Educational CyberPlayGround ®


Learning about Linguistics

Educational CyberPlayGround provides Linguistic information and resources for learning aboug languages like Creole, Irish American Vernacular, Black English, AAVE African American Vernacular, Creole Dialect Speakers, ESL, Ebonics, and Pidgin.

Promote and improve the teaching and learning of languages, identify and solve problems related to language and culture, and serve as a resource for information about language and culture.

6/25/16 KE ~ "Language like Music is a Virus and it can infect broad swaths of the public rapidly." If there's no virality, if it's not spreading, it's not happening.

Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.” ~ Edward Sapir

“There are nine different words for the color blue in the Spanish Maya dictionary,” writes Earl Shorris, “but just three Spanish translations, leaving six [blue] butterflies that can be seen only by the Maya, proving that when a language dies six butterflies disappear from the consciousness of the earth.”

A tribute and call to action for linguistic diversity.
A 15-minute motion poem (poem on film), each line comes from a different endangered or minority language, currently referred to as treasure languages. 48 speakers each speak in their mother tongues, as line by line, language by language, the poem is created.

Language is divided into two areas of study; the official or standard language then all the other languages which are called Creole, Ebonics, Gullah, Pidgin, AAVE, Black English Vernacular, Irish American Vernacular English, Patois, and Patwa, and sometimes called Dialect.

 

"LINGUISTICS"
is the
study of language.

"LANGUAGE" entered the English language in the 14th century and means the 'tongue' of a people (the original meaning) or any language in general. Also entering English in the 14th century is the word 'communication' from 'communicate' meaning 'to share' or convey knowledge.

2016 Which are the World's Most Influential Languages?
English is still King. English remains the number one most connected language in the world. After English, however, there was no single global network, but rather three sets of smaller networks around the world, linked together by languages that have had historical and colonial influence, such as French, Spanish, German, Russian, Portuguese and Chinese.

YOU CAN'T SEE WITHOUT WORDS

Words jump-start vision
A study published recently in The Journal of Neuroscience shows that words have a profound effect even on the first electrical twitches of perception. Cognitive scientists have come to view the brain as a prediction machine, constantly comparing what is happening around us to expectations based on experience — and considering what should happen next. “These predictions, most of them unconscious, include predicting what we're about to see,” says Gary Lupyan, a University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor. Work in Lupyan's lab hasdemonstrated the predictive process through manipulating the connection between language and vision in the brain. Work in Lupyan's lab has demonstrated the predictive process through manipulating the connection between language and vision in the brain.

YOU CAN'T THINK WITHOUT WORDS

Metaphor map charts the images that structure our thinking

Language Nerd Alert: language is ridiculously important in search. "Experts have now created the world's first online Metaphor Map, which contains more than 14,000 metaphorical connections sourced from 4m pieces of lexical data, some of which date back to 700AD." While it is impossible to pinpoint the oldest use of metaphor in English, because some may have been adopted from earlier languages such as Germanic, the map reveals that the still popular link between sheep and timidity dates back to Old English. Likewise, we do not always recognise modern use of metaphor: for example, the word “comprehend” comes from Latin, where it meant to physically grasp an object. { THINK SIGN LANGUAGE }
Metaphor is pervasive in language and is also a major mechanism of meaning-change. This helps show how we mentally structure our world. We describe social networks in terms of weaving and spinning; something is defined as “tweedy” if it is rustic, or “chintzy” if petit bourgeois. Textiles also influence the way that we talk about imagination: we “spin a yarn” and “embroider our thoughts”. How to use Guide

Search Creole / linguistics on Binpad for more

 

K-16 Education uses many words for the study of Language and the language arts -- reading, writing, spelling, and speaking.

 

Language is the natural social study (social studies). Language will tell you the unique history of the people who speak it. Think Linguistic Rights.

Language is also subdivided into regions.

American Virgin Islands Negerhollands Creole, Haitian Creole, Jamaican Creole, Hawaiian Creole, Louisiana Creole, and many others, from all over the world. Raise the level of awareness about Virgin Island culture. Combat misinformation about Ebonics in the media. Present the Culture and History of the American Virgin Islands. To promote Literacy for Dialect Speakers which will enhance opportunities. The information contained on this site is relevant to those who are interested in Language and the language arts, such as reading, writing, spelling, and speaking. Ask a Librarian

K-12 Education divides language into the following categories, Language Arts, ESL Education, Bilingual Education, Teaching English as a foreign language.

K12 Education wants to develop relevant content for ESL lesson plans a dialect speakers.

LANGUAGE EXPERTS

 

The Linguistics of Writing an Email Like a Boss so, if you could do that, that would be great ummmkay? ~ Bill Lumbergh

 

There are many reasons why most people do not know anything about Linguistics or know who the expert linguists are in the world.

The US federal government provides money directly to any State University that has a Department of Education but there is no mandatory state requirement for undergraduates to take a single class in linguistics before they are allowed to graduate and go out and go into K-12 schools and teach children how to read!

A national scandal

Cultural Ignorance

The mainstream media needs to learn about dialect speakers, and their issues which are global issues existing in every county. The National Media needs to interview and quote the Linguists who are the experts in the field.


