Back to the Books

My Project 2 topic is “Should there be a lingua franca?” and it is a little ambitious as it tackles the implications of having a lingua franca: so that entails why we have one and why we need it, as well as whether or not having English as the lingua franca is fair, and if not, what language we could possibly use instead. I’m really excited about my topic, because the reason I took this class was to learn more about when and how people use English (or another language) to bridge communication gaps, and so I want to use this language log as a way to talk about my topic, and as a way to put some of my ideas on paper before I actually start writing my essay.  I’m going to focus on a subset of my research which is “Could another language be the lingua franca?”  The first thing to look at here is the sheer number of speakers. This includes native and non-native speakers, not just native, because we are looking at the possibility of these languages becoming the/a lingua franc...

Earlier this week I found an article in my news feed on recent research that found that penguin calls share many similarities to human speech. I was pretty surprised, obviously. The article says that researchers analyzed the speech of a group of about 30 African penguins. Their findings indicate that two laws of language apply to the African penguin calls: Zipf's Law of Brevity and the Menzerath-Altmann Law. Zipf's Law is really extremely complicated and includes a lot of calculations that I do not fully understand as an SIS student, but the basic point is that the sounds that humans (or apparently penguins too) tend to make most often tend to be short in nature. Menzerath-Altmann's law is much less complicated, and it states that the longer the word, the more likely it is to be broken up into multiple short syllables. The African penguins are the first non-primates that have been shown to adhere to these two linguistic laws, and this changes our view of what language e...

I’ve wondered for a long time why languages have gendered articles.  Ever since my first encounter with the written Spanish language in seventh grade, I’ve not had a great answer for why a language would choose to split what could be one definite article into two (or more) articles. When I asked my Spanish teachers, they didn’t really know, and usually responded with unsatisfying or unconvincing answers. For a time, well actually until recently, either because of misinformation from my Spanish teachers or just from my own imagination, I believed that the gendering of each article that accompanies every noun had to do with that specific nouns characteristics.  That never made too much sense though. The contrary example that always came to mind was that the Spanish word for “dress” is “el vestido” - a masculine article and noun ending for quite a feminine object. Our in class discussion this past Friday on parts of speech, which included articles and the lack thereof in...

I have been out of Spanish class for a while now, not having taken Spanish since my high school level 3 Spanish class back in junior year. Now that I'm an SIS major, however, I have to take a language and why not take the one I have the best background in and that will likely be most useful? So I'm taking Spanish this semester. What I would never have guessed when I elected to take Spanish is that I would be placed in an Intermediate II course right off the bat. The whole course is taught in Spanish, and let me tell you, I'm a little more than a bit rusty on my Spanish. It's an absolute struggle to force myself to comprehend each instruction, and it's an absolute embarrassment when I can't understand an instruction and sit there looking busy until my professor comes over and has to explain to me what we're doing exactly. Being in this Spanish class has really increased my appreciation for International Students. To sit through just an hour and fifteen-minu...