Learning Journal #8
I found most of this section of reading very difficult to get through, as throughout much of it Crystal simply lists languages that belong to each language family. I did, however, find it interesting that it is believed many of the languages in Eurasia derived from a single language. This was somewhat surprising to me, because on the surface it seems that many Eurasian languages have evolved to be extremely distinct from one another. The way in which language reconstruction can be used to provide insight into the daily life of people who spoke it was also extremely interesting. Crystal shows that cultural elements, along with the types of animals, and greenery that existed in a society may be deduced from the language alone. Crystal’s assertion that the “dialects” of Chinese such as Mandarin and Cantonese are actually separate languages also caught my attention. Though they use the same script and share the same cultural history, the Chinese varieties of speech are so dissimilar as to be mutually unintelligible. Because of this, they may be classified as different languages.
I think that knowing the history of a language could be useful, especially if one already knows a language which is related to the new language to be learned. In this case, it would be possible to take advantage of similarities in the languages. Also, history can provide a great deal of context for the language, which may help elucidate the need for certain vocabulary, for example.
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