Talking hands

In chapter 1 Margalit Fox gives us a brief discription of the bedouins in a village named Al- Sayyid, located in a part of Isreal and was tucked into an obscure corner miles from the nearest town for nearly two hundred years. Margalit goes on to describe the bedouins as middle class people. She says " families live in houses, some with indoor plumbing and vast sofas upholstered in plush. They own automobiles computers and VCR's, but there is something even more remarkable about the Al - Sayyid bedouins and that is what brought the team of scholars here; a highly unusual language, spoken only in this village and never documented until now". Of the 3,500 residents in the village 150 are deaf.

We are approching the end of the semester, and I am grateful for the experience of getting know more about my langauge inside out. I am also grateful for the experience in which I was able to meet new friends from different countries that obviously speak different languages. I learned so much this semester not only on the basis of the language we speak but truely what it means to speak a language, to know where it arrived from, and to get familiar with this significant way of communicating. It serves a great importance to our everyday life, something I would have never thought of before. I learned deeply what this language really means to the society it represents. In the article talking hands I believe their society to be truly blesssed although they amy not speak yet it makes me appreciate my ability much more.

In conclusion, I am concerned about the rest of the chapters that proceded, what happened with the reasearch? Was it succesful? How about the experience of the middle eastern people did they reject the idea again?

extra credit assignment.

Social gender slide 78, refering to gender and language a word used to classify individuals according to their social gender roles.

Men take longer time to talk than women slide 84- differential way in which men and women talk.

Marked gramtically slide 61- in this situtaion a word for a male would be different than the same word for a female.

lexicalized slide 63- in english we use slush sleet snowflake, but in several other languages for example Inuit they have differnt words for the same word.

Platypus slide 71- its an example of exceptional animals categorized by the Australian aboriginal language.

How does language dertermine how we see the world? slide 59-langauge dertermines how we think , language limits our thinking.

Whistle their langauge slide 56- manner of communication among the Piraha people in brazil who dont belive in the past who literally whistles in various situations.

Where did my language go?

New york city is considered to be the most linguistically diverse city in the world, with languages that are from other parts of the world now commonly heard in NY than anywhere else. According to Daniel Kaufman Professor of linguistics at the city university of New York " It is the capital of language density in the world". Professor Kaufman has helped start a project, the Endangered Language Alliance to identify and record dying languages like Husni Husain's in Rego Park Queens, he speaks mamuju and Ormuri which is spoken by a small number of people in Pakistan and Afganistan. Professor Kaufman is concerned that a language will proberly disappear in a generation or two when the population of native speakers has become to small or died out. Like Mrs. Smilovic who speaks vlashki, she say's that she is also worried that her culture is getting lost, but with an organized meeting in Queens she was surprised by the turnout of about 100 people who speaks the vlashki language. Furthermore several languages have been found right here in NYC and it is trying to be saved by its spaekers. They are teaching their children this identity that can live on because for others they believe that it might be a waste of time trying to save a dying language that is not spoken here. English and Spanish is as far as they're concerned according to Mr. Lovell from Belize, he speaks a langauge called garifuna. Like him who try's to teach his younger daughters through songs Rev. Eli Shabo also teaches his children neo-aramaic at home with high hopes and intentions that their language, roots, culture will live on, even when they die.

In reading this article I am amazed in knowing that people with all these variants of languages reside right here in my neighborhood, I would never think that in seeing a person in the store or train that they could be one of the few speakers of a very rare language. Yes I know New York City is linguistically diverse but I must admit that before reading this article it never once crossed my imagination to think that people out here are trying to save their languages, literally by teaching their children, through groups and organizations, this is indeed a serious topic. I believe that although most of us come to this city for a better future,life, a better chance at our dreams, what we"v been taught will forever remain with us, it is our tradition and roots to remember and then in turn to pass it on to our children. In this case theses people feel a need to stay connected with their language in honor of passing it on, for they might be the last to know of it. It has become a part of who they are now and without its existence it might seem like they never existed.

Chapter 9, Syntax

Chapter nine, which is based on the structure and ordering of components within a sentence or syntax, which also orginated from greet and means "putting together" or "arrangement", (86). The chapter first talk about generative grammer, system of explicit rulles specifying what combinations of basic elements would result in well-formed sentences, using mathematics, as a comparison. As in algebra their is an endless set of results when 3x + 2y( y=2,1) (x=10,5). the endless set of such results is generated by the operation of the rules. On pages 87 states the grammar will have a finite (limited) number of rules, but will be capable of generating an infinite number of well formed structures.

