Myth 10: Some languages have no grammar.

• Every language has grammar, otherwise there wouldn’t be a wrong way of making sentences

 

Opinion: I always considered German, Hungarian and Russian a more difficult language than for example Dutch because of all the cases, but I never considered the fact that some languages don’t have grammar while others do. Just like Language Myths said: as long as you can write words or sentences wrong, a language has grammar. This means that every language uses grammar because there is no existing language where all word orders are acceptable to make a good sentence.

 

Myth 11: Italian is beautiful, German is ugly.

• Because of the soft and elegant sounds, Italian and French sound pretty and they give people a positive feeling. German and Arabic on the other hand achieve the opposite effect because of the harsh sounds that are produced by speaking the language.
• The way you think about a certain language is partly based on where you live and which languages you speak yourself.
• If a certain group has more power in the media, their accent will be more often accepted because people hear this particular accent frequently.

 

Opinion: When I first learned German, I agreed with the title of this chapter: German is ugly. The sounds where just sounded very harsh to me. But, when you get used to the language is just doesn’t sound that harsh anymore. I once saw a video of people who never heard Dutch before and they thought that it sounded like German. As someone who’s first language is Dutch, I found this every strange to hear. In my opinion the two just did not sound the same at all. The video was just a great example of what Language Myths says: the way you think or a certain language is based on where you live and what languages you speak yourself.

 

Myth 13: Black children are verbally deprived.

• Even though there are many famous African-American speakers, are African-American children described as verbally deprived.
• African-Americans just sound differently from Anglo-Americans, because of historically, socially and linguistically influences. If an African-American child is raised in a white suburb, within a white family, then the child will sound perfectly Anglo-American. The way someone speaks depends on the environment where they were raised, not their race.
• Another reason that African-American children are said to be bad at language, is because the spelling tests are made for Anglo-American children. A French-Canadian child would never get a score as high as a Parisian child on a Parisian-French language test, and therefore it wouldn’t be fair to call the French-Canadian child stupid.
• African-American English has different rules than Anglo-American English. Double negatives, for example, are allowed in African-American English, but not in Anglo-American English.

 

Opinion: I believe that the reason that African-American English is called “bad English” is because the usual middle-class person live by the rules of Anglo-American English. If we lived by the rules of African-American English, the rules from Anglo-American English would sound odd. This is why we can conclude that there isn’t good or bad English, they are just different.

 

Myth 14: Double negatives are illogical.

• There are different forms of double negatives.
• People dislike double negatives because they don’t sound logical.
• When we have two negatives to deal with, then, the question is not just whether or whether they are not logical, but which logical issues are involved and how they interrelate with each other and with the rest of the utterance.

 

Opinion: Personally, I think it is very annoying when people use double negatives in a sentence and this chapter did not change my mind. I get why some people think that you can use double negatives, but for me it just sounds really annoying and wrong.

 

Myth 15: TV makes people sound the same.

• Language changes all the time, due to motivation. There is no exact way of knowing why people want to change language all the time.
• People blame the television for the changes that occur in their language.
• Cat phrases come from movies, such as Pulp Fiction (Check out the brains on Brett!), but they are repeated so many times that people forget that the phrases are from movies and they assume that they are just sayings.
• Media does not necessarily influence people to speak (see the example of the boy named Vincent who has two deaf parents).
• People may borrow some phrases or sayings from each other, but it takes real people (no television!) to make sure that you remember how and when to use them.

 

Opinion: This chapter reminded me of the essay that I wrote for assignment 6.1, where people blamed television and other media for ruining English. This chapter proved, again, that this isn’t true because people only change language based on what other real people say. I agree with this statement.

 

Myth 18: Some languages are spoken more quickly than others.

• To measure speed, it is important to know when there are pauses in someone’s sentence.
• Some languages use more pauses than others, and some languages have longer words (Hungarian) than others (Chinese).
• Finnish is faster than English in syllables per second, but slower in wordcount.
• It would be more fair to see how fast a language is by testing sounds instead of syllables, because syllables depend on which language you’re speaking.

 

Opinion: Languages like Spanish will always sound faster to me, than Hungarian for example. Now I know that it is because Spanish people don’t use as much pauses as Hungarians do. They also use fairly short words, which is fun to know. I didn’t know that there were real studies to find out which language sounds faster and why.