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CHAPTER 1
We sometimes do some silly things, like when we talk with the babies or when a mum talks to his baby just born. She knows that he doesn’t understand but she says something or some things like “oh you are gorgeous, you are gorgeous…” to have attention from him because if we stay quiet we can’t have the attention of nobody. We also use different tones of voice, rounding our lips while we spoke and we repeat more than one time the same thing, we don’t same ordinary things to children, because it can be boring. This is the first approach of a baby to the new world and to the language use, especially by the mother, they begin to learn the mother tongue with this repetition of sounds, words and word patterns. And we do the same thing with animals for example and when we tease our friends. CHAPTER 2 During the first year of like, babies don’t speak, they just reproduce some noises like “w a a a” when they are crying or when they are in pain, but when they are picked up and cuddled, the crying stops and begins the “pleasure cries”. If we hear the cries, we can’t understand if the babies are English, French, Chinese.. the sound is the same. The first changes in baby’s cries can be seen around 3 months of age, they move their lips, vocalize like “oo”, “brr”, these aren’t letters of alphabet but sounds just like “goo” or “coo” and this stage is called COOING, when the baby is trying to tell something to us. Then they hear “pa pa pa” or “ma ma ma” sounds and this stage is called BABBLING, they hear it, parents want them to repeat it but they have no idea what they’re saying and at 6 months age they don’t know that mama and papa are used to called their parents. At 9 months of age, they use “ba-ba” as sounds that sound like real word and they learn the 2 most important features of language: rhythm and intonation. Rhythm is the ‘beat’ of a language and at 9 months a baby start to give their utterances a bit of a beat. Intonation is the melody of a language, the way in which the voice rises and falls and can express an exclamation, a request or a command for example. So babies begin to learn their mother tongue at 9 months with the rhythm and intonation and start to use tone of voice around 1 year. Babies also can listen under before they’re born when they are in the mother’s womb. CHAPTER 3 When we pronounce a word, a baby doesn’t know the meaning of this word because they haven’t learn to talk yet but they can watch and listen. Around them, there are a lot of things they listen or watch and this can be related with a specific word which they hear and they love listen and they want to listen things that surrounded them and their brain is set up to learn a language or languages, because their brain contain a ‘language acquisition advice’. They can learn more than one languages, because for them these are just words. They learn the words hearing people around them that emphasise something in an exclamation “oh look, It’s a dog, hello doggie…”, LOOK, DOG, DOGGIE are the words the baby notices. They don’t understand what we say but they can learn different word because they associate something with a word they have heard before, for example. Babies begin to say some words, the words in a language are called VOCABULARY, there are 2 stages: active vocabulary, when we say words and children use them and passive vocabulary, when they understand words but don’t use these words.
CHAPTER 4
To say a correct word a baby takes a lot of time because he has to practice and it can produce words and meaning using the vocal organs, the lips, the tongue, the teeth and especially the lungs where the airstream begin. The sound go across the space thanks to the air which goes out of our mouth and the organs make vibrations in the air, called sound waves. There are different movements of the vocal organs when we breath or when we speak. Very important are the vocal chords (the author calls them vocal folds) which are protected by the Adam’s apple and in order to the vibration of them we can produce voiced or unvoiced sounds. The vibration can change if we speak is slow, if we sing is higher and they vibrate fast or not, this can differ from man to women to children. We can feel the vibration if we say ‘ssss’ (unvoiced) or ‘zzzz’ (voiced). If we whisper, there isn’t vibration but if we speak we make sounds with very strong vibrations. CHAPTER 5 A baby and a person need some time to understand how to pronounce the different sounds, because all this is in relation with the movements of the lips, the tongue ecc and we can produce different types of sounds. A sound is represented by square brackets and we can produce it with the vocal organs in different ways and this is also related to the vibration of the vocal folds and to the tongue which has to be in the right place at the right time. Also we can produce nasal sounds when the air comes out of the nose and when there are also oral sounds when the air comes out of the mouth. Babies became to speak when they begin to produce correctly all these sounds. CHAPTER 6 Aroudn 18 months, babies begin to know and say around 50 words because they listen what it’s going on around them and they know words referred to food, toys, people, event of the day, actions people do, clothing, animals, parts of the body, locations etc. They listen more than these words, a lot during the days and this is related to the passive vocabulary, they listen these but they can’t say them. Around 18 months, they want to say complicate things and join words together. A single word alone can’t have a really sense because we have to put it in a sentence to understand the meaning, sometimes one word can have more than one meaning and so we have to understand it in relation with the context. Sentences help up to make sense of words and so we need to study the structure of a sentence, this is grammar. CHAPTER 7 It’s important to know the language to having a conversation because we need it to have a chat, study, play, ask for help etc and this is a natural things. It’s very important to take turns because one person can answer to another and they don’t have to speak at the same time or interrupt another person while he is speaking. During 2 years old, child begin to speak and to have mini-conversations, parents say sentences more complicated to teach their babies and also to teach them the polite forms used in conversations, like “please, thank you, bless you” etc.. Child also have to learn listen, express agreement or disagreement shakig their heads but they understand to give feedback when they are older or read between the lines when people try to be polite.