Surface structure, expalined as for example, charlie broke the window (active sentence) or the window was broken by charlie (passive sentence), the distinction between both is what is called surface structure. In contrast to deep structure explained as it was charlie who broke the window.However the structural ambiguity, two distinct underlying interpretation that is represented differently in deep structure is Annie had an umbrella and she whacked a man with it, or Annie whacked a man and the man happened to be carrying an umbrella.

On pages 88 talk about the rules of grammer and its crucial property of recursion ( repeatable any number of times). For example (on the table ) the gun was on the table. ( near the window , in the bedroom). The gun was on the table near the window in the bedrrom. Furthermore the chapter explores on symbols used in syntactic discription such as the arrow which indicates rewrite as, round brackets [( )], optional constituent or [{ }] curly brackets, one and only one of these constituents must be selected. Otherwise on pages 91 and onward dicusses about lexical,rules, complement, phrases, transformational rules and phrase structure rule. However I am having a hard time distinguishing a noun from a adv and so on , right off the back and also the tree diagram seems to be very confuseing like in chapter eight.

Bill Bryson "where words come from"

Where words come from by Bill Bryson, goes into great detail about words; the different types, how they are formed, or created; or made up. As he said "in Englsih, in short, there are words for almost everything". Starting at pages 67 he supports this by his many examples, just to name a few, there's a word for describing a sudden breaking off of thought: aposiopesis. If you harbor an urgeto look through the windows of the home you pass, also a word for this: crytoscopophilia, and so on. However I would have never thought that words for these actions even existed, however they are not familiar. On pages 68 he continues, that English has the richest vocabulary, for example one word can have several different meanings, all retaining to that word, such as house for home, forceful and forcible. No other langauge has so many words all saying the same thing. "Fine" for instance has forteen definitions as an adjective, six as a noun, and two as an adverb and it fills two pages in the oxford dictionary with 5,000 words of discription, ( fine art, fine gold, feeling fine, fine hair etc.). This condition of many meanings is called Polysemy. Furthermore on pages 71 according to Danis linguist Otto Desperson words are formed in one of four ways; by adding them, subtracting them, by making them up and by doing nothing to them. For example words created by error can be called Gost words, such as buttonhold and sweetheart. Also stated, words are formed by backformation, example pea originally pease as in the nursery rhymes. Laze from lazy, greed from greedy etc. For centuries words are adopted by taking them from other countries such as shampoo from India, ketchup from china, sofa from Arabia etc. Often, words are modified in the time it takes to reach us, having undergone various degress of filtering. Also changing meanings as they pass from one nation to another. Adding that this tendency to turn foreign sounds into native speech is common, example New York Flatbush was orginally Vlacht Bos. In the late middle ages the word dog was created, in english it was Hound or hund, however it was displaced. Further examples includes jaw, jam, bad, big, gloat,fun, grease etc. Many words are made up by writers, example shakespeare used 17, 677 words in his writings one tenth has never been used before. The new words of today represent an explosion of technology, pages 76 for example Lunar, module, and myocardial infarction.When a word stays the same but the meaning changes on pages 77, this is compared to as counterfiet once meant a legitimate copy. More than half of all words adopted into English from Latin now have meanings quite different from their original ones, for example Nice 400 years later becomes elegant, strange, unmanly, modest,precise etc. However somtimes an old meaning is preserved in a phrase or expression, like starve orginally to die, came to be to die of hunger. With adding the prefixes and suffixes: pre-, anti-, -ness, -able. English posseses the ability to make new wirds by fusing componds such as airport, seashore, footwear etc.

Reading Log for chapters 6,7 and 8.

Chapter 6, words and words formation process talks about Etymology, which is the study of the origin and history of a word. Also there are many different ways a new word can enter the English language. However coinage is one of the least common processes of word formation in English. For example older words such as aspirin, nylon, vaseline, and zipper. More recent examples include kleenex, teflon,tylenol and exerox. The chapter goes on to discuss about eponyms, words based on the name of a person or a place. For example sandwich/ which Earl Sandwich insisted on haveing his bread and meat together. The word Fahrenheit from the German Gabriel Fahrenheit this is a term based on the names of those who first discovered or invented things. To add to this chapter and the formation process of words borrower, compounding, blending, clipping, backformation, conversion, acronyms,derivation all have a specific impact on new words, joining of two separate words, reduction, verbs and nouns.

