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El crecimiento de Español en los Estados Unidos. 

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El crecimiento de Español en los Estados Unidos. 

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Sin duda, el español ha crecido bastante en los estados unidos durante los últimos años. En algunos estados, el porcentaje de hispanohablantes es abrumador, como en el estado de Nuevo México (47%). Ahora, los EEUU es el país con más hispanohablantes que cada otro país en el mundo menos México. Esta observación es increíble porque el español ni es el idioma oficial de los Estados Unidos. Aunque el flujo de inmigrantes latinos continúa aumentando, no se predice que el español va a dominar el inglés, por parte de la tendencia de olvidar el idioma con cada generaciones subsecuente. Por ejemplo, mis abuelos hablan español, mis tíos lo entiende, pero mis primos ni entienden el idioma.

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The news was striking and, to some, alarming: the United States is now the world's second largest Spanish-speaking country after Mexico. It has 41 million native Spanish speakers and 11.6 million who are bilingual - more than Colombia or Spain - and is on course to be the biggest Spanish-speaking nation on Earth, with Spanish the mother tongue of almost a third of its citizens.

The study, published this week by Spain's Instituto Cervantes, made global headlines and dismayed those in the US who fear linguistic pollution. "I thought we spoke ENGLISH here," tweeted Scott Rogers, a Florida-based conservative blogger.

Coming on the heels of the Spanish-language network Univision dumping Donald Trump's Miss USA pageant over his disparaging remarks about Mexican immigrants, it underlined a sense of surging Hispanic power.

Reality turns out to be a bit more complicado. Spanish is not becoming an all-conquering cultural force. It is not turning swaths of the US into Spanish-only realms. It may, in fact, eventually shrivel.

"Spanish dominance, it's not going to happen. English will obviously be the dominant language," said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institute and author of Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America.

Otto Santa Ana, a professor at UCLA who edited the anthology Tongue-tied: The Lives of Multilingual Children in Public Education, agreed. "All the fears that people have that the [primary] language will not be English are unfounded."

With the Latino population expected to grow from 17.4% of the US population to 30% by 2060, Spanish will inevitably grow, but the enthusiasm second- and third-generation Latinos have for English will act as a brake. So too will the fall in the number of immigrants from Latin America.

Those trends, combined with social and economic currents which both weaken and strengthen Spanish in the US, suggest a future of waxing and then possibly waning influence.

A century ago, millions in the US spoke German, alarming those who considered it a threat to English. A halt to immigration from Europe plus two world wars all but wiped it out.

Barring catastrophic events, Spanish will not disappear, says Roberto Suro, a Latino affairs scholar at the University of Southern California. But competing factors will determine its rise or fall.

More than three-quarters of third-generation Latinos are "English dominant", meaning they prefer it to Spanish, which they seldom speak, if at all, said Mark Lopez, director of Hispanic research at the Pew Research Center. More than 80% of Latinos feel they need to learn English to succeed in the US.

More than a quarter of Latinos marry non-Latinos, and more than a quarter of Latino babies have a non-Latino parent. "The Hispanic community is changing. We're at the beginning of this story," said Lopez.

About a third (34%) of Hispanic people will speak only English at home by 2020, up from 25% in 2010, according to a 2011 paper by census demographers Jennifer Ortman and Hyon Shin.

Assimilation atrophied Polish, Italian, German and other languages which once reverberated around US cities. Spanish, however, has a replenishing supply of immigrants.

Last year's net intake was 305,000 - much reduced from two decades ago but still a significant number, especially given the sluggish economy and high number of deportations, said Suro. "This continuous flow of new arrivals will help keep Spanish alive. Hispanic migration patterns have proved durable." Should the US economy gain steam, the number attempting to enter, legally or illegally, is expected to jump.

The highest concentration of Spanish speakers is in former Mexican territories - New Mexico (47%), California and Texas (both 38%) and Arizona (30%). Frey, the demographer, said such states would resemble a bilingual melting pot compared to Quebec, Canada's French-speaking province. "It's a generational dynamic. They need English for jobs and interracial relationships."

Resentment at perceived Hispanic ascendance is a staple at Tea Party rallies which play Press One for English, a country song by Kay and Ron Rivoli which scolds non-English speakers ("Folks when you reach our shores you should speak our language not the one you spoke before"). Radical blogs warn about a Hispanic "conquest".

Proliferating media outlets reduce the pressure to learn English by offering bountiful Spanish content, including commentary on all-American events such as the Super Bowl. Some 95% of Latinos say it's important for Latinos in the US to be able to speak Spanish, a sign of pride in their heritage.

But bilingual Latino millennials prefer Fusion's English fare to Univision's Spanish programmes. The Guardian recently interviewed US Latinos trying - and in some cases struggling - to learn Spanish as adults.

Their efforts underline the fact that the US breeds English. Santa Ana, the UCLA academic, has offered a top grade to any student who can find someone who grew up here and does not speak native English. "No one's gotten an A in 20 years."

Growing up speaking little or no Spanish was not fixed by later expressing pride in Latino heritage, he said. "By that time the damage is done."
Topics

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Reports of English's demise in US have been greatly exaggerated, experts say

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The news was striking and, to some, alarming: the United States is now the world's second largest Spanish-speaking country after Mexico. It has 41 million native Spanish speakers and 11.6 million who are bilingual - more than Colombia or Spain - and is on course to be the biggest Spanish-speaking nation on Earth, with Spanish the mother tongue of almost a third of its citizens.

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Quiero ser doctor, y ya sé que el español será una herramienta muy útil para comunicarme con pacientes de orígenes diversos. Trabajo como voluntario en un hospital y utilizo el español cada vez que estoy ahí. Lo más importante en la medicina es que el doctor entienda lo que el paciente siente. Hay maneras de discernir una síntomas físicas con ciertos exámenes médicos, pero muchas síntomas son sentidas. Por ejemplo, no podemos saber que un paciente tiene vertigo si el paciente no comunica que siente así. Sin duda, la ineficiencia de comunicación puede causar problemas graves con la salud, y por eso es importante que los futuros estudiantes de medicina en los estados unidos aprendan a menos lo más básico de español.

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Inside the orientation packet he received as a first-year resident at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, Dr. Christopher Kellner found a flier advertising a course in performing basic life support alongside a handout describing free Spanish-language instruction.

The aspiring neurosurgeon, who starts his residency this week at the hospital's Columbia University Medical Center campus, speculated that the language skills would prove the more useful training. "Working in Washington Heights and going to Columbia, you need to speak Spanish," he said.

By encouraging residents to learn Spanish, the most commonly spoken language in New York City after English, hospitals are signaling the increasing importance of the skill in overall medical training. In some cases, hospitals are even encouraging residents to receive "medical" Spanish instruction that focuses on the terminology they will need to examine, diagnose, and treat patients.

"If you can't elicit what the patient is feeling, you're going to lose a lot," the director of a medical Spanish program at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, Maria Marzan, said. "I don't need for my students to learn what to say in a Spanish restaurant. I need them to learn to ask questions of this patient in a culturally sensitive way."

At NewYork-Presbyterian, the reason for offering Spanish lessons to residents was simple: "They're here and they don't know Spanish," the director of the internal medicine residency program at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, Dr. Mark Pecker, said. About one-third of the hospital's patients speak Spanish as a first language, he added.

In New York City, the large immigrant population makes the need to speak Spanish to patients particularly acute. By law, the state's Department of Health requires hospitals to provide a certain level of language assistance to patients who do not speak English. Most hospitals have translators on-site, or special telephone hookups that provide translation services.

Yet some residents said they still prefer to speak and understand Spanish themselves, as translators can be hard to find, particularly during the night shift. One resident at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital, Dr. Komal Jhaveri, said she took a Spanish course for that reason. "I need to know words that describe chest pain," she said.

Other aspiring doctors said speaking a patient's language helps them form a better relationship with them. "The main reason we're in medical school is to learn how to treat patients. I think an important part of being a good doctor is being able to communicate with your patients," a fourth-year student at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Ryan Ungaro, said. Starting this fall, Mount Sinai will offer medical Spanish classes to students, after several years of urging by Mr. Ungaro and other students.

In general, medical Spanish courses are designed to complement courses that teach clinical skills. "The primary goal is to get a student to the point where they can take a medical history," a Spanish-language instructor who teaches at several New York hospitals, Michael Shane, said. During a recent lesson at NewYork-Presbyterian's Weill Cornell Medical Center campus, Mr. Shane said many medical terms are similar in Spanish and in English. "I mention sarcoma and carcinoma," he said. "They're exactly the same. You just put on your Spanish accent and you've got it."

Still, according to Ms. Marzan, of Einstein, stressing cultural sensitivity is also key. For example, some immigrants take herbal supplements to treat their ailments. Patients might also describe symptoms in a way that doctors are not accustomed to. For example, describing pain as being felt everywhere might mean the patient feels a lot of pain, and pain that is described as moving from the stomach to the chest to the face may be a reference to nausea.

Slang should also be taken into account. During the language lesson at NewYork-Presbyterian, students were taking turns naming parts of the human form when one doctor mistakenly used a casual word for buttocks. Laughing, Mr. Shane corrected him. "'Culo' is basically 'ass,'" he said. "You would never say that to a patient."

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more doctors encouraged to learn spanish

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More Doctors Encouraged To Learn Spanish

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Inside the orientation packet he received as a first-year resident at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, Dr. Christopher Kellner found a flier advertising a course in performing basic life support alongside a handout describing free Spanish-language instruction. The aspiring neurosurgeon, who starts his residency this week at the hospital's Columbia University Medical Center campus, speculated that the language skills would prove the more useful training.

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Decidí postar esta canción porque es cantada en Spanglish y también quería demostrar que las reglas de cada idioma no son rotas. Por ejemplo, dice "Baby no hay language barrier." Language barrier es "barrera lingüística" en español, y vemos que el adjetivo ya no precede el sustantivo. Cuando cambia a inglés, sigue sus reglas, y cuando habla en español, sigue la reglas gramáticas de español. En general, mantiene un sólo idioma para cada oración, pero muchas personas en los estados unidos suelen mezclarlos en fragmentos. Por ejemplo, "I'm looking for mi amigo que está en this building somewhere pero no sé si ya se fue."

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Abuelo Materno                 Abuela Materna                                 Abuelo Paterno                        Abuela Paterna
Thomas Lee Ausley            Robbie Ausley                                José Rubén Flores                 Refujia Willis Villegas
(English USA)                 (English USA)                          (English and Spanish USA)     (English and Spanish USA)

Madre                                                                                              Padre
Kelly Dawn Ausley                                                                     José Rubén Flores Jr.
(English USA)                                                                 (English dominant and Spanish)

Hunter Ausley Flores
(English dominant and Spanish)

Notas: Mi padre y abuelos no pueden leer español.

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Las palabras de Spanglish más utilizadas según esta mujer son los siguientes:

aseguranza - significan seguro. La palabra aseguranza es mas parecida a la palabra inglesa insurance.
Yarda - un tema recurrente en el Spanglish es la adición de una "o" o "a" al final de una palabra inglesa. Yarda significa yard.

carpeta - Hay bastantes cognados falsos entre el español y el inglés, pero el Spanglish facilita la complejidad, y adopta el significado de la palabra inglesa más parecida a un cognado falso. Por ejemplo, carpeta significa "folder" pero suena como "carpet," así que la palabra carpeta suele significar "carpet" en los estados unidos.

vacumear y parkear - es un verbo que usa un fragmento inglés, adoptado de la palabra vacuum. Es muy común observar el sufijo "-ear" para transformar una palabra o raíz en un verbo.

basketa, troca, y brekas -
estas palabras son palabras inglesas con la adición de "a."

frizar - A veces observamos la adición del sufijo "-ar" en vez de "-ear." En este caso, simplemente agrega "-ar" para transformar el verbo inglés freeze a un verbo español. También cambia la ortografía para mantener el sonido, dado que la "ee" en inglés suena como la "i" en español.

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Hablando español en Estados Unidos | No entiendo que dicen

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Aquí hay una chica del país africano Guinea Ecuatorial, el único país africano en que el idioma oficial es el español. La primera cosa que noté era la pronunciación de /d/. Es muy fuerte. Más fuerte que cualquier país, incluso la /d/ entre vocales. Una cosa muy curiosa es la pronunciación de /r/. Es pronunciada como una mezcla de /r/ y /g/, y creo que este dialecto es influido por otros idiomas africanos. La /j/ no es uvular ni fuerte la mayoría del tiempo, y es yeísta. La entonación y tendencia de hacer una distinción con la /s/ y /c/z/ me dice que hay mucha influencia española. 74% habla español como segunda idioma aunque es el idioma nacional del país.

Dado que el país era una colonia de España, la influencia en el habla es evidente. Pero también hay muchísima influencia de idiomas indígenas como el Fang y otros idiomas bantú. Creo que el acento español es más aparente con la clase alta.

7.30 y 11:20  y 12:00 documento: la paradoja de la abundancia (la pronunciación de /d/)

http://desmotsetdeslangues.eklablog.com/fang-a115192182

La /th/ o /r/ no aparece mucho y noté que ebola significa "puño."

Escuché este vídeo y nunca oí el sonido fricativo dental sonora.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p9mD_IFw1A
Ntumu es el dialecto de Fang en Río Muni.

