The Science of Language

Greetings everyone,

I am not going to be in class this Thursday, So I've arranged to simply post my eval up here, and have ya'll give me feed back to take me through the 'peer review' process without being actually present.

I really appreciate it, thank you!

Eliana Stockwell-Ferber

Evaluation

Creoles Pidgins and Minority Dialects

Fall 2008

My name is Eliana,

and I'm not truly tech-savvy, so I'm a wee bit apprehensive about this. I've never written a 'blog', which maybe is strange of our generation. I was not at class for week two. This is because I'm Jewish and that day was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. I was thinking about linguistics however. I don't know much Hebrew, which is the language that all Jews, no matter what other languages they speak or where they live, share somehow. So, I was thinkin'. . . Hebrew was a language created around some pretty major religious principles, and was not used as an every day language in some parts of its history. The result is a language that has the capacity to not communicate a sense of time. One can speak Hebrew to convey very clear messages about time, but in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible and Jew's holy script). God says things like "and it was good" after creating everything, but translated, that could mean "it was good, it is good, it will be good...". This, I think, reflects some way cool ideas in Jewish mysticism about time as being multi-dimensional, everything and nothing, a spectrum... and all that trippy stuff. This is so exciting to me, that language can reflect cultural, even religious concepts.