From this past weeks reading I gathered a few things. First there are far too many language families and its roots to really keep track of or remember it. Also, there are two main ways to evaluate a language and its family. Finally, one can evaluate where a language comes from based on what is not found in the vocabulary.
My first point of too many language families to keep track of is evident through Africa, which has 480 million people and over 2000 different languages. Of course many of these languages might share a commonality but overall it does not help me better understand my current language I am learning.
The two perspectives of evaluating language are genetic and typological. Genetic evaluation is a historical analysis derived from any ancestor languages. This can be traced through the Latin language, which has the romance languages that grew out of it. The other perspective is typological. In which a formal comparison of similarities found between two languages is done. This is less helpful than the genetic perspective but is nonetheless somewhat effective.
The last thing that I found very interesting was how a person studying a language can trace where it came from. For example by looking at an ancient language and noticing that the word “palm tree” is not in the language one can easily note that the language must not have originated from the Mediterranean where palm trees are normally found. Although it does not necessarily zero in on the exact location of where the language started, it can still narrow down the options through process of elimination.
Overall, I did not think this reading was very beneficial. The roots and history of a language does not help me as a language learner understand Hebrew any better. The roots of an ancient language that does not exist any more has no effect on what the present language is trying to teach me. Only studying the origins of Latin, which has the romance languages growing out of it is beneficial to know, because it does have some commonalities amongst each other. However, knowing the other ancient families that some languages have grown out of does not help me in studying my Hebrew language.
From my meeting with Maya I was able to learn words to describe weather as well as more than ten plus animals. After learning all of those words I was able to work on an introduction for myself about who I am, where I am from, etc. By completing this introduction I have fulfilled all of my voki requirements, but I still plan on completing more Voki’s.
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