Scribbles

People seemed to like my essay this week. I have to give credit to the Nyquil I took just before I wrote it. I’ll post their responses in the comments to this post.

The development of a global language is inevitable in our increasingly globalized planetary culture. Just as modern technological innovations like the telephone, the television and especially the internet are helping to tie together the myriad economies of the world, they are also helping to create one global culture. As several people have stated before, language is intrinsically tied to culture. For our planet’s global culture, the likelihood that English becomes (or already is) its language is very high.

I’m watching Stephen Colbert as I work on this week’s essay. His interview for tonight is Steven Pinker, who is promoting his new book, “The Stuff of Thought.” He’s had his genome mapped and apparently, he’s lactose intolerant and has a 20% chance of going bald.

As difficult as I thought the homework for this chapter was, the quiz was surprisingly easy. I missed three (again), but out of thirty, that makes out a respectable 90%. Once more, I missed one question through laziness. The other two were again mistakes in my understanding. I’m right at the edge of getting an A in this class, so it’s keeping me on my toes. On the other hand, I’m finding that it’s keeping my interest pretty well. I’m starting to think of what direction I should take after this class is over. I’ve been reading up a bit on Lisp and programming languages in general lately. I can’t help but think that that topic and this one (linguistics) are going to merge together in my head and point me in a promising direction.

I posted this on the class discussion board today:

Hi Natalie, I’m having a little trouble with the aural manifestations of some allophones given as examples in the book. In particular, the distinction between the [gj] versus the [gw] allophones of [g]. The [gj] sound in the word “geese” is supposed to be different from the [gw] sound of the word “good”. To me, these sound like the same [g] sound, only modified by the vowel that comes after it. I realize that when I physically form my mouth and tongue to make these sounds that they form differently, but I can’t see why they can be classified as different sounds completely. Maybe it’s only because I don’t speak a language that makes this distinction. I guess this is where it would be helpful to discuss these things in person rather than online. thanks

• Syllables and Syllable structure - onset + rhyme(nucleus + coda); VC, V, CCV, CCCV, etc.
• Stress - whitehouse vs. white house; blackbird vs. black bird
• Schwa - a lightly accented vowel sound. Derivation sequence:
  • Underlying Form
  • Schwa insertion
  • Derived Form
  • Assimilation
  • Surface Form