On this page, you can find the summaries I wrote on several chapters of Language Myths.

 

Chapter 1: The Meanings of Words Should Not be Allowed to Vary or Change

Language changes all the time. At least, the languages we speak change all the time. The languages we do not speak (anymore) do not change. The pronunciation of words change, grammatical structures change and the meaning of words change.

 

A lot of words have multiple definitions. Some words even exist in multiple languages. We change the meanings of words a lot because we like it better, we think there is a better definition for it or simply because we can. When a lot of people start using a word (differently), others will follow. However, the changing of words can be confusing sometimes an it can lead to a lot of discussion. It is important to keep clear distinctions between the different meanings. We don’t want to cause confusion. We change the meanings of words because we want things to become more clear. The only way we can achieve this, is when a lot of people agree and start using these words. The changing of words and definition is something that will always continue. (173 words)

 

My opinion 

I think it is good that language is changing all the time. We change language with a purpose. We want to improve the use of language by clarifying words, meanings and sounds. Language has been changing for a very long time now and it has brought us where we are now. I think we shouldn’t fight the change and variations of words.

 

Chapter 2: Some Languages are Just Not Good Enough

There are a lot of different languages in the world. They all got their own rules, habits and charms. Most languages are the first languages of a community and therefore play a big part in communication. But there are also languages we do not use a lot. English, for instance, is a language that is used all around the world and for different purposes. This language is seen as an important language. However, Maori, the indigenous Polynesian language in New Zealand, isn’t used that much. Some people think this makes Maori an inferior language. It is important to a lot of people in New Zealand, but is isn’t used worldwide. Luckily, the people who do think the language is important, do their best to bring it to the attention of other people.

 

There is also the idea that languages which need to borrow words from other languages aren’t good enough. This would probably mean that no language is good enough because in this time, it is almost impossible not to use borrowed words. Borrowing words is also a beautiful way to make texts understandable for more people. (187 words)

 

My opinion 

Everyone speaks in their own language. Some people know one language and other people know multiple. Nelson Mandela once said: ‘’If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart’’. This means that we can understand multiple languages but that we only really get touched by our own language. And like I said, everyone has their own language. I think all languages are equally good.

 

Chapter 3: The Media are Ruining English

A lot of people think English is a very important language. There are also people who think this important language is being ruined. They say the English language is ‘sick’. These people are called ‘language protectors’. They think parents, teachers and the press are to blame for ruining the English language. Some grammatical mistakes are being made a lot. When parents, teachers and the press start making and using these mistakes, other people will copy them. This has been happening for years now.

 

A lot of journalist are called sloppy language users nowadays. This is called the ‘dirty fingernails’ fallacy. This means that journalists never bother to scrub their linguistic fingernails clean. This is of course just an opinion and not everyone agrees with it. However, it is a fact that the media and therefore journalists have a lot of influence in the use of language. It is easy for people to copy the media, especially for children and language learners. This means journalists should be careful in their use of language. However, they do need to write interesting pieces, which influences their use of language as well. (188 words)

 

My opinion 

I don’t think the media are ruining language. Furthermore, they are spreading language. They don’t think of language themselves. They use language that already exists and spread this through the media. Of course, journalist can be very influential and they need to be careful in what they write and spread. However, we choose to copy words ourselves. We might not always be aware of it but in the end it is our own choice which words we want to use and which words we don’t want to use. I think the media is a powerful tool to spread language. Children can learn and develop their language by reading newspapers and magazines, watching television and listening to the radio. Besides, we can’t stop them from doing this so why should we?

 

Chapter 5: English Spelling is Kattastroffik

Most of the time, when you know the way an English word is pronounced and what it means, you ought to be able to write it down. However, sometimes you find out you can’t. When you describe letters, it is best to use the terms ‘consonants’ and ‘vowels’. It is said that the English language contains five vowels. However, it actually depends on your accent. Depending on your accent, there are about twenty vowels in the English language. By changing one vowel, you can give a word an entire different meaning. Consonants can have multiple sounds. For instance, the /s/ can also sounds like a /z/ and the /f/ can sound like a /v/. And there’s also the difference between single spelling and doubled spelling (baker, backer). There are a lot of marks to clear up the pronunciation and spelling of words. Stress is an important indicator for pronunciation.

 Homographs are words that are spelt the same but pronounced differently. However, words that are pronounced the same but spelt differently, are called homophones. And finally, there are also words that both sound and look the same. We call them homonyms.

