Personal Dimensions of Education Essay

Learning involves you taking in the world around you and connecting to what you are experiencing. It then requires that you make sense of the experience- that you come to an understanding of it. Learning also involves using your critical thinking skills and sound judgement to respond appropriately to any workplace task, online assignment, or opportunity to speak publicly. My views of learning have changed as a result of this class by understanding learning patterns, what they are, how to use them, and how I can implement them. By utilizing the LCI, I can better take in the world around me, make sense of it, and respond appropriately. Taking the LCI and getting my scores for Sequence, Precise, Technical Reasoning, and Confluence, I can see if I use each one as â€Å"Use First†, â€Å"As Needed†, and â€Å"avoid†. This is all very new to me and has certainly helped me become a better learner. As a learner, I am Strong-Willed, meaning I am my own team. Using my learning patterns, I can control the plan, ideas, the talk, the decisions, the process, and the outcome. I have the ability to use multiple patterns all at once. This allows me to be more thorough and produce better work. My Sequence score is 32. I use this pattern by arranging my day on paper. I write things down such as work, school, gym, grocery store, etc. This lets me check things off as I complete them. I like to organize my list from highest priority to the least. My Precision score is 28. I use Precision mostly at work. Currently, I work as a chef and precision is vital. I must label all foods once they are open and meals that are complete with name, date, and time. I measure all my ingredients, especially when baking. Documenting all temperatures on a HACCP sheet, whether cold or hot is also critical. We must not allow food  to be in the â€Å"temperature danger zone†, between 41 degrees and 140 degrees. My Technical Reasoning score is 29. I believe everybody uses this pattern more than they realize, regardless of their score. We as humans are problem solving and implementing some sort of plan all day long. Building, constructing, and assembling are used constantly pertaining to character, meals, plans of action, or even picking out something to wear. Finally, my Confluence score is 18. I have used this pattern ever since becoming a father. Imagining and dreaming up games or scenarios is something my daughters and I do constantly. This pattern also served me well with my education. There are many benefits to my learning patterns and being a Strong-Willed learner. Confluence is the only pattern that I use â€Å"As Needed†, giving me many options to utilize. Sequence has allowed me to keep my work organized and in order. By listing my goals for each week, it has been easier to compare and contrast, develop solid, well written work, and has made it easier to review my work for quizzes, discussions, and assignments. Precision has allowed me to hand in well documented work that is thorough and accurate. Detail and correct reading and writing skills give me the ability to learn quicker. Technical Reasoning has let me demonstrate college level work. By giving purpose to my work, I feel like I am really accomplishing something worth while. Problem solving and figuring things out for myself lets me remember things easier. I am able to implement different styles based on the directions and what the instructor is looking for. By meshing these patterns together, I have made learning work for me, developed a regular schedule, and have been actively seeking to grow in knowledge and skills, therefore becoming a better intentional learner. Because I am a Strong-Willed learner, my patterns could have easily made things difficult for me if I had not tethered them. I scored high in sequence, precision, and technical reasoning, 32, 29, and 28 respectively. This sometimes gave me the false notion that everything I was doing, such as my answers, structure, etc., was correct and I didn’t need the help of  classmates or the instructor. This was somewhat true in the beginning of the class, but changed as we got into chapter 4 and I started learning about FITing. Pertaining to Sequence, I needed to tone down the fact that I really want to know exactly what the finished assignment should look like instead of just doing my work to the best of my ability and having faith that what I hand in is correct and acceptable. With Precision, I had the tendency to try and gather too much information in little time. I learned to use my time better while still gathering good information. Technical Reasoning affected the working relationship I had with Precision by limiting the amount of information provided. I quickly learned to use these two patterns together by tethering them. By tethering these three patterns and forging Confluence, I will be a more intentional learner in the future. Over the past five weeks, I have really enjoyed learning the concept of intentional learning and getting a more in-depth definition of exactly what learning is. I have never been taught about learning patterns and was very interested to learn about them and find out that I was a Strong-Willed learner. I found the LCI to be an amazing tool to use with learning. It was also refreshing to brush up on critical thinking, reading, and writing. Being able to apply intentional learning techniques to career networking and executing the steps of a career development plan I found to be priceless. I have taken online classes in the past, so I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. What I didn’t expect was how valuable this class would be to me and the ease I had with how Ashford has made learning. I still have to work hard and apply myself, but I am very happy to have chosen this school and look forward to finishing my degree plan in this setting.

