Blog 9:

http://www.pbs.org/speak/words/sezwho/socialsetting/

This article talks a lot about language and society, and how the affect on another. It gives examples about how language differs between different races, genders, and locations. Even when it is all the same language, the slang and dialects can make it hard to understand one another.

I think that the race and gender differences in language are mostly stereotypical. They don't affect a person's language as much as where they grew up and who they grew up with. If a young black male grew up in an all white neighborhood, he would puck up the slang and accent that they use there, regardless of how similar or not it may be to "black english." Also, as stated in the article, men and women have stereotypes of knowing different language too. A man is supposed to know more about tool names and car parts, while a woman is supposed to know more color names and decoration pieces.
However, if a man is a painter or an interior designer, he will know the "women's" terms and know less of the "men's" terms. Or if a woman is a mechanic, she would know the "men's" terms and vice versa.

Overall, I think that where a person lives will affect their language much more than what they are.

Blog 8: Acquiring language as an adult.

Many people say that learning a language is too hard once they become an adult. They say that their brain doesn't work the way it did when it was a child, and therefore, they cant learn a new language. It is true that the brains work differently in adults than in children, but adults certainly still have the ability to learn more languages. This article makes a few good points about this. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationopinion/10315238/Are-children-really-better-at-foreign-language-learning.html


First, a child has to learn language from the beginning. They don't know grammar or many words yet. As an adult, one will already be fluent in a language and understand grammar rules. That gives an advantage to adults because they just have to learn to change some of the rules around and learn only a few new rules to get the grammar of the new language. Second, when put into a similar environment, an adult learns language just as well as a child. In general, a child will be learning a language in a class type setting, playing games, singing, and reading with the language. Many adults try learning on their own. If an adult plays games with the language, they will enjoy it more and be more willing to study. The singing is very useful because it puts the language to a tune or rhythm. Tunes and rhythms are very useful for learning because they are very easy for a human to remember. If an adult makes the effort to get these things included in their language studies, they will have a much more fun, and easy, learning experience. The article also give more examples that I didn't put here.


No matter how old you are, don't let anyone tell you that you are too old to acquire a new language.

Blog 7: Enduring Voices

http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/enduring-voices/

There is a project called the Enduring Voices Project. The purpose of this project is to help save and keep a record of dying languages. They keep records of the languages online in what they call "Talking Dictionaries." Here is a link to some. http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/enduring-voices/talking-dictionaries/
These Talking Dictionaries are records of the the words, writing systems, and pronunciations of the languages.

I think that this project is a worthwhile one. Even if it cant keep the languages being used, It still preserves them so they don't disappear entirely. Whenever a language is lost, a culture is also lost. There are languages that have words for things that we don't have in any other known languages. As the website states, some of the languages are used by people who have been living in secluded places for thousands of years. They will know so much more about the nature around them than any other culture, and therefore, their language would incorporate those things in ways that other languages can't. Not only will this give us a better understanding of their culture, it will also give scientists a better understanding of the undocumented nature in those parts of the world. It will also help better their understanding of how the brain works.

I think that if anyone reading this blog knows a person who knows a dying language, you should encourage them to contact this organization.

Blog 6: Maxims

This blog entry is about maxims of conversation, sometimes called Grice's maxims, after the person who made the term. A conversational maxim is a rule that a speaker is assumed to follow. There are 4 maxims of conversation. This article states what the maxims are, and I will go more in depth on them here.

https://www.usingenglish.com/articles/grices-conversational-maxims.html

1: Maxim of quantity. Say as much information as needed. Don't say more or less. When Person A asks a question such as "What are you doing?" and Person B says "something", Person B has gone against this maxim by saying too little information. If Person B says "I am reading a book so i can know all of the information that i need to know in order to pass the class and then in turn get a good job" now he has gone against the maxim by giving too much info. In order to follow this maxim, Person B would have had to say "I am reading a book."

