"Talking Hands" by Margalit Fox

In the introduction Fox is explaining her research trip to an isolated Middle Eastern village. The villagers in this isolated village Al- Sayyid speak unusual language spoken only there and which has never been documented before. Four linguists have been doing research for couple of years and they have been documenting this extraordinary language. Before the linguists started their research they had to gain the trust of the villagers, as well they had to protect their privacy. Fox was the first journalist that was allowed to visit this village, but she wasn’t allowed to interview any of the villagers. She was permitted to visit the village, but she had to show her whole manuscript to the linguists. The history and the life that are described in her book are based on her own observations and on the interviews with the members of the research team. To keep the privacy of this village in her book Fox has changed the names of every villager; also she has disguised the exact location of the village.
In the first chapter “In the village of the deaf” from the book Fox describes the house at the edge of the village, the owner of the house and his family. The man and his family are called Bedouins; they are middle class, they own automobiles and computers, but the remarkable thing about them is their unusual language, spoken only in their village. Fox explains that for the last seventy years the inherited deafness has been passed down from one generation to the next. In the village there are around 3,500 residents and about 150 are deaf. Many of the hearing residents can speak the sign language. Then Fox talks about the second time that the entire team goes to the Al- Sayyid village and collects data. On their first visit to the village they videotaped the villagers telling stories in sign. Then Fox explains how over the years many of Al- Sayyid deaf children go to special classes for deaf in other towns, where they learn the Israeli Sign language. This language is very different from the Al- Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language. This language as the other languages that has very few speakers can very easily die. I think that when the older Bedouin signers die and their children use the Israeli Sign language instead of their own, then this unique language will change or maybe die.

NY Times

United States is the most multicultural country and New York City is known as home to one of the most ethnically diverse population. In this article are mentioned the spoken languages in New York City, also the dying languages. Professor Daniel Kaufman started the project “endangered language alliance” to identify and record dying languages. Some of the languages found in New York City are Vlaski, Mamuju, Aramaik, Chaldik, Mandaik, Bukhari, Chamorro, Irish Gaelic, Kashubian, indigenous Mexican languages, Pennsylvania Dutch, Romany and Yiddish. When the language is not carried on to the next generations, then the language dies and the culture gets lost through the decades. From this article I learned that the Vlaski language is dying which I really didn’t realize that since my mother speaks that language. I know that the language is very important to every person because knowing a specific language helps families and relatives connect to each others.

Sedaris “Me Talk Pretty One Day”

a) “Sometime me cry alone at night”.
This is an incorrect sentence. The correct sentence is:
“Sometimes I cry alone at night”.
The pronoun “me” is not used correctly in the first sentence, because it depends on the category person, such as first, second and third person and the category number, such as singular and plural. In the second sentence “I” is correct because is used in English language for first person singular.
b) Last year my brother came to the United States to visit me. He knew the basics of the English language. He was able to understand most of the words, but he couldn’t speak fluently. At the time I was teaching him words and explaining their meaning. Because I thought he needs to know more words to be able to form a sentence. But now after I learned about the syntax I think that he had difficulty because he wasn’t familiar with the rules of the grammar. Knowing the system of rules, it will be much easier for him to form a sentence.

Research log for chapter 9

In this chapter is explained the term syntax, a Greek word which means “arrangement”. Specific grammar rules are used to form a sentence; these precise rules are called generative grammar. This grammar has limited number of rules which can form an infinite number of sentences. There are shown two types of different sentences in the book. One sentence is active and the other sentence is passive, and the difference in those two sentences is in the surface structure. The deep structure is the basic components in the both of the sentences. Recursive rules are the rules that can be applied more than once in producing a structure. Some of the symbols that are used in syntactic analysis are N for noun, V for verb, NP for noun phrase, VP for verb phrase. Other symbols that are used are an arrow (→) for “rewrites as”, pair of round brackets (), for an optional constituent and the curly brackets {}. Very interesting and helpful is the tree diagram. The tree diagram is used to show the grammatical information for a whole sentence. At the top of every tree diagram is the letter S, for sentence, then at lower level the noun phrase-NP and verb phrase VP, then the NP is divided into article –A and noun-N. Other rules that are explained in this chapter are the phrase structure rules. The first rule in this set of rules is: “a sentence rewrites as a noun phrase and a verb phrase”. The second rule is: “a noun phrase rewrites as either an article, an optional adjective and a noun or a pronoun or a proper noun”. The lexical rules are used to specify which words can be used when we turn structures into recognizable English. The word “that” used in sentences is called a complementizer (C), and it is used to introduce a complement phrase (CP). The transformational rules are used to change or move constituents in the structures.