Nazi Party Rises to Power

Ian Kershaw was a medievalist who, nearly 30 years ago, turned his interests to the history of the Third Reich. This is the second volume of his encyclopaedic biography of Hitler, and the best thing in it is his treatment of Hitler's effect on the German people. He intersperses his biography with evidence of German popular sentiment, fragmentary and yet telling. Many Germans (perhaps understandably) have tried to separate the history of Hitler from the history of the German people during the Third Reich, one historian going so far as to declare that there were no National Socialists, there was only Hitler.This is nonsense, and Kershaw knows it very well. The great majority of the Germans followed Hitler until the very end. Kershaw's Hitler is more telling about the Third Reich than about the man himself. The result is a one-dimensional portrait, and not an illuminating one. This is a pity, because we shall see more and more studies of Hitler (including, I fear, more and more cleverly composed and carefully disguised apologies).There is not one trace of defence or apology here, and Kershaw makes the much-needed and persuasive argument that even when no evidence of direct orders exists, there is no reason to think that his minions were committing their brutalities contrary to, or even without, Hitler's wishes. But Kershaw's portrait of Hitler is that of a single-minded fanatic with crazy ideas who was doomed to defeat. It was not as simple as that.Hitler was no fool, and his abilities as statesman and strategist derived from the same talents that had enabled him to become ruler of Germany. These talents were protean – for instance, his uncanny capacity to foretell what his enemies would not do. Kershaw does not see how close Hitler came to winning the war, not only in the summer of 1940 but in 1941. His knowledge does not extend sufficiently to Hitler's adversaries, or to foreign policy. After November-December 1941 Hitler could no longer win the second wo rld war, but he could still prevail by not losing it.Had he driven Stalin beyond the Volga, forcing an armistice of sorts, or thrown the Anglo-American armies into the sea in 1944, he would not have won the war, but one or other of his enemies would have been compelled to make some kind of arrangement with him. He knew that, and in December 1941 his entire strategy changed. He now faced a long war, and believed that sooner or later the uneasy and unnatural coalition of his enemies, capitalists and communists, would break apart. He was right; but, fortunately, too late for him. ) He also knew that this could not be achieved by diplomacy, but by striking a decisive blow against one of his enemies. At the same time he gave the command of German industry to Speer, turning it into an astonishingly successful and productive war economy. There is almost nothing in Kershaw's book about this momentous change in Hitler's strategy. Nor is there anything about Hitler's attempts to divide the Al lies.Kershaw begins the present volume by summing up his first one: in the 1930s Hitler â€Å"was a political outsider with few, if any, special talents beyond undoubted skills as a demagogue and propagandist†. Yet in his foreign policy before 1939 â€Å"his sense of timing ha[d] been excellent, his combination of bluff and blackmail effective, his manipulation of propaganda to back his coups masterly†. Another contradiction, within one page: â€Å"He was certainly alert to the dangers of a collapse in his popularity, and the likely domestic crisis which would then occur. Yet: â€Å"It is, in fact, doubtful whether he would have believed the accounts of poor morale, even if he had read them. † By 1936 Hitler â€Å"had thought himself infallible; his self-image had reached the stage of outright hubris†. Yet in November 1936 Hitler said to Speer, after a long silence: â€Å"If I succeed, I will be one of the greatest men in history – if I fail, I w ill be condemned, rejected, and damned. † This volume is not well written: there are many errors of facts and dates, and strange words such as â€Å"devotalia†, â€Å"actionism†, â€Å"diplomatic outfall†.The other main shortcoming is Kershaw's extensive dependence on Hitler's statements as his primary source. The problem here is not only that Hitler, despite his loquacity, was a very secretive man (as he himself states on occasion); we must also keep in mind that he was a master of the spoken word (again, something which he often emphasised). The great turning point of his life came in 1919: his decision to enter politics was contemporaneous with his discovery that he was a very efficient speaker.Thereafter, he always spoke with the purpose of influencing his hearers, not only in his public speeches but also in table conversations and talks with Goebbels, on whose diaries Kershaw sometimes unduly depends. Did Hitler always believe what he was saying? Kers haw writes as though he did, yet we have evidence to the contrary. This is especially so in the case of Russia. Kershaw writes that in the 1930s Hitler was â€Å"increasingly preoccupied with the looming threat, as he saw it, from Bolshevism†.Not at all: Hitler gave little thought to Soviet Russia until 1939, but he very ably used the threat of Bolshevism to impress conservatives in Germany and Britain. Several times during the war Hitler praised Stalin for having got rid of the influence of Jews. Yet in all his public statements, including the last ones in April 1945, he proclaimed the peril of â€Å"Jewish Bolshevism†. It is the great merit of British writing to have married biography to history. In the 19th century, professional historians tended to eschew biography.The English tradition was an exception, with enduring results during the 20th century, to the extent that the appetite of the public for serious biographies is now larger than ever before, and every seri ous biographer now follows the practices of historical research. Still, biography requires particular talents, including not only a certain degree of empathy with one's subject but an incisive understanding of human nature. Kershaw is a better historian than he is a biographer.