The spelling system is constantly developing. (196 words)

 

My opinion

Language is always changing and so is its spelling. If we can change the meaning of words or give some words multiple meanings, I think we can change spelling as well. We should be able to change spelling if it makes things more clear. Some words need clarification because they have multiple definitions and multiple spellings. This can be hard for language learners though. If we change the spellings of words too often, it will become very hard to learn a language.

 

Chapter 8: Children Can't Speak or Write Properly Any More

It is said that young people tend to misuse the English language. Some people think that young people do not properly learn language. Therefore, they want to do everything possible to improve language teaching. The language of our children is important to us because they represent the future. However, there is always this idea that things used to be better in the old days. People have been complaining about the language of youth since 1700. They believe there was a Golden Age concerning language. They think children back then could spell better than children nowadays. However, language has changed and will continue changing forever. Children nowadays use different words than children back then but that doesn’t mean they are less capable of using language. Some people think it is best to use systematic drills and tests in language teaching but this isn’t true. These methods always punish the same children and demoralise dyslexics and slow learners. It also isn’t fair that we blame children nowadays for not speaking standard English anymore. Like I said, language is always changing and using different words isn’t necessarily a bad thing. (187 words)

 

My opinion

 It is not fair to blame children nowadays for not speaking standard English anymore. Language has been changing forever and it is only fair if we let our children develop their language in a present-day style. It is not necessary to teach them the standard English if they don’t want to use it. They want to use modern language. Language isn’t developing for nothing. As long as children learn the current grammar rules and vocabulary in the right way, we shouldn’t complain. We should watch their language when it comes to curse words and inappropriate slang though.

 

Chapter 10: Some Languages Have No Grammar

Let’s start with a definition of grammar. According to linguistics, grammar is the set of rules which the speakers of a language follow when they speak the language. All languages have rules. If there weren’t any rules, it would be impossible to make a mistake while speaking a language. But this isn’t the case. It is possible to make a mistake while speaking a language. And besides that, all languages distinguish at least nouns and verbs. There are all kinds of rules in grammar. There are word order rules, pronunciation rules, spelling rules, tense rules and so on. Whenever there are rules in a language, we speak of grammar. (109 words)

 

My opinion 

The thought that some languages would have no grammar sounds ridiculous to me. Every language has its own rules. People who think that a certain language has no grammar should do some more research. Every language has grammar. Not every language may have as much grammar as another language, but it’s there. There are always certain rules to be followed.

 

Chapter 11: Italian is Beautiful, German is Ugly

Some languages are more liked than others. Languages like French and Italian conjure positive feelings because of their romantic, cultured and sonorous sounds. Languages like German and Arabic conjure the opposite because of their harsh, dour and unpleasant sounds. The English language is probably somewhere in the middle of this. People don’t just have opinions about the different languages, they also have opinions about the different accents in one language. For instance, some people like a British accent better than an American accent. I think this is very personal though. However, according to this chapter some languages are inherently more attractive than others and how we feel about a language is based on social conventions. People often copy language and if a powerful group were to use a certain language, it is likely that their language will be copied. It is nonsense that a language is beautiful or ugly but a language can be more popular than other languages. (159 words)  

 

My opinion 

I think that everyone should decide for themselves which languages they like and dislike. It is a subjective matter. However, it is not fair to say that a language is ugly because all languages have something in common. They are all meant to communicate and that is a beautiful thing. To me, German people don’t sound beautiful because I think they pronounce a lot of things like they angry. But this is just a simple judgement of mine. German is a beautiful language as well because it offers a lot of people a way to communicate.

 

Chapter 13: Black Children are Verbally Deprived

On both a public and a personal level, verbal art is an integral, pervasive and highly valued component of black culture. In history there were several black people who were known as excellent speakers. However, nowadays some people seem to think that black children are verbally deprived. When we listen to a tape-recorded speech, we can often hear if it’s a white or a black person speaking. The linguistic inferiority principle says that the speech of a socially subordinate group will always be interpreted as inadequate by comparison with the socially dominant group. This would mean that African-American speech would be considered linguistically deficient when it’s compared to the middle-class. According to evidence of listener identification judgements, speakers will be identified with the language of their socialised community and not with their racial classification. However, during the time of slavery, people used to be judged by their race. Slaves were not seen as humans and therefore their language was seen as gibberish. Luckily, that’s not the case anymore nowadays. I think black people can have some sort of accent sometimes but white people can also have this and this doesn’t mean they are verbally deprived. (195 words)

 

My opinion 

I think it is wrong to say that black children are verbally deprived. It sounds like people still think we live in the past where black people were seen as inferior. It is not a thought you should have in this time. Black children can learn languages just as good as white children. The difference is that some black people don’t have the materials to offer their children good education. This doesn’t have anything to do with their colour.