Congress Investigated

Congress investigated In 1996 and heard experts like Dr. John Rickford, Dr. Labov, Dr. John Baugh and they decided not to appropriate funds.

 

Why isn't there more outrage?

 

What's personal is political.

No money - no funding - no problem, it goes back under the radar. Myths promoting a Culture of Ignorance.

The money in the U.S. appropriations committee is given to the ESL, TEFL, Bilingual Education area - what about money for Dialect Speakers?

"The failure of inner-city schools to teach children to read is among the most serious social problems that our country faces."
-- Dr. William Lobov
Professor of Linguistics and Psychology [p] 215.898.4912
Director of the Linguistics Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania.

Linguistic Intelligence

Kids Learn Words Best By Working Out Meaning [1]
Toddlers learn new words more easily when they figure out the words' meaning for themselves, research by a 22-year-old Johns Hopkins undergraduate suggests.
Not a 'blicket' in the bunch. Meredith Brinster uses nonsense words to determine how toddlers acquire and comprehend unfamiliar vocabulary.
Meredith Brinster's original research, suggesting that learning words by inference is more powerful for 3-year- olds than just being told their meaning, is intriguing and may have important implications for the future of teaching, her faculty adviser said.
"One of the things that is particularly exciting about the work Meredith is doing is its potential to change the way we think about education and learning," said Justin Halberda, assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins.
Interested in how very young children learn to attach the names of objects to the objects themselves, Brinster designed a study to measure which word-learning strategy was more effective: direct instruction, in which an adult "directly" points to and names an unfamiliar object, or inference, in which toddlers use reason (such as process of elimination) to mentally "fasten" an unfamiliar word to an unfamiliar object. Based on previous research, Brinster posited that the young children would learn words more quickly via inference.
According to her preliminary results, she was correct.
"We found that our hypothesis was true, and that inference is better than instruction," said Brinster, a psychology major.

Howard Gardner says: LINGUISTIC INTELLIGENCE is associated with the auditory sense, and is not closely tied to the world of objects or other people. It is the most widely and democratically shared across humans, and is the most thoroughly studied intelligence.

It is:
a) sensitivity to the meaning of words, whereby an individual appreciates the subtle shades of difference between spilling the ink "intentionally," "deliberately," or "on purpose." A sensitivity to the order among words, and a sensitivity to the sounds, rhythms, inflections, and meters of words. And a sensitivity to the different functions of language - its potential to excite, convince, stimulate, convey information, or simply to please.
b) Writers, poets and other wordsmiths have a strong Linguistic Intelligence.

Standard English is the language of commerce, the language of the administrator.

It will be the problem of the millennium to solve the post imperialist notion of superiority / inferiority . It is the American tragedy of the underclass culture in a capitalist system. ~ KE

One More Thing...

TONAL LANGUAGE

 

Learn about Tonal language speakers. - There are 2 kinds of languages, one that uses pitch and the other doesn't. If your are a tonal language speaker how do you use a computer to type pitch? Linguist Jeff Allen suggests: Tones in Ijo... http://www.bisharat.net/A12N/tones.htm

December 22 1845: The voice synthesiser Euphonium, is demonstrated to the public in Philadelphia. Using reeds, bellows and chambers to simulate the anatomy of the human speech organs, it is said to have been able to produce 16 syllables.

By 6 months of age, infants develop a map in the auditory cortex of the phonetic sounds in the native language their mother or caretaker speaks.
Language comprehension research of 6 to 9 month olds infants can understand simple words even before making word-like sounds.
By 12 months, infants lose the ability to discriminate between sounds that are not made in their native language. While subtle phonetic distinctions might be lost in the first year, children have the ability to learn a second, third and fourth language quickly until about age 10. After that, the brain starts discarding the excess language learning connections. After 10, learning a foreign language is still possible but more difficult.
This pruning of unused or unneeded neuron connections is necessary for thinking clearly, making fast associations, reacting to threats and solving problems. But the pruning process also can work against the growing child, especially if connections that could have proved useful later in life are killed because of lack of use.Only those connections that are reinforced over and over again will remain.
http://www.abqtrib.com/archives/news03/081903_news_science.shtml

"Language Liberation: The internet allows everyone to publish, and challenge the so called "authority" from the top by all of us at the bottom - over these agonizingly contrived, tortured, and incorrect stories about this word jazz currently in print dictionaries. Only the internet can interrupt the endless $treams of the dictionary bu$iness supply chain while their power over just what we are allowed to know, erodes into oblivion and becomes an forgotten blip in history. Only the internet and pressure from the public, can level the playing field and provide democracy." ~ Karen Ellis

Doing ethnographies in schools - vs. the red tape.
Children as seen as a vulnerable population, and could potentially become immersed in hot water if a teacher recorded some of their folklore while in the school.
Gain access to K12 school by writing the school district office about your research topic and reques access to the students. They can grant permission to come to the school and conduct interviews with students. Make your intentions and motives clear before you begin your ethnographic research. (Some ethnographers conceal their purposes as researchers and deceive the people they're studying -- generally because they don't want people in a setting to alter their usual behavior by virtue of being watched).