Approaches to Teaching Listening Skills

Approaches to Teaching Listening Skills Among the other four skills, listening is the one that has been most forgotten and neglected in second language classrooms. So teachers don’t pay much attention to this skill and teach it carelessly. In the field of language teaching and learning proficiency has tended to be viewed as the ability of speaking and writing in language in question. Listening and reading skills are in the second position. One reason for this situation might be the demanding characteristic of the listening skill. Listening has gained a new importance in language classrooms after spreading IT technology based information in society in Iran. Moreover it should be mentioned that most of the students’ class time is devoted to the listening. Despite this, we often take importance of listening for granted, and it is the most overlooked skill among other skills. In natural order of learning any language, listening stands at first rank. Without any reception one can not produce anything. Though, if a teacher wants to have fluent and productive students, he/she should pay much and necessary attention to teaching listening skill. Listening Some of the teachers believe that speaking should be actively discouraged. One of the reasons of emphasizing listening and delaying speaking is based on an opinion. Those who give importance to speaking view the language as a product and think that language is a behavior and speaking is the manifestation of this learning or happening. On the contrary, there are approaches that gave more importance to listening Nation, Newton (2009). in this approach of language learning , listening is at the center. All of the information necessary for building up the knowledge for using language comes from receptive skills: listening, and reading. When the knowledge of language in this regard is built the learner can write and speak. In other words, with out any input, the outcome or output should be nothing. Gray and Gray (1981) described the benefits of del aying speaking and concentrating on listening. These benefits include the following: † 1. The learner is not overloaded by having to focus on two or more skills at the same time-a cognitive benefit. 2. Speed of coverage -receptive knowledge grows faster than productive knowledge. 3. It is easy to move very quickly to realistic communicative listening activities. 4. L earners will not feel shy or worried about their language classes. Having to speak a foreign language, particularly when you know very little, can be a frightening experience. 5. Listening activities are well studied to independent learning through listening to readings.† Critics believe that producing a language is not sufficient for learning. In language learning substantial quantities of receptive activity should be included in the mind for future use. To speak communicatively and to convey and understand the meaning, one should have a previous language knowledge and information in his/her mind. Models of listening Traditionally listening was viewed as a passive skill through which the listener or hearer received information sent by message senders. More recently listening is viewed as an active and interpretive process by which the message is not fixed but is made or created by participants. (Newton,Nation.2009)

Assignment2UT Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Assignment2UT - Essay Example .. (Sumner & Keller, 1913 p 234) †. This argument is aimed at ensuring the poor do not get any support for social justice against the rich and that wealthy slave owners should be left to continue with oppression since they happen to be strong in the natural sense. As an observer of the Cotton Farmers Alliance, these arguments by Professor Sumner are more than disturbing given the degree of oppression witnessed in Houston that called for cotton pickers strike. The foundation laid by America’s founding fathers demanded justice for all, rich poor, black or white. Speaking against government support for the less fortunate as advanced by Professor Sumner is contrary to the founding principles of the United States. Justice must be done to reduce the growing gap between the poor and rich members of the American society and this can only be done with government protection of the voiceless. Before nature, we are not any better than the wilder beasts and rattle snakes, but then we are not living in the wild as Professor Sumner would like to make us believe, we are human beings with a sense of intelligence living in a civil liberated country that was founded on the platform of justice and freedom for all. These founding principles have the implication that the rights of the ‘wild beasts’ are protected against attacks from ‘lions’ and that as the American ‘lions’ industrialize, the ‘wild beasts’ that are the poor cotton pickers, must be carried along in clear structures that assures them a place in the table of industrial success. The kind of unrest witnessed in the south is a product of years of oppression and to mitigate this, government must come up with clear protection policies which will ensure that the fruits of industrialization are shared by both the cotton pickers and the industrialists as the American society works towards closing the rich-poor gap. Professor Sumner argues in his book: What Social Classes Owe to Each Other; that social programs by the government to help the poor are contrary to nature and robs hard working people of their rightful rewards. He forgets that the alleged hard workers are propelled to success by the poor laborers who toil to make their enterprises successful. It’s an act of fairness to give the laborers a share of their output because no success can be realized if it were not for the efforts of cotton pickers in the south. The economic principle of fair reward is the basis of my support for social programs that will ensure cotton pickers share into the success of industrialization through these programs. Sumner’s ideologies have no place in the American society after my observation of happenings in Houston. Question Two: The Populist Party, 1892 Common problems Addressed by the Populist in Nebraskan and Georgia Key to the issues facing the Populist of Omaha and Georgia are economically traversing issues, which were so dominant in the U.S.A in the late 19th century. Therefore, in the event of such a convention, the two groups would have similar issues to rise on a wider scale. Some of the issues include labor and remuneration, the legal and justice system as well as taxation (Sumner & Keller, 1913). Watson from Georgia speaks of exploitation of the

