UWYO Linguistic Anthropology Spring 2018

This class was the first I had ever heard of “creole” as a broad term, so I was very excited to learn about what it meant for a language to be a creole and how they developed. Pidgin languages develop as a result of two or more languages existing together, as speakers of those languages try to communicate with each other, but they’re less complex than a full language. When a pidgin language becomes the native language of children and it develops greater linguistic complexities, it becomes recognized as a creole language. I had only ever heard the term creole used before in reference to Louisiana Creole—which is French-based and developed first as a pidgin for African slaves and thus involved many African languages—as well as the people who speak it. It surprised me to learn that “creole” referred more to a type of language; I always assumed it was specific to Louisiana! Especially because the other creole I knew of, Patois, is not called “creole” like Louisiana Creole is. It really got...

The aspect of language and linguistics that I found most interesting was the definition of a word changes based on how it is said and its context.  For example, when we watched the beer commercial the meaning behind the word "dude" was changed based off how one of the characters said the word and the context they were in.  I have noticed this to be true in everyday life as well.  I wonder if this only applies to the English language or if it applies to other languages as well. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B0W6uimCSMDvqBWFNBhFPo3KqNd79_GW/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1X90wH9e23PXTQtKeHrwiwLBejzPhLgp8/view?usp=sharing

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1dZJoBqtq9A3jxKNWWOVZMD9QtG6jS_2D9x5bvjps7Bo/edit?usp=sharing Enjoy, and have a great summer, ya'll!

I enjoyed all of the topics in this course, but found a few topics especially interesting because they relate to me personally. Having a visual impairment, nonverbal language is one that I am not fluent in. Nonverbal language includes facial expressions, hand gestures, and body movement. While some movements are large and easy to read, such as frantic waving or stomping, many facial expressions or other gestures are much more subtle, such as a brief nod, wink, or glare. For me, I must be very close to someone to read these subtleties; otherwise I may be oblivious to them. Further, projecting my own body language to communicate with someone else nonverbally is problematic, as I cannot make direct eye contact, which is a key element of communication. Since I cannot observe social behavior, I have not entirely mastered the language to effectively communicate with it. I also liked the topics of generalization and categorization because I can see it in action with my g...

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1HGz0vc8Pu7nsUw4DmGLbdmnSp6M-KN3b9s10L8CU1U0/edit?usp=sharing

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Owj5kJznUsxTByuMxPgf-PtdeD-YQ-c2YQ_QC0xM-No/edit?usp=sharing 

Here is my presentation for my papers on the Maori language

Here's a link to the Google Slides associated with my power-point.

Something I find interesting when studying linguistics are the changes in word pronunciation over time. My favorite example of this phenomenon is Grimm’s law, which is a systematic formulation which correlates between Germanic and other Indo-European languages. (Encyclopedia Britannica) Grimm’s law serves as a method of decoding the pronunciation of words based on the languages. For example, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, Grimm’s law shows us that the originally voiced “bh”, “dh”, “gh” had become the English “b”, “d”, “g”. In this example the previously voiced “h” sound began to be left off or otherwise unvoiced in areas where English developed. The consistency of these types of formulas within Grimm’s law supports the idea that both vowel and consonant sound shifts are a normal phenomenon in language and not a random mispronunciation of a handful of words. I first encountered Grimm’s law while studying Medieval Literature at the University of Wyoming. During tha...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ttVpUIYqtuqR69-yy6ccFlsYX3q4yUMh/view?usp=sharing

For both of my papers for this class, I chose to research the Czech language and how its grammatical gender may contribute to gender inequality in the Czech Republic. Before I get into that discussion, I should give a bit of background information about Czech. It is spoken primarily in the Czech Republic, where there are about 10 million speakers. Here is a map:  It's a West Slavic language closely related to Polish, Sorbian, and Slovak. Czech is similar phonetically to these other languages, but looks different written, because Czech developed accents over some letters, over time, so that there would be one grapheme for each phoneme. Where Polish would use two letters for one sound, Czech uses one accented letter.

A recent article i read goes over the recent remake of "queer eye for the straight guy" called "queer eye", and it talked about how homosexual people have been revamping the English language, specifically with the word that was coined by the show zhoosh  which means to tweak something slightly. This word caused a little uproar in the linguistic community because the English language  has no letter for the first sound in this new word, even though the sound is present in the middle of words like mea(su)re. Another thing the host of this show does is abbreviate a lot of words such as "struggles to function" becoming "strugs to func." So I was curious, how do small minority groups change our language as a whole such as "strugs to func" becoming semi popular to use according to this article?