For this last learning journal, I didn't really have any new knowledge and insights learned in class since me and my partner skipped one class at the very end of the spring break. Therefore, I just wanted to talk about things that I learned throughout the semester with Dr. Marsh-Soloway and with all my classmates.
First of all, what is language? The only definition I knew at the very beginning of this semester was that language is used for communication between different individuals. However, right now, when I think of languages, my brain is filled with phonology, morphology, grammar and phonetics. Phonology deals with interpretations of speech sound and phoneme which is the smallest unit of sound. Morphology, from what I learned, is the study of words and relationships between different words. Grammar, obviously, the whole structure and system of languages of any kind. Phonetics, comparing with phonology is the production and perception of speech sounds in any language and it deals with phone.
I never knew some of the proper nouns before this semester and I'm surprised that I managed to memorize these even though I didn't regard them as interesting in the first place. And I was always wondering, how languages developed and how did they emerge a very long time ago when the first group of people tried to communicate with each other. I know we've covered language trees and language families before. But I still wonder, how could each language differ from each other hugely but has many things in common at the same time? This might sound a little abstract and what I wanted to say is that we could tell almost simultaneously if someone is speaking another language because of different phonetics. But, how could some languages, though developed separately have similar or even the same structure (grammar for instance)?
Throughout the semester, after all these things I learned, this knowledge always surprised me by telling me how marvelous the brain is. Everything eventually ties to the study of brain while it's not fully understood by people even though everyone has a brain. I always wonder if we can, in the future, actually accomplish this task of understanding our brains because it's visible while intangible at the same time. Languages are the same. Every one speaks one language while no one actually understand it.
We learned words, meanings of words, sounds of words, forms of words, compositions of words and grammar rules and so on in this semester. We also learned about how people produce sounds using teeth, and lips and so on.(I'm sorry but I couldn't really remember the proper nouns for human parts that produce sounds). However, the development of everything, eventually, is from the brain which is the most incomprehensible and complex human parts to understand and study. And again, I always wonder if people in the modern time could actually develop a new language that could be used even between a very small groups of people just like what we're using for speaking right now. And if not, is it because we lose the ability to do so or something else?
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