Chapter 7, focuses on Morphology which is defined to be the basic forms in language. Futhermore discussing on morphemes, a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function. There aare free morphemes, morphemes that can stand by themselves as single words , example open and tour. Bound morphemes that cannot normally stand alone Example words that are attached to -re,-ist, -ed, -s, receive, reduce, repeat. However free morphemes are furthered call Lexical morphemes and other type of free morphemes are called Functional morphemes. Examples include, but, when, because, on, near, above in. Bound morphemes which changes the adjectives good to the noun goodness. A list of Derivational morphemes include suffixes such as -ish in foolish, ly in quickly and -ment in payment. The second set of bound morphemes are called inflectional morphemes, used to produce new words in the language. It is also used to show if the word is plural or singular, past tense or not. This chapter also talks about morphs and allomorphs and how morphology works with other languages, furthermore how different forms of language are used to realize morphological processes and features.

Lastly, chapter 8 demonstrates on phrases and sentences: grammar. The process of discribing the structure of phrases and sentences in such a way that we account for all the grammatical sequences in a language and rule out all the ungrammatical sequence is one way of defining grammar. Therefore without knowing the rules to a language it is uncertain to make a well organized sentence. The part of speech helps out with identifying the nouns, articles, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, preposition, pronouns and conjunctions. Furthermore the chapter discusses about grammatical gender, the prescriptive approach, descriptive approach or structural analysis/ immediate constituent analysis.

Yes and No Amy Tan

Yes and No by Amy Tan is a very interesting piece, Including many of her personal opinions and experinces. To me this article was meant to send a type of message after she read the New York Times magazine. Maybe that chinese people are not stupid just becuase they tend to nod their heads quite often. Maybe that they are very intelligent people who major in molecular enginering, pre-med or writers as she is. Also in my perspective, in writing this article Amy wanted to say " hey look I am chinese who once struggled with the way I speak but look I am a very successful writer, a bilingual one". However she adds on pages 31 that she worries seemingly about stereotypes, that may be part of the reason there are few chinese in top management positons, in mainstream political roles. She writes her story explaining that although there might not be ways of denouncing a yes and a no the way a questioned is answered appears to capture the point, just as direct and efficient.

In this article Amy is clearly stressed on the way chinese people are viewed. Honestly speaking I would be just as much harrassed. After all it is her heritage that invents and designs most of the top new gadgets, I would advice her to be nothing more but proud. She addresses the way she feels throughout the piece specifically looking at pages 29, she contemplates on which language had the greatest effect on her molding, was it english, chinese or both.

I found it to be somewhat true yet interesting when she quoted from Sapir Whorf hypothesis that "no two languages are similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. I believe where we come from and the languages we speak portrays a big role in our lives, our education and our status. We are viewed the way we speak, our words and sentences tell alot about us.

MY name is Samantha Jagroo

s-Voiceless, alveolar,fricative
ə-
o-
m-voiced,bilabial,nasal
e-
n-voiced,alveolar,nasal
θ-voiceless,dental,fricative
ə-
d3-voiced,palatal,affricative
ə-
g-voiced,velar,stop
r-voiced,alveolar,liquid
u-

On a regualar day people who are common to the english language would pronounce my name the way it is spelled Sa-man-tha, however I did notice that chinese people would pronounce the "man" as "men and the "a" as an "i", so it would then be simentha. Based on what I have learned about phonetics I would conclude that this occurs due to properties of speech as sound. Referring back to chapter 4 and the activity between the trachea and the larynx. The way a chinese person would pronounce a word compared to an english or french speaker will all sound differently. Familiarity with pronouncing words and letters from the english alphabet will be much tougher for a Asian person whom is not acquainted with the way something of the english language should be said.


Most of all I have problems pronouncing people names that I am not use to on an everyday basis. For example Indian,African and Punjabi names are really hard for me to pronounce. The name Anurada (if spelled correctly) is an example; I would pronounce this as spelt, An-u-ra-da but an indian person would make their tongue role on the "r". Another example would be words in biology class, I can never figure it out unless coached sometimes the way it is spelt is totally different from the way it is pronounced. An approach I believe to figuring out the correct pronunciation would be to figure out the place and manner of articulation, the way it is pronounced knowing weather it is a nasal and a stop or a palatal and a dental; would help to someone whom is new to a language or trying to expand their knowledge.

Chapter 5- The sound patterns of language.

