Linguists and the retreaval of lost languages

Many times those languages that died out in order for most of the modern languages to survive. When I watched the movie, I never knew that there would be a language that is spoken is Siberia. There is a misunderstanding that whenever a person speaks a certain language, he's from that country. For example, I'm from Kiev, Ukraine. Whenever people hear me speak, it's mostly English with Russian accent, which I still have. They don't know that I spoke Russian since I lived in Ukraine, since Russian dominated Ukrainian, and it was spread easily. For those people who were forced to give up their native language and speak the conquered language, whenever it might be, English, French, Spanish, Russian, you name it, its very hard to remember it after a long period of time. So, retreaval of these language tells us more about the ancestors of the language and where they came from.

Research book part 2

As I reed the Guy Deutscher's book "Through the Language Glass: How the world looks different in other languages", he talks about differential of color and how it is said between nations. For example, in our English language, if a person sees blue, he just says "blue". But in other languages, concept of blue can change. In the Russian language, we have different color of blue, like navy blue, dark blue, light blue or baby blue.

Prescriptivist vs. descriptivist

If I would describe myself, I would say that I'm descriptivist. When I came to the United States, I tried to understand and started to translate everything from English to Russian. But that wasn't easy vocabulary wise and by different grammatical structures. I translated it but when I used it in school, it was completely wrong grammatically and many times I wasn't understood. But my classmates understood that I came from a different country and English was very hard for me to understand at that time. Now same thing goes to Japanese. I have friends that help me out and make me feel comfortable learning this language, even though the grammar structure is very different from English to Japanese.

How pronounce my name

At first, I would pronounce like this. First, the letter m, which is a nasal voiced, followed by an a, which is a central low vowel. Then comes the r, which is a voiced alveolar liquid, followed by a front high vowel i, and a central low vowel a. So, if it's sounded out, it would be ma-ri-a. That's it.

Brief summary of the book

The book "Through a Language Glass: Why the World looks different in other languages" by Guy Deutscher is about language and it's concept in the world. What he says in his 1st half of the book that language shapes us, and makes us who we are and the environment that we live in. This one stuck with me. For example, Guy Deutscher says: "If you take a Bostonian boy and a Bejing girl and switch them, they will assimilate into the environment they are in. For example, if you take a Bejing girl that spoke excellent Mandarin in her life, and move her to a British family or a French family, she will start to speak those languages as time goes on." Same thing with language.

My blog buddy's post

I really liked how Heidi described in her blog. As I read it, it reminded me of myself, when I came to America from my home country. I saw America amusing at first, but then strange and weird. I saw different people, but they spoke the language that I only knew in certain words, not being able to communicate with the strangly people that I never met before. Maybe it because of the fear of the unknown, or just fear of losing everything you had in your life, like your home country. As people start to learn English as their second language, they think in their own tongue and interpret words and sentences in their own language. Later on, they lose that capability and learn the language by pushing the brain to think only on that language, for example English. That what I sometimes do when I learn Japanese. It isn't easy learning a language that you never heard before in your life. Every immigrant coming to this country experience that.

The Book I chose

Picture taken from http://www.beingforthebenefit.com/?p=67

I chosed the book called "through the language Glass: Why the World looks different in other languages" by Guy Deutscher. I chosed it because the author talks about many types of languages and how those languages react to the world in their own point of view. Different people see the world from their personal view, due to the climate and place where they live. If they live in a cold climate, they would see their world asa different as someone living in a climate where it always humid. Different people see the world how they see it, and how they experience their lifes in environment around them. Language plays a role while describing something, like it would give a different descriptions about one particular thing, for example, color. In Russian, it would be more meanings than in English.

How Language shaped me (Blog #1)

Picture taken from http://www.svfs-russia.com/contents/display.asp?c=languages

Every single day of my live I was taught that in order to communicate throughout the world that I knew of is I needed to know a language. I was taught Russian, even though I was born in Kiev, Ukraine. Many times this language gave me everything that I have today, culture, traditions and even my own thoughts. People would see the world from their own perspective, from their own point of view of how they were raised in their family. My language is Russian. I used it in any part of communication, like speech, reading, writing. Even when I was in school in America I thought in Russian. Nowadays I think English before Russian, maybe because I speak most of the time at school and then when going home, I speak Russian, and no English is allowed in the house, with some exceptions.
The language that I speak is only used on community meetings, for non-English speaking people from Russia or from other Slavic countries, and between family members. Languages are usually passed down generation through generation, from parents to children. For me, learning English was a hard thing, even coming from my motherland. I started to learn the language kind of quicker than my parents, simply because languages are easily learned by children rather than by adults. Language is limited for some people, especially if you're an adult and you're coming from a foreign country that doesn't have English as it's second language.