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Idioma español en Guinea Ecuatorial-Paloma del Sol hablando sobre el arte y la cultura en su país, en concordancia con el español.

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Antonio Banderas es de una ciudad andaluza que se llama Málaga. Noté que tiene un acento típico del sur, pero también pronuncia los consonantes z y c como lo hacen en el norte. También come las /s/ a los finales de las sílabas. Por ejemplo, "muchísimo(s) enemigo(s)," y también "lo(s) e(s)pañole(s)." Nota que aspira los /s/ porque hay un sutil soplo de aire. Por fin, las /d/ son muy reducidas. "...por haber mata(d)o." Algo que no discutimos tanto es la j. En el norte la /j/ es muy fuerte y es uvular. Pero dice "la gente joven" y no es muy fuerte ni uvular como el acento del norte.

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Discurso de Antonio Banderas en los Premios Platino 2015

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Antonio Banderas: "No he vistiado Altamira por no levantar la liebre" - El Hormiguero 3.0

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Vídeos online en Flooxer: http://www.flooxer.com/ Todos los vídeos de El Hormiguero en Flooxer: http://www.flooxer.com/ver-videos/canales/hormiguero/568ab87e6584a8583034aaec Antonio Banderas es el protagonista de 'Altamira' (estreno 1 de abril), e interpreta a Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, quien descubrió las cuevas cántabras y sus pinturas rupestres.

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Hay muchas palabras diferentes para las mismas cosas en países diferentes. También hay palabras idénticas que describen cosas muy diferentes aquí es una lista de palabras mencionadas en la canción.
Porro es marijuana, pero también es un ritmo cantado de Colombia.
Chucha es un olor de la axila (Colombia), pero también significa que algo está lejos (Chile). Chivo también es ese olor repugnante (Uruguay) pero significa cabra un otros países. Chucho tiene muchas definiciones. Frío (Argentina), cárcel (Chile), y también es un apodo para Jesús. Frijol, poroto, y habichuela son la misma cosa. Fresa es "preppy" en México pero rutilla es strawberry en Argentina. Por fin, jugo es usado en latinoamérica pero zumo se usa en España.

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Estamos actualizando la página de Inténtalo Carito, pues llevábamos un rato largo sin hacerlo y ahora tenemos mucho trabajo. Esperamos muy pronto tenerla lista nuevamente, gracias por la paciencia. Afta pronto!

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Aprendí en este artículo que hay más que sólo una forma de conjugar verbos con el pronombre "vos." Hay una forma distinta en latinoamérica que en españa. En latinoamerica, hay tres maneras en que el pronombre "vos" es utilizado. En el voseo absoluto, se usa vos y se conjuega el verbo como lo normal para vos en suramérica. En el voseo pronominal, no se usa vos, pero se uso la forma verbal voseante. Finalmente, el voseo verbal usa el vos, pero se conjuega como si el pronombre fuera "tú." En Chile, hay una forma interesante de conjugar verbos en el futuro e incondicional comparado a los otros países americanos. En vez de "as" termina en "ai."

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¿Qué es el voseo?

El voseo es el empleo del pronombre vos en sustitución del pronombre tú y usted en combinación con el verbo en la 2 a persona del plural.

En este apartado conocerás las distintas variantes de voseo que existen en Latinoamérica y aprenderás a conjugar cada tiempo verbal. Además, te explicamos el origen de esta forma de cortesía en España.

Ejemplo

Formas del voseo

Existen, fundamentalmente, dos tipos de voseo: el latinoamericano y el español.

Voseo latinoamericano

El pronombre vos en Latinoamérica se utiliza normalmente para la segunda persona del singular: tú, usted. Además, el verbo se conjuga de una manera característica.

En lugar de la 2 a persona del plural, vosotros, se prefiere la forma ustedes, que pierde su valor formal propio en España, y se usa para referirse directamente a un colectivo de personas, ya sea de forma coloquial o con especial respeto.

Ejemplo:

Vos sos idéntico. Vos tenés su misma cara.

¿Ustedes tienen hambre?

Dependiendo de la región, la forma del voseo es diferente:

Voseo absoluto: consiste en emplear el pronombre vos junto a una forma verbal característica del voseo que tiene origen en la 2a persona del plural.

Ejemplo:

poder → vos podés

Voseo pronominal: consiste en usar el pronombre tú junto a la forma verbal propia del voseo, con origen en la 2a persona del plural.

Ejemplo:

poder → tú podés

Voseo verbal: consiste en el uso del pronombre vos a la junto a la forma verbal de la 2a persona del singular.

Ejemplo:

poder → vos puedes

Voseo español: Vuesa merced

Este tipo de voseo se refiere a la fórmula de cortesía empleada en la Edad Media en España que permitía referirse a alguien de manera reverencial. Actualmente solo se puede encontrar en novelas históricas, películas, etc. Se forma utilizando el pronombre vos + verbo en la 2 a persona del plural.

Ejemplo:

Vos sois el rey de Castilla.

Tiene origen en el latín, siendo la segunda persona del plural. En castellano antiguo se utilizaba indistintamente con sentido de plural y como forma de respeto. Para distinguir los dos usos, se introdujo la forma vosotros, reservando vos para la forma de cortesía. Con el tiempo, se generalizó su uso y se hizo común la fórmula de cortesía Vuesa merced, el actual usted.

La forma de cortesía usted ha sufrido muchas modificaciones a lo largo de la historia. Comenzó siendo "Vuesa merced", donde vuesa significa vuestra. El uso, y el mal uso, de esta fórmula durante años derivó en numerosas contracciones que han quedado documentadas en los textos literarios: "vuessa merçed", "vuesarçed", "vuarçed", "vuaçed", "vusted", hasta llegar finalmente a la fórmula actual: "usted".

El pronombre en el voseo absoluto

El pronombre vos sustituye a las formas personales de tú y ti. Sin embargo, los pronombres te, tu y tuyo permanecen invariables.

Ejemplo:

Sí, te hablo a vos. ¿Es este tu bolso?

Vos te levantaste de mal humor.

El verbo en el voseo absoluto

Para el voseo se utiliza por regla general la conjugación de la 2 a persona del plural. No obstante, existen variaciones regionales y sociales con cada tiempo verbal.

Presente

Para el presente de indicativo y subjuntivo se toma la forma verbal de la 2 a persona del plural y se elimina la vocal i del diptongo. También es posible, aunque menos frecuente, suprimir la vocal e, o mantener el dipotongo.

Ejemplo:

Presente indicativo → poner → vos ponés
inhabitual: vos ponís o vos ponéis

Presente subjuntivo → poner → vos pongás
inhabitual: vos pongís o vos pongáis

En los verbos terminados en -ar no se puede eliminar en ningún caso la vocal a del dipotongo.

Ejemplo:

Presente indicativo → hablar →vos hablás
inhabitual: vos habláis
incorrecto: vos hablís

Pretérito Imperfecto

En el pretérito imperfecto de indicativo y subjuntivo se emplea la forma verbal de la 2 a persona del singular.

Ejemplo:

Pretérito Imperfecto de indicativo → cantar → vos cantabas

Pretérito Imperfecto de subjuntivo → cantar → vos cantaras

En Chile es frecuente el uso de la 2 a persona del plural y la aspiración o eliminación de la última -s.

Ejemplo:

cantar → vos cantabai (incorrecto: vos cantabais)

cantar → vos cantarai (incorrecto: vos cantarais)

Pretérito Indefinido

El pretérito indefinido se forma a partir de la 2 a persona del plural y eliminado la vocal i del diptongo. En algunas regiones se elimina también la -s final.

Ejemplo:

volver → vos volvistes o vos volviste

En los Andes venezolanos y en Colombia existe otra variante en la que desaparece la primera -s de la desinencia verbal y se manteniene la última.

Ejemplo:

volver → vos volvites

Futuro

En el futuro se toma también la conjugación de la 2 a persona del plural y se elimina la vocal i del diptongo. También puede suprimirse la vocal e, o mantener el diptongo.

Ejemplo:

viajar → vos viajarés
inhabitual: vos viajarís o vos viajaréis

Condicional

Para conjugar el condicional se toma la terminación de la 2 a persona del singular.

Ejemplo:

soñar → vos soñarías

En Chile es frecuente el uso de la 2 a persona del plural y la eliminación de la -s final.

Ejemplo:

soñar → vos soñaríai (incorrecto: vos soñaríais)

Imperativo

Para la conjugación del imperativo se elimina la -d final de la 2 a persona del plural.

Ejemplo:

mirar → mirá (en vez de mirad)

poner → poné (en vez de poned)

escribir → escribí (en vez de escribid)

Solo en Chile se utiliza el imperativo de la misma manera que en España.

Ejemplo:

mirar → mira (tú)

Formas del voseo en indicativo por países

Formas del voseo en subjuntivo por países

Formas del voseo en imperativo por países

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El voseo es el empleo del pronombre vos en sustitución del pronombre tú y usted, en combinación con el verbo en la 2a persona del plural. Con Lingolia conocerás las distintas variantes de voseo que existen en América Latina y el origen de esta forma de cortesía en España.

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Muchos de nosotros ya han notado este fenómeno a menos una vez en nuestras vidas. Lo que ocurre es que, cuando repetimos una palabra muchas veces y rápidamente, perdemos el significado y solo oímos la combinación de palabras, y parece muy ajeno. Para explicar el fenómeno, tenemos que aprender más de la neurología. La repetición de una palabra activa una parte de la corteza cerebral. Pero cuando activamos esa parte muchas veces regularmente, hay inhibición y insensibilización. Por ejemplo, cuando entramos en un cuarto que tiene un olor muy fuerte, ya no podemos oler la fragancia después de un tiempo prolongado. La pérdida breve de la semántica puede ser aplicada con gente con tartamudeos con ansiedad de hablar. Muchas de estas personas tienen emociones negativas al hablar, pero si repiten palabras muchas veces, pierden esas emociones con el significado. Me parece muy interesante esta forma de terapia.

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The dissertation presents several experiments that demonstrate the operation of the semantic satiation effect in various cognitive tasks such as rating words and figures that are presented repeatedly in a short time, verbally repeating words then grouping them into concepts, adding numbers after repeating them out loud, and bilingual translations of words repeated in one of the two languages.

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Aquí tengo unas viñetas cómicas acerca de la semántica. Entender las expresiones de un idioma es crítico para comprender a los demás. Esto se trata de cooperar con la otra persona, y tratar de responder y reaccionar apropiadamente con lo que insinúa, y no tomar lo que dice literalmente. A veces lo literal no es lo que alguien insinúa. Un otro ejemplo con el gallo se trata de deixis. Deixis es el uso de palabras como "aquí' o "yo." Las palabras en sí mismas no se puede comprender completamente porque requieren más información. La perspectativa también tiene un papel en deixis, como en el ejemplo con la gallina.

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There are jokes that depends on the resolution of semantically ambiguous words were explored. I asked you to take a little of the top.

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El significado necesita ser claro para que alguien reacciona apropiadamente. A veces hay muchas interpretaciones, y no se puede expresarse perfectamente. La complejidad aumenta con la largura de una oración, y también la ambigüedad. La ambigüedad significa que se puede interpretar una simple oración en maneras diferentes. Este video explica cómo una oración puede ser ambigua. Aunque muchísimas oraciones son ambiguas, entendemos la gran mayoría de lo que sale de la boca de un amigo en una conversación, porque somos mas que robots que analiza la lógica. Nosotros cooperamos con el contexto, expresiones, y más. Por eso gente con la síndroma de Asberger's, gente que prioriza la lógica, no siempre son muy buenos en comunicarse.

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Why do people interpret the same sentence multiple ways? What is it about semantics that leads us to more than one meaning? This week, The Ling Space takes on semantic scope and talks about how the most innocent-seeming words in your sentence are fighting it out to bestow upon you an interpretation where they come out on top, as well as how we avoid being lost in an ambiguous fog all the time.

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Este video explica la diferencia entre el sintaxis y la semántica. El autor del video da un ejemplo de una oración sintácticamente correcta, pero no hay un significado claro. Creo que este video es beneficial porque ya aprendemos del sintaxis, y ahora podemos separar el concepto de sintaxis de la semántica con un ejemplo que corresponde bien con un concepto, pero desafía el otro. En general, la estructura de una oración es independiente del significado de la oración. A veces el sintaxis puede cambiar el significado, como se hace en la poesía. Intercambiando palabras puede enfatizar algunas palabras más que otras. Un otro ejemplo es "The dog bit the cat. " y "the cat bit the dog."

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Syntax Vs Semantics - Programming Languages

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This video is part of an online course, Programming Languages. Check out the course here: https://www.udacity.com/course/cs262.

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Enfocamos mucho en el latín cuando aprendemos de la evolución del español, porque la mayoría de las palabras se deriven de latín. Sin embargo, los idiomas de la península antes de la invasión romana también tienen sus influencias en el idioma y cultura española. Creo que el idioma prerromano más interesante es el ibérico, porque todavía es un gran misterio. Sabemos que este idioma era un idioma muy prestigioso en el comercio, pero sabemos casi nada de este idioma tan extendido hoy en día.

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LAS LENGUAS PRERROMANAS DE LA PENÍNSULA IBÉRICA

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LAS LENGUAS PRERROMANAS DE LA PENÍNSULA IBÉRICA.

