• Rather than a weekly discussion thread, watch this video. I made it last year but it covers some parts I couldn’t get to tonight:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCarK3wSnPA
Ignore the slang reading by McWhorter I mention on there — we didn’t read it this year.
• Blog Post #4:
The readings for this week deal with language change. What is made clear throughout is that all languages are constantly changing; this is, and has always been, the normal situation for every language.
With that in mind, I’d like you to turn your focus on your own language – whether it be English or another language that you speak or grew up speaking. After doing the reading, I’d like you to talk to someone older than yourself – a parent, a grandparent, a mentor, anyone at least 10 years older than you – about changes they’ve noticed between the way that they grew up speaking your language, and the way that you speak your language. Is your accent different? Do you use different words? Did the spelling system change at all? Report your findings. 250 words.
• Read Encyclopedia of the World’s Endangered Languages pp.vii–xvi and the paragraph-long description of any endangered or extinct language from North America — your choice. You will briefly discuss this language during our next class, which will count as your quiz grade.
Blog Post 4:
I chose to talk with my father for this blog post. My father is puerto rican who grew up in the puerto rican capital of the United States at the time which was in the late 1900’s. Not only did he speak a lot of Spanish with his friends and family, but he also spoke a lot of English growing up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Although my father and I both grew up in the same part of Brooklyn, the differences in culture because of time made our experiences vastly different. I understand spanish when it is spoken to me so I asked him to explain some differences in the language that he has been able to pick up on. He said that the accent from when he grew up are not as strong as before. He said that it had turned into a language spoken a little more proper as compared to the strong puerto rican and dominican accents of his time. He said that can be a result of the city as a whole becoming more and more diverse by the decade. An example of a word that he used that had changed was the word “coche”. He. said that the definition of the word had meant “carseat” in english. However, the meaning of the word has changed throughout Hispanic New York and is now just an alternate word for “car.” I related that to me because my father had taught me at first that “coche” means “carseat” and I would say it around my friends and in class when I was trying to improve my spanish and most of my friends and teachers corrected me. It is fascinating to see how languages can change through generations.