In chapter five which is based on the sounds patterns of a language, Yule starts with adding that each individual person will not pronounce a word in a physically identical manner, for example the word "me". He also stated that the humans vocal tract, of a fairly large or a small person wouldn't be of any difference; hence two physcally different people would inevitably have physically different vocal tract only in terms of size and shape (43). The discription of the systems and pattern of speech sounds in a language is called phonology. It is concerned with the abstract set of sounds in a language that allows us to distinguish meaning in the actual physical sounds we say and hear (44). Yule then talks about the meaning-distinguished sound in a language or a phoneme, and how it is compared or different to an allophone, which would only result in a change of pronunciation of the same word (45). Pages forty six talks about minimal pairs and minimal sets. For example teo words such as pat-bat are identical in form this would be a minimal pair. Words however that are differentiated such as feat-fit-fate-fate would be a minimal set.

My most favorable part of this reading was the Elison. In detail it talks about a word efficiency and transcription. For example the word "and" the [d] sound of this word was not included in the transcription or for instance friendship the word [d] is yet not included. This is said to be a sound segment that might be present only in careful pronunciation (49). I can relate to this section because on a bust day trying to get things done, in the sudden appear of a hi or hello I would talk very fast allowing me to pronounce words without care. Like "hi" would more sound like "i" or hows mum, here you will see that my pronunciation of these words will create a new spelling. Also if you would take the time ti notice high school student or must I say the "hip" young people of our society nowadays would speak in a way that wouldn't be considered the normal way of speaking. I would say from experience it is more organized when we talk to our parents or when we've grown up. My sentence wouldn't include howdi-how you do.


Connecting this chapter to my own language is very common. Since in some words we say you sure wont know how to begin spelling it. We speak a very broken english accent although at most some of our words would sound very british english.

To conclude on a questions; I am not understanding the syllables and cluster part of this reading. Far less for the chart below I am looking for a pattern to understanding but it is very confusing for me.

"The Language of the world"

New York City is one of the most popular cities in the world. In 2008 the city estimated population exceeds 8.3 million people and is considered the most densely populated major city in the United States, (Wikipedia.org/wiki/new_york_city). Hence this large diversity of people incorporates many different languages ranging from Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, Cantonese, Spanish, French Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Persian, Urdu, polish, German, and English just to name a few. However, English is the most common language that is spoken here that adds up to approximately 3,929751 in 2000, according to the NYC data, (http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/nycdata). Furthermore since English is the standard language of the United States people are forced to learn it in order to get around from day to day.
I choose to use New York as a major example of the importance of a language, example English, and the importance it brings across not only to me but to everyone; in the workplace, classroom, in the bus, or train, the grocery store, the fish market etc. Without this ability of using a language sure I agree that there are other ways of expressing yourself but being able to be understood without second thought is priceless. I would say that language is almost like a key; a key to understanding, comprehending, reading and writing, expressions of thoughts, emotions and opinions. Today language is such an important part of our lives that plays such a dramatic role. In the way we speak a language it shows who you are, where you came from, identity, status, even education and where you intend ongoing.
Overall, my relationship towards language was always quite simple, since the only language I am familiar with is English. In the past years surrounding myself with the many different types of cultures I could speak another language to “be cool” or Just to know, For example my ancestors are from India and in watching Indian movies I would need to make sure that there are English subtitles in order to understand, this makes me feel mostly left out of what I believe I should be and a part of my culture. Another example would be after migrating to the United States, yes I speak English and they “New Yorkers” speak English yet it was a very different type of the English language, the dialect was very much different. For example my friends would say “budder” pronouncing the “d” more, I was always use to saying “butter”, pronouncing the “t” more. Even thought we both speak English, in living here I also had to change the way I speak, adapt and learn the language that will he lp me get around without getting looked at in a weird way.
One very interesting idea that came to mind in writing this story is why everyone couldn’t be able to speak a language that will be understood in every other state or country you go to, making life a lot easier. They will still be able to carry on with their signature language such as French, Spanish English etc. but the other language would be referred to as “The Language of the World”. I am not very sure that this task will be easy but I will like to explore on this idea. Also it is that children are more likely to learn much easier than an adult, I would like to test this in some way.
In conclusion to my language story, in taking this course I have realized how important it is to speak a language. I would say living in New York it’s not only a blessing to speak any language but the proper English language. Millions and millions of people come to United States each year for a better future, but the first step in getting to any of these dreams is being able to speak the language of this land. It may not seem so important but I have heard of many stories from many people of their struggle which was not knowing where to go and not being able to ask for their directions, because they are unfamiliar with speaking the language. Not being able to buy food is another sad story and upon everything the embarrassment that some would face in even trying, because they mispronounced and misled.