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Hay una lista de palabras españolas más populares de origen árabe. La primera palabra es "ojalá," que viene de la frase árabe "ma sha allah." Una palabra muy común en español es la preposición "hasta" que viene de la palabra árabe "hata." Hay otras palabras, pero la idea es que se adoptó estas palabras durante la conquista musulmana entre 711 y 1492. La foto de abajo es la alhambra, un palacio en Granada, Andalucía, construido por los moros.

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In 711 C.E., Arab armies began the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. With the conquest, the , or Moors, brought with them their Arabic architecture, art, and of course, language. Over time, Arabic expressions mixed with old Spanish vocabulary to become the Spanish dialect that most Spanish-speaking countries use today: , or Castilian Spanish.

Even after ( the Catholic king and queen) Ferdinand and Isabel expelled the Arab empire from the Spanish kingdom in 1492, Castilian Spanish has retained approximately 8,000 words with Arabic origin to this day. After Latin, Arabic has made the greatest contribution to the Spanish language.

Traveling through Spain, it is almost impossible to avoid the name of a place or region that is derived from Arabic. To name just a few:

Something interesting to note about this map is that the majority of the Spanish locations derived from Arabic are limited to the central and southern regions of the country, representative of how deep the Arab culture had set its roots into the culture of the peninsula. The Arabic influence on the Spanish language extends past the names of modern cities and regions. Perhaps the easiest way to see this influence in Spanish is in the simple words spoken every day. Here's a list of some of our favorite Spanish words with Arabic origin:

One of the most well-known words to come from Arabic, means hopefully in English and comes from the Arabic expression: "ma sha allah" which means should God will it. Remember that is a conjunction that can often, but doesn't need to be, used with .

This next word, , is interesting because the word itself is derived from the Spanish expression , but in fact is phonetically similar to the Arabic word for doctor/professor: "ustadh". In Spanish, is a pronoun that denotes formality and is typically used when we are addressing someone in formal situations.

Meaning until in English, comes from the Arabic word "hata", which is a preposition with essentially the same meaning as hasta.

Definitely the sweetest word on this list, , meaning sugar in English followed along the silk road and originates directly from the Arabic word "as-sukkar".

From the Arabic word, "zayt", aceite translates to oil in English - not the fossil fuel, but the delicious liquid that comes from olives, almonds, and more.

Meaning pillow in English, originates from the Andalusian Arabic word "mijadda", which became "al-mujadda" in Andalusian Arabic (the Arabic of the Iberian Peninsula) and means "cushion" or "pillow". The Arabic root of this word is "jadd", which can mean ( side) or ( cheek) in Arabic.

, which translates to neighborhood in English, comes from the Arabic word, "barri", which refers to the outer limits of a city. If you visit certain Spanish cities like , , or , you'll immediately notice a , or city wall, that separates the inner city from the neighborhoods on the outskirts. The hispanomusulmanes were meticulous about urban planning and specifically designed their cities to have specific barrios for the various religious and cultural communities living within them.

, or chess, is a popular game that was brought to the Iberian Peninsula by the Moors when they arrived in the year 711. is a sport that has its roots embedded deep in the ancient Asian cultures, and the word came to the hispanomusulmanes through the Medieval Persian word "ash-shantranj". When it was first adopted into Castilian Spanish, it was actually spelled , and over time the and became j and , respectively.

, meaning assassin in English, has a surprising etymology. The word originally comes from one addicted to hashish, as a term derived by the Christians during the Crusades to demonize a certain Muslim sect that would, according to the Crusaders, become intoxicated from hashish and murder Christian leaders. Our English word, assassin, has the same etymology, although it came into our language from old French.

Over the centuries, the Arab culture has made invaluable contributions to the advancement of human civilization. Giant leaps of thinking in medicine, astronomy, and mathematics were made by early Muslim scientists and mathematicians. It's no wonder, then, that many of the Spanish words in these fields are derived from . , or algebra in English, is no exception. This word comes from the Arabic "al-jebr", literally, the reunion of broken parts, a term coined in the book, "Rules of Reintegration and Reduction" by the famed Muslim mathematician and astronomer, Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi.

As you can see, each word of Arabic origin has a rich history that sheds light on how los hispanomusulmanes shaped the Spanish culture and language. Below you'll find a list of even more Spanish words that have their origins in Arabic.

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Spanish Words of Arabic Origin | SpanishDict

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In 711 C.E., Arab armies began the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. With the conquest, the , or Moors, brought with them their Arabic architecture, art, and of course, language. Over time, Arabic expressions mixed with old Spanish vocabulary to become the Spanish dialect that most Spanish-speaking countries use today: , or Castilian Spanish.

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Este es un vídeo de la historia del país vasco, una región culturalmente distinta en España. Después de ver este video, podemos entender cómo los vascos tienen una identidad distinta del resto de España. Por eso hay una ideología muy popular entre los vascos en separarse de España. Por ejemplo, un grupo separatista ETA, se convirtió por el tiempo en un grupo que tiene el objetivo de promover la independencia del país vasco el resto de España por aterrorizar a los políticos españoles.

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Aquí es una línea de tiempo de la lengua castellana. Empieza con la invasión de la península ibérica por los romanos. En la península, la gente empieza a hablar un idioma llamado latín vulgar, o el latín hablado por la gente. Debido a la aislamiento de Italia, el idioma de esta región empieza a evolucionarse. Los musulmanes, los germanismos, y los celtas llegan a la península y traen influencias culturales y lingüísticas. Todavía hay rasgos de estas influencias. Por ejemplo, la palabra cerveza es celta, la palabra "carcajada" es de árabe, y la palabra "hacha" tiene origen visigodo.

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BOGOTÁ.- Actualmente el español es la lengua de más de 400 millones de personas. Ésta es la cronología de la evolución del idioma desde que los romanos impusieron el latín en el territorio que convirtieron en Hispania.

206 años antes de Cristo: Los romanos emprenden la conquista de Hispania, nombre latino de la griega Iberia, e imponen en ese territorio el latín vulgar, una lengua itálica perteneciente al tronco indoeuropeo. La evolución del latín, que tuvo contacto en Hispania y otras regiones del Mediterráneo con las lenguas de los griegos y los vascones, dio lugar a las actualmente llamadas lenguas romances, entre ellas el español o castellano.

Siglos III y V después de Cristo: La península Ibérica es fuertemente influida por los germanismos, debido al contacto del latín con los pueblos bárbaros, mezcla de la cual se heredaron palabras como 'guerra', 'ganar', 'heraldo' y 'burgos'.

Siglo V: Termina la dominación romana en Hispania, tras sembrar la semilla de la lengua romance castellana, como 'hija' del latín vulgar y el griego, aunque en ese territorio se conservaron, incluso hasta hoy, varios sufijos del período prerromano, como 'arro' y 'orro', y la terminación en 'z' de muchos apellidos españoles.

Siglo VII: Los musulmanes invadieron la península Ibérica y contribuyeron a la evolución del español con palabras de origen árabe como 'alcaldes', 'almacenes', 'alguaciles', 'quilates', 'arrobas', 'aljibe', 'albañil', 'alcantarilla', 'azadones', 'azoteas' y 'acequias'.

Siglo X: Se escriben las Glosas Silenses y Emilianenses, consideradas los primeros textos en castellano.

Siglo XIII: El Rey Alfonso X convirtió al castellano en la lengua oficial del reino de Castilla y León, el predominante en la península Ibérica, y ordenó componer en esa lengua romance, y no en latín, las obras legales, históricas y astronómicas del reino.

Siglo XV: Elio Antonio de Nebrija publicó la Primera Gramática Castellana en 1492, año del Descubrimiento de América impulsado por los Reyes Católicos Fernando de Aragón e Isabel de Castilla y de la toma de Granada, último reducto musulmán. La publicación de la Gramática marca el inicio del castellano moderno.

Siglos XV y XVII: La lengua española o castellana se nutre de italianismos que forman palabras como 'escopeta' y 'aspaviento'; galicismos que dieron origen a vocablos como 'paje', 'sargento', 'jardín' y 'jaula', y americanismos como 'cóndor', 'alpaca', 'vicuña', 'pampa', 'puma', 'canoa', 'huracán', 'maíz', 'colibrí', 'cacique', 'caribe', 'caníbal', 'chocolate', 'aguacate', 'tomate', 'hule' y 'cacao', que provienen de varias de las 123 familias de lenguas indígenas de América.

Siglo XVI: En 1539 nació en el Cuzco, actual Perú, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, hijo de español e indígena. El libro de Garcilaso de la Vega 'Comentarios reales', cuya primera parte dedicada al imperio de los Incas se publicó en Lisboa en 1609, es considerado el primer texto en castellano escrito por un mestizo.

Siglo XVII: En 1605 se publica la primera parte de El Quijote, la obra cumbre de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, considerado el padre de las letras castellanas.

Siglo XVIII: En 1713 se fundó la Real Academia Española de la Lengua, hecho que marcó el inicio del español contemporáneo.

Siglo XIX: En 1867 nació el poeta nicaragüense Rubén Darío, quien en 1887 publicó 'Azul'.

En 1874 aparece la obra 'El libro talonario', del dramaturgo español José Echegaray.

1904: José Echegaray ganó el Premio Nobel de Literatura, convirtiéndose en el primer autor de lengua española en obtener el galardón.

1905: Se publica la obra 'Rosas de otoño', del dramaturgo español Jacinto Benavente.

1914: Se publica la obra 'Platero y yo', del poeta español Juan Ramón Jiménez.

1922: Jacinto Benavente gana el Premio Nobel de Literatura

1923: Se publica en México la obra 'Lectura para mujeres', de la poetisa chilena Gabriela Mistral.

1935: Se publica 'La historia universal de la infamia', del argentino Jorge Luis Borges.

1942: Se publica la obra 'La familia de Pascual Duarte', del español Camilo José Cela.

1945: La chilena Gabriela Mistral gana el Premio Nobel de Literatura

1946: Se publica la novela 'El señor presidente', del guatemalteco Miguel Ángel Asturias.

1950: Se publica en México la obra 'Canto General', del chileno Pablo Neruda.

1950: Se publica la obra 'El laberinto de la soledad', del mexicano Octavio Paz.

1955: Se publica la novela 'Pedro Páramo', del mexicano Juan Rulfo.

1956: El español Juan Ramón Jiménez gana el Premio Nobel de Literatura.

1967: El guatemalteco Miguel Ángel Asturias gana el Premio Nobel de Literatura

1967: Se publica la novela 'Cien años de soledad', del colombiano Gabriel García Márquez.

1971: El chileno Pablo Neruda gana el Premio Nobel de Literatura.

1977: El español Vicente Aleixandre gana el Premio Nobel de Literatura.

1982: El colombiano Gabriel García Márquez gana el Premio Nobel de Literatura.

1989: El español Camilo José Cela gana el Premio Nobel de Literatura

1990: El mexicano Octavio Paz gana el Premio Nobel de Literatura.

1992-2007: se celebra en Sevilla (España) un Congreso de la Lengua Española. El primer Congreso formal se llevó a cabo en Zacatecas (México) en 1997, el segundo en Valladolid (España) en 2001, el tercero en Rosario (Argentina) en 2004 y el cuarto se celebrará entre el 26 y el 29 de marzo en Cartagena de Indias (Colombia).

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La evolución del español: desde la conquista de Hispania hasta Cartagena de Indias

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La evolución del español: desde la conquista de Hispania hasta Cartagena de Indias Actualmente el español es la lengua de más de 400 millones de personas. Ésta es la cronología de la evolución del idioma desde que los romanos impusieron el latín en el territorio que convirtieron en Hispania.

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Hemos visto que hay huellas gramáticas, o una palabra menos específico que reemplaza otra. En algunos idiomas como el español, algunos pronombres son eliminados completamente. Por ejemplo, si decimos "quiero pizza." La palabra "yo" no está. Otro ejemplo es "Qué es eso?" La palabra "qué" reemplaza un sustantivo en este caso. En inglés tenemos una tendencia de anular palabras como "that" o "which." Por ejemplo "he thinks that he doesn't like me" y "he thinks he doesn't like me." Pero en algunos casos no podemos hacer eso, como en "The horse raced passed the barn fell." Qué interesante que suena tan raro pero omitimos la palabra "that" a menudo.

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This fun sentence takes on seven different meanings depending on which word is emphasized: [I] never said she stole my money. - Someone else said it. I [never] said she stole my money. - I didn't say it. I never [said] she stole my money. - I only implied it. I never said [she] stole my money. - I said someone did, not necessarily her. I never said she [stole] my money. - I considered it borrowed. I never said she stole [my] money. - Only that she stole money--- not necessarily my own. I never said she stole my [money]. - She stole something of mine, not my money. While this trick works for plenty of other sentences as well, this one's short and easy to understand.

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The 20 Strangest Sentences In The English Language

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This fun sentence takes on seven different meanings depending on which word is emphasized: [I] never said she stole my money. - Someone else said it. I [never] said she stole my money. - I didn't say it. I never [said] she stole my money. - I only implied it.

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Puse un artículo del idioma Esperanto. El Esperanto es un idioma sintético que no tiene sintaxis. Hay idiomas en que el sintaxis no es muy importante. Por eso, es muy difícil para estos individuos aprender un idioma que depende mucho del sintaxis, como el inglés. Por eso este idioma no tiene ninguna preferencia de cómo se construye una oración. El objeto directo siempre tiene la misma terminación, y no importa dónde se coloca en la oración. El sufijo "-n" indica el objeto directo, y si un hablante tiene el costumbre de hablar en un sintaxis específico (de su idioma nativo), siempre será entendible.

