My blog is on the move

Hello Felicity! Hello everybody!

Time seems to be the less available resource in our lives. I'm saying this because I can't understand why it took me so many days to become a 'follower' of our teacher's blog. Every one's personal situation is different and so are our personal options and priorities. But I think below that general complaint about time there are two basic explanations. We look for happiness instead of being happy and as a consequence we want to do more things than we are reasonably able to do.

I promise you something. I won't go into philosophy anymore. The theme about English history and evolution is very exiting and there's no need to drift across elusive subjects like philosophy.

You will see in this blog I put some information on general language history. I had the information already. I made a sort of summary and translation into English as a writing practice. I have some very basic information on the History of the Universe. From the very beginning (the 'Big Bang' happened 13,700,000,000 years ago) to the twentieth century. Language is part of that history. Mankind is too.

LINGUISTICS (a few points)

(Note: The story below it is not intended as 100% rigorous )

The Birth of Human Language

• The firsts human ancestors probably lived some 6 - 7 million years ago in Africa. Their anatomy and brain didn't allow them to speak and their intelligence was very limited.
  


• 3.5 - 4 million years ago evolution made to appear Hominids with larger brains. They were short height but they made a big step forward because they already walked in an upright position standing only in their feet.

In Ethiopia the remains (fossils) of a young female from that time was found. From her remains a quite realistic life size model has been made and it is shown in Barcelona's Science Museum (CosmoCaixa). The "girl" found was named "Lucy" by her discoverer after the Beattle's song.

• 2 million years ago appeared humans that made tools for the first time in our planet. This shows a tremendous progress in intelligence. But they could'n speak yet.




• Only some 100,000 years ago humans develop their anatomy and brain very close to ours and they started to speak! At the time there were Homo sapien (exactly as ourselves) and other Homo especies. The ability of speaking was in all of them. Though it is believed that at the begining humans spoke only simple basic words and their sintax was very limited.

Isn't it amazing to know that 100,000 years ago minkind was just about to speak and all current complex and rich languages come from that simple origin? Isn't it amazing that currently there are some 6,000 languages in the world? Isn't it amazing that if a language inventory along time could be made it will show many times more languages already dead? Isn't it a shame that everyday some languages from anywere in the world are dying?

The Birth of Writing

• Human evolution driven by the struggle for surviving and the environtment constraints led Homo sapiens to the need of deep selfconsciousness and the use of symbols as representations of reality and hope. About 30,000 years ago humans started "painting" walls and roofs of deep caves. They didn't live in those caves which reinforces the idea of the use of those paintings as rituals related to their practical lives. Hunting would be the main theme for them.

Once you come across the idea of drawing symbols of big events you are about to starting drawing symbols or signs as representations of all kind of things around you. When you do those representations you are actually writing. This happened some 25,000 years later.

• Humans invented writing more than 5,000 years ago.
  
  
• It is interesting to point out that four different writings were invented in four different places and at different times.

In Mesopotamia: Sumerian Logograms, 5,300 years ago

In the Nile River Valley: Hierogliphics, 5,300 years ago

In China: Ideograms, 3,400 years ago

In Central America: (the Maya culture) Glifs, 1,700 yeras ago

The Birth of the Alphabet

The very early systems of writing were complex, difficult to be learned and little practical. A logogram or hierogliphic writing uses a symbol for each object, action, concept, etc. This means that those systems have many thousands of different symbols. The lack of practicality of such systems is obvious.

A huge progress in writing is the way we write. We use our "Alphabet". By using only less than thirty signs (letters) we are able to write and infinity number of words. What is the history of the Alphabet?

• The first signs used as an alphabet were made 3,700 years ago by the Semite people at South of Palestine. They created a 15 sign alphabet since they only used consonant signs. Their writing without vowels fulfilled their language phonetics.


• It is quite interesting that the invention of writing has happened only once in mankind history. All other further alphabets came from that very first one.

• Our western alphabet comes from that old Semitic alphabet as well. It is still the same used by Romans and their Latin language. The summary of its history is:

Old Semitic --> Northern Semitic --> Phoenician -->

Greec --> Etrusc --> Latin

Murphy's Law

Do you know Murphy's Law? Most of you do. I think is relatively known over here. For some who may not know its definition is the following:
"Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong".

From this -pesimistic- statement there are thousand ways to say it, some in a quite funny way. One of this is: "if a toast with jam and butter spread over falls on the floor it's always the jam side the one sticking to it".

Why I brought Murphy's Law about? Because this sort of determinism happened to me just this week. I decided to by book no.3 (Adventures of English) according to Felicity's list. My decision was very strong. I like sciences and linguistics are part of science. Thus I felt that book by far suited very well my own interest. Now Mr. Murphy came into play. I went to Alibri, Casa del Libro and Come in. Guess what happened. The book is not in stock anywhere and Come in told me a delivery delay of three weeks minimum!

I gave up my expectations and I got Jeremy Paxman's "The English", which seems to be written in a language level very suited for any of us. I'm fine with this book.

See you when again?, Mr. Murphy...!

English and myself

I always liked English. Languages are very much as living systems or living beings. And like living beings you may like or dislike a language very soon after you "meet" them. English phonetics are part of the reason I do like English. It is a language with a wide range of sounds either from its vowels or from its consonants. After some time when I was more acquainted about English I realized one of the most poweful characteristics of this language. This is the abillty of English of expressing an idea, a concept or an action with very few short words. It's what I call languge efficiency. To be an efficient language it must accept a lot of flexibility in the meaning of its words. English does it and even is extremely good at creating new words as long as they are needed with changing times.

The opposite to my point on English are the latin languages. They are very good in academic environtments but they "suffer" when modern times demand them to evolve as technologies or general situations change.

This week I may have not learned much English yet. But to be honest I'm very pleased to be within the class group and Felicity. You know I can hardly remember myself in a class having other people to work with. At the very beginning of first day it was strange because I'm used to do what I want the way I want. But all people in this class look very nice and I'm also happy to see that we can work together very well since English level seems quite balanced among all of us.