I talked with my mom about how English has changed from when she was growing up from how I grew up speaking and she explained to me when she went to school punctation, and the sounds of long and short vowels were drilled into her mind throughout her journey in school. She also said that when she was growing up when you encountered someone older than you like someone’s mom or an elderly person you addressed them as Mrs./ Mr./ Sir/ Mam. I also noticed that me and my mom pronounce a lot of words differently. For example: forest, mountain, sausage, dog, coffee. My mom’s accent is also much heavier than mine, she is born and raised in Staten Island but has a strong Brooklyn accent. She also mentioned how our generation of adults/ children have dirty mouths, cursing is more a part of people’s vocabulary. My mom would say “you’re full of baloney” and “I would say your full of shit”, maybe she’s just weird but my mom doesn’t curse lol. We also refer to things with different names for instance she calls the thing you change the channel with on the tv a clicker and I call it a remote, she calls the thing people put on their eyes to see eyeglasses and I just call them glasses. Grammar has also changed throughout the years like all the abbreviations she isn’t familiar. I’ll be texting her and I’ll say something like g2g or ttyl and she’ll have no idea what I’m trying to say. Sometimes my mom will question herself if she’s pronouncing something differently after she hears me pronounce it.
Author: samantha laRocca
Blog Post 3
1. Proposition: I have black hair
Truth value: False
Truth conditions: For this to be true, I would need to have black hair.
Entailment: “I have black hair” entails that the color of my hair is black.
2. Proposition: There are giant sea creatures living in unexplored parts of the ocean.
Truth value: Unknown
Truth conditions: In order for this to be true, there would have to be giant sea creatures living in unexplored parts of the ocean.
Entailment: “There are giant sea creatures living in unexplored parts of the ocean” entails that there are parts of the ocean not yet investigated and massive marine animals live there.
3. Proposition: I have Arachnophobia
Truth value: True
Truth conditions: For this to be true, when I see a spider my heart rate would increase, and I would start to panic.
Entailment: “I have Arachnophobia” entails that I have an intense fear of spiders.
Blog Post #2
One word that I found that was interestingly borrowed from one language (the donor language) into another language (the borrowing language) is the word champagne. This particular word is of multiple origins but was borrowed from the French vocabulary into the English vocabulary. In French champagne is pronounced like cham+pagne [ʃɑ̃.paɲ] and in English it is pronounced like sham+payn [ʃæmˈpeɪn]. Even though champagne has the same definition in both languages, the pronunciation of the word has adapted to fit into the phonemic inventory and phonotactics of English. There are a couple of differences between the way English speakers and French speakers pronounce the word ‘champagne’ an English speaker pronounces the [ʃ] sound like ‘sh’, while a French speaker pronounces [ʃ] like ‘ch’. Instead of using a nasalized vowel like [ɑ̃] which is pronounced like ‘am’, we replaced it with the front low unrounded vowel [æ]. As for the second syllable a French speaker would pronounce ‘pagne’ using the following sounds: [p],[a], [ɲ]. In English we don’t have a palatal nasal sound, so we replaced it with the high-mid, tense, front vowel [eɪ].
Are these really words?
I remember while growing up in elementary school I had this one teacher that wouldn’t allow the class to say words like gonna, wanna, and needa. So, if you said “ I needa use the bathroom, can I please go”, she would say “needa is not a word you need to ask again the correct way” in front of the whole class so everyone would look at you and know not to say that unless you want to be corrected ( embarrassing). She would then write it down every time you said it and if you said it more than 5 times you weren’t allowed to use the bathroom anymore while she was there, you had to either wait for lunch or for the next period with a different teacher. Oh, and god forbid you wrote in down in your notebook or on a piece of paper that was being handed in it was circled in a bright red marker and written on top in bold: THAT IS NOT A WORD FIX IT!!!!! She never really gave us a real explanation as to why we weren’t allowed to use those words, she would always just say “it’s not a word” and no one ever questioned it because she was the teacher, and she was really mean. After that teacher I was sacred to say or use those words in my writing. Till this day I still don’t know if they are really words that can be used, but I will not use them in my writing or talking to a teacher. I will however use them if I am talking to a friend.
February 13
hello