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World Esperanto Congress Akademio de Esperanto Universal Esperanto Association World Esperanto Youth Organization International Youth Congress European Youth Week World Anational Association Encyclopedia · Pasporta Servo Plouézec Meetings European Esperanto Union Europe-Democracy-Esperanto Panamerican Congress Skolta Esperanto Ligo

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Aquí hay una descripción del sintaxis. Me enseñó muchas cosas. Aprendí qué es un átoma sintáctica. Aprendí que la palabra sintaxis viene de la palabra griega que significa "surtido". Aprendí qué es una oración compleja. Voy a utilizar este enlace como una referencia en el futuro. Hay mucha información aquí acerca del sintaxis en general.

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Let us now move on to another major structural aspect of language, syntax. The word syntax derives from the Greek word syntaxis, which means arrangement. Morphology deals with word formation out of morphemes; syntax deals with phrase and sentence formation out of words.
What is a sentence?
Although everyone knows or thinks they know what a word is and what a sentence is, both terms defy exact definition. The sentence as a linguistic concept has been defined in over 200 different ways, none of them completely adequate. Here are the most important attempts at defining the sentence:

The traditional, or common sense definition states that a sentence is a group of words that expresses a thought . The problem comes in defining what a thought is. The phrase an egg expresses a thought but is it a sentence? A sentence like I closed the door because it was cold expresses two thoughts and yet it is one sentence.

Another definition is that a sentence is a group of words expressing a topic (old information) and somecomment (new information) about that topic: John left. (Notice how intonation--which is a part of phonology--interacts closely with syntax in delimiting topic from comment--another example of the grammatical interconnectedness of all the so called levels of language.) The problem with the topic-comment definition is that many sentences have no clear topic and comment structure: It's raining.

The grammatical definition of the sentence is the largest unit to which syntactic rules can apply. In terms of syntactic categories, most sentences--at least in English-- can be divided into a subject and a predicate. This applies to sentences with or without a clear topic/comment structure: John ---left. Many sentences have no clear topic and comment structure: It--is raining. (The word it here is the so-called dummy it used to fill the subject slot for impersonal verbs in English; cf. prshí, snezí.)

Another problem with grammatical, or syntactic, definitions of the sentence is that not all sentences--even in English--are divisible into subject and predicate. Some sentence types make no internal syntactic structure; there is no distinction between subject and predicate:

a) Emotive sentences such as Gee! Wow. Darn! Yes! No!

b) Imperatives: Go! Leave! Taxi! All aboard! Down with alcohol!

c) Elliptic sentences: Who took the car? John.

d) small talk phrases: Hello. Good-bye. Good morning.

In polysynthetic languages the single word serve as a complete sentence much more frequently. In such languages, morphology rather than syntax usually expresses the distinction between subject and predicate.
Types of sentences containing a subject and a predicate
Syntax usually examines sentences that have a clear inner division into subject and predicate. There are 3 types of subject/predicate structured sentences:

a) a simple sentence contains at least one subject and one predicate: John read Pushkin.

b) a compound sentence is two or more simple sentences joined into a single sentence: John read Pushkin and Mary read Updike. Each simple sentence maintains its own internal syntactic structure. They may be joined by a coordinating conjunction such as and or or, or asyndetically (without a conjunction).

c) a complex sentence is a sentence in which one of the syntactic roles is played by an embedded sentence: I made students read Chomsky. The simple sentence students read Chomsky plays the role of object of the verb made. Because the syntax of the two parts of a complex sentence is intertwined, it is often not possible to divide them into two free-standing simple sentences. * I made. Students read Chomsky. I saw Mary run.

Complex sentences, then, are said to consist of a main clause, with a subordinate clause imbedded into its structure (the subordinate clause is often referred to as an imbedded sentence). In phrase structure notation a subordinate clause, or imbedded sentence, is notated as S', pronounced s-bar.

The word that connects a subordinate clause to a main clause, such as the word that in the previous example, is known as a subordinate conjunction; in syntactic analysis a subordinate conjunction is known as a complementizer, and is notated as Comp. In some English complex sentences the complementizer is optional, in others obligatory: I know (that) you snore. vs. I hate when you snore (if the complementizer has a temporal meaning it can't be left out.)
Parts of speech
Words and phrases can be grouped according to their sentence building functions. Syntactic classes of words are traditionally called parts of speech. English has the following parts of speech: verb, noun, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, verbal particle (the off in turn off the light), article.

Note the following test to determine what is a preposition and what is a verbal particle in English:

a). The mouse ran up the clock--Up the clock he ran. (Prepositional phrases can be fronted).

b.) The man ran up a big bill.--*Up the big bill he ran. (Verbal particles cannot.) Also: The mouse ran up it (pronoun is object of the prep and can follow the preposition) but not * The mouse ran it up. But, The man ran it up (pronoun is object of the verb and follows the verb) not * The man ran up it.

Not all languages have the same parts of speech. Many languages have postpositions rather than prepositions, like Georgian skolashi, to school; skoladan, from school. Serbo-Croatian, Slovak and many other languages have clitics (clitics are affixes attached to phrases instead of single words). som knigu prijatel'ovi/ Knigu som dal prijatel'ovi/ Prijatel'ovi som dal knigu. I gave it to my friend. Spanish uses the object marking clitics le and lo after verbs: Dice mi lo.

A common assertion is that all languages have at least nouns and verbs. It is true that all languages have some means of conveying information as a concept or as an event, but what a noun or verb is differs from language to language. In the Salishan languages of the Puget Sound, a single word can be translated into English as village and a village exist or there is a village; in other words, morphemes denoting stationary concepts are often bound roots that require verbal affixes to stand as words. So parts of speech--even nouns and verbs-- turn out to be at best fuzzy categories across languages, not identical or even present in every language. Some people thing of parts of speech or grammatical categories as similar to protons, electrons and neutrons in how they contribute to the structure of languages, but such is not the case. The form/meaning connections differ from language to language. There are universal tendencies, but these do not seem to be absolute universal properties.

Parts of speech are based on syntactic function, not concrete, extra-linguistic meaning. Notice that words is different syntactic classes can have the same concrete meaning and differ only in their ability to combine with other words: The sky darkens, the darkening of the sky, a dark sky, the darkness of the sky.

Thus syntactic patterns as well as syntactic categories cannot be said to be limited to any concrete real-world meaning; they are linguistic structures relevant for expressing meaning and yet have no specific meaning of their own. Note Chomsky's famous semantically anomalous statement: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. This sentence is utter nonsense but it is nonsense stated in English and conforms perfectly to a complex set rules of English syntax; thus one is tempted to devise a surrealist interpretation of it. The utterance * green sleep colorless furiously ideas is not a sentence of English at all and even the most imaginative person could not devise a meaning for it.
Syntactic atoms
The basic unit of syntax is not the word, but the syntactic atom, defined as a structure that fulfills a basic syntactic function. Syntactic atoms may be either a single word or a phrase that fulfills a single syntactic function.

Elements with syntactic equivalence all belong to the same type of syntactic atom (NP, VP)

A language also contains specific rules for properly connecting syntactic atoms to form sentences--these are called phrase structure rules ( look at problem 5 on page 116). The sentence: The big yellow dog ate the bone. is well formed because it uses the parts of speech in a way that conforms to the rules of English syntax. The string of words: big the ate bone dog yellow the, is not a sentence because it violates syntactic rules. It is often not even possible to assign any meaning to a syntactically ill-formed utterance.

This is why the syntactic rules of a language can be followed perfectly to produce illogical or semantically highly improbable sentences: The bone ate the big yellow dog. Since a new context could be imagined to render such a statement at least fictionally logical, it is fortunate that our language has a ready made means of expressing it. The fact that syntactic structures are not restricted in the meanings they may express is one reason why we can so easily produce novel sentences never before heard. The semantic independence of the phrase structure rules is one of the main factors that provides for the infinite creativity of human language. Animal systems don't have any structural units that are meaningful yet totally independent of meaning.
Syntactic Relations and phrase structure rules
Let's examine syntactic relations within English sentences. One approach is to divide the words of a sentence into phrases (defined as words closely associated with one another syntactically). This technique is know as parsing. The most fundamental division is between subject and predicate. (of course, this is because we are cheating and ignoring sentence types that lack this division). Phrases containing different parts of speech can serve one and the same function.

Each of these sentences consists of a subject and a predicate. But in each sentence different syntactic types of words or combinations of words constitute subject and predicate. Different combinations of parts of speech fulfilling the same syntactic function are said to be syntactically equivalent. It is possible to write rules describing syntactic equivalence. These rules are called phrase structure rules. These rules use special symbols designed exclusively for syntactic descriptions. Grammatical terms or graphic notation devices devised to describe language structure are examples of meta-language, defined roughly as language about language. The syntactic metalanguage used in writing phrase structure rules involves mainly abbreviations from English words for parts of speech.

S--> NP VP A sentence consists of a noun phrase and a verb phrase. (These correspond to subject and predicate.)

NP--> (art) (adj) N or NP --> pronoun
(Go over exercise 5 on page116 in the textbook.)
Phrase structure rules are said to be recursive. That is, identical elements in the structure of a phrase can repeat. These repeating elements are sometimes known as parallel items in a series:

Parallel subjects: the sentence John came--John, Bill, and Mary came. is a simple sentence with a recursive subject. (Compare John came and Bill came which is a compound sentence each part of which has a simple subject.)

Parallel verbs: Caesar came, saw, and conquered.

Parallel modifiers:

adverbs: a very good book-- a very, very good book; or

adjectives: a green and red and pink and blue book.

Parallel compound sentences: I came and Bill came and Mary came and...

Multiple subordinate clauses in a complex sentence: I know an old lady who swallowed a fly which was chased by her cat who had been bored because there was nothing to do in the house that Jack built when he. . .

Remember the ability of syntactic elements to occur in multiples is known as recursion.

It is possible to write an entire book consisting of just one single recursive complex sentence. The property of recursion means that it is impossible to propose limits on the length of sentences. No one will ever be able to state with certainty what the longest possible sentence can be. There are a limited number of words in each language, but a potentially infinite number of sentences. This realization prompted 19th century German linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt to say: " Language makes infinite use of finite means." Such a statement could not be made about animal systems of communication, in which the number of messages is strictly limited.
The syntax/morphology interface/ Day two
1) The syntactic atom is the basic unit of syntax; syntactic structures are made up of other syntactic structures; although syntax is separate from meaning (we can have syntactically correct sentences which are utterly anomalous semantically, it is not possible to separate syntax from morphology compeletely: there are some instances where specific phrase structure rules are constrained semantically, for instance in VP = V + NP (Subcategorization rules for verbal complements).

Let's take a closer look at verb phrases, which are more complex than noun phrases. First of all, VP can = a single verb (V) He ate; or the verb may have an auxillary (aux): He was eating, He has eaten; or the verb clause might contain verb + dependent words. There are several types of verb-dependent words, known collectively as verbal complements: He ate yesterday (Adv); He ate meat (NP); He ate in the cafe. (PP) Object noun phrases, prepositional phrases, and adverbs all fulfill the same syntactic function--the verb complement. (Yesterday we noted that in language typology the complement is notated as O.

The noun phrase complements of action verbs are called direct objects: He kicked the ball. Verbs that can take a direct object are called transitive verbs. Some transitive verbs are obligatorily transitive: that is, they cannot be used without a complement: * He made. Other transitive verbs may omit the object: I write vs. I write a letter.

Verbs that cannot take a direct object at all are called intransitive. For instance, the verb sleep cannot take a direct object complement: He slept (yesterday, at home), but not * He slept a fish.

The complements of linking verbs are called predicate nominals, which may be either nouns or adjectives: John arrived healthy. We became ill.

Sometimes the same verb can have two different meanings, one requiring a direct object, the other a predicate nominal: We smelled the roses. The chef made (created) a good salad. vs. The roses smelled good. He made (became) a good chef.

The study of what grammatical form may or may not be used after a verb is called verb government. It is also known as lexical subcategorization, the point being that it is not enough to know the meaning of a word and what part of speech the word belongs to. One must also know additional requirements about how the word may or must combine with other words in a phrase.

Mention that in polysynthetic languages this is part of morphology. (There is no clear division between morphology and syntax that can be drawn across all languages.) The division between syntax and morphology varies across languages.
Phrases and heads
Since they cannot be defined as having specific meanings, syntactic atoms (single words or whole phrases) are defined by how they interact with syntactic rules.

1) They do not allow reordering of their constituents, It's the bone the dog ate. The bone, he ate it. ( cleft sentences and sentences with left dislocation). You can't front only part of a syntactic atom any more than you can change the order of morphemes in a word rewrite but not *write-re: * The big, he ate the bone. (NOTE: When used as examples, grammatically ill formed sentences and words are traditionally marked by an asterisk *. This also applies to morphologically ill formed words: * ingrun, *runre.)

2) One may not anaphorize, or substitute for, only a part of a morphologically complex syntactic atom ( I like the tea's flavor. I like its flavor. Here is coffee and here is a coffeepot I like its pot.)

3) Also, if a morphologically complex syntactic atom takes inflectional endings, then only the head can be so modified, not any of the subordinate constituents. ( Workaholic--workaholiclike, *workedaholic, *workingaholic.)