thing but are used in different contexts, in newspapers, on TV, in everyday conversations.. Some expression are more formal and other colloquial and this has been decided in the past by powerful people in society who decided how to write and speak to take distance from ordinary people. Standard English is used around the world but is useful also if someone wants a good job and very few people use it when they are children. We learn Standard English when we go to school even if it isn’t the language used outside, we learn a different way to speak in respect of the one we use at home or streets. It’s important to understand and control when we have to use a type of language or another, in clever ways. CHAPTER 12 When we speak with someone we notice immediately if they come from a different part of the world or country because they sound different, use different words and grammar. All this is related to dialect and accent. A dialect is the way of talking that belongs to a part of a country, uses local words and phrases, such as the British dialect, or Irish or Scottish and this happens in all countries, like USA, dialect use in New England is different from the one used in New York. Dialects use different words and grammar, Scots English use “I’m no going”, “I canna come” and the standard is “I’m not going”, “I can’t come”.. this can also say if someone come from a particular city. A lot of differences are in British and American English in words and grammar, for example to say the hour. Accents are only to do with pronunciation and tell us from which part of the country they come from, to be precise for example in Scotland there are Scottish accents, Glasgow accent, Edinburgh accent and so on and it’s the same in England, USA or Australia. Accent change over time and if we speak with someone with a different accent, we can affect his accent and so does him with us. We have accents to identify where someone comes from. In England there is the Received Pronunciation (RP), born at the beginning of the 20th century used from upper classes, to take distance from lower classes and now it’s especially used by educated people, on BBC, is taught at school and used by foreigners. Also in other countries there is a “cultured” accent. But for example nowadays people with regional accents have obtained some of the top jobs in society. CHAPTER 13 Accents travel very easily and develop naturally, we can hear them in children from their 3 years old, people who speak more two languages are bilingual, three language are trilingual and more than two are polyglot. A lot of people in the world speak more than one language and all the countries are multilingual, especially the UK where there are a lot of people from different part of the world. London is the most multilingual capital in the world, also NY, Boston ecc. English is the mother tongue of the majority, even if a lot of cities in the UK have dozens of languages. Immigrants don’t drop their language even if they don’t use it so much where they live and at the same time the welcoming country makes effort to foster multilingualism or offer services in a lot of languages. People use their mother tongue when speak with their friends or relatives and they don’t leave it because it’s part of their identity. We have to be aware about the importance of language and there are 2 anniversaries during the year. Bilingualism is an important issue in UK, USA and Western Europe where for centuries they have spoken just one language, considering the other inferior, in the past Franco repressed Catalan and the Spanish was the only language accepted and today also communities are fighting for this.
