"The hidden Signs"

In an astonishing narrative of the journey to a remote village in Israel close to the city of Haifa, a team of researchers begin to document an isolated language “AL-SAYYID”. Talking Hands by Margalit Fox is a narrative of exploration of a linguistic team.
The reading is basically about what the language they were researching, where it was used and how it was preserved to stay the way it is. The researchers and linguists went to the village and were going to be granted the opportunity to encounter the language with the people of that village.
The language that they were going to research was a very rare type of sign language that was never recorded.
The Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) is a sign language used by about 150 Deaf and many hearing members of the Al-Sayyid Bedouin tribe in the Negev desert of southern Israel As both Deaf and hearing people share a language, Deaf people are not stigmatized in this community, and marriage between Deaf and hearing people is common.
We have learned various things throughout the semester, one of which was from the documentaries that we have watched which was about rare languages that were close to extinction. The reading also made me think about the chapter 13 I just read out of Yule about the brain and language. I think in order to explore the techniques of any type of language you must understand the science behind learning a language.
My question that I would want to ask or explore would be why we wait for something like a language to be almost extinct for it to be recognized.
What I think is that this particular sign language that is being explored is quite amazing and intrigued me to start to learn more about it.

bingo challenge

Starting with slide 53 "External Reality"
External reality is referring to linguistic relativity which shows the differences in language as evidence(external reality)it varies according to the langugae being used to talk about it.

Slide 55 "Kinship names" meaning relationship between entities that share a genealogical origin through biological, cultural or historical descent. In the slide it shows is how these kinship names differ in different languages as in father, uncle and grandmother

Slide 56 "Differ culture by culture"
This part of the slide explains that concepts of time in different languages differ by culture.

Slide 61 "Masculine"
The word masculine in this slide is referring to linguistic relativity, explaining to us how in some tribes each noun is grammatically marked by gender.

Slide 62 "Snow on the ground"
This expression refers to the Inuit people using this expression to create a number of snow related phenomenon.

Slide 63 "Lexicalized"
Meaning like in English we lexicalize conceptual distinctions of snow, meaning we express it in a single word like slush, sleet or ice however in other langauges used by the Inuit people they use many words for the same word.

Slide 68 "Born to run"
In this slide born to run is the name of the album by Bruce Springsteen

"Languages Vanishing Like Dinosaurs"

Sam Roberts’s article, “Listening to and Saving the World’s Languages,” was a an eye opening to the way languages become extinct. However, it was not a surprise to read about New York being culturally diverse and rich in languages, it was actually great to realize that these qualities were actually facts about the city.It certainly made me aware that there was really a problem occurring with the extinction of languages. The article was about languages and how they were becoming extinct through different means. There were many languages in New York alone that were becoming wiped out through globalization. The project of “The Endangered Language Alliance” was a project that would enable linguists to capture these languages before they die out. Something that I didn’t know that disappointed me was the fact that these languages even existed. I didn’t know that there could be a language that existed with only one person in New York that speaks Mamuju. It’s hard for me to understand this situation because the languages that I grew up around have always seem to be ones that many people spoke. I didn’t think that in the generation that we live in, there could be languages that would become extinct. My questions to everyone is “Do you believe your language makes you the person you are” “What are ways to keep your language from extinction,and what can we do as individuals to help prevent that.?

“Sometime me cry alone at night”

The sentence “sometime me cry alone at night” is grammatically incorrect. The sentence could be “sometimes I cry alone, at night” or “I cry alone at night sometime”. The pronoun me is used instead. "I" is mostly used at the beginning of a sentence.


I can speak both for myself and others learning a new language as I experienced it myself. I have also seen many of my family members experienced learning a new language. In the beginning I couldn’t grasp the reason why the people around me couldn’t learn another language especially when it came to pronunciation. I wouldn’t even understand it even when it was me experiencing the same situation would tell myself that “why is it so hard to pronounce words like the people around me even though I have studied this new language”. I thought once you had the rules and structure of a language, you were all set. However, now I have come to realize that even though this may be the case, learning a language may be hard at times. Phonology causes an individual to sometimes hear differently than what he has read so everything becomes just a little more complicated. The sounds of each language differ which tend to cause confusion for someone who is learning. Phonology comes hand in hand with morphology. They both deal with the words structure, speech sounds. These specific aspects of a language differ very much from language to language. The grammar and syntax probably cause a great deal of confusion for people learning a new language as the grammatical rules for each language differ. That’s why when I think of a person learning a new language now I understand that it certainly isn’t an easy task.

"Sentences" Chapter 9

In chapter 9 George Yule describes the “syntax” of a language. He claims that in two sentences like Nihal is driving the car. And the car is being driven by Nihal. The difference between these two, are what is called “surface structure”. Then there comes the “deep structure” as in It is Nihal who is driving the car. Is Nihal driving the car?. Yule describes in depth what the structure and components of a sentence can be. He used various terms to describe these as structural ambiguity where a sentence can clearly represent two meanings using the deep structure.
Yule, used the tree diagram to show the grammatical information of a sentences. He breaks down such a small sentence like “The girl saw a dog” into what each word really represents. Yule shows how such “small set of phrase structure rules and lexical rules just decries a sample of what might become a more complex phrase structure grammar of English” (93). For this he used the sentences “the small boy saw George with a crazy dog recently” (93).
Yule goes on to describe words like” that” are used to help introduce a complement phrase. Finally, George Yule uses chapter 9 to show that there is more to a sentence than just its words. There are rules of grammar; and structure that are required to make a sentence with meaning as well as, create various other meanings in the same sentence.

"Origin"

Bill Bryson in "Where Words Come From" talks about the while concept of words, where they come from, how they come, and how they stay. He is concerned with the etymology of words being their origin and history that comes with words. Bryson talks about what Yule stated, in chapter 6 of "The Study of Language”. The both discuss the same fact; that words go through various stages to officially become a word. Each one describes the way this happens; what the process is. Bryson claims, how different people throughout history have had different views to the word formation. Bryson shows the breakdown of the whole concept. In Bryson’s text he claims there is a five specific ways; 1) Words are created by error 2) Words are adopted 3) Words are created 4) Words change by doing nothing 5) Words are created by adding or substituting something and lastly “fusing compounds” (83).
Accordingly, I think that one of Bryson’s claims about English being one, of the most languages that has numerous words for just one word. However, maybe most people don’t know this but Arabic is one of the most rich vocabularies in the world. I always heard this when living, in Egypt that English, is sort of narrow when it comes to explaining terms from other languages. It could be that this opinion is our narrow opinion of course thinking that your language is the best.

Chapters Six, Seven, and Eight

People always claim “oh this word is taken from another language “or “we say this in Greek”. We tend to make assumptions from the way we here words around us. However, Yule asserted in his book that words are taken from another and mixed from other words of the same language. Yule also made clear in English there have been new terms formed and starts the use of, it in everyday language. We notice in Chapter 6, Yule explains the ways words are formed, mixed, combined and sometimes even cut from. Yule goes on to discuss further in Chapter 7, more about the characteristics and properties of words. He describes that there are words in the English language that require elements to make meaning to it such as “morphemes” (63). Some morphemes can be stand on their own while others cannot and become meaningless. Yule claims that in many other languages the use of morphemes is essential. In chapter 8, Yule goes more into the syntax of the language. He teaches us what is an article, adjective, and noun, he helps learn what each one is and where we put in a sentence. Chapter 8 also mentions the fact that the English language has no “grammatical gender” (76) unlike Spanish or French. In addition, Yule states that there are components to make a sentence. All in all these chapters are basically showing how forming, structuring, and grammar play a role in language.