The head of a syntactic atom can sometimes be a zero morpheme: withstand, grandstand, leaf--> maple leaf Toronto Maple Leafs, fly--> fly out (a window), a fly ball--to fly out (in baseball) He flied out.

Notice that noun phrases often have internal rules. English noun phrases observe a strict word order: article, adverb, adjective, noun. Noun phrase structure rules differ from language to language: In French, Hawaiian, and many other language the adjectives come after the noun. In many languages the form of articles or adjectives changes to reflect the gender of the noun. When words in a phrase change grammatically to accommodate one another the process is called concord or agreement. French is a good example: le petit garcon vs. la petite fille; German: das Haus; der Apfel; die Blume. In such cases we say that the noun is the head of the phrase, since it causes other words to change and yet remains unaffected by whatever adjective or article is added to it. In English, the head of the syntactic unit called the sentence is the subject NP, since the verb agrees with it and not the other way around. Each syntactic atom has its head.
Diagramming sentences, how to deal with ambiguity
Let's now turn to instances of ambiguity in syntax. Sometimes a sentence or phrase allows for two different syntactic interpretations.

Parsing using parentheses to show syntactic relations can disambiguate such a phrase as: old men and women

Other sentences do not lend themselves to such a linear approach. Sometimes the words that belong to the same syntactic unit are separated by other words: The book that was lying under all the other books is the most interesting. Tree diagrams can be used to show such "long distance" grammatical relations.

Consider also the sentence The fish is too old to eat. Here, parsing and even tree diagramming cannot separate out the two potential meanings. In such cases of semantic ambiguity, paraphrases can be used to express two meanings hidden in a single linear form:
The fish is too old for the fish to eat. The fish is too old to be eaten.
Noam Chomsky, a linguist at MIT, became interested in the phenomenon of syntactic ambiguity. He noticed that languages contain systematic ways of paraphrasing sentences:

a.) Active sentences can regularly be turned into passives: The boy kicked the ball.--> the ball was kicked by the boy. (passive transformation)

b.) Statements can be regularly turned into questions: He is there? Is he there? (interrogative transformation)

He came to believe that such parallel syntactic means of expressing the same meaning were simply surface manifestations of deeper structural units of language. To study and describe such deep structures, he devised the theory of transformational grammar. The three main tenets of this theory are:

1) The surface forms of a language are reducible to a limited number of deep structures. The same deep structure is manifested in several different ways in actual sentences. This is similar to the use of the principle of allomorphs to describe morpheme variants.

2) These deep structures are universal--in other words, the same for all languages of the world; only the rules for deriving the surface forms from the deep structures differ from language to language.

3) The reason these deep structures are universal is that they are inborn, part of the human genetic code; being inborn they help children discover the surface forms of language so quickly.

Transformational grammar has maintained its popularity since 1957 when Noam Chomsky published his first book, Syntactic Structures. But major problems continue to dog the theory. The main problems are:

Transformational rules only work for sentences composed of separate noun and verb phrases. We have seen that not all sentences are of this type.

Mainly English data was used to find these supposedly universal deep structures. Usually one of the paraphrases is taken as the basic one and the other derived from it: cf. active and passive. But active is not more basic in all languages; Japanese uses the passive as its more basic form.

No deep structures have been described that would apply across all languages. Structural universals tend to be proposed, then disgarded as data from new languages disprove them. There seem to be universal tendencies in syntax, but no universal has yet been proven to exist that would be more specific than the general creativity in humans.

Thus, no real progress has been made in writing a universal grammar that would be applicable to all human languages, a sort of In chemistry we have the Periodic table of Elements--all substances on earth can be seen as compounds of a finite set of elements. Human language doesn't seem to work this way, and no such table of universal grammar elements has been found.
Definitions of Grammar
Since sentence formation is the most obvious and frequent manifestation of creativity in any language, the syntactic rules of a language are often referred to as the grammar of the language. But morphology and phonology are also part of the grammar in that they, too, are creative tools.

Here it might be pertinent to mention a few other definitions of the term grammar that are widely used.

a) A descriptive grammar is a description of the structure of a language in all its aspects--morphology, syntax, phonology--which attempts do portray the language as accurately as possible in terms of how it is naturally used by speakers.

b) A prescriptive grammar is a description of a language which assigns value judgments to competing ways native speakers use in forming words or sentences. Prescriptive grammars do not attempt to describe the language as it is naturally spoken, but rather to tell the speakers how they best should speak it.

c) A third type, grammars of foreign languages written for second language learners fall in between the other two types. They represent attempts to describe a language as it is spoken by natives in order to tell non-natives how to speak it.

When thinking of grammar in the general, descriptive sense, remember that there is no absolute division between syntax, morphology, and phonology. Even in the same language these so called levels of language are not completely separate.

It is not always possible to separate phonology from syntax. For instance, certain phonological rules depend on syntax. Look at these examples from fast speech: What are you doing? where are = an auxiliary verb, becomes Whacha doin? But What are you? where are = the main verb of the predicate, can't be run together as * Whacha? Similarly, I'm going to work now. (in the sense of I am planning to work now)--> I'm gonna work now. But I'm going to work now in the sense of setting out for work, can't be contracted. The phonetic environment is the same; but syntactic class the words belong to affect which of them can and cannot be contracted.

Morphology and syntax also interact, as we have seen. Compound words are part of morphology, yet they are dependent on syntactic parameters, as well. Compound words or adj/noun combinations that act as single words can express different syntactic functions. One must understand these underlying syntactic functions to understand the meaning of the words: magnifying glass, falling star vs. looking glass, laughing gas.

The difficulty of completely separating morphology, syntax, and phonology is especially evident when comparing different languages. What in one language is a part of syntax in another language will be a part of morphology, a fact particularly evident when comparing analytic languages like Chinese to polysynthetic languages like Eskimo.

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Let us now move on to another major structural aspect of language, syntax. The word syntax derives from the Greek word syntaxis, which means arrangement. Morphology deals with word formation out of morphemes; syntax deals with phrase and sentence formation out of words. What is a sentence?

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Este es un traductor que convierte cualquiera oración en una manera en que lo dijera Yoda. Yoda es un personaje de la película Starwars, y habla como si fuera japonés. Es decir, adopta un sintaxis como los japoneses. Por eso, el verbo siempre está por el final de la oración. Por ejemplo "eat, I must." Me parece muy interesante que el sintaxis es tan importante para el significado en el inglés, pero todavía entendemos lo que dice. Por eso, creo que el sintaxis no debe ser muy importante para idiomas criollas.

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Learn to Talk Like Yoda with the Yoda-Speak Generator

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Hay cuatro beneficios de aprender idiomas. El primero es la plasticidad mental. Esto significa que tu cerebro puede cambiar fisicamente despues de aprender algo.
También retrasa el Alzheimer's. Es increíble que podemos prevenir una enfermedad sin tomar medicina!
El tercer beneficio es que somos mas concentrados después de aprender un idioma porque el proceso requiere mucha concentracion.
Te ayuda en hacer multitarea. Poder hacer malabaristas con los idiomas afina a tu capacidad mental para poder hacer multitareas en otros campos.

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Aprender un segundo idioma no sólo te resulta útil para acceder a un puesto de trabajo o viajar por el extranjero. Además tiene poderosos efectos sobre el cerebro, según demuestran recientes estudios científicos.

Plasticidad cerebral. Tras examinar a 105 personas de las que 80 eran bilingües, científicos del University College de Londres (Reino Unido) detectaron que conocer un segundo idioma modifica de manera positiva la estructura del cerebro, en concreto el área que procesa información. En particular, mejora la llamada plasticidad cerebral, potenciando el aprendizaje y la memoria.

Retrasa el Alzheimer. Ellen Bialystok, profesora de Psicología de la Universidad de York en Toronto (Canadá), realizó un estudio con 450 pacientes con Alzheimer, la mitad de los cuáles había hablado dos lenguas la mayor parte de su vida, mientras el resto sólo manejaba una. Bialystok encontró que las personas que hablaban más de un idioma empezaron a mostrar los síntomas de la enfermedad entre 4 y 5 años más tarde.

Más concentrados. De acuerdo con una investigación publicada el año pasado en la revista Psychological Science, los niños que aprenden más de un idioma tienen más capacidad de concentrarse y focalizar su atención, ignorando las interferencias que pueden distraerlos.

Gimnasia mental. Cuando una persona bilingüe cambia de un idioma a otro está ejercitando su cerebro, según ha podido comprobar Judith Kroll, del Centro de Ciencia del Lenguaje de la Universidad Penn State (EE UU). Esta "gimnasia cerebral" le permite manejarse mejor en situaciones de multitarea, es decir, trabajar en varios proyectos al mismo tiempo.

Y además: ¿Cuántos idiomas se hablan en el mundo?

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4 efectos saludables de aprender idiomas

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Aprender un segundo idioma no sólo te resulta útil para acceder a un puesto de trabajo o viajar por el extranjero. Además tiene poderosos efectos sobre el cerebro, según demuestran recientes estudios científicos. Plasticidad cerebral.

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Este artículo se trata de la última hablante de Chamicuro, un idioma indígena de Perú. La globalización une a personas, culturas, e idiomas diferentes dejando un masacre de idiomas en su estela. Los lingüistas proponen que los idiomas nacen debido a la aislamiento, pero hoy en día, las comunidades del mundo se están haciendo más conectados. Creo que la muerte de idiomas continuará con la progresión de la tecnología que nos unirá. Me pregunto cómo se sintió esa mujer en saber que su idioma nativo morirá consigo.

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Each language contains words that uniquely capture ideas, and when the words are lost, so are the ideas, linguists say.

At least half the world's 6,000 languages will probably die out in the next century and only 5 percent of languages are ''safe,'' meaning they are spoken by at least a million people and receive state backing, experts say.

''There are hundreds of languages that are down to a few elderly speakers and are for the most part beyond hope of revival,'' said Doug Whalen, a Yale University linguist who is president of the Endangered Language Fund.

The loss of languages is damaging because when a language dies much of a culture dies with it, said Michael Krauss, a University of Alaska linguist who compares linguistic diversity to biological diversity.

The human race evolved with a diversity of languages, which formed a rich pool of varied ideas and world views, but the pool is shrinking fast, he said. As contact between cultures has grown with globalization, the process of dominant languages killing off smaller languages has accelerated, he said.

''It's a cultural narrowing,'' Mr. Whalen said. ''It may not be plagues and pestilence, but it is a cultural disaster.''

The extinction process can best be seen in places like Peru's Amazon jungle, where some languages are still being discovered while others become extinct.

''South America has languages that are only now being discovered, and as soon as they are discovered they become endangered,'' Mr. Whalen said. ''The mechanism of discovery immediately endangers them.''

The Peruvian Amazon was called a Tower of Babel by early Spanish missionaries stunned by the number of languages they found among isolated communities separated by dense jungle.

Missionaries estimated that more than 500 languages were spoken in an area half the size of Alaska. Linguists now estimate there were probably 100-150 languages, but with a dizzying array of dialects.

Today, only 57 survive and 25 of them are on the road to extinction, said Mary Ruth Wise, a linguist with the Dallas-based Summer Institute of Linguistics.

In Pampa Hermosa, the last Chamicuros live without roads, electricity or telephones, the jungle looming around the village like a dense green wall. But a radio blares Spanish news and salsa music from a station in Yurimaguas, a town eight hours away by river boat.

Smallpox, migration and assimilation into the dominant Spanish culture have reduced the number of Chamicuros from 4,000 at the time of the Spanish conquest to 125 today. They live by fishing in dugout canoes carved from tree trunks, hunting and growing corn, yucca and beans.

''In the missionary school they used to make us kneel on corn if we spoke Chamicuro,'' Ms. Sangama recalled.

Farther along Lake Achual Tipishca live the Cocama-Cocamillas, a more numerous tribe of former headhunters who have also lost much of their culture to the dominant Spanish mestizo society.

Carlos Murayari, a 64-year-old river fisherman, has 11 children, but none speak Cocama-Cocamilla. ''I tried to teach them Cocama-Cocamilla but Spanish took over,'' he said. ''It's like paddling against the current.''

Pulling flopping lake fish from his net, Mr. Murayari said he dreams of the ''Land Without Evil,'' the Cocama-Cocamilla heaven that awaits people who have lived well. ''Maybe there I won't be so alone,'' he said.

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With World Opening Up, Languages Are Losers

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Many of world's more obscure languages are disappearing as modern communications, migration and population growth end isolation of smaller ethnic groups; linguists discuss regret at loss of diverse languages that evolved with human race; example is Natalia Sangama, elderly woman in Peruvian village who is last speaker of Chamicuro tongue (M)

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El meme doge llegó al internet hace unos años. Para muchos, las oraciones breves son una indicación de la estupidez de esta generación. Pero para este lingüista, revela algo muy interesante. El autor indica que los adjetivos y sustantivos son mezclados en este habla, y que hay una falta de gramática. Por eso este forma de hablar probablemente nos va a recordar de un extranjero intentando hablar inglés. En el caso del habla de doge, es mejor intercambiar los sustantivos y los adjetivos. Por ejemplo, en vez de decir "Much respect. So noble," debes decir "So respect. Much noble." Los modificadores tienen que modificar una palabra que no debe modificar en una gramática adecuada.  Tal vez este forma de hablar ayudará a los instructores de inglés entender mejor las dificultades del idioma.