CHAPTER 14
There are around 6000 languages in the world, some don’t exist anymore and other haven’t been discovered yet, like in small communities or villages around the world. Linguists have to understand if these new languages are language or dialect. The difference is that the language is made up of many dialects and people who speak dialects can understand each other. The dialects are divided in groups and we can say that one dialect belongs to a group if they look or sound similary, similar grammar, words and sounds. “padre” “pere” “padre” “pai” are similar words and have a common origin, even if there are some differences and also this is related to the history and the past facts happened in Europe. Linguists called this group. ROMANCE FAMILY which is the parent language and French, Spanish, Italian ecc are daughter languages, for example. All the languages in the world can be grouped like this one and we can understand also the similarities between words of different languages. There are the Germanic family, the Celtic family, the Slavic family. All this language, maybe, can come from an ancient parent language, THE INDO- EUROPEAN FAMILY, we don’t know where Indo-Europeans lived but we can say that one group ended up in Italy, where the language became Latin, another in Scandinavia where the language became Germanic, another in India and so on. CHAPTER 15 Exist a lot of languages but not each language belongs to Indo-European family, for example Basque, is unique and is an isolated language and this is because is language survived before the arrival of Indo- European but Basque people borrowed different words from other languages, but there other isolated languages. The speech began with a set of vocal organs that makes all sounds to create different words and with a brain that can handle the sounds. Ape in the past can’t talk and happened that the human-like beings used primitive speech and researchers, after analisyng a skeleton and his bones said that they were similar to the modern one and they could produce few speech-like sounds and also some sign language to using the gestures. But the first ability in writing was in humans then they begin to talk but speaking seems the last thing to develop but it’s important you can do a lot of things thanks to the speech and speaking. CHAPTER 16 There are a lot of sign, like the road signs, and people can say if they are signs, drawings or a kind of writing and it’s difficult to say when humas started to writing. The marks only look like writing when they are used to replace drawings, like in the past to count how many animals a man killed and put it on the cave wall with some sign invented to distinguish things and then around 9000 BC they used clay to distinguish things. Then they began to use clay tokens and made signs on them to show DIFFERENT things even if there could be some problem, like the dishonest servant. But around 3400 BC, a writing system developed and the system was called cuneiform, from “cuneus” in Lating “wedge”. The earliest has been found in the ruins in Uruk, on the banks od the river Euphrate, it had 800 signs, with numbers, objects, parts of the body. Cuneiform writing came to be used also for making a list of possessions, sending messages, recording events and this is the FIRST true writing system in the world, then the Egyptian produced a different kind of writing system, and also in China, among the Mayas.
traces of this because they have never been written down. They disappear as plants and animals do, for different reason and humans also are the cause. But the main reason is that people begin to use and speak another language and because the new language can offer us a better kind of life and can help us to get a good job. Some people can lose a language, but other can be bilinguist and this is important to preserve our identity and we preserve languages thanks to people, government and money. The language is revitalized. CHAPTER 21 All living language change and they change all the time and this is because something is invented and we have to name it, like the new words related to the development of the early years related to technology. People who lived in 1990 don’t know these words but before they didn’t exist and at the same time, now we don’t use words used in the past, they go out of use but they don’t disappear. Vocabulary is the area where the language change most, new words are especially technical terms related to specialized area of knowledge. Also grammar, pronunciation change and if something changes begin to be used in few hours. People who use the old way of talking often dislike the new usage, but then they use it anyway. Pronunciation changes and we can notice the difference from people of different generations. The area which changes slowly is writing system, in the past capital letters were used a lot for example and also we use ‘hi’ and not ‘hello’ or ‘bye’ instead of ‘goodbye’. CHAPTER 22 We can say that language has different variation. It can change in order to the age and we can understand it hearing the sound quality of voice or the expression they used, some are usually used by old people and other by young people. Language changes in order to the sexes, the pitch of the voice is different and for example girls use intensifiers, polit forms and adjectives like ‘lovely’,’super’ ecc. The way we speak can tell the other people about the ethnic group we belong to and can tell also the differences between upper and non-upper class because language is a powerful marker of the social class. Also language can change in order to the relationship we have with the listener, it can be formal or