2: Maxim of Relevance. This maxim requires that a person should be relevant. If Person A asks "What are you doing tonight?" and Person B says "I am going to fly to Chicago next week" Person B has violated this maxim by saying something completely irrelevant to what the other person has asked. To follow this maxim, Person B would have had to have said something along the lines of "I am going to do homework tonight."

3: Maxim of Manner. This maxim requires the person to be brief and orderly, and to avoid ambiguity and obscurity. This one is hard to make a specific example of, due to what it is. A general example though, would be if Person A said something to Person B, and Person B started spouting out incoherent nonsense for an extended period. Person B would be breaking the rules of this maxim because it wouldn't be short or orderly. It also would border obscurity.

4: Maxim of Quality. This one requires truthfulness. This one can be as simple as if Person B robbed a store. Person A asked if Person B did it, and Person B says no. Person B is being untruthful and therefore breaking not only the law, but the rule of this maxim.

Overall, I think that Grice's maxims are pretty interesting, and it would be very useful if we could learn to fully understand them all.

Blog 5:

Upon searching through youtube, I found this strange little video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt4Dfa4fOEY . It is titled How English sounds to non-English speakers. The title got my interest. I watched the video, and I was slightly confused by it. I knew what the concept of the video was, but my mind was trying to process something that cant be processed. Some of what was said was English, but the words were not coherently used. Some parts were just jibberish, having no meaning at all. Overall, the video was unintelligible. But I do see how someone could mistake it for English, if they don't know the language.


The video does make me think about how some people "make fun" of other languages by making sounds that sound similar to something in that language. Maybe this is how someone would do that for English. The people in the video do seem to be speaking slightly fast too. That could be because of the same reason other languages we don't know often sound fast. When speaking, we don't generally put breaks between words. In languages we know, our mind knows the breaks, so it isn't hard for us to understand. However, in languages we don't know, we are unsure of where one word starts and another ends. Often, it will seem to be spoken really fast. That would be why someone learning English may ask you to slow down when talking. Its not because you are talking fast, its because they aren't able to separate the words very well yet.

Blog 4: Similarities of some languages.

The idea for this blog entry came from reading some of the comments that people have left me. I was going to do a nice big explanation about Cantonese Chinese vs Mandarin Chinese, but then I found this video which explains it very well in my opinion. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e73btaVo868 


Just in case you cant watch the video for whatever reason, I will briefly explain it now. Mandarin and Cantonese are both different types of Chinese. They are both mutually unintelligible to an extent. Spoken Mandarin and Cantonese are different, so one wouldn't be able to understand the speech of the other. Its different when it comes to writing though. They both use the same writing system. However, the sentence structure is different. A person who knows Mandarin would recognize the characters in written Cantonese, but be unable to read the sentence. A person who knows Cantonese would be able to read the Mandarin though. The Cantonese speakers can rearrange their words into different orders, therefore making it so they could communicate with a Mandarin speaker through writing, but the pronunciation would still be different, so even with the rearrangement. They wouldn't understand each others speech.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm7mCmncbvA
This video shows some differences of Taiwanese vs Mandarin. I don't really know much about Taiwanese, except that it uses the same writing system as Mandarin and Cantonese. I just thought it was interesting seeing some differences between the two.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCuZGYEdZ4Y
This video is about the mutual intelligibility of Thai and Laos languages. I originally though that the writing systems were the same, but the speaking systems were different. It seems I was wrong. It is actually the other way around. I will have to do some more studying on these two languages before I say any more about them, but due to time constraints, I probably wont be able to do so before this blog is due. Once I am able to do the research, I will post a comment on this entry explaining my findings.

Blog 3:

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/07/the-contested-title-of-the-person-who-speaks-the-most-languages/

I found this article by searching what the most languages a single person has ever spoken was. I was expecting around 30 or so. Instead, what I found was that a few people may be able to speak nearly twice that! I planned to be able to speak around 10 or so throughout my life, thinking that there simply wouldn't be time for more, but seeing this, maybe I will be able to do more.

