Summary Language Myths 6f4p4k

Summary Language Myths Chapter One: The meaning of words should not be allowed to vary or change Languages keep changing. We don’t really know why, but it happens. There are non-changing languages but that are dead languages. As long as a language changes it’ll keep alive. There are many words which have lost their ‘true’ meaning and gained other meanings throughout time. If a word doesn’t work out too well, the language will change it once again to make it more fitting. Some purists think that language is a thing that should not change. According to them we need to go back to the ‘true’ meaning of a word. There are also converse , words that have different meanings but lead to each other. A good example is learn and teach. If a teacher teaches a class, the class is learning. But a teacher could also say, I learned this class something, by teaching them. I think we can’t switch back to the real meaning of a word, I think it would cause too much confusion because it would really change the whole language, which not necessarily has to change in a good way.

Chapter Two: Some Languages Are Just Not Good Enough When we look at all the languages around the world we will notice that there are huge differences in the use them. Since English is a lingua franca you will see it put to use way more than for example Swahili. Most of the languages are just languages spoken by smaller communities. Some people think some languages are inferior to others because they are not used to write literature or to discuss rocket science. For example in New Zealand, the Maori language is seen as inferior language because of the said reasons, which causes problems. But then again according to the ancient Greeks, Latin was an inferior language but still it became the language for science from around 1600 until now, so opinions on languages will change during time as well. A language which is in some eyes inferior, could be the next world language for example. There is also a sad part about it, some people tend to see the s of a ‘inferior language’ as inferior people, which is total nonsense of course. It is true that some languages can’t discuss certain subjects, because there is no need to discuss those things, but words can be borrowed from other languages as well or develop words themselves. After all, old English didn’t discuss computers.

Chapter Three: The Media Are Ruining English

For decades people are saying that English is a dying language, however in every decade there seems to be a time where people feel the need to protect the English language. Everyone and everything has been blamed throughout time. At this point, people have come to the conclusion that it is the Media’s fault. The Dirty Fingernail theory states that Journalists don’t pay enough attention to language details. This is not true, the fact is that languages are subject to change and the problem is ignorance about how the language changes. Journalists don’t invent new forms in a language they merely use them, a journalist just writes in the way where the language changed in to. There is another theory, which states that journalism is just Junk Writing, because the journalists write in such a way to attract attention and too keep people reading their article. Writing for the press is not that easy and requires a lot of practice. The media aren’t necessarily ruining English, they just adapt to the changes made in the language.

Chapter Five: English Spelling is Kattastroffik The English language is full of words that are hard to spell. However, if you know how to pronounce a word and the meaning of said word, you should be able to write it down. That is of course when there is no divergence in a word, where one speech sound has multiple ways of spelling and one spelling can mean an entirely different speech sound.

Chapter Eight: Children Can’t Speak or Write Properly Any More For centuries people have been complaining about the state of the English language. Most of the times the youth and the education get blamed for this matter. However there are no valid arguments. These days the children’s writing and reading skills are much better than in the days

where people refer to. The speaking of the youth shouldn’t be directed at schools, since they don’t really teach children how to speak . the kids might not speak standard English, but what is standard English? If we set Posh English as a standard, is Cockney English not proper then? Youth dialects shouldn’t be banned, it’s something that shows that languages keep on changing.

Chapter ten: some languages have no grammar Grammar is a rule that speakers of a language follow. The rules are about how words can be put together and the way they are put together. Every language has nouns and verbs, which means every language uses grammar. Just because there is no grammar book, it doesn’t mean that a language doesn’t use grammar. Chapter eleven: Italian is Beautiful, German is Ugly According to the title of this chapter one language should sound nicer than another one. But it’s not just the language itself, it’s also the dialects. How pleasant or not a language might be, is also dependent of if you like the people, who speak the language, or not. For example, some people hate the German language, because they simply don’t like Germans. Languages are also region bound, so people don’t like certain languages because they don’t like the region at all. This all seems more like a matter of prejudice than actual dislike of a language. Chapter thirteen: Black children are verbally deprived African American kids are sometimes described as verbally deprived. Some ethnical groups will of course use a different sound than the white Americans, which is of course not always the case, there are a lot of minorities who speak perfect English for example Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. I think this myth is rather racist. Chapter fourteen: double negatives are illogical One of the most disliked problems in grammar are the double negatives. But why do people dislike them so much? It’s not a mathematical problem, only in maths is negative + negative a positive. Actually some people see it in that way, they see the people who use double negatives as less intelligent, which is quite ignorant in my opinion. I mean will these

people get angry every time that a double negative is used in a song or something like that? I mean there are bigger problems in this world than the use of double negatives.

Chapter fifteen: Television makes people sound the same

Sociolinguistics see some evidence of language change caused by the television, not that the whole language changes, it just popularizes some vocab words or catchphrases, there are almost no sound or grammatical changes at all caused by the television. For example, when someone with a heavy Southern accent comes on TV, not everyone will start talking in an Southern way. Some people might copy it for fun maybe, but I guess you will learn the most changes in your language by simply traveling or meeting new people.

Chapter eighteen: some languages are spoken more quickly than others A common north-European thought is that Italians, Spaniards and Frenchmen speak extremely fast. They are all three alike. It’s like our northern-European languages are spoken way slower, or are they? You can’t really determine the speed of one language compared to another one, because every language has many sides so it’s kind of ridiculous to just pick one language, because you would ignore aspects of the picked language. There is no general way to determine which language is faster, since a language is alive, you cannot include every part of a language. So we can think that the one language is much faster than another one, but we will never be sure.