 

Chapter 14: Double Negatives are Illogical

Double negatives cause a great deal of suffering. People object double negatives because they don’t think double negatives are logical. In maths, minus two minus minus two equals zero. This means that two minuses equal a plus. A sentence like ‘there ain’t no heaven for you to go to’ would then mean ‘there is a heaven for you to go’. We shouldn’t use mathematical arguments in language though. Language and maths are two different things and languages don’t necessarily have to be logical. Humans are capable of figuring out what a sentence with a double negative means. Besides, a lot of languages have double negatives. Double negatives can be used to evoke the negative meaning of a sentence or to nuance something. An example of that last thing is ‘not ungrateful’. This could mean ‘very grateful’ to a lot of people. Double negatives are mostly used in verbal speech nowadays. They are not part of the standard English. This might be the reason why a lot of people don’t accept them. (171 words)

 

My opinion 

I think double negatives sound a bit illogical but in the end we can all figure out what they mean. They are often used to emphasise things. I think I shouldn’t use double negatives in formal speech or during orals because they are not part of the standard English language. However, I don’t think we should get rid of them in our language because they can make things interesting. They can make us think about a sentence and this makes us think about language. It is nice way to give our language a moment of thought.

 

Chapter 15: TV Makes People Sound the Same

Language is always changing and so is the way people speak. We all use words but we don’t all use the same words. There is a clear difference between young and old, men and women, people with a different status and people from different neighbourhoods. A lot of people wonder why language is changing all the time and some linguistics point at television. They believe that media and television influence the vocabulary of people. Words can spread really fast through television and media. Words and phrases people have heard on television, can become very popular. A lot of people will learn about them and use these words and sentences themselves. However, there is no evidence that television influences grammatical innovations and sound changes. TV can spread language but is does not invent words. It is us people that copy words and phrases we hear, not the TV. Besides, we do not all copy and use the same words. TV does not make us all sound the same. (167 words)

 

My opinion

 I don’t think that television makes us all sound the same. There are a lot of different languages, accents and dialects in the world. We can see and hear all of them on television as well. This means that not everyone on TV talks the same way. There are a lot of accents and words we can copy. There are so many different things we can copy which means that we can’t copy all of them. Everyone copies different things and therefore we won’t all sound the same. If we would all sound the same, there won’t be different dialects and accents anymore and this is something I don’t see happening very soon. We like our different accents and dialect too much for that. Besides, we also like to be ourselves from time to time.

 

Chapter 18: Some Languages are Spoken More Quickly than Others

 Some languages sound slow and other languages sound quick. This is the same case with dialects. A western cowboy dialect may sound slow to you while a southern London accent sounds fast. But are there really characteristic differences in speed? There are ways to measure the speed of speech. We can measure this with pauses and hesitations and without pauses and hesitations. The terms ‘speaking rate’ and ‘articulation rate’ are usually used. In some languages it is common to use more pauses and hesitations than in others. Besides that, some languages contain longer words than other languages. You can also measure the number of syllables. These are all factors to take into account in the measurements of language speed. However, if you were to speak rapidly, you might leave sounds out that you would pronounce if you were to speak slowly. This makes it hard to measure the amount of sounds. Syllable-timed speeches sound faster than stress-timed speeches. It is very hard to measure the exact speed of speech because of all the different things you have to take into account. It is hard to say if a language is faster than another language. It also differs per person. (199 words)

 

My opinion 

I think that some languages sound more quickly than others. I think French sounds very fast compared to Dutch or English. This could be because I find French more difficult to understand than the other two. But maybe it is true. I think it also depends on who is talking. Some people speak faster than other people. I find it hard to say if some languages are really more quickly spoken than others. I guess research can find that out partly but not entirely. It would be really difficult to research and measure this because everyone speaks differently. Some people take more breaks while they are speaking, other people pronounce certain vowels more quickly and so on. There are too many factors to take into account.