Status Updates From An Introduction to Language

"Any fool can make a rule
And every fool will mind it"

-Henry David Thoreau

«There are physiological & psychological reasons that limit the number of adjectives, adverbs, clauses, & so on that we actually produce & understand.
Speakers may run out of breath, lose track of what they’ve said, or die of old age before they are finished.» :)))))

No, I'm not in Uni/College anymore. But I'm reading this because I love Linguistics. Lol

Do we know only what we see, or do we see what we somehow already know?

-Cynthia Ozick

"Hardly a moment of our waking lives is free from words, and even in our dreams we talk and are talked to. We also talk when there is no one to answer."

Slow reading...

Assimilation and analogic change account for some linguistic changes, but they cannot account for others. Simplification and regularization of grammars occur, but so does elaboration or complication. (...) A tendency toward simplification is counteracted by the need to limit potential ambiguity. Much of language change is balance between the two. Language contact is also a vehicle of language change.

Metaphor has a strong cultural component. Shakespeare uses metaphors that are lost on many of today’s playgoers.“I am a man whom Fortune hath cruelly scratched,” is most effective as a metaphor in a society like Shakespeare’s that commonly depicts “Fortune” as a woman. "There’s a bug in my program" would make little sense in a culture without computers, even if the idea of having bugs in something indicates a problem

The terminology reflects different ideologies, but the choice of expression is primarily intended to sway public opinion. Politically correct (PC) language also reflects the idea that language can influence thought. Many people believe that by changing the way we talk, we can change the way we think; that if we eliminate racist and sexist terms from our language, we will become a less racist and sexist society.

Reading the text out of order.

... No [h] was pronounced in honest, hour, habit, hotel, hospital, and herb . Common words like honest and hour continued h -less, despite the spelling. The other less frequently used words were given a "spelling pronunciation," and the h is sounded today.

"What often happened was a process that early experimenters with machine translation called 'language in, garbage out.'"

We use the term “grammar” with a systematic ambiguity. On the one hand, the term refers to the explicit theory constructed by the linguist and proposed as a description of the speaker’s competence. On the other hand, it refers to this competence itself. NOAM CHOMSKY AND MORRIS HALLE, The Sound Pattern of English, 1968

Perhaps language changes for the same reason all things change: it is the nature of things to change. As Heraclitus pointed out centuries ago, "All is flux, nothing stays still. Nothing endures but change."

In general, the written language is more conservative, that is, slower to change, than the spoken language.

"Recent studies of the social and linguistic properties of codeswitching indicate that it is a marker of bilingual identity."

Advertising, where being noticed is more important than being correct

"What sensible people call 'the mouth,' linguists call the oral cavity ..."

"Language itself is not sexist or racist, but people can be, and because of this particular words take on negative meanings."

این ترم فصل هفت، نه و ده...

ughhhhh

Currently studying linguistics through this in my Linguistics I class, will probably still be reading it next semester (I do have Linguistics II.) So far so good.

Cuốn này xác định xong trong vòng vài năm nữa luôn!

Kari rong bab pungkasan, bab 11 lan 12. Bab 11 ngenani owah-gingsiring basa, déné bab 12 ngenani aksara. Arep taklanjut wengi iki.

The part of grammar that represents a speaker’s knowledge of sentences
and their structures is called syntax.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead; therefore we must learn both arts. -Thomas Carlyle.

A really great linguistic college textbook.If you are interested in how and what a language is? this is the book for you. Chapter 4 was really tough to understand, words went over my head, not to blame the author, the semantic field is a bit confusing.

Speed reading lvl: ASIAN. :>
Just a few more chapters! Doing my academic book review while reading this.

Super speed reading! I shall finish this in a night. Hahaha! For my ESL/EFL book review. :>

Speed reading! Haha!