colloquial and can be influenced by the situation around us. CHAPTER 23 We can say that languages changes in order to the different job or work we have. There are scientific language, religious language, medical language and all these are called occupational dialects. In scientific language, for example, is used an ‘impersonal’ language, where science doesn’t care about the characters or our feelings, if we want to know how people feel we have to read a poem or novel. Scientific language uses special words and grammar and also for the other jobs there are different special words and jargons, like the language used on TV, that can differ and the style can alter depending on the sport they are describing. CHAPTER 24 Slangs are some type of words used by a group of people who have the same interests and background, in a language there are a lot of slangs, used by doctors, lawyers, footballers. These slang words are used also by doctor with their colleagues but can be used with a patient if they are friends. When people have a lot in
common, they share their slang. In a town there can be different slangs used in the different schools by the different students. In addition, slangs change so quickly, some were used in film or by old people but now are not used anymore. Now it is difficult to understand the slang people used a lot of years ago. Now exist also home- grown slang, so there are some words used just by the members of a family or closely friends and relatives and this is also because people use slang to show they belong together. A standard language uses words that are there for everyone to use and it’s important to understand what words are slang or standard, we need to remember not to mix them up and not to use it into school essay or formal email. CHAPTER 25 David Crystal suggests us to use more the dictionary because it can be useful in different situations. We use it if we don’t know the meaning of a word and we have to do this to enrich our vocabulary. It should be use when we think we know that word but we aren’t sure and also, a word can have different meaning and we have to pay attention when we use it and in which context. Dictionaries are used also to check the spellings, how a word is pronounced, say something about the grammar, if the word is a noun, verb ecc, if it’s used in a special way and also the origins of the words and this last is related to etimology. CHAPTER 26 Etimology is the study of the origins and history of a word. In the past, for example, ‘sausages’ and ‘salary’ mean the same thing but now it’s different and they have different meanings. There are words which have kept their meaning since they arrived in the language and others which have changed their meaning now and today we can look at this thinking of words like ‘mouse’,’surf’, ‘spam’ related and use on Internet. Words can change by becoming more general in meaning like ‘office’ that at his origin was a kind of religious service and at the same time, words change by becoming less general in meaning. In old books, we have to keep attention on this because we have not to read in the modern meaning. People who study etimology are called etymologists and they have to do a lot of researches because some words are mysteries and we don’t know where they come from. All words have history, includes the names of people and places. CHAPTER 27 We need to give names to places so that we can tell people where we live and the places are named after people, Washington for the 1st^ president, Victoria and Maryland for the queen ecc, some places are named after features of the landscape, like Twin Peaks for the two mountains but for example Bridge Road has nothing to do with a bridge. Also sometimes the meaning of a place name is clear, but the event which caused it is long forgotten. In addition not all the name places can be related with words with meaning in modern English, other, instead, have names that are related to people, like America for Amerigo Vespucci and Venus from the Roman goddess and so on. Humas love to name things like shops, pubs, restaurants, schools and other buildings. Also some house have a name which describes the way they look or where they are like ‘the cottage’, ‘the croft’, ‘woodlands’, other names are based on animals, holiday destinations, books.
CHAPTER 32
Why use language? We use language to communicate with other people and this is the primary purpose. But there other uses of languages, to be playful, to express identity, for example accents and dialects can help us to do this or in writing identity is expressed with different front page in the newspaper. We use language to express emotions, to get on with other people like when we say ‘thank you’, ‘bless you’ when we sneeze, to avoid embarrassment and to fill awkward silence. Magic sounds a bit far out, we don’t promise anything until we say ‘I promise’ and we don’t apologize until we say ‘sorry’. An important use is that we use language to think, we talk to ourselves and we think trying to work out a problem. We think to organize something and also we do it in writing to remember things. CHAPTER 33 The words tell us a lot about the feelings of the speakers. The feelings we have when we see or hear a word are called ‘connotations’ and these can be positive or negative, like ‘vagrants’ with a negative c. or ‘homeless people’ with a positive c. But also language can try to make us think in a way rather than another and it’s called ‘biased’ and also language is used to manipulate us or persuade us to behave or think in a certain way and this last use of language is ‘rhetoric’ and aims to persuade and influence people, it is used in