Discussion #6

It is a theory that the Korean language belongs to the Altaic language family, which includes Turkish, Mongolian, and Japanese. After King Sejong, monarch of the Yi Dynasty (1392-1910), created the Korean language, it came into contact with Chinese, Japanese, and English. It borrows words from their vocabulary and writes them in Hangul. Their language tends to adapt well with other languages, yet they still maintain the same grammatical structure of Subject-Object-Verb. The first Korean alphabet, created by King Sejong, could be an Isolate Language, meaning it has no relatives among other languages. Furthermore, their own honorific system is based on Confucian values. Over time, languages may change in how they sound and what they mean because of social change. To track, linguists may identify patterns through the language with resources such as case study observations, historical texts, and audio recordings. Furthermore, I found it interesting how the Korean language is different…

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Discussion Post #6

My target language Catalan belongs to the Western Romance branch of the Indo European language family, descending from Vulgar Latin. Its exact classification is debated — some linguists group it with Gallo-Romance (alongside French and Occitan), others with Ibero-Romance (alongside Spanish, Galician and Portuguese). Occitan is probably the most similar language to Catalan that survived into modernity, although it is only spoken by a small amount of people in northern Spain and southern France. Catalan shares a lot of features with French, but it has also had a lot of contact with Castilian Spanish due to geographical proximity and centuries of political incorporation into the Spanish state. The result is a language linguistically positioned between Spanish and French, much like how Catalonia itself sits geographically between the Castilian-dominant parts Spain and France. For example, like French, Catalan elides articles before vowels (cat. el home → l’home (eng. the man), like fr.…

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Discussion Post #6

American sign language (ASL) is a daugther language of French sign language and, although it is mainly used in America, it is incredibly distinct from spoken English. Since ASL is not a spoken language, no sounds exemplify periods of contact with other cultures, instead these periods of contact are exemplified by changing handshape, movement, and speed, as well as non-manual markers like facial expressions and body posture. For example, ASL is the parent language to Black American Sign Language (BSL), Indonesian Sign Language, and Filipino Sign Language, each of which is distinguishable from the other by these aforementioned characteristics as well as by new word signs that only exist in that particular sign language. Many of these were the result of a clear movement that discouraged the use of sign language in favor of the dominant spoken language of that geographic location, so the deaf and hard od hearing (HOH) community were forced to create their own "home-sign" language to…

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Discussion Post March 1

Mandarin Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family. Languages can change over time in diverse ways: the meanings of certain words can either be transformed or dropped as common patterns or new senses of words arise. Sounds can change across speakers and lead to new pronunciations, and the transmission of language across place and generation can continue the process of language’s evolution and shifts. Today, facilitated global communication is also contributing to the sharing and adaptation of new words. My Dutch relatives have described this in relation to the Internet (many of the words they use to describe actions like “googling” are cognates of English words used to describe the processes). One important change I have learned about is the creation of the Simplified Chinese script under Mao Zedong to promote better literacy; this has led to some differences between China and Taiwan, which uses the Traditional script. I have not learned a large vocabulary yet, but the word…

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