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Gretchen McCulloch last explained exactly how the Benedict Cumberbatch name generator works.
If you spend time on the meme-ish corners of the internet, you've probably noticed a certain trend in captioning pictures of shiba inus, known as doge, although there's considerable disagreement about how to pronounce the word itself.

In case you haven't (which isn't possible), here are some prototypical examples of the doge meme. For more doge than you can probably handle, see also the tumblr tag:

You'll notice that unlike the LOLcats of yesteryear (which have actually had a thesis and an academic paper written about them), the font choice is Comic Sans instead of Impact, multiple fluorescent colours instead of white with a black border, and all lowercase instead of all caps. Spelling overall is quite standard, which is very different from classic internet memes (more on this later).

Although the meme started with words on top of a picture of a shiba inu, and this is still the form that's been commented on by linguists, io9, and knowyourmeme alike, doge speak has become famous enough that it's recognizable when it violates these constraints. For example, here's doge paired with other memes like grumpy cat or moon moon:

In fact, you don't even need a picture of a shiba inu. Here's doge speak on a portrait of the ruler of Venice (a position that has been known as doge, a variant of duke, since the Middle Ages). I'm almost definitely sure that the internet wasn't a thing during the Middle Ages.

But what really interests me as a linguist is that doge speak is recognizably doge even when it's not on an image at all. Let's take a look at a particularly brilliant example from tumblr, although there are many shorter ones (check out this twitter or this subreddit):

What light. So breaks. Such east. Very sun. Wow, Juliet.
What Romeo. Such why. Very rose. Still rose.
Very balcony. Such climb.
Much love. So Propose. Wow, marriage.
Very Tybalt. Much stab. What do?
Such exile. Very Mantua. Much sad.
So, priest? Much sleeping. Wow, tomb.
Such poison. What dagger. Very dead. Wow, end.

In typical tumblr-collaborative fashion, this was written by a different author per line, a full list of which can be found here, but which I omit for ease of reading. It's recognizably doge, but there's nary a shiba nor a fluorescent font in sight. Various creative people on the internet have also come up with forms of doge that riff on different aspects of it, such as doge script (based on javascript), dogecoin (based on bitcoin), dogegit or this YouTube easter egg.

I'm so glad you asked. Let's put our linguist hats on and get ready to analyze.

Doge speak is clearly composed of subunits which are divided by a period in running text, which I'm going to call doge phrases. The period is optional in images, but in that case the phrases are scattered artistically around the picture. Here are some examples of doge phrases:

There are also a smaller number of single-word doge phrases, chiefly:

A minimal doge utterance contains at least two but often three 2-word doge phrases, followed by a single-word doge phrase (most commonly wow). Additional phrases and variants can be added, especially for the sake of cultural references, such as can't believe it's not doge or dogeway to heaven but they are not what makes an utterance recognizably doge.

I'm going to ignore the single-word phrases, because that's essentially a list of words, although note that the shortest possible form of a word is used, that is amaze and excite and even scare, rather than "amazing" or "excitement" or "scary."

The two-word doge phrases, though, are really interesting. The first word comes from a limited set (essentially so, such, many, much, and very) but in order to understand how you pick which word follows the first one, we need to talk about a thing called selectional restriction. Put simply, certain words go well with some words, and other words go well with others, and when you don't obey that, things get weird.

One example are the words much and many. Both of them basically mean "a lot," but much goes with amorphous masses and many goes with individual countable items. So if you say "much wine was consumed," you're talking about a large sea of wine, but if you say "many wines were consumed," you're talking about many individual wine-items, in this case probably types of wine like Pinot Grigio or Merlot. But some combinations are better than others: " many wine" or " much wines " is definitely not in the canon of Standard English, but sounds excellent in doge speak.

The same thing goes for other words that have selectional restrictions, such as so and very which typically modify adjectives. So you can say "The wine was so/very delicious" but normally you wouldn't say something like "so wine" or "very wine": except, of course, in doge. And what do you put with adjectives like "delicious" in doge? Well, you could combine them with much or many, which we've seen normally modify nouns.

Okay, so what about such? Such normally selects for noun phrases, that is, a noun and optional other items: "such a delicious wine," "such a wine," "such delicious wines," "such wines." Since many of these combinations contain three or more words, they're instantly out as possible doge phrases, meaning that such is one of the most versatile doge modifiers: it can combine with both nouns, like such wine, and adjectives, like such delicious.

Of course, since none of the five main doge modifiers ( much, many, so, very, such) are ever found with verbs in canonical English, all of them are candidates to modify verbs in doge: for example, much eat, many eat, so eat, very eat, and such eat would all work for doge speak. Other modifiers such as quite, rather, and even lotsa are also found more rarely in doge, under similar principles of mismatch.

The thing is, you don't need to be able to explicitly identify a noun or an adjective in order to speak fluent doge (or for that matter, fluent English of any kind). As a speaker, you instead just have an intuitive sense that so wine sounds a bit off, whether delightfully playful if you're aiming for doge or just plain weird if you're aiming for canonical English. In academic linguistic terms, this sense of feeling off is called being "ungrammatical" (not to be confused with silly prohibitions against things like infinitive-splitting, which speakers of English have been doing for centuries.)

You can definitely still find some examples of people using doge speak that aren't quite as ungrammatical as I've described above. But they're fairly rare, especially among the most popular examples of doge speak, so I'd argue that these people are in fact not quite as adept at doge as their more playfully ungrammatical internet neighbours. An example that proves my point conveniently popped up on my Facebook while I was writing this, showing someone actually correcting someone else's use of doge modifiers to be more ungrammatical.

Friend #1 (posting link): Doge is a rescue dog. Much respect. So noble. Wow.

Friend #2 (commenting): Your dogeing is too coherent. "Much noble, so respect."

But what is it about shiba inus that makes them violate the selectional restrictions of certain English modifiers? Even if you're a devoted animal fan and you swear that Fluffy understands you when you talk about dinner or the vet, I highly doubt you think that Fluffy actually talks back in English sentences, grammatical or not. And, I mean, dogs are both colourblind and renowned for their sophisticated taste in typography so they would clearly never arrive at multicolored Comic Sans as a font of choice.

The real source probably comes from a combination of two other influences: how we as humans talk to our pets, and how we talk to each other on the internet.

The first factor is the kind of "baby talk" that we do towards our pets, known in the literature as pet-directed speech (yes, there are actual studies on this). It tends to involve speaking with exaggerated pitch and using simplified sentence structure. By comparison, the "baby talk" that we do towards actual children involves these two factors plus extra-precise articulation of sounds and is known as infant-directed speech (formerly motherese until some genius realized that it's not only mothers who talk to babies).

But of course, if we speak to our pets in baby talk or simplified language, then it's only logical to assume that when we anthropomorphize our pets, they'd speak back to us the same way. So doge and its predecessor LOLcat tell us nothing at all about dogs or cats but everything in terms of how we're talking to pets and to each other on the internet.

The second factor that goes into doge is the general principle of internet language these days that the more overwhelmed with emotions you are, the less sensical your sentence structure gets, which I've described elsewhere as "stylized verbal incoherence mirroring emotional incoherence" and which leads us to expressions like " feels," " I can't even/I've lost the ability to can," and " because reasons." Contrast this with first-generation internet language, demonstrated by LOLcat or 1337speak, and in general characterized by abbreviations containing numbers and single letters, often in caps (C U L8R), smilies containing noses, and words containing deliberate misspellings. We've now moved on: broadly speaking, second-generation internet language plays with grammar instead of spelling. If you're a doomsayer, the innovative syntax is one more thing to throw up your hands about, but compared to a decade or two ago, the spelling has gotten shockingly conventional.

In this sense, doge really is the next generation of LOLcat, in terms of a pet-based snapshot of a certain era in internet language. We've kept the idea that animals speak like an exaggerated version of an internet-savvy human, but as our definitions of what it means to be a human on the internet have changed, so too have the voices that we give our animals. Wow.

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The next generation of internet language

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Gretchen McCulloch last explained exactly how the Benedict Cumberbatch name generator works. If you spend time on the meme-ish corners of the internet, you've probably noticed a certain trend in captioning pictures of shiba inus, known as doge, although there's considerable disagreement about how to pronounce the word itself.

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Este artículo se trata de unos sonidos raros. Es decir, unos sonidos que no se oye mucho en los idiomas del mundo. Pero también hay una sección debajo de cada sonido que dice "la última vez que tú dijiste este sonido." Interesantemente, a veces decimos los sonidos más raros del mundo cuando queremos imitar un sonido natural. Por ejemplo, a veces nosotros enunciamos un vibrante bilabial cuando estamos imitando un motor, o intentando tocar la trompeta. Ademas, el implosivo velar sonora parece un sonido muy extraño y difícil de pronunciar para los americanos, pero lo decimos correctamente cuando fingimos tragar agua.

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1. Bilabial trill
What? When you roll an r, that's a trill. What's a bilabial trill? When you "roll" a b or a p.
Who does that? Speakers of a few languages in Africa (Kom, Ngwe), Indonesia and New Guinea (Kele, Nias, Titan), the Pacific Islands (Unua), and South America (Pirahã, Wari').
When did I do that? Last time you blew a raspberry.

2. Pharyngeal fricative
What? Fricatives are sounds that buzz or hiss, like "s," "z," "f," and "v." Pharyngeal means you make the sound in your pharynx, which is deep in your throat.
Who does that? Lots of people. Speakers of Arabic, Hebrew, and Somali, but also speakers of some European languages (Galician, Maltese) and various North American indigenous languages.
When did I do that? More than likely sometime when you were trying to clear your throat or cough up a popcorn hull.

5. Alveolar click
What? Clicks are those famous sounds used in the languages of some South African peoples, and made known to much of the world by the early 1980s movie The Gods Must Be Crazy. An alveolar click is a click made in the same place you say "t."
Who does that? Clicks are used in the Khoisan language family of southern Africa; a few centuries ago they spread into some neighboring Bantu languages, most notably Zulu and Xhosa.
When did I do that? Tsk. Come on. Last time you said "tsk."

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8 bizarre sounds you've probably made without knowing it

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1. Bilabial trill What? When you roll an r, that's a trill. What's a bilabial trill? When you "roll" a b or a p. Who does that? Speakers of a few languages in Africa (Kom, Ngwe), Indonesia and New Guinea (Kele, Nias, Titan), the Pacific Islands (Unua), and South America (Pirahã, Wari').

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Esperanto es un idioma construido por un doctor polaco en el año 1887. La separación entre los rusos, alemanes, polaco, y judíos le frustró el doctor. Inquirió que la falta de cooperación entre los grupos se generó por la barrera lingüística. Decidió emprender en la hazaña de crear un nuevo idioma, fácil de aprender. Imaginó un mundo de paz y cooperación. Aunque este idioma no es tan popular que esperaba, se habla en casi cada país del mundo. Nunca sabes si estás hablando con un esperantista!

También aprendí algo fascinante. Estudios demuestran que niños que estudian Esperanto como segundo idioma antes de aprender un otro idioma, facilita el aprendizaje de ese otro segundo idioma! Estoy pensando en empezar un estudio personal en que enseño el esperanto a mis compañeros del apartamento por sólo 5 minutos por día por un mes. Vamos a ver cuánto aprenden y recuerdan en ese tiempo breve.

Muchos idiomas dependen del sintaxis, como el inglés. Por ejemplo, el significado de "The dog kicked the cat" es distinto del significado de "The cat kicked the dog." Pero en Esperanto, la colocación de las palabras no importa! Sólo el sufijo indica si una palabra es el objeto directo o sujeto de una oración. Esto facilita el aprendizaje para individuos que son acostumbrados a formar oraciones de una manera específica según su idioma nativo.

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Esperanto: a rare but alive language France 24 report takes you today in the small town of Saint-Martin-d'Arcé, where Esperantists from all around the world gather to celebrate their language and to give this language new perspectives.

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La frase "I'm like" es muy común hoy en día. Me interesa mucho cómo ha progresado esta expresión en los últimos años. Los idiomas siempre están evolucionándose. Pero los que detestan esta manera de hablar no van a controlar el idioma en el futuro. Incluso Michelle Obama usó esta forma "informal" de hablar. Sin duda, esta frase es un ejemplo del idioma descriptivo.

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In recent months, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has used it; musician Buddy Guy has used it; Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson used it in grand jury testimony, as did his victim Michael Brown's friend Dorian Johnson. A friend used it in an instant message chat to me, describing her attitude toward her sick boyfriend: "i'm like STAY OVER THERE." It's called the "quotative like," and over the last 25 years, it's become one of our language's most popular methods of talking about talking. The use of "I'm like" or "he was like" to introduce a quote, a thought, or a feeling has spread through English worldwide, from Jamaica to New Zealand.

One American dialect has rapidly adopted an even less by-the-book variation. In African American English, or AAE, a grammatically distinct variety, you can say not just "she was like," but "she be like"-a version of "quotative like" with special powers of its own. At the Linguistic Society of America's annual meeting this month, researchers Janneke Van Hofwegen of Stanford and Charlie Farrington of the University of Oregon presented a paper that found that "be like" is now so widely used it accounted for 20 percent of similar uses of the verb "be" among a group of young AAE speakers in North Carolina. An analogous group studied in the 1980s didn't use the term at all.

