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Sunday, May 8, 2011

Respond to The Linguists:

Language to its speakers means a lot because it holds the culture and tradition together. The way we speak out language affects the way we conceive the world. It is important to hold on to a language because it beings the people together as a nation and culture it makes them who they are. Learning new languages can be helpful because it helps us to realize the differences between other countries and the culture. It also helps us to understand what the people in that culture do, eat, where and how they live. Sometimes people misunderstand each other because of cultural differences and language so it is better if we can understand each others freedom and rights in the world so that we all can practice our culture, religion, customs, etc. I think that no one have the right to say that their language is better then others. 


Sunday, April 24, 2011

Through The Language Glass: Summary #5

Deutscher mentioned how colors were formed in verbal expression. He said that in most languages the first color started with the color black, white, then red, then yellow-green, and finally blue. Many linguistic have been looking for ways to figure, if it is human nature or cultural conventions? Did people understand color after they became more civilized? Deutscher explains the discoveries of  colors and how  they were discovered, and how languages were understood by perceptions and then vocabularies. “Tested hundreds of people from different races and ethnic types, not just for vision but also for many other mental processes.” ( Deutscher 82). Psychologist and anthropology were trying to see if different race makes the people see things differently like colors and how they interpret things. They found out that “ the elementary brain activities, through differing in degree from one individual to another, are about the same from one race to another.” (Deutscher 82).  From this we can say that language and the society creates how we think about the world around us.

Friday, April 22, 2011

Through The langauge Glass Summary 4:

This chapter talks about color and how some language still could not distinguish between green and blue. In Burma, Tagalog speakers in Philippines does not recognize the color blue because blue to them is green. Teda tribe in Chad still did not distinguish green from blue at all. The chairman of the Berlin society for anthropology, ethnology, prehistory was trying to find out more about how a society or a region sees colors and how they are different. The Nubians from Sudan were shown the color blue, they were asked what color they see, and some say the color blue was black and other said green. Also the colors yellow, green, and gray all three colors are described by the same word. W.H.R Rivers a psychiatrist did research on colors and “how the color vision of the natives related to their vocabulary and weather the capacity for appreciating differences correlated with the power of expressing those differences in language.”(Deutscher 65-66). Rivers found out that these people were not colorblind, and knew the difference between colors but did not have names for them. "' seemed almost almost inexplicable, if blue were not to these natives a duller and a darker colour than it is to us.'"(Deutscher 67).  Europeans are better at telling the difference between blue and green then that of the natives.

Saturday, April 9, 2011

Through the Language Glass summary # 3

Deutscher explains how color was discovered and how colors are discovered in different languages. He says that colors were understood by perceptions and later was used in words. Deutscher explains how our mother tongue “can affect how we think and how we perceive the world.” Some cultures have not paid much attention to color spectrum's and because of that there are limited colors. When William Gladstone, after studying Homer, suspected that artificial dye in classical Greece might have stimulated the color perceptions of ancient peoples. Before dyes were manufactured for shades of blue, the Greeks may not have been used to recognize a range of hues in their depths. He shows how languages may lack green-blue distinctions that in our native tongue appear as if natural to us.

prescriptivist or descriptivist

In the video clip it says how English language is constantly changing and that is because new things are created and so we need new names for them. Changes will happen through time, it’s unstoppable. Prescriptive believe that if the American language changes too much it will get harder for more people to learn and understand. A Prescriptive would think that it’s bad that the language is changing because the old words may be lost. But a Descriptive believe that the English language has changed over time and that they like to know new words that seem interesting to them and also the words that people might use more often.

Persentation Assignment


        In the book, Through the Language Glass, the author Guy Deutscher says, “a nation’s language, so we are often told, reflects its culture, psyche, and modes of thought.” Deutscher mentions that culture influences language and the way we think, and that different languages can guide people to think differently. He also tells us that some languages have future tense while others don’t and that is the reasons why sometimes people don’t think about the future. “We learn our mother tongue; we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways”. When we know a language we know the culture and history about it so we start thinking differently. He argues that culture and language does shape a person to think the way they do. Deutscher talks about language, cultural history and science in his book, for example he brings the theories of Darwin and Homer.
       Deutscher’s writing is strong because he was able to describe how Linguistics has a link between the language and the culture of its speakers. In the first chapter Deutscher had me thinking about the subject and really think deep about how culture influence language. In the book The Study of Language “The social interaction source” in page 3 it says “ the appeal of this proposal is that it places the development of human language in a social context [and] so, human sounds, however they were produced, must have had some principled use within the life and social interaction of early human groups.” Deutscher expands this idea to a bigger issue and gives details why the society and culture, which develops the way, people speck and think.

Sunday, April 3, 2011