afrohippy

hi!! i had to make a new twitter account because my old one is... a whole mess. nice to meet you!!

[afrohippy @afrohippy1]

okay, so I lied. I have more to say. sorry! it's just that... this video is pretty good. not necessarily an article, but I totally recommend watching it if you're in the mood, or have been lately, for learning any language whatsoever.
https://t.co/ZtXcWVhWOD

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[afrohippy @afrohippy1]

one final thing: that video with the children jumping between languages was pretty rad. so was the one debunking the idea that bi- and multilingualism inhibit our ability for proficiency in either language. I've been saying this for a while!

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[afrohippy @afrohippy1]

oh, and another thing! the feral children concept was very interesting. I remember learning about it in sociology class too, and it's so unfortunate and awful that it happens. the cut-off period for being able to learn a language as a child comes startlingly soon.

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[afrohippy @afrohippy1]

so, for this week, I think of the biggest take aways is that input is invaluable for language acquisition. which sounds pretty obvious, thinking about it. it's just that the idea of more input creating a greater volume of statistical averages is fascinating.

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[afrohippy @afrohippy1]

the reading for this week seemed pretty dense. while i was making cards for the terminology, i realized how many of these concepts i've never even heard of. it seems like linguistics is rather underground as a science, compared to something like psychology.

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[afrohippy @afrohippy1]

myth #10 kinda reminds me of an earlier myth we learned about, that some languages are easier than others. it's weird how much mainstream knowledge and perception about language learning seems to be myth-y and unreliable.

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[afrohippy @afrohippy1]

it's crazy how it can seem like i have seven good sources, until i start annotating them and they're all... not good suddenly.

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[afrohippy @afrohippy1]

really random thing related to one of the assignments we had: i legit thought the "principle of compositionality" was called the "principle of cosmopositionality" for a good two hours and even told my friend about. i assured them i wasn't wrong.

i was.

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[afrohippy @afrohippy1]

has anyone else heard the idea that chinese (mandarin, at least) doesn't have much grammatical structure?

myth #10 definitely had me thinking about that.

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[afrohippy @afrohippy1]

one quick thing about annotated bibliographies: they are your friend! imagine being able to get rid of all the sources that you don't need in a paper. that's less citing!

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[afrohippy @afrohippy1]

not really certain about the specifics of my topic yet!! but i'm definitely curious about the whole women-talking-more-than-men myth thingy. i feel like there's a lot of angles that could be taken with it

but like??

where to beginnnnn ( ་ ⍸ ་ )

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[afrohippy @afrohippy1]

@nsc_michelle it's possible, for sure. myth 5 talked about men talking less than women, and technically, there was some statistical truth to be found there. men, on average, talk less when it has no impact on their status or level of influence. would that be an example of what you mean?

[afrohippy @afrohippy1]

@odblt curious verbiage there from BBC. i kind of get that myth 9 vibe, where the dialect is appreciated for its uniqueness, but perhaps not taken seriously at the same time. just me?

[afrohippy @afrohippy1]

something interested i learned is how dialects can vary not only because of pronunciation variances, but also stability variances. english in more city-ish areas is less stable, whereas more rural english changes less often. no one speaks shakespeare, though!

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[afrohippy @afrohippy1]

@Julia10171500 haha, it's pretty interesting to me how like... in linguistics, there's some super complicated terms, you know? stuff we'd have no way of guessing the meaning for. then there's stuff like... yeah, released and unreleased. tickles my funny bone, not sure why.

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[afrohippy @afrohippy1]

so, looking back on myth 5, it's begun to make more sense as i've sorted through some of my classmates' video responses. english might be confounding, but then again, maybe every language is. our five vowels being more so twenty-ish doesn't help our case, though.

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[afrohippy @afrohippy1]

one of the myths i learned about this week was that women talk more than men. turns out it's much more complicated than that, and that men and women typically talk for different reasons. i like the idea of silence being golden most of the time, though.

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[afrohippy @afrohippy1]

@yesi26972343 wait, so does that mean that "e" is a much lower vowel than "ou" ? i noticed i can't make the sound without dropping super low into the bottom of my mouth. whereas with ou, it's almost at the very center of my mouth, it feels like.
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[afrohippy @afrohippy1]

myth 3: journalists ruin english, basically.

they help it afloat by documenting its evolution, right? same with social media influencers. it's cool that words can change or be created in certain areas, and people outside of those areas can be privy to the change.
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[afrohippy @afrohippy1]

to wrap this week up, here's something else about linguistics i found to be impactful: no language is more ideal than another. it's all about resources and time: any language can develop its own way of handling a given topic.
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