interesting when Tan began to criticize the suspicious practice of comparing languages. On page 30, Tan makes the claim that “one language-that of the person doing the comparing- is often used as the standard, the benchmark for a logical form of expression,” and as a result, the language that is being compared will always be “lacking.” In that case, is there ever really a language that is lacking?

Is it also unfair to compare a formal language from its common slang? I remember when I was younger I used to talk in slang constantly. I also cursed frequently and when my family would criticize me for my “bad” speaking habits, I could not understand what made my habits so bad. In my eyes, I simply spoke words, and while my family did not agree with the words I chose to use, they always understood what I had to say. Perhaps slang does not fit the standards of the English language, but does that necessary make it deficient?

My name in IPA

[dʒanəθən]

dʒ- voiced palatal affricate

a- low back

n- voiced alveolar nasal

ə- mid central

θ- voiceless dental fricative

ə- mid central

n- voiced alveolar nasal

Some say [tometo] and some say [toməto], but regardless of the varied way the word is pronounced, somehow we still manage to understand tomato. George Yule addresses the slight variations of these sounds, known as allophones, and explains why they exist. In addition, he differentiates between phonemes and allophones, noting that swapping a phoneme in a word will result in a new meaning. I find this interesting; how is it possible that some changes in sounds do not affect a word but others do?

I also found the phonotactics section on page 46 fascinating! Yule’s examples of words like vig and [fsɪɡ] remind me of my childhood days playing scrabble. Especially at those game-breaking moments, when there would be no letters left and all the players would try to sound out the most awkward letter combinations in search of words, I think about how true phonotactics are. Daring as my friends and I might have been with some potential words, there were always some combinations of letters that clearly could not be potential words. It never needed to be questioned that zjag or oq are not words; now I am aware that my subconscious competency of phonotactics is responsible for this ability. While we do not tend to think about the rules of our language, they certainly do exist.

In fact, it makes me wonder, who is responsible for starting the English language? Were these initial rules set in place consciously or accidentally? Or to what extent was the English language planned? This class has been like an awakening and led me to question something that I had originally felt so sure of, my language.