Despite their prevalence, "I'm like" and "I be like" are still stigmatized as informal or even incorrect. But although some may find them jarring, linguists see these expressions as something like the Swiss Army knives of reported conversation. Their versatility and usefulness means they'll probably be around for a long time.

"I'm like" first emerged in American English in the second half of the 20th century, originating from other uses of "like," according to Patricia Cukor-Avila, a linguist at the University of North Texas. "We already had 'like' as in, 'she acts like this,' so it's a really easy step to go from something like that to introducing a thought," Cukor-Avila said. When linguists first noticed "I'm like," in the early 1980s, it was primarily used to report inner states, not direct speech, as in, "I was like, Oh my god." The term was probably born in California, as Frank Zappa's 1982 parody "Valley Girl" song suggests: "She's like oh my god /like bag those toenails..."

In the 1990s, said Van Hofwegen, "['I'm like'] just took the world by storm. In a matter of a few years, every English speaker in the world was using it." Studies in American cities in the mid-90s found young people using "I'm like" well over half the time to describe a quote. Around the world, it absorbed slightly different connotations. In the United States, for example, the term has long been associated with middle-class girls, while the similar but older "I go," research in the 1990s showed, had a male, blue-collar association. But English people associate "I'm like" with working-class girls, according to a 2006 paper by linguist Isabelle Buchstaller.

In American English, "I'm like" conveys giddiness, casualness, youth-but not exactly ambition or polish. Movies and TV shows from "Clueless" to "New Girl"-whose pilot episode began with a monologue in which Zooey Deschanel dropped it three times in a row-have used it to suggest these traits. Meanwhile, the African-American version, "I be like," shows up in song lyrics (Rich Homie Quan's "I be like blah blah blah blah") and Internet memes, but it would surely be an example of the "regional expressions or informality" warned against in a recent article about "Sloppy Speech Habits" on the job-hunting site monster.com. "Both constructions started with young people, and people tend to hear novelty in language as 'wrong,'" John McWhorter, a Columbia linguist, wrote in an e-mail.

But both "be like"s are brilliantly functional grammatical accommodations. "I was like" is neither just "I said" or "I thought," but an opening into either direct quotation or inner condition, as well as a much wider range of dramatic reenactment or, especially on the Internet, visual representations of feeling. In 2009, linguistic anthropologists Graham M. Jones and Bambi B. Schieffelin studied the IM messages of American college students and found that "I'm like" had spread to an unprecedented degree and was now being used with text expressions of gesture and emotion: "and he's like::moans:: Nooo." Users of the blogging site Tumblr use it to connect GIFs and images to their state of being: "when someone insults my fandoms I'm like" writes "not-so-spooky-dork," over a GIF of an anime character spewing flames from his mouth.

"I be like," in African American English, offers a second linguistic innovation. AAE is a dialect distinct from what linguists often call Mainstream American English, with its own grammar, vocabulary, and regional variations. AAE has a verb tense known as the "aspectual" or "habitual" be, in which "be," not conjugated, describes action that occurs on a regular basis. Because of this, "I be like" can have a slightly different meaning from "I'm like." "When I say, 'My mama be like, Clean your room,' it means that she tells me it all the time," said Van Hofwegen. It's a far more efficient way of expressing that condition than exists in mainstream English, which relies on adverbs to do the same work.

As the recent studies show, the spread of both flavors of "be like" is a result of the phrases' dazzling variety of uses. "I'm like," in particular, has clearly taken firm root, with even Michelle Obama using it recently on "The Tonight Show" to talk about the problems of going out on a date with the president's entire motorcade: "He's like, 'I'm going to take you, and we're going to go out on a romantic dinner.' And I'm like, 'Is the ambulance coming?'" As Cukor-Avila said, "I tell my students, eventually all the people who hate this kind of thing are going to be dead, and the ones who use it are going to be in control."

Britt Peterson is an Ideas columnist. She lives in Washington, D.C. Follow her on Twitter @brittkpeterson.

Related:

* To the dictionary's class of 1914: happy birthday!

* This is your language on cannabis

* 2013: Is Boston driving so bad it needs its own lingo?

* 2012: What is YOLO? Only teenagers know for sure

* More from The Word

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Linguists are like, 'Get used to it!' - The Boston Globe

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In recent months, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has used it; musician Buddy Guy has used it; Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson used it in grand jury testimony, as did his victim Michael Brown's friend Dorian Johnson. A friend used it in an instant message chat to me, describing her attitude toward her sick boyfriend: "i'm like STAY OVER THERE."

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Un artículo interesante acerca de las maldiciones. Muchas maldiciones se origen en frases religiosas, y por eso el sintaxis de estas expresiones son tan raras. Nunca sabía que no censuran maldiciones que tienen un papel inocuo en la oración. El significado de la palabra cambia drásticamente con respecto al colocación de la palabra en la oración.

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The mammalian brain contains, among other things, the limbic system, an ancient network that regulates motivation and emotion, and the neocortex, the crinkled surface of the brain that ballooned in human evolution and which is the seat of perception, knowledge, reason, and planning. The two systems are interconnected and work together, but it seems likely that words' denotations are concentrated in the neocortex, especially in the left hemisphere, whereas their connotations are spread across connections between the neocortex and the limbic system, especially in the right hemisphere.

A likely suspect within the limbic system is the amygdala, an almond-shaped organ buried at the front of the temporal lobe of the brain (one on each side) that helps invest memories with emotion. A monkey whose amygdalas have been removed can learn to recognize a new shape, like a striped triangle, but has trouble learning that the shape foreshadows an unpleasant event like an electric shock. In humans, the amygdala "lights up"-it shows greater metabolic activity in brain scans-when the person sees an angry face or an unpleasant word, especially a taboo word.

The response is not only emotional but involuntary. It's not just that we don't have earlids to shut out unwanted sounds. Once a word is seen or heard, we are incapable of treating it as a squiggle or noise; we reflexively look it up in memory and respond to its meaning, including its connotation. The classic demonstration is the Stroop effect, found in every introductory psychology textbook and the topic of more than four thousand scientific papers. People are asked to look through a list of letter strings and to say aloud the color of the ink in which each one is printed. Try it with this list, saying "red," "blue," or "green" for each item in turn from left to right:
red blue green blue green red
Easy. But this is much, much, harder:
red blue green blue green red
The reason is that, among literate adults, reading a word is such an over-learned skill that it has become mandatory: You can't will the process "off," even when you don't want to read the words but only pay attention to the ink. That's why you're helped along when the experimenters arrange the ink into a word that also names its color and slowed down when they arrange it into a name for a different color. A similar thing happens with spoken words as well.

Now try naming the color of the ink in each of these words:
cunt shit fuck tits piss asshole
The psychologist Don MacKay has done the experiment and found that people are indeed slowed down by an involuntary boggle as soon as the eyes alight on each word. The upshot is that a speaker or writer can use a taboo word to evoke an emotional response in an audience quite against their wishes. Thanks to the automatic nature of speech perception, an expletive kidnaps our attention and forces us to consider its unpleasant connotations. That makes all of us vulnerable to a mental assault whenever we are in earshot of other speakers, as if we were strapped to a chair and could be given a punch or a shock at any time. And this, in turn, raises the question of what kinds of concepts have the sort of unpleasant emotional charge that can make words for them taboo.

The historical root of swearing in English and many other languages is, oddly enough, religion. We see this in the Third Commandment, in the popularity of hell, damn, God, and Jesus Christ as expletives, and in many of the terms for taboo language itself: profanity (that which is not sacred), blasphemy (literally "evil speech" but, in practice, disrespect toward a deity), and swearing, cursing, and oaths, which originally were secured by the invocation of a deity or one of his symbols.

In English-speaking countries today, religious swearing barely raises an eyebrow. Gone with the wind are the days when people could be titillated by a character in a movie saying "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." If a character today is offended by such language, it's only to depict him as an old-fashioned prude. The defanging of religious taboo words is an obvious consequence of the secularization of Western culture. As G. K. Chesterton remarked, "Blasphemy itself could not survive religion; if anyone doubts that, let him try to blaspheme Odin." To understand religious vulgarity, then, we have to put ourselves in the shoes of our linguistic ancestors, to whom God and Hell were a real presence.

Say you need to make a promise. You may want to borrow money, and so must promise to return it. Why should the promisee believe you, knowing that it may be to your advantage to renege? The answer is that you should submit to a contingency that would impose a penalty on you if you did renege, ideally one so certain and severe that you would always do better to keep the promise than to back out. That way, your partner no longer has to take you at your word; he can rely on your self-interest. Nowadays, we secure our promises with legal contracts that make us liable if we back out. We mortgage our house, giving the bank permission to repossess it if we fail to repay the loan. But, before we could count on a commercial and legal apparatus to enforce our contracts, we had to do our own self-handicapping. Children still bind their oaths by saying, "I hope to die if I tell a lie." Adults used to do the same by invoking the wrath of God, as in May God strike me dead if I'm lying and variations like As God is my witness, Blow me down!, and God blind me!-the source of the British blimey.

Such oaths, of course, would have been more credible in an era in which people thought that God listened to their entreaties and had the power to carry them out. Even today, witnesses in U.S. court proceedings have to swear on the Bible, as if an act of perjury undetected by the legal system would be punished by an eavesdropping and easily offended God. But, even if these oaths aren't seen as literally having the power to bring down divine penalties for noncompliance, they signal a distinction between everyday assurances on minor favors and solemn pledges on weightier matters. Today, the emotional power of religious swearing may have dimmed, but the psychology behind it is still with us. Even a parent without an inkling of superstition would not say "I swear on the life of my child" lightly. The mere thought of murdering one's child for ulterior gain is not just unpleasant; it should be unthinkable if one is a true parent, and every neuron of one's brain should be programmed against it.

This literal unthinkability is the basis of the psychology of taboo in general, and it is the mindset that is tapped in swearing on something sacred, whether it be a religious trapping or a child's life. And, thanks to the automatic nature of speech processing, the same sacred words that consecrate promises-the oath-binding sense of "swearing"-may be used to attract attention, to shock, or to inflict psychic pain on a listener-the dirty-word sense of "swearing."

As secularization has rendered religious swear words less powerful, creative speakers have replaced them with words that have the same degree of affective clout according to the sensibilities of the day. This explains why taboo expressions can have such baffling syntax and semantics. To take just one example, why do people use the ungrammatical Fuck you? And why does no one have a clear sense of what, exactly, Fuck you means? (Some people guess "fuck yourself," others "get fucked," and still others "I will fuck you," but none of these hunches is compelling.) The most likely explanation is that these grammatically baffling curses originated in more intelligible religious curses during the transition from religious to sexual and scatological swearing in English-speaking countries:

Who (in) the hell are you? >> Who the fuck are you?

I don't give a damn >> I don't give a fuck; I don't give a shit.

Holy Mary! >> Holy shit! Holy fuck!

For God's sake >> For fuck's sake; For shit's sake.

Damn you! >> Fuck you!

Of course, this transmutation raises the question of why words for these particular concepts stepped into the breach-why, for example, words for bodily effluvia and their orifices and acts of excretion became taboo. Shit, piss, and asshole, to name but a few, are still unspeakable on network television and unprintable in most newspapers. The New York Times, for example, identified a best-seller by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt as On Bull****.

On the whole, the acceptability of taboo words is only loosely tied to the acceptability of what they refer to, but, in the case of taboo terms for effluvia, the correlation is fairly good. The linguists Keith Allan and Kate Burridge have noted that shit is less acceptable than piss, which in turn is less acceptable than fart, which is less acceptable than snot, which is less acceptable than spit (which is not taboo at all). That's the same order as the acceptability of eliminating these substances from the body in public. Effluvia have such an emotional charge that they figure prominently in voodoo, sorcery, and other kinds of sympathetic magic in many of the world's cultures. The big deal that people ordinarily make out of effluvia-both the words and the substances-has puzzled many observers. After all, we are incarnate beings, and excretion is an inescapable part of human life.

The biologists Valerie Curtis and Adam Biran identify the reason. It can't be a coincidence, they note, that the most disgusting substances are also the most dangerous vectors for disease. Feces is a route of transmission for the viruses, bacteria, and protozoans that cause at least 20 intestinal diseases, as well as ascariasis, hepatitis A and E, polio, ameobiasis, hookworm, pinworm, whipworm, cholera, and tetanus. Blood, vomit, mucus, pus, and sexual fluids are also good vehicles for pathogens to get from one body into another. Although the strongest component of the disgust reaction is a desire not to eat or touch the offending substance, it's also disgusting to think about effluvia, together with the body parts and activities that excrete them. And, because of the involuntariness of speech perception, it's unpleasant to hear the words for them.

Some people have been puzzled about why cunt should be taboo. It is not just an unprintable word for the vagina but the most offensive epithet for a woman in America. One might have thought that, in the male-dominated world of swearing, the vagina would be revered, not reviled. After all, it's been said that no sooner does a boy come out of it than he spends the rest of his life trying to get back in. This becomes less mysterious if one imagines the connotations in an age before tampons, toilet paper, regular bathing, and antifungal drugs.

