"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.

"YES and NO"

What Amy Tan shows us, is how we (people) perceive other languages very differently. We make certain assumptions that may or may not be true about other languages. Tan describes what her lifestyle was like and what made it the way it was; due to the fact that she was raised in a bilingual household. Tan explains how people may misinterpret certain languages due to what is lost in translation. She suggests that most large meanings in one language begin to be lost when translated into another. The article in the New York Times Magazine (26) where it suggests that Chinese people are so careful and humble in the way they talk to the point that don’t even have words for yes and no. Tan explains that there may not be the words yes and no exactly they maybe used discreetly however there is a way to state it. Different languages are extremely hard to compare especially languages that don’t use the same alphabet or letters. What I found interesting is the way Tan claims, “My uncle nodded and said he understood fully: Americans take things quickly because they have no time to be polite” (26). She stated this explaining the part of how Chinese people were to starve in America because people only ask or offer once. I think it differs according to cultures as Egyptians and Italians it’s the same as Chinese we keep pleading and begging for the person to accept what we have offered however you may find other countries that don’t necessarily do that. Each person thinks there language is the easiest or that it’s very hard to for them to learn another. Tan states, “English speakers point out that Chinese is extremely difficult…” (31) where as “Chinese speakers tell me English is extremely difficult…” (31). We should all be open to change and learn another language or maybe more. What I would like to explore more into; is the Chinese language its seems very interesting.

Confusing Sounds of Speech

This chapter was all over the place for me. All in all, it was about phonology. The different types of phonology, the terms and much more about speech sounds. The chapter introduced how each meaning distinguish sounds in a certain language. Yule explains parts about substituting one sound for another can change a meaning these two sounds represent “phonemes”. He also mentions the everyday sounds that people use is called “assimilation” which is one of the co-articulation effects. This can mean when two words have almost the same sound. What I found interesting was the fact that when people say “friendship” without pronouncing the “d” I always thought of it as a flaw that Americans comprise. However, Yule claims that this way of talking is “described as elision” (49). It’s just everyday talking. I related this specific part about the “elision” the co-articulation effect because even in Arabic sometimes there are sounds you don’t pronounce in everyday language. There are many sounds in words that become combined when pronouncing in Arabic just because we talk fast and we become use to one particular way. Honestly I didn’t understand a lot about this chapter it was very confusing, the words look alike and I had to read each paragraph twice or more to understand a bit. I didn’t understand the part about syllables and clusters and also allophones, phones and phonemes. What I want to explore more is why is it that any word that is in the same minimal set that is not in the regular vocabulary like mig or tig or whatever it is. Why that is these words can’t have meaning or representation. What does it take for a word to become part of our language?

"Mishaps of Our Names"

a) nɑhʌl hɑʃim
Nihal= nɑhʌl (voiced +V, alveolar, nasal)
Hashem=hɑʃim (voiceless -V, glottal, glides)

b) People pronounce my name differently all the time. Each of us have different ways of saying different letters. I have noticed since I have been learning about phonetics that each letter and word has a specific way of movement in our mouths. Letters are articulated very uniquely. Certain letters that one person may pronounce through the movements of his/hers lips; tongue and larynx may be very different from another. This varies on region, country and many other variables that affect the way we pronounce.

c) Sometimes I don’t know how to pronounce words in other languages due to the fact that myself like others have been systematically trained through our vocal cords to pronounce a certain way. I think that lack of understanding phonetics makes us open to mistakes in most pronouncing.I dont remember a specific word or name that I pronounce wrong however I know that there are plenty of words that I need to change.

Me and my Language Story

Language is uniquely distinguished from person to person, region to region and most certainly from country to country. We all have a specific way of using our own language. I know at least a hand full of people who talk the same language but each one of them speaks with a different dialect. Some of us, use language has a means of shaping our personalities where others just use language as a means of communication. I see people everyday speaking English but each one of them says that same word in a different way. Language is such a unique tool that makes out one person from another; it helps us see the obvious differences between one another. Language to me is who I am what I am and how I am. I always thought of language as a means of representing my personality especially for the fact that I haven’t been around one or two but three and now the forth.

Accordingly, I feel that language has been programmed into my DNA or something I seem to be naturally attracted to new languages. A personal experience that I recall very well from my childhood is being programmed on my own to change the language I spoke as soon as I got on the plane, wherever the plane was going was the language I would start to speak and I spoke it well too. I was this little kid who spoke two completely different languages with such great fluency. I always think of that particular experience when I think of language. My dad would always seem to be amazed by my ability to do that. It’s fascinating how children learn much quicker than adults, I experienced that on my own when trying to learn French, and I am struggling compared to learning as a child.

My views towards language are quite distinctive due to the way I was brought up and lived especially because I have travelled a lot and went to school in a different country than the United States. I speak fluent English and Arabic, however Italian I understand it more than I can speak it. My mother speaks to me in English and Italian while my dad speaks to me in Arabic. I know have an odd type of living where I hear at least two or three languages in my house at one time however growing I never seemed to get confused but now I have started to think and raise questions like how have I and others like myself learned to talk two or more languages fluently without confusing the syntax of each. I guess maybe we each have a brain that’s accustomed to changed and distinguish between a language and the other. Another question that I raise is what about dreams, what happens when we are sleeping because I know that I speak when I am asleep, my mother claims I say Arabic terms where my father claims I say English terms.

Before taking this class I didn’t really know and understand why people were able to speak one language but lack another but due to this class especially last week’s discussion board comments I am now starting to believe that maybe it is hard for people to learn a new language because their vocal cords, lips and larynx are set on one language and it would be hard to change that especially if the new language you are trying to learn possess certain sound systems that are not available in your own.