Where words come from

The chapter “Where words come from” by Bill Bryson is about the words in the English language, how they were formed. The words were created by making them up, adding and subtracting from them, as well creating them by mistake and borrowing them from different languages. At the beginning in the chapter, Bryson speaks about words that are not very familiar, but they describe something that we know. Such as the word aposiopesis, this means sudden breaking off of thought. English language has the richest vocabulary, for example it has one word with many meanings, term known as polysemy, and has several words meaning the same thing. It is very interesting how some words can be created by mishearing, such as the word sweetard, now known as sweetheart. Some of the words were formed by misreading and typographical errors. There are words that were formed with back-formation, for example beg from beggar, and laze from lazy. For so many years the English language has been borrowing words from every language, such as ketchup from China, sofa from Arabia, potato from Haiti. But many borrowed words get anglicized, and we can’t even notice that they are borrowed from other languages, like the word bankrupt, taken from Italian word, banka rotta, which means “broken bench”. In the English language for so long there was a word hound, but then a new word was created, which we are familiar with, the word dog. Like dog there are a lot of other words that were created through the centuries. The writer Shakespeare plays a big role in creating new words, some of them we use today, such as critical, monumental, radiance, excellent. Isaac Newton, Jeremy Bentham, Sir Thomas Elyot also created words that we use. Some words stay the same, but their meaning changes, strange but sometimes the meaning becomes opposite. A lot of words that were adopted from Latin changed their original meaning, such as the word nice, which originally was stupid and foolish. The words can also change by becoming more detailed, like starve, which original meaning was to die, and then was changed to die by hunger. With adding the prefixes and suffixes pre-, anti-, -ness, -able, a lot of new words can be created.

Research log for chapters 6, 7 and 8

In chapter 6 are explained the processes of word formation, from the least common process to the most common process of word formation in the English language. Such as coinage (the invention of new terms), borrowing (taking words from different languages), compounding (joining of two separate words to produce a single form), blending, clipping (the word is reduced to a shorter form), then backformation, conversion, acronyms and the most common derivation (small “bits” called affixes, which appear in words).Then in this chapter are described the different affixes, such as prefixes, which is added to the beginning of the word and suffixes, which is added to the end of the word. Also another type of affixes called infix, which is included inside another word. In chapter 7, is described the basic elements in a language, known as morphemes and the study of those elements, the term morphology. Types of morphemes used in English are free and bound morphemes. Then there are two categories of free morphemes, such as lexical and functional morphemes. Also there are two categories of bound, such as derivational and inflectional morphemes. One morpheme has different versions, which are called allomorphs. Then in chapter 8 are described the rules for proper use of language and definitions of the technical terms such as nouns, pronouns, articles, verbs, adverbs, adjective, prepositions and conjunctions. The category grammatical gender helps us distinguish between masculine and feminine. With the labeled and bracketed analysis of the structure of a sentence we can easily understand how the sentences are formed in the English language.

“Yes and No” by Amy Tan

Amy was born in the United States; and her parents were immigrants from Mainland China. She writes how it felt growing up in bilingual family. Her parents were talking to her on both Chinese and English language, she always responded on English but she knew Chinese language also. She is explaining in the chapter how she read an article in New York Time Magazine that stated “…there aren’t even words for yes and no” in the Chinese language. Then she explains why she doesn’t agree with that and explains the Sapir-Whorf thesis: “that one’s perception of the world and how one function in it depends a great deal on the language used”. A great and interesting example for this thesis is the example she gave about the Eskimos and their infinite words for snow, they actually have the ability to see differences in the snowflakes configurations, and the others who are not Eskimo have only one word. (28). Then she talks about the English speakers, who said that Chinese language is difficult, also the Chinese speakers have said the same thing to Amy about the English language that is very difficult (31). But as I learned from this course all languages are equally complex and equally capable of expressing any idea. Amy worries that the people are seeing the Chinese people from a partial perspective. Then in the last part of the chapter she agrees that there is no words for “yes” and “no”, but she gives a couple of examples of different questions and different answers, so the answer actually depends from the question. Like the example she gave in the chapter, if you ask a Chinese person if he ate, than the answer can be chrle (eaten already) or meiyou(have not).