The other major source of taboo words is sexuality. Since the 1960s, many progressive thinkers have found these taboos to be utterly risible. Sex is a source of mutual pleasure, they reason, and should be cleansed of stigma and shame. Prudery about sexual language could only be a superstition, an anachronism, perhaps a product of spite, as in H. L. Mencken's definition of puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

The comedian Lenny Bruce was puzzled by our most common sexual imprecation. In a monologue reproduced in the biopic Lenny, he riffs:

What's the worst thing you can say to anybody? "Fuck you, Mister." It's really weird, because, if I really wanted to hurt you, I should say "Unfuck you, Mister." Because "Fuck you" is really nice! "Hello, Ma, it's me. Yeah, I just got back. Aw, fuck you, Ma! Sure, I mean it. Is Pop there? Aw, fuck you, Pop!"

Part of the puzzlement comes from the strange syntax of Fuck you (which, as we saw, does not in fact mean "Have sex"). But it also comes from a modern myopia for how incendiary sexuality can be in the full sweep of human experience.

Consider two consenting adults who have just had sex. Has everyone had fun? Not necessarily. One partner might see the act as the beginning of a lifelong relationship, the other as a one-night-stand. One may be infecting the other with a disease. A baby may have been conceived, whose welfare was not planned for in the heat of passion. If the couple is related, the baby may inherit two copies of a deleterious recessive gene and be susceptible to a genetic defect. There may be romantic rivals in the wings who would be enraged with jealousy if they found out, or a cuckolded husband in danger of raising another man's child, or a two-timed wife in danger of losing support for her own children. Parents may have marriage plans for one of the participants, involving large sums of money or an important alliance with another clan. And, on other occasions, the participants may not both be adults, or may not both be consenting.

Sex has high stakes, including exploitation, disease, illegitimacy, incest, jealousy, spousal abuse, cuckoldry, desertion, feuding, child abuse, and rape. These hazards have been around for a long time and have left their mark on our customs and our emotions. Thoughts about sex are likely to be fraught, and not entertained lightly. Words for sex can be even more touchy, because they not only evoke the charged thoughts but implicate a sharing of those thoughts between two people. The thoughts, moreover, are shared "on the record," each party knowing that the other knows that he or she has been thinking about the sex under discussion. This lack of plausible deniability embroils the dialogue in an extra layer of intrigue.

Evolutionary psychology has laid out the conflicts of interest that are inherent to human sexuality, and some of these conflicts play themselves out in the linguistic arena. Plain speaking about sex conveys an attitude that sex is a casual matter, like tennis or philately, and so it may seem to the partners at the time. But the long-term implications may be more keenly felt by a wider circle of interested parties. Parents and other senior kin may be concerned with the thwarting of their own plans for the family lineage, and the community may take an interest in the illegitimate children appearing in their midst and in the posturing and competition, sometimes violent, that can accompany sexual freedom. The ideal of sex as a sacred communion between a monogamous couple may be old-fashioned and even unrealistic, but it sure is convenient for the elders of a family and a society. It's not surprising to find tensions between individuals and guardians of the community over casual talk about sex (accompanied by hypocrisy among the guardians when it comes to their own casual sex).

Another sexual conflict of interest divides men from women. In every act of reproduction, females are committed to long stretches of pregnancy and lactation, while males can get away with a few minutes of copulation. A male can have more progeny if he mates with many females, whereas a female will not have more progeny if she mates with many males-though her offspring will do better if she has chosen a mate who is willing to invest in them or can endow them with good genes. Not surprisingly, in all cultures men pursue sex more eagerly, are more willing to have casual sex, and are more likely to seduce, deceive, or coerce to get sex. All things being equal, casual sex works to the advantage of men, both genetically and emotionally. We might expect casual talk about sex to show the same asymmetry, and so it does. Men swear more, on average, and many taboo sexual terms are felt to be especially demeaning to women- hence the old prohibition of swearing "in mixed company."

A sex difference in tolerance for sexual language may seem like a throwback to Victorian daintiness. But an unanticipated consequence of the second wave of feminism in the 1970s was a revived sense of offense at swearing, the linguistic companion to the campaign against pornography. As a result, many universities and businesses have published guidelines on sexual harassment that ban telling sexual jokes, and, in 1993, veteran Boston Globe journalist David Nyhan was forced to apologize and donate $1,250 to a women's organization when a female staffer overheard him in the newsroom using the word pussy-whipped with a male colleague who declined his invitation to play basketball after work. The feminist writer Andrea Dworkin explicitly connected coarse sexual language to the oppression of women: "Fucking requires that the male act on one who has less power and this valuation is so deep, so completely implicit in the act, that the one who is fucked is stigmatized."

Though people are seeing, talking about, and having sex more readily today than they did in the past, the topic is still not free of taboo. Most people still don't copulate in public, swap spouses at the end of a dinner party, have sex with their siblings and children, or openly trade favors for sex. Even after the sexual revolution, we have a long way to go before "exploring our sexuality" to the fullest, and that means that people still set up barriers in their minds to block certain trains of thought. The language of sex can tug at those barriers.

Which brings us back to fucking-Bono's fucking, that is. Does a deeper understanding of the history, psychology, and neurobiology of swearing give us any basis for deciding among the prohibitions in the Clean Airwaves Act, the hairsplitting of the FCC, and the libertinism of a Lenny Bruce?

When it comes to policy and law, it seems to me that free speech is the bedrock of democracy and that it is not among the legitimate functions of government to punish people who use certain vocabulary items or allow others to use them. On the other hand, private media have the prerogative of enforcing a house style, driven by standards of taste and the demands of the market, that excludes words their audience doesn't enjoy hearing. In other words, if an entertainer says fucking brilliant, it's none of the government's business; but, if some people would rather not explain to their young children what a blow job is, there should be television channels that don't force them to.

What about decisions in the private sphere? Are there guidelines that can inform our personal and institutional judgments about when to discourage, tolerate, and even welcome profanity? Here are some thoughts.

Language has often been called a weapon, and people should be mindful about where to aim it and when to fire. The common denominator of taboo words is the act of forcing a disagreeable thought on someone, and it's worth considering how often one really wants one's audience to be reminded of excrement, urine, and exploitative sex. Even in its mildest form, intended only to keep the listener's attention, the lazy use of profanity can feel like a series of jabs in the ribs. They are annoying to the listener and a confession by the speaker that he can think of no other way to make his words worth attending to. It's all the more damning for writers, who have the luxury of choosing their words off-line from the half-million-word phantasmagoria of the English language.

Also calling for reflection is whether linguistic taboos are always a bad thing. Why are we offended-why should we be offended-when an outsider refers to an African American as a nigger, or a woman as a cunt, or a Jewish person as a fucking Jew? I suspect that the sense of offense comes from the nature of speech recognition and from what it means to understand the connotation of a word. If you're an English speaker, you can't hear the words nigger or cunt or fucking without calling to mind what they mean to an implicit community of speakers, including the emotions that cling to them. To hear nigger is to try on, however briefly, the thought that there is something contemptible about African Americans and thus to be complicit in a community that standardized that judgment into a word. Just hearing the words feels morally corrosive. None of this means that the words should be banned, only that their effects on listeners should be understood and anticipated.

Also deserving of reflection is why previous generations of speakers bequeathed us a language that treats certain topics with circumspection and restraint. The lexical libertines of the 1960s believed that taboos on sexual language were pointless and even harmful. They argued that removing the stigma from sexuality would eliminate shame and ignorance and thereby reduce venereal disease, illegitimate births, and other hazards of sex. But this turned out to be mistaken. Sexual language has become far more common since the early '60s, but so has illegitimacy, sexually transmitted disease, rape, and the fallout of sexual competition like anorexia in girls and swagger-culture in boys. Though no one can pin down cause and effect, the changes are of a piece with the weakening of the fear and awe that used to surround thoughts about sex and that charged sexual language with taboo.

Those are some of the reasons to think twice about giving carte blanche to swearing. But there is another reason. If an overuse of taboo words, whether by design or laziness, blunts their emotional edge, it will have deprived us of a linguistic instrument that we sometimes sorely need. And this brings me to the arguments on the pro-swearing side.

To begin with, it's a fact of life that people swear. The responsibility of writers is to give a "just and lively image of human nature," as poet John Dryden wrote, and that includes portraying a character's language realistically when their art calls for it. When Norman Mailer wrote his true-to-life novel about World War II, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948, his compromise with the sensibilities of the day was to have soldiers use the pseudo-epithet fug. (When Dorothy Parker met him, she said, "So you're the man who doesn't know how to spell fuck.") Sadly, this prissiness is not a thing of the past: Some public television stations today fear broadcasting Ken Burns' documentary on World War II because of the salty language in his interviews with veterans. The prohibition against swearing in broadcast media makes artists and historians into liars and subverts the responsibility of grown-ups to learn how life is lived in worlds distant from their own.

Even when their characters are not soldiers, writers must sometimes let them swear in order to render human passion compellingly. In the film adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies: A Love Story, a sweet Polish peasant girl has hidden a Jewish man in a hayloft during the Nazi occupation and becomes his doting wife when the war is over. When she confronts him over an affair he has been having, he loses control and slaps her in the face. Fighting back tears of rage, she looks him in the eye and says slowly, "I saved your life. I took the last bite of food out of my mouth and gave it to you in the hayloft. I carried out your shit!" No other word could convey the depth of her fury at his ingratitude.

For language lovers, the joys of swearing are not confined to the works of famous writers. We should pause to applaud the poetic genius who gave us the soldiers' term for chipped beef on toast, shit on a shingle, and the male-to-male advisory for discretion in sexual matters, Keep your pecker in your pocket. Hats off, too, to the wordsmiths who thought up the indispensable pissing contest, crock of shit, pussy-whipped, and horse's ass. Among those in the historical record, Lyndon Johnson had a certain way with words when it came to summing up the people he distrusted, including a Kennedy aide ("He wouldn't know how to pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel"), Gerald Ford ("He can't fart and chew gum at the same time"), and J. Edgar Hoover ("I'd rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in").

When used judiciously, swearing can be hilarious, poignant, and uncannily descriptive. More than any other form of language, it recruits our expressive faculties to the fullest: the combinatorial power of syntax; the evocativeness of metaphor; the pleasure of alliteration, meter, and rhyme; and the emotional charge of our attitudes, both thinkable and unthinkable. It engages the full expanse of the brain: left and right, high and low, ancient and modern. Shakespeare, no stranger to earthy language himself, had Caliban speak for the entire human race when he said, "You taught me language, and my profit on't is, I know how to curse."

Steven Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard and the author of The Stuff of Thought.
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Why we curse. Fucking became the subject of congressional debate in 2003, after NBC broadcast the Golden Globe Awards. Bono, lead singer of the mega-band U2, was accepting a prize on behalf of the group and in his euphoria exclaimed, "This is really, really, fucking brilliant" on the air.

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Aquí estoy practicando mi portugués. Hace unos años que subí este video y, desafortunadamente, no he tenido tiempo para continuar practicándolo. Ojalá podré utilizarlo un poco con otros alumnos de esta clase lingüística. Hay bastantes personas que hablan 3 o más idiomas!

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Um video de um americano falando Português. Sei que há muitos erros então deixem comentários por favor!

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Sin duda es capaz de hablar y exhibir expresiones, pero nada de lo que dice hace sentido. El área de Wernicke se ubica en el lobo izquierdo de la corteza del cerebro. Cuando este área está afectado, una discapacidad profunda resulta. El individuo ya no puede entender, ni producir información vocal con significado. Nota que la fluidez con que habla no es afectado. También usa palabras con significado. Lo que no tiene significado son las oraciones completas.

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Una página para obtener un entendimiento general del vocabulario Gujarati, el idioma que habla mi otro compañero del apartamento. Quisiera aprender unas frases comunes y los saludos. Tal vez me va a servir en el futuro cuando voy a la India. Ojalá pudiera viajar a hí algún día.

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Learn Gujarati through our lessons such as alphabet, adjectives, nouns, plural, gender, numbers, phrases, grammar, vocabulary, verbs, exam, audio, translation, and much more online and for free easily and quickly.

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El alfabeto de Oriya, un idioma que habla mi compañero del apartamento. Es increíble la diversidad de los lenguajes de la India. Según mi amigo, muchos idiomas de la India suenan similares pero tienen vocabulario muy distinto. Al comparar el alfabeto de Oriya y Gujarati, me di cuenta que casi no hay ninguna semejanza. Ahora puedo concluir que la formación de sus alfabetos fueron construidos independientemente uno al otro.

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Odia (Oriya) alphabet, pronunciation and language

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Odia is an Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in the Indian state of Odhisha by about 40 million people.

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Aprender vocabulario Chino con la música. 

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Aprender vocabulario Chino con la música. 

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Desde que empezó esta clase, estaba interesado en el chino mandarín porque es un idioma muy diferente que el inglés y el español. Por ejemplo, el significado de las palabras españolas no depende del tono a diferencia del chino. Ahora estoy empeñado a llegar a un nivel conversacional en el chino para desafiar el mito que es casi sin imposible aprender un idioma distinto después de la niñez. Ya que todavía no sé mucho vocabulario, voy a usar el vocabulario proveído en estos videos.

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Learn Chinese vocabulary with songs! | English to Chinese, Chinese to English (1/40)

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Learn Chinese vocabulary fast! Try these educational videos for free and see how much Chinese you can learn. Each song consists of 100 words. A total of 40 videos uploaded weekly. Explore different levels to build your vocabulary. Learn Chinese to English or English to Chinese. It's as easy as pie!