Humanities Homework Help

Journal Topic

Consider the following topic for this week’s journal entry:

Read this article by John McWhorter on Aeon (Links to an external site.) about how much about English is ‘not normal’. Then think about what we have studied thus far with respect to phonetics, phonology, morphology and syntax, and how English is similar to and different from other languages. Do you agree with his arguments? Give detailed points about your position.

Instructions

• Post your initial post by Thursday of this week. Your response should be 100-150 words in length, and you should connect the elements in the journal topic to our course in some way. You should also include your personal experiences, tying them into the course.
  • You won’t be able to see anyone else’s post before you write your own—and that’s on purpose. Use this time to reflect on your experiences. Remember that there are ‘no wrong answers’—so long as you use the information that we have learned thus far in the course to your work, then all is good!
• Between Friday and Sunday, please reply to at least two of your colleagues’ posts. Useful comments include engaging in dialogue, reflection, or suggestion. If you find that you agree with a given response and have nothing else to add, then I challenge you to reply to someone who has a different perspective than yours, and explore the differences.
• Optional: If you have any helpful resources, feel free to share them in your posts/replies.

Classmates posts:

1

In his article, John McWhorter brings up many very intriguing points about the history of the English language and how it accounts for the ‘strangeness’ of our language today. He explains how different words in English were formed, and compares them to words in Old English, Celtic languages, and foreign languages such as Spanish and French. I agree with most of his arguments after reading the article, but I did not know a lot of what he explained. I liked his argument about the tenses/moods used in the English language. A large part of learning Spanish has been getting genders and tenses right, which as a native speaker of English, I would naturally think it strange. However, reading this article, I now understand that it is English, not the other European languages that are strange.

2

I’ll admit that prior to my first linguistics class, I considered English as the language that was the most ‘normal’ to me. After all, it is my primary language and I’m most fluent in it; most of my understanding of the world is constructed with English. As I’m most familiar with English, I came to regard other languages as ‘not normal’, based on how it’s aspects were different in comparison to English. I just spoke English the way I was taught, never questioning peculiarities such as, why there were different words for expressing the same idea in varying degrees and the roots of words. I agree with many of McWhorter’s arguments on the strangeness of English, despite my initial belief that English is the most normal and the easiest language to learn. Unlike most other languages, whose words are typically derived from earlier versions, the English language is described as “muttley’ and “mongrel’, a mishmash of other languages such as Old English, Old Norse, French and Latin. English is truly a polyglot language in the sense that it’s comprised of so many other languages. Many people consider English as simple when in reality it’s complexity and weirdness is because it’s influenced by so many other languages each with their own unique rules and ways.