Linguistic Reading Response

It is arouse to note that contrary to popular belief, more often than not different pronunciations are the essence of different contexts variances in social settings, the use of courtly and informal pronunciations, etc. Unfortunately, Ameri dirty dogs have long labored under the misdirect assumption, especially where wrangle is concerned, that there is one right way to do something, and all other(a) ways are wrong (Callary 118). Sounds used in language are produced by the gentle vocal apparatus, thus the stipulation Articulatory phonetics to refer to sounds described by the articulations (actions) of the vocal tract.We produce dialect sounds by modifying a stream of air as we push it by the lungs through the trachea and ultimately out of the oral or os nasale cavities, or both (Callary 119). Stated this way the production of speech sounds seems trivial, obvious, and fantastically easy. But the facts of articulation prove otherwise, with the production of even the simplest sound the result of an amazingly complex activity involving coordination of muscles all working in fine timing.Studying language scientifically is quite a challenging and knotty undertaking (as the assigned reading pages illustrate, with all the allophones, phonemes, morphemes, etc.), though people cleverness generally take the nuances of language for granted. Aside from the technical aspects of language, one of necessity to also consider its other socio-linguistic components origin, cultural factors, and regional variations, among others.A account of the Spanish Language by Ralph PennyConsidering that it is already a unawares language, it is still pretty amazing that Latin is the ancestor of Spanish (and, by definition, of all other roman typece languages), spread by soldiers, traders and farmers of the Western Roman Empire two thousand years ago to the present cosmos of the Spanish-speaking world. Interestingly, Romance languages do not descend from Classical (i.e. literary ) Latin, provided non-literary varieties, often referred to collectively as Vulgar Latin (Penny 5). Vulgar Latin differs only in the sense that is spoken by the Latin-speaking population with littler or no school education.In the contemporary scene, there is a significant Spanish-speaking populace within the United States of America with the waves of human migration from Spanish-speaking countries, e.g. Mexico. To a certain extent, Spanish has influenced the development of the English language as it is being spoken in the USA, notably in states with guiding light Latino populations.The African hereditary pattern of American English by Joseph E. Holloway and Winifred K. VassIn a similar vein to the Spanish-American experience is African-Americanism. Considering that at least 70 percent of the ancestors of Americans of African descent came from the Mande (West Aftican) and Bantu (Central African) pagan groups (Holloway and Vass xix), it is not affect that these two cultures cont ribute substantially to the diverse North American ethnic stock. This is evident in jazz closely associated with black musicians, whose history and origins can be traced to the Old Congo Square of red-hot Orleans. Yet procurable dictionaries and related works on African-American culture, language and history do not provide comprehensive documentation of linguistic Americanisms, except maybe for Turners Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (Holloway and Vass xix).Moreover, it would appear that the controversial debate over the pick of linguistic Africanisms in North American is still raging, led by the factions of E. Franklin Frazier and Herskovits. For Frazier, the institution of slavery completely destroyed any surviving African culture and consequently, African-American culture developed without any African antecedents. In this way he emphasized African discontinuity, advocating a deculturalization hypothesis. Herskovits on the other hand argued that African cultural influences s urvived in the New World, retained by process of acculturation and adaptation by the African slaves brought to the Americas (African continuum and continuity in African-American language).List of Works CitedCallary, Edward. Phonetics. Eds. Clark, Virginia, Paul Eschholz and Alfred Rosa. Language Introductory Readings. New York St. Martins Press, 1985. 113-133.Penny, Ralph. A History of the Spanish Language. 2nd Ed. London Cambridge University Press, 2002.Holloway, Joseph and Winifred Vass. The African Heritage of American English. Bloomington Indiana University Press, 1997.