Positive Thinking and Health Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Positive Thinking and Health - Research Paper Example Describing her experience as a breast cancer patient, Ehrenreich castigates the elaborate positivity that is associated with the pink ribbon culture observing that the â€Å"cheerfulness of breast cancer culture goes beyond mere absence of anger to what looks, all too often, like a positive embrace of the disease†. Even though, testimonies provided in books such as The First Year of the Rest of Your Life may assert otherwise, by highlighting the understandably life altering powers of cancer that can possibly act as a source of redemption or even a bridge between an individual and the divine, Ehrenreich’s claims regarding the futility of positive thinking on physical health are echoed in the research conducted by Petticrew et al. who declare that aspects related to positive thinking such as fighting spirit, willpower and hopefulness do not have a noteworthy or significant impact on the recurrence and survival rates for cancer as reflected by the examinations of 10 cases of patients who coped with cancer by maintaining a fighting spirit and 12 patients who approached the disease with hopefulness, additionally, the findings postulate that the role of positive factors and aspects in combating diseases has been exaggerated by psychologists thereby, discrediting findings that have established a correlation between the strengthening of the immune system through positive thinking techniques. (1066). However, a study conducted at the Ben-Gurion University of Negev in Israel which questioned a sample size of 255 breast cancer patients and 367 physically fit females regarding their life experiences concluded that women who face traumatic, negative and hurtful experiences carry a higher risk of being victimized by breast cancer (Smith). This research aids the assertion that positive thinking can indeed enhance an individual’s ability of maintaining a healthy physical state and combating the occurrence of diseases such as cancer. Wilkinson and Kitzinger note that the foundations of prior literatures regarding the beneficial effects of positive thinking on cancer mortality rates and the psychological state of patients are largely dependent upon self-report data which hampers the validity and objectivity of the available evidence, this view postulates that the subjectivity of perceptions, conversational devices and the contextual meaning of positive thinking diminish the accuracy of patients’ internal cognitive statuses thereby, leading to the generation of biased data on the helpful effects of positive thinking on cancer patients (797-811). Fredrickson’s arguments in favor of the merits of positive thinking however, are not based upon self-report data whose objectivity has been questioned by Wilkinson and Kitzinger with regards to the studies conducted on cancer patients. Empirical data gathered by Fredrickson claims that the broaden-and-build theory of positive psychology is

ACTIVITY 5 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

ACTIVITY 5 - Essay Example By isolating possible areas of discussion, which would have to be researched, it became evident that a particular aspect of the general topic was most attractive to me: immigrant populations in new societies, and their potential to achieve. This will still have to be refined – a country of choice, and immigrant populations able to be defined in that country as well as the choice of the type of achievement to be studied – and hence this proposed topic: Influences on Academic Achievement/Non-achievement on Newly-arrived Immigrant Populations in the United States. And it is clear that some research will be necessary before a study can be started: are there clearly definable immigrant populations available; what would the time-frames have to be; would it be ethically correct to identify groups in society so overtly; which definitions of achievement would be used – the local or the â€Å"old country† definitions; what levels of academic achievement would form the focus of a study? In addition, research available on the hereditary factors that influence academic achievement would have to be considered, and their impact on this study gauged. Nonetheless, the topic, and consequent research could provide valuable insight into interventions that could be implemented if non-achievement is occurring, or factors that encourage achievement could be identified. In a working environment within psychology, mind-mapping could be a valuable process to define ideas: one may want to embark on some research, within a field of interest. The initial idea, such as mine was, may be within a personal and general area. By free-association of ideas, all one’s thoughts are made concrete in the initial stage of brainstorming. Then, it becomes clear that certain ideas logically fit together. Some are at this point able to be dismissed – others, it becomes clear, need to be developed. The action of mind-mapping helps

