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erratioIt's been a while since the last time i bored everyone with a post about the world of linguistics.
Just before this semester started I found myself, as one does, deep in the Course Handbook trying to decide what courses to take. More specifically, what Linguistics courses to take. Ironically, all the descriptions of the Linguistics course were too vague for me to make head or tail of what they were really about, so I ended up picking based on a combination of of course title and what little info I could get out of the description. And thus I found myself enrolled in Social Contexts.
The thing about Social Contexts is that it's much more an Arts subject than, say, Generative Grammar (which I rejected because the course title sounded too dry and boring). And by that I mean that in one it's all diagrams and structures and analysing things. In the other it's two hours of talking about the state of the world. Having said that, I'm kinda glad that I did end up enrolling in this course because whilst it may not be the kind of course that I'll get a brilliant mark in, it certainly is interesting.
Mostly the course is about what happens when different languages, or different language users, come into contact with eachother. Sometimes a new language is formed, a creole or pidgin that takes elements of all the contact languages and ends up becoming something else entirely. Sometimes you get language death, especially when you have one culture highly dominant over the other. And then you have linguistic imperialism, where one language is taught and effectively forced onto others in the belief that one language is somehow better than another (often the factors are to do with being able to get jobs by speaking certain languages and that sort of thing). I think that mostly covers the last 5 or so weeks worth of lecture.
One of the examples the lecturer keeps using is that of India, where a whole different form of English is taking hold after the colonialism of the past. And I find it particularly interesting because I have so many Indian (/Bangladeshi/Pakistani) coworkers, and I'm really noticing all the little points the lecturer brings up. In addition to that I have my friends who despite not being born in an English-speaking country would consider English to be their native language and don't really intend to pass on their 'real' native languages to their future kids, which is one of the was languages die out. So it's all very interesting because we're not talking entirely in the abstract, I have people to anchor all this information on when I need a real-world example.
And then last week we had a lecture on sign language done by a different lecturer, and it was awesome. People don't really give sign language much thought, and when they do it's natural to assume that sign is just a way of speaking English with your hands. Well, when you think about it that's a silly way to go about it given that sign language uses a completely different phonology to spoken languages, and that rather than having pitch and tone and amplitude of voice they have space as their medium. Sign languages (and there's a different one for almost every country where there are communities of deaf people) are a completely different language to English or whatever the native spoken language might be. And one consequence of this is that not only can deaf people not participate in the world of sound, it makes participating in reading and writing extremely difficult too. For a deaf person, learning to read and write is effectively learning a completely different language, one in which there are all these silly constructs (like 'the' and 'is') that sign doesn't use because they would be superfluous.
Another point the lecturer brought up that I hadn't considered: The whole concept of deaf people being able to learn to lipread is ridiculous. For an example of just how ridiculous try performing the following exercise: Rent a movie that you're not completely familiar with. Now change the language to a language that you don't know. Now make sure there are no subtitles. Now play the movie and see how far lipreading gets you.
Anyway, next in the course we have language acquisition coming up, both first and second, and education of second languages. Should be.. interesting :)
Just before this semester started I found myself, as one does, deep in the Course Handbook trying to decide what courses to take. More specifically, what Linguistics courses to take. Ironically, all the descriptions of the Linguistics course were too vague for me to make head or tail of what they were really about, so I ended up picking based on a combination of of course title and what little info I could get out of the description. And thus I found myself enrolled in Social Contexts.
The thing about Social Contexts is that it's much more an Arts subject than, say, Generative Grammar (which I rejected because the course title sounded too dry and boring). And by that I mean that in one it's all diagrams and structures and analysing things. In the other it's two hours of talking about the state of the world. Having said that, I'm kinda glad that I did end up enrolling in this course because whilst it may not be the kind of course that I'll get a brilliant mark in, it certainly is interesting.
Mostly the course is about what happens when different languages, or different language users, come into contact with eachother. Sometimes a new language is formed, a creole or pidgin that takes elements of all the contact languages and ends up becoming something else entirely. Sometimes you get language death, especially when you have one culture highly dominant over the other. And then you have linguistic imperialism, where one language is taught and effectively forced onto others in the belief that one language is somehow better than another (often the factors are to do with being able to get jobs by speaking certain languages and that sort of thing). I think that mostly covers the last 5 or so weeks worth of lecture.
One of the examples the lecturer keeps using is that of India, where a whole different form of English is taking hold after the colonialism of the past. And I find it particularly interesting because I have so many Indian (/Bangladeshi/Pakistani) coworkers, and I'm really noticing all the little points the lecturer brings up. In addition to that I have my friends who despite not being born in an English-speaking country would consider English to be their native language and don't really intend to pass on their 'real' native languages to their future kids, which is one of the was languages die out. So it's all very interesting because we're not talking entirely in the abstract, I have people to anchor all this information on when I need a real-world example.
And then last week we had a lecture on sign language done by a different lecturer, and it was awesome. People don't really give sign language much thought, and when they do it's natural to assume that sign is just a way of speaking English with your hands. Well, when you think about it that's a silly way to go about it given that sign language uses a completely different phonology to spoken languages, and that rather than having pitch and tone and amplitude of voice they have space as their medium. Sign languages (and there's a different one for almost every country where there are communities of deaf people) are a completely different language to English or whatever the native spoken language might be. And one consequence of this is that not only can deaf people not participate in the world of sound, it makes participating in reading and writing extremely difficult too. For a deaf person, learning to read and write is effectively learning a completely different language, one in which there are all these silly constructs (like 'the' and 'is') that sign doesn't use because they would be superfluous.
Another point the lecturer brought up that I hadn't considered: The whole concept of deaf people being able to learn to lipread is ridiculous. For an example of just how ridiculous try performing the following exercise: Rent a movie that you're not completely familiar with. Now change the language to a language that you don't know. Now make sure there are no subtitles. Now play the movie and see how far lipreading gets you.
Anyway, next in the course we have language acquisition coming up, both first and second, and education of second languages. Should be.. interesting :)
Sign language
Date: 2007-04-23 05:17 pm (UTC)Re: Sign language
Date: 2007-04-23 11:33 pm (UTC)That's particularly interesting because according to the lecturer a lot of the kids who get them voluntarily take them out or stop charging them when they reach the age of about 12. Something to do with the implants not working amazingly, and the kids would rather be fully deaf than half and half
Re: Sign language
Date: 2007-04-24 10:02 am (UTC)In relation to your point that kids who acquire a sign language as their first language having difficulty with English grammar - true, but you could make the point about any non-English speaking group in an English-speaking country (e.g. immigrant groups). People have to be prepared to put effort into learning English as a second language. On the other side, the society needs to be a bit less language-chauvinist, and a bit more open to multilingualism and the challenges and benefits which accompany it.
Daniel