3/29/2005 10:47:00 AM|||Jonthon|||

Humans have utilized language for over a thousand years, even previous to the advent of record-keeping. It is one of the oldest human activities and one of the youngest sciences. In my time at Mizzou, I have taken courses to study its history, structure, and interplay with culture. Almost every course I have taken has based some portion of the curriculum around language, whether that be as a means to transfer information (Comm 103), to influence others (any of my advertising classes), to search for truth (Philosophy 52), or to simply create and understand beautiful prose (any of my English classes). Through my studies, I have come to believe that language, be it English, Spanish, Czech, ebonics, or any other, is exactly equal and serves an identical purpose from culture to culture.
In high school English classes, I remember learning the names of parts of speech and memorizing lists of words. I remember being the victim of grammar prescriptivism, which was the cause of Winston Churchill’s famous quote, “Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.” I remember laughing when I first heard Groucho Marx’s quip, “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.” I remember the first time I diagrammed those sentences, thereby peering into the complex nature of language and the human mind that utilizes it.
When I came to Mizzou, my interest in language persisted. I learned about Linguistic theory and the Chomskian revolution. I read the works of authors such as Hemingway, Kerouac and Hurston, who display a mastery of something that is exclusively human. I began to see that language was integral to all that we do, and that without it, we as a culture would be undifferentiated from our animal brethren.
In my first Linguistics course, I worked with my professor, Judith Goodman, to propose a research study on powerlects and the use of language for conversational control. At that time, I focused on secondary language – eye contact, body positioning, gesturing, tone and pitch, and other extra-linguistic factors that we use to communicate. While my research was never conducted, the process served as a powerful educational experience.
During my next semester, I studied the structure of English with Vicki Carstens. The class challenged some of my former perceptions of language. We would diagram sentences, but not in the high school fashion. Rather, we would identify phrases and clauses, and organize them in a left-branching tree. The parts of this tree could then be transmogrified to form passive and question sentences. We learned about embedding (I think you think I love language), which allows language to be infinite as opposed to finite. I discovered that the tree could be used with any language, be it English, Spanish, Yoruba, or any other language. They all consist of basic noun and verb phrases that can be similarly diagrammed, which made perfect sense once I started diagramming languages I couldn’t even pronounce.
I concurrently studied the history of the English language. The ambitious instructor worked all the way back to the theoretical Proto-Indo-European language that, if it existed, is the language from which all others descended; the language of Babel. The infusion of Latin elements led our language to be much more agglutinative, and as we adopted more and more inflections, we created a need for new words, which we drafted from languages across the world. This explains the large amount of borrowing in our language. I purport that this theory was adopted when crafting Esperanto, the language formed from all other languages and intended to be used across the world (if Americans won’t switch to the metric system, I don’t see Esperanto catching on any time soon).
Because we are so involved with our own language, it is sometimes difficult to analyze it objectively. Kelly Maynard’s Language, Gender, and Culture helped me step outside those boundaries, as did my Spanish and literature classes. I have come to see language as only a tool; while some cultures make their tools more complex, bejeweling them with umlauts, accents, and linguistics devices, all cultures possess tools equally capable of serving their purpose. No language should be looked down upon simply for being different from one’s own. In that realization, I have come to judge the entirety of other cultures as not better or worse, but as different and nothing more. This is rational, brings a sense of inner peace, and validates my educational pursuit entirely.

|||111211577179449147|||I had to write an essay, but it's pretty damn good