advertisements, shops, newsapapers, politics… It is used by everyone and also when we say ‘pleeease’ it isn’t just to be polite but also to persuade people to do what we want. CHAPTER 34 In the recent years, the way we describe people change a lot. In the past a lot of job made distinction between men and women, like ‘steward’ and ‘stewardess’ or ‘poet’ and ‘poetess’, but now ‘-ess’ is disappeared, are used very rarely. We avoid using certain names if they are felt to be insulting and if we use it we can get into trouble, even when we don’t want to insult. Names do hurt and the hurt lasts a long time, these names are for example ‘baldy’, ‘four-eyes’, but sometimes we use name that can be hurtful for someone, like ‘cripples’, this isn’t good, now we say ‘handicapped’ or ‘disabled’ but for someone this can be an insult, this hasn’t a negative connotation but for some people does and so how can we call people who are in wheelchairs? There isn’t a name and we can say something like ‘differently abled’ ecc. This can happens also for old people or black people. Governments, employers, and social groups tried to sort out the problem by favouring one name and banning another, we can lose jobs if we don’t use the ‘correct’ name and the original idea behind political correctness is try to avoid using language that will offend people. But some people think to offend someone when in fact they are not and this can be resolved avoiding using words which actually weren’t offensive at all. CHAPTER 35 ‘Literature’ can have different meanings, but the main use is to cover everything where people have used language to create something special as a work of art and these works can be fiction where we tell stories using our imagination and non-fiction where we talk about the real world, sometimes we have a mix. In the cultures where the language is not written we have to listen to. All literature has one thing in common: the authors are trying to use language in the most effective way, they can make us feel happy, scared or sad.
When we read we can imagine what we are reading, the landscape, the characters, the objects ecc and the job of a poet is to make us see and feel and make us laugh sometimes. Literature adds dimension to our lives, it captures our heart and mind in a particular way, different from the view of a painting or sculptures, because of the detail express by the language. CHAPTER 36 We have different styles and we develop to suit the different circumstances in which we find ourselves, a better comparison is with the clothes we wear, we have clothes if it’s hot, or it’s cold or for special occasion and we build a language wardrobe inside our heads, but with styles. We write and talk in different way depending on where we are, who we are talking to, and we use formal or informal language in different contexts. In school we use formal language, but the way we answer maths’ questions is different from the way we answer for history exam. When we leave school, we use a lot of style at work, at home and now the styles are double because of the Internet. Sometimes, we don’t have to choose the language we have to used, like in religious services or in court. So we have to say that exist in a language different styles and mastering a style means developing a sense of when it’s appropriate or not use it, this is ‘language sense’. Style is also a matter of conforming to the way people do things. To develp a personal style we have to admire and copy the models and another way is to play with the rules of our language, in English for example we can move some words around quite a bit and a sentence has the same meaning but there isn’t a ‘correct’ answer. CHAPTER 37 While we’re reading, our brain is processing and we ready letters, numbers, puntuaction marks, the words are combined to create sentecences and sentences to create texts. The same thing happens with speech, even if we don’t talk in paragraphs or chapters, we make speeches come alive with the intonation, speed, loudness ecc and the purpose is to be able to say and write whatever we want to. This can be amazing because we can also create new words to express something and this ability to take familiar bits and combine them to create sentences is what sets language apart from other ways than human being use to communicate. When people talk, they use also gestures, facial expressions or touch and this is called ‘body language’ and it become a real language when deaf people develop gestures into a sign language. Humans can communicate their feelings in different ways, painting, through the music but if we want to describe a painting we need language, Language allows us to talk about our experience in a way that other way of communication can’t do and the subject which studies this is called LINGUISTICS. CHAPTER 38 Linguistics is the science of language and people are linguists but ‘linguist’ doesn’t mean that one person is fluent in several foreign languages, he can study languages without being fluent in a lot of languages. If we translate something from one language to another we have to put some examples to make better sense for readers but the vocal organs used in a language are the same as those used by people of another nationality. More languages we know, the deeper will be our undestanding of how language works, it doesn’t take so long to have a basic knowledge of a language, it’s important to know the basic forms and expressions of a lot of languages rather than know it in a perfect way, only a few languages have been really well studied and other are not studied at all. There a lot of languages but few linguists. Even the well- known languages need study.