Finding a solution for Underage Drinking in Miami Essay

Finding a solution for Underage Drinking in Miami - Essay Example In the same population, 24% of them had confessed to have taken alcohol in the past month while 9% reported to have been drunk in the course of the month. This level of consumption is undoubtedly higher than that of other drugs such as tobacco and any other illegal drug. The other concern on alcohol consumption is its high correlation with myriad social, emotional and behavioral problems such as accidents, stealing, depression, involvement in violent behavior, use of illegal drugs and missing school among others (Richard et al 2012). Besides these immediate problems early initiation of alcohol is also associated with complex alcohol related problems in later years. Early consumption of alcohol that is by age 15 also represented a very high likelihood of developing alcohol dependence (Scott Tippetts, et al 2009). This is a likelihood of 4 times more than those who start drinking at age 21. A more current study reveals a similar picture among the youth. A 2005 survey went further and i ndicated that 5400 young people below the age of 16 get initiated to alcohol on a daily basis (Lipperman-Kreda, Grube & Paschall, 2010). These statistics as well as other more recent and growing studies on alcohol consumption reveal a worrying trend among young people. This calls for prompt action to arrest the growing numbers of underage drinkers. This study focuses on finding a long lasting solution which would complement the ongoing efforts to curb underage drinking in Miami. In United States the legal drinking age is 21, yet the number of underage drinkers’ remains high begging several questions, one of these questions is where do these underage drinkers get alcohol? This is mainly worrying as the law demands that no single establishment should sell alcohol to an underage (Main, 2009). Irrespective of this directive 92.2%, 82.6%, and 62% of 12th, 10th, and 8th grades respectively attested to the fact that accessing alcohol was fairly or very easy. The focus on alcohol sup ply and access is fundamental to any study seeking to stop the supply of alcohol to the underage (Lipperman-Kreda, Grube & Paschall, 2010). This is because cutting short the supply is the single most effective means of ensuring that under age drinking is curtailed. Studies reveal that alcohol supply to this group mainly comes from social or economic sources. Economic sources represent commercial establishments dealing with alcohol meaning that some of them blatantly ignore the established laws. In regard to social sources, these are mainly home set ups, where this group accesses alcohol when the adults are absent or during parties (Richard et al 2012). Most effort has been directed to curbing alcohol supply to underage drinkers from the commercial set up. This has been targeted through law and directives which are manifested through compliance checks and cops-in-shops. Similar effort has been made in the social settings through such activity as party dispersal programs (Wachtler, 20 11). The success of these measures has been evident overtime and it would be misleading to point out that these have not helped in deterring use and possession of alcohol by this grouping. Evidence overtime has shown that tackling of underage drinking through stringent laws and policies is quite effective (Maimo & Christopher, 2012). The evidence of this is seen in cases where a given policy is properly enforced, for instance the school anti-smoking policy was seen to

Ethcis of Stem Cell Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Ethcis of Stem Cell - Research Paper Example Anderson looks at the ethics and religious points of view on the subject. He describes how different religions have different views as to when life begins. Some Hindus for instance take the stance that life begins at 3 months after conception. Other individuals would differentiate between an embryo concieved in a human relationship and this laboratory act of creation. Ideas have altered over time. Thomas Aquinus for instance held the view, put forward earlier by Aristotle, that life began 40 days after conception.. Anderson goes on to point out that there are a number of different ideas involved. First , purely biological life which begins at conception. Secondly animation, i.e the point at which an embryo begins to move independently. Thirdly what he describes as ‘ensoulment’ i.e. the theological point at which an embryo can considered to have a soul. He also discusses such things as value - does an adult invalid have more ‘value’ than a few cells in a pert rie dish? Anderson points out the Roman Catholic Church’s stance which is that government’s have an obligation to protect the vulnerable. Surely this obligation should extend to the severely ill as well as those groups of laboratory bred cells? Duffy, D., ( 2002) Background and Legal Issues Related to Stem Cell Research, Congressional Research Service, Almanac of Policy Issues, Duffy claims that human embryonic stem cells (HESC) from embryos in their earliest stage of development are believed to be capable to transform themselves into differing body cell types than any adult stem cells. Research has therefore centered upon the potential that these cells have for the treatment to treat or mitigate the effects of various diseases as well as generating tissues which could be used to replace faulty cells or even organs. Duffy describes various sources for such cells. These are one week old blastocysts created via in vitrio fertilization; embryos of from 5 to 9 weeks obtained through elective abortion processes; embryos created in vitro purely for research purposes; embryos created by somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) i.e. cloning; and finally adult stem cells such as those from bone marrow ore the umbilical cord.. Because the harvesting of such ‘master ‘cells involves the destruction of human embryos it has met much opposition by those who feel i t is unjustified slaughter of potential human beings. It must however be pointed out that these are embryos bred in a laboratory and which whould never have come into existance otherwise, so this is very different from an abortion done perhaps only for reasons of social convenience. In 2002 , according to Duffy, the American Government announced that, with a number of restrictions, federal funds would be made available for stem cell research, but this would be with established strains.

