Just Kidding.....Here's the one I missed (Plus, I'll raise you a PDF)

The article I was required to read this week was a quaint little article on language and how it affects the way that we think about and perceive our environments. One of the main things that I found very interesting was coincidentally one of the main focuses of the article. The article dismantled the idea of the Whorfian Hypothesis or the idea that we are unable to comprehend ideas not encompassed by our linguistic understandings. This is just false, but what the article didn’t dismantle that our language affects our sub-conscious perceptions of our ideas. This is especially true for languages that are gender specific. The article brought up one example that was really attention-grabbing. It spoke of how certain languages like English have the ability to hide a persons gender in conversation, while someone speaking a gender specific language like French for example is inclined or obligated to make the gender of that person known by either saying viosin (female) or viosine (male).

The other thing that I found almost unbelievable was the section on cardinal directions. Some languages and cultures don’t think of directionality in terms of their spatial location, but cardinally instead. It takes me a second or so to gather my cardinal directions even when I have access to the sun, and to think that some languages have such a sub-conscious influence from birth that would allow them to maintain their cardinal orientations in a room with no sun after having been disorientated and spun around is almost incomprehensible. I almost wish that I had been born into one of those cultures, think of what good navigators they would make.

Here's a PDF! ;)

During the week I didn’t blog about we watched part of a documentary entitled "Do You Speak American". They only interesting idea I pulled from the narrators dull rhetoric, was the opposition between the prescriptivism and descriptivism. The way in which I understand it is that the prescriptivism believes that we should have a strong language foundation, a base that is universally understood by all Anglo/American speakers. Descriptivism advocates the idea that as the national culture and values change the language should with it.

I take an eclectic stand. As the nation, culture, and the world grow, expand, and evolve we will find it increasingly difficult to accommodate new ideas into preexisting words and phrases, therefore new terms are inevitable. What I don't agree with is the formation of novel terms to represent preexisting ideas and denotations: slang. Different dialects breeds disharmony, superior-ism, and discrimination. Have you ever heard someone make fun of a southern drawl, or a New York accent? I know that I have. I have seen and heard Chinese persons exhibit a disconnected sense of shared culture because one spoke Mandarin, while the other spoke Cantonese. The slang that originates from hip-hop and rap music has come to embody something almost criminal by the preceding generation (the employing generation) while it is a integral part of most of my generations daily lives (the future work force).