Thursday, September 16, 2010

                                                                        THE POWER OF LANGUAGE

My native language is Spanish, I was born in Colombia and had never learned another language before until I came to the United States and took ESL classes at la Guardia Community College. Since the beginning I knew it would be a challenge for me to learn English, and I am still in the process, but luckily thanks to my hard work and dedication I have been able to speak more fluently, communicate easily, and attend college.
 I use both languages equally on a daily basis, but, perhaps because of college, I read and write more in English now.
In my opinion I consider language as one of the most precious resources we have as human beings. I don’t really know how does language happen; but it is definitely acquired through family, community and living with people. It would be impossible for a child to learn a language on his/her own. Therefore, two or more people are required to produce any type of language in order for it to happen.
The main questions I have about language, are how it originated, and which was the first language ever spoken. According to many, the origin of language is still a mystery.
After reading Deutscher’s article, I realized how extraordinary languages are, and it made me think of those who have the ability to learn many languages and are able to interpret them and translate them specially when they are completely different from each other.
Another interesting fact from his article is how languages influence the way we think, but the most fascinating one was his explanation about the language of space and “how we describe the orientation of the world around us.” His comparison between the Guugu Yimithirr and how  geographic directions control their speech, while for us it is only used on certain occasions, helped me understand the power of language and depending on its type, how it can determine who we are and how we think.

1 comment:

  1. Hi, Carolina! You will be a great "informant" for our class since you are still in the process of learning English! (By the way, you wrote beautifully! Congratulations!) By "informant," I mean someone who can give us first-hand information about your own acquisition process.
    I really liked the part of Deutscher's paragraph that you wrote about. Can you imagine knowing north/south/east/west without even having to think twice? One of these days, I bet there will be someone in my class who speaks one of these languages (like Guugu Yimithirr) who can be an "informant" about what it feels like to have to learn the way we talk about space: above/below/around/in front of: basically all our prepositions!

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