Characteristics of Highly Effective School Administrators Essay

Characteristics of Highly Effective School Administrators - Essay Example e school administrator must be able to communicate goals and vision of his/her institution, and plans, achievements and challenges that the institution faces. The administrator should also be able to attract input from other stakeholders and develop the stakeholders support for ease in development and implementation of administrative policies. Administrative leadership, also known as managerial leadership, is another characteristic of an effective administrator. This feature incorporates abilities to balance between priorities, delegate leadership roles, facilitate innovation and improvements, and to ensure accountability. In balancing priority, an effective administrator identifies activities with their priorities and allocates time, in duration and order, to each activity to ensure effectiveness in completion. An administrator with the trait also identifies and recognizes potentials of each subordinate and promote growth. In addition, the successful administrator is accountable, setting standards for other to emulate, and leads in innovation and development of potentials. Highly effective school administrators also have educational leadership trait, also known as instructional leadership. The administrators ensure that instructional ventures are best on reliable vision towards effective learning. The administrators also ensure that instructions are improved continuously and that high levels of expectation and favorable culture for development are established in their

Irish immigrants Essay Example for Free

Irish immigrants Essay When the Irish began arriving in America in large numbers in the 1840s, they were generally destitute and unskilled, and for decades they occupied the lowest levels of American society, often trapped in menial jobs like domestic service or difficult, often dangerous jobs like railroad and canal construction.   According to historian Paul Boyer, â€Å"Irish immigrants entered the work force at the bottom.   Paddy with his pickax and Bridget the maid were simultaneously stereotypes and realities† (Boyer et al 273).   However, they rose quickly in America compared to other immigrants groups, mainly because of several advantages. Their ability to speak English certainly helped them, giving them advantages that later immigrants from non-English-speaking nations did not immediately have.   In occupations like factory labor, they were able to rise more quickly than other immigrants, slowly moving up the social ladder.   In addition, they gradually More importantly, the urban Irish became active in politics, particularly within the Democratic Party, which appealed to the new arrivals and offered them assistance in finding housing and jobs in exchange for votes.   This gave the Irish a wide array of opportunities, moving from unskilled labor into better-paying blue-collar positions as firefighters, police officers, and workers in city departments like sanitation, water, and streets. By 1900, the Irish had already ascended through the working class and were making headway in the middle class, and this progress accelerated as later immigrants from southern and eastern Europe began arriving by the millions.   The head start they enjoyed in arriving sooner than most other ethnic groups, their knowledge of English, and their affinity for politics all combined to give Irish immigrants advantages that other immigrant groups would not enjoy to the same degree. Boyer, Paul et al.   The Enduring Vision.   Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

