The readings present a more sophisticated lens on the study and origin of linguistics and language. The first reading delves into the complexity of the human brain and how each portion of the brain has a role in processing the information from our senses. One interesting part that I found in this section was that the human brain hemispheres were responsible for behavior on the opposite side of the body. This feels overly complex and not exactly intuitive since one would think that the respective hemispheres control the respective part of the body. However, although each part in each hemisphere has a main role, the brain is still connected and not at all independent halves. One claim that I find a bit strange is that after a brain has lost a part, a person loses certain functionalities. For this I wonder why can’t the brain partition that lost portion’s work to another part of the brain. Additionally, if we were to replace that lost portion of the brain, would the subject's functionality be recovered? Is there any part of the human brain that turns out to be essential? I am not sure if that idea was covered in this reading.
I do not think that language is a purely biological phenomenon even though it is biology that facilitates many forms of communication because language can outgrow the biological necessities that it was initially formed for. Additionally, if we look at computer languages, we can see that language is not necessarily biological even though it was developed by biological beings.
The parts of the brain that are most important for the production and comprehension of speech are the Broca’s area and the Wernicke’s area, which are the lower back part of the frontal lobe and the upper back part of the temporal lobe respectively. Heschl’s gyri also plays an important role in audio reception.
We process and conceptualize meaning by studying the context to which that word is connected to. This is because a word can be representative of many different types of meanings and understanding which meaning is necessary. We innately break down a word and attempt to associate it with whatever context we have seen it in before, specifically sentences. Words on their own are difficult to decipher in terms of meaning because they could represent many things, but with a sentence structure, we can use experience and context to single out a single meaning.
For me, these readings do not inspire any insights or motivations for learning Korean because I have only just learned the alphabet. I’m not sure a surface level understanding of the biological brain will help me in advancing language since that falls into a different field of context. Once I have a better understanding of what words can be complex, revisiting this work may be helpful in furthering my journey into Hangul. There may be specific examples where meaning is more vague and understanding the application of and context of a character will be crucial to comprehension, but I believe that will come with time.
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