The article does raise an interesting question though. At what point are you considered being able to speak the language? If being considered to speak a language only requires knowing some words or phrases, Then that would mean that I can speak over a dozen already. Maybe it requires being able to do basic or advanced conversation? The way I see it, there are different levels of it. 1: There is just knowing words and phrases. 2: Only having studied it. 3: Being proficient. 4: Being able to speak it. 5: Fluent.

In my opinion, being able to speak a language requires the ability to hold semi-advanced conversations for extended lengths of time over many different subjects. With that definition, I am able to speak only one language, English. I am proficient in Spanish and Japanese, being able to hold basic to intermediate conversations over some subjects. With Russian, Vietnamese, and Mandarin Chinese, I have only studied them some, being able to read and somewhat write and pronounce them, but not necessarily knowing what I am reading or saying. With Thai and Korean, I only know a few words and phrases and I am still learning their writing systems.

What would you consider as being able to speak a language?

Blog 2: Loss of language

http://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/endangered-languages

This article talks about how many languages are being lost, and that within a century, at least around 5 out of every 6 languages used today will likely be lost. I agree with the article in the sense that language is an important part of a culture, and if the language is lost, the culture will soon follow. The world will become less and less diverse, and everything will pretty much be the same as everything else. I don't know about you, but I think that would be pretty boring if every culture became the same. Boredom aside, if entire cultures are to be lost, we won't be able to learn as much about each other. In my opinion, one of the best things about people, is how we are all so different from each other, and the differing languages are a big part of that.

My final thoughts about this:
1. Don't let anyone convince you to not learn a language just because they say it wouldn't be very useful. That is a big part of why so many are dying out.
2. Learning a new language can help you to understand and learn about a new way of life.
3. I personally think it would be very good if everyone were to learn at least 3 different languages. If everyone took the time to do that, I believe that the world would become an easier place to live in, and it would promote a better understanding of others, and in turn, a better understanding of ourselves.

Blog 1: This one is about how language may or may not make you think differently. Please excuse this poor excuse of a title, I'm just not good at coming up with names for different things.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

The reason I picked the article was because the title intrigued me. The title is Does your language shape how you think? When I read the title, what came to my mind was "What does it mean? Do they think that if I were to originally speak a different language other than English, I would think in a different way?" The article is related to language because it looks at multiple examples of how people may or may not think differently based on their language.

I found the article to be very interesting. The reason I feel that is because it talked about how different languages I am unfamiliar with worked. I didn't know before that some languages didn't have words or concepts such as left, right, front, or behind. They instead just use north, south, east, and west when referring to everything. For example, I would say there is a person sitting to the left of me. They would say there is a person sitting to the north of me.

I agree with the article about the part where it talks about how just because a language may not have a word for a certain concept, it doesn't mean that speakers of that language wouldn't understand the concept.

I think that the article on its own isn't enough, but it can give someone a start on finding different ways to view other languages. If someone can understand the concepts talked about in the article, they can have an easier time learning more about how their own language works, and they can understand better how other languages work.

I will probably research this topic more in the future because I think it can help me to understand more about different concepts in other languages.

I am Steven McCarthy. My interests include learning about foreign cultures, and their languages.  I speak fluent English. I have at least a basic level of proficiency with reading, writing, and speaking Spanish and Japanese. I also have done basic studies in Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Thai, and Russian. I plan to become fluent in all of those languages and possibly more. The reason I am taking the English 213 class is because I need to take it in order to get the Academic Certificate in Language Studies, and also in the hopes that I can use what I learn in this class to help me to better understand the languages I am learning. Most of my experiences that have to do with language are in classes, online, or in books. Unfortunately, I am unable to get much practice speaking these languages out in public, due to a lack of people who speak them. Spanish Is the only one I can easily find people to speak with. That is part of the reason I want to travel, so I can use what I have learned in places where it is more relevant.