Recruitment Process for Child Practitioner

Recruitment Process for Child Practitioner Summary This report talks about the recruitment process of a professional called G. It states what strengths and weaknesses she can give to her new role and how she can better herself in the setting as a practitioner. G is 20 years old and is currently studying a level 3 assessor award but also already has qualifications in level 2 health and social care and also a NVQ level 3 in childcare. G is applying for a room leader’s job in the setting see appendixes 1 and 2. The report also looks into the theories linked to practice and how G can implement these in her job role. Introduction In this report the author will explain what the recruitment process is and how It works right from the employer making the advertisement and what would be included, why we interview and give a trial in the interview and then after they are successful and the employer has gathered all relevant information they will then get an induction before starting work in the setting. Next we will discuss what G’s stability is for the post, such as her strengths and weakness, looking into the things she can bring to the setting and also looking at any problems that may arise. Then the author will discuss her potential progress, what G can do to progress in her new job and how can she plan what she is going to do. Next will be reflecting back on theory looking into individual relationships, motivation, behavior, management, leadership, group processes and managing performance Recruitment process Firstly the employer will have to make a job advertisement, including all parts of the job role and what is expected of the new employer. It will also have to state what qualifications they expect from the applicant. The job description should include at least six important factors, these being: Job title, Main duties, Role, Location, Salary and a brief of what your company does. (Marketing Donut, 2014) Then the employer will have to put the advertisement in local papers or online so that the applicant can find it. Once the applicant has assessed that they have everything they need for the job and it is what they are looking for by reading the job description like in appendix two, they will then call for an application form which they will then fill in and send back to the employer. Once the employer has assessed all applicants the ones which fit the needs if the job will be offered an interview. Once they are asked back to a structured interview the employer will examine the applica nt’s childcare knowledge, qualifications gained, practical experience and attitudes. The applicant may be asked to bring a current Disclosure and Barring Service, also known as a DBS (Gov. UK, 2014) along with your qualification certificates, three forms of I.D, one with a photo and also a current C.V. Each candidate is asked the same structured questions, their replies are noted, so that the employer can look back to find the best suited person. (Honeysucklechildcare.co.uk, 2014) In the interview it also gives the applicant an insight of the setting and how its set out this will help them to determine if the environment is right for them. At the interview the applicant may be asked to do a small trial with the children this is so that the staff can see if they work well with the children and in the setting. Once the employer picks the applicant they will firstly contact the two references that were supplied on the application form to find out information on how the applicant has worked in the past and if there has been any challenges. After they have gathered all relevant information and have their qualification certificates and their DBS they will be given an induction. Induction is the first part of the learning in setting for an employer when starting a different job. It contributes a structured start for the employees in the first weeks/months of work, which will make sure that they are sufficient enough to be left unsupervised with children unsupervised. Evidence suggests that a structured induction procedure, along with a developmental scheme will stimulate an important part in the retention of employees. (Kurtts, 2011) G,s induction will allow her to get to know all the people she will be working with and the policies and procedures of the setting it will also allow time for any relevant paperwork to be filled in. During the induction as a room leader she will be shown how to fill in all the paperwork she needs to do in the setting such as daily planners, registers, EYFS record keeping and diaries for the parents of the children. Most importantly, it will give an insight to the manager if she will cope with the job role and with the pace of the daily activities of the setting. G’s suitability G was most suitable for the job advertised, this is because it worked within what she was looking for and also her strengths fitted well into the job role, also as the job is mornings it seemed to tie in well with her weaknesses as well. Strengths She has a high attendance rate, which is strongly important as a room leader as other staff members will be relying on her not only for ratio purposes but as she is planning activities and daily duties. G is very enthusiastic and in interview showed her good positive ideas and communicated very well with the manager and also with the children and other colleagues. G will be able to bring her new ideas into the setting when it comes to planning the daily activities and outings with the children staying within the setting policies and procedures. She will be working mornings so this seems to fit in well with her lifestyle also she is still studying so working part time gives her the time she needs to continue that training. Weakness G will need some training in boosting her ability to plan activities on her own. She will also have to be overseen for a few weeks while in her trial period as she hasn’t had any responsibilities in inform parents of information, although she has had previous communication with parents in her old setting. It was previously disclosed by past employer that she seems to get moody when tired, so this seems to fit in well that she will only be working part time in the mornings. G is still in training so although she is working part time so it fits round her daily life this can also be a weakness as she may find it hard to work with such high standards and supervise everyone in her room as well as going to college and doing college work this may also delay her in doing any training that’s she may need through work. Training is regularly given at improving someone’s discrimination or cognition. (Cottrill, 1997) Potential Development for G G could progress her development by finishing her current course to her highest standards. She can also take up any opportunities that her work may give her such as higher level training and by attending all relevant training such as safeguarding and child protection as this is a requirement for all staff. (Pre-school.org.uk, 2015) G could also look into her own further education and development such as a PGCE in early childhood