Every day we spend a majority of our time doing something that get absolutely nothing done. At the end of the day sometimes we look back and say, “What happened to those five hours.” We are also very intrigued by things that make absolutely no sense or are out of the ordinary. How often is a baby born talking and telling about Heaven and how great of person God is?
When learning rhetoric, it said basically to get the reader interested. How do you get the reader interested? Do exactly what I said above say something that they don’t see every day. Many of the magazines at the grocery counter catch my attention. I am educated enough not to believe that a dogs body and Hillary Clinton’s head had been fused and is running for president. And I know that Aliens aren’t leaving their offspring on the earth.
The reading we did for last week’s class did just that as well caught my attention in the beginning. Language has always interested me and I love to listen to others speak. I love being in a college setting because of the people from not only around to US but from around the globe are all in this one setting. It is sort of a mish mash of languages. Sometimes as I sit in the cafeterias I listen to other groups of students talk and have a hard time understanding them. I have noticed many differences in language and mostly it depends on where a person is from.
Our reading focused more on the way structure of our sentences in inborn into us, or so it seems. And how the sounds of a child’s native language sooths it as it is in the womb. I think that is totally miscued, it is not testable, you cannot rip the baby out of one mother and put it into another to see if this is true or not. But think about this, different languages take on different sentence structure. I am aware that most follow a Subject Verb Object, however many put different adjectives in front of the noun or vice versa. There is no way that this can be inborn into infants.
I am interested in how all this works, but the reading went on forever with tons of examples. OK, we believe you after the first five examples. And as far as languages with gender yes it is hard. Many people wonder how someone can learn a second language or even the first for that matter with gender rules, where not only people but objects have genders. It is somewhat confusing but it makes sense in the way that the objects are grouped together, and you know the basics of what is male and female.
Last thing! An update on the Veteran that likes to make his keep by standing on the Entrance and Exit ramps, I seen him again last night, right after it started raining I really felt sorry for him if he is telling the truth. But I just can’t make myself believe that he has been trapped in Knoxville for this long against his will. I don’t know I kind of want to go buy him a bus ticket and see if he leaves. If as a class we pooled our money together we could get him home!
1 comment:
I think one of the most unfortunate things early grammarians did was to talk about the different classes of nouns and the different classes of humans using the same term: gender. As you say, it trips us up at times when learning a second language, but in the long run it isn't really that difficult of a concept.
I wonder if there's any way you might design a research project that would allow you to interact with this man in some way. What could one learn about how he in his unique circumstances uses language to relate to other people? Of course, this is something to think about only if you're interested and feel comfortable doing it.
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