Language Myths 14,15,18
Myth 14: Double negatives are illogical
There are different forms of double negatives and people are annoyed on different levels about those double negatives. They are disliked because they don’t sound logical and if you are really pedantic you can make people really confused for example: don’t you want no dinner? If I say yes it might mean I want dinner or not it is not completely clear. Usually context will clear these double negative logic problems up but not always. Therefore I really don’t like them. My brother likes to ask double negative questions and when I say yes I will not get what he asked for, for example: wil jij geen cola? And if I say yes I do not get a glass of coca cola. This turned me off the double negative for forever.
Myth 15: TV makes people sound the same
The reasons behind linguistic changes are almost always very subtle, it is based on motivation. The number of possibilities is enormous and saying it’s the telly’s fault is quite ignorant. The thing the media can be blamed for is the effective spreading of new catch phrases and thereby ‘tainting’ regional speech. There is abundant evidence that mass media cannot provide the stimulus for language acquisition. If we look at hearing children with deaf parents, they do not learn to speak by listening to radio or watching tv. Language is globalised by the television, people will hear all the varieties of English on tv and that has never happened before in history. We are all connected nowadays and that might lead to less regional varieties spoken or it might not. We simply do not know. The only thing we do now is that the language media uses is a mirror of what we, the people, use. We only change our language based on what real people say to us, not based on the media, no matter how many memes come to life.
Myth 18: Some languages are spoken more quickly than others
To measure the speed someone talks at it is important to know when there are pauses in someone’s sentences. Some languages use more pauses than others, and some languages have longer words. The only fair way to measure speed it to count syllables per minute. Finnish is faster in syllables per minute than English but an Englishmen will have said more words in that time because Finnish words are longer. The absolutely fairest way to measure how fast a language is, is to count sounds instead of syllables because sometimes syllables vary in length in different languages. Personally, when I think of fast languages I think of Spanish and Italian. This is because those people speak with passion. By reading this essay I have learned that it is also because they have fewer pauses in their sentences and they use shorter words than other languages. This a fun new bit of trivia.
Maak jouw eigen website met JouwWeb