education and care. This will help her as this course is aimed at people who are already working with young children in early years such as nurseries. It will deepen G’s knowledge and understanding of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) she will also extend her knowledge and professional skills in observation and assessment of young childrens development how children develop while learning through play, combined with working with all parents and careers and the leadership of staff teams. These are all things G will be doing while a room leader, but with the training she can progress to a supervisor of the setting. (Shu.ac.uk, 2015) You can assess your own progress at work by specializing your goals when doing a personal development plan. (Ireland, Cure and Hopkins, 2009) All people set some goals when in a professional working environment. These goals may be only short term or semi-permanent goals. If the goals set are too overwhelming and that they will not be achieved in a time scale set, then you can set them for longer periods of time or do them one at a time. (Streetdirectory.com, 2015) Reflecting on theories Individual relationships Children learn and become independent through individual positive relationships Positive relationships help children develop because they show warmth and loving relationship with a sense of belonging. The professional has to show a sensitive and responsive relationship to the child’s needs, feelings and interests, they are supportive when a child uses their own efforts and independence. While they are regularly setting clear boundaries for the child. (Moylett and Stewart, 2012) This then leads to the attachment theory as infants have a universal need to seek close proximity with their caregiver when under stress or threatened (Prior Glaser, 2006). This being the case G should always be available for her peers and always have positive relationships with them so she can aid their development so the children can develop well and also easily be calmed with distressed or threatened. If she does not have positive relationships with the children this may hold back their best potenti al development and also when distressed they will not be calmed easily. Motivation To maximise a child’s development positive motivation will play a major part. Elton Mayos theory of motivation examined the social desires of the employee. He believed that pay alone wasnt adequate to encourage workers to put forward their best practice. He believed that the social desires of the staff ought to be taken into thought. He suggested employers treat their staff in a caring and humane way so that it demonstrates an interest within the individual so as to possess them manufacture their best work. (Silver, 2015) G can implement this in her own work as she can be well motivated towards all children and staff in setting, this then will have a knock on effect and helps them to produce their best work and also so the children can work to their best ability, giving them the best possible development outcomes. Behavior A practitioner’s behavior has a massive effect on all aspects of the setting. The main two are maintaining yourself as a professional, your behavior towards others and your job will show people how professional you are and how you come across in your job. In social learning theory Albert Bandura states behavior is learned from the setting and the practitioners through observation. Bandura also states that humans consider the connection between their behavior and its consequences. Children also observe the people around them and the way in which they behave in. (Bandura 1977). G can do this in her setting by keeping positive behaviors and by acting professionally at all times. However, she must be aware of when she gets tired she can get moody and that this behavior will have a negative effect on the children and other staff members. Management and Leadership The management can have a big impact on the whole setting from to how they professional run the setting through to communication within the setting. The manager of the setting can help the other professionals in the setting by going through personal development plans, giving good communication, Motivating the team and giving them training so they can develop. G can take up all the opportunities given to her and stick to her development plans alongside her manager. Group processes There are many ways to group process one being Bruce Tuckmans Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing team-development model this is a way of all staff members linking together to make sure their overall performance is at the highest level possible. The development model explains that because the team develops maturity and talent this establish relationships and also how the manager changes their leadership styles. Starting with a direction, moving through employment, then collaborating and finishing authorisation. (Bonebright, 2010) G can do this with her other staff members so that as a team they can perform to the best they can. Managing performance One way of managing performance is to have a performance management, this is a way of approaching the setting through supporting workers to perform well and develop in their roles. Things like appraisal, outlined objectives, supervising and feedback will modify a shared understanding and agreement of expectations. This then permits workers to develop their skills and ability so that they can improve the standard of the training and care provided within the setting. An effective performance management system will encourage staff to recognise as well as rewarding achievements, whereas providing opportunities for individuals to develop their careers. Positive communication is additionally integral to support and inspiring staff so that it enhance their performance. (Dnn.essex.gov.uk, 2015) G can take on board how she supports the staff members in her room and give them feedback at team meetings on how they can improve themselves. References Bandura, A. (1977). Social Learning Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Bonebright, D. (2010). 40 years of storming: a historical review of Tuckmans model of small group development. Human Resource Development International, 13(1), pp.111-120. Cottrill, M. (1997). Give Your Work Teams Time and Training. Academy of Management Perspectives, 11(3), pp.87-89. Dnn.essex.gov.uk, (2015). Early Years and Childcare Provider > Information for Managers > Managing Staff > Performance. [Online] Available at: http://dnn.essex.gov.uk/eycp/InformationforManagers/ManagingStaff/Performance.aspx [Accessed 6 Jan. 2015]. Gov.uk, (2014). Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks (previously CRB checks) GOV.UK. [Online] Available at: https://www.gov.uk/disclosure-barring-service-check/overview [Accessed 13 Dec. 2014]. Honeysucklechildcare.co.uk, (2014). Recruitment. [Online] Available at: http://www.honeysucklechildcare.co.uk/4.html [Accessed 28 Dec. 2014]. Ireland, B., Cure, R. and Hopkins, L. (2009). Perfecting your personal development plan. Vital, 6(2), pp.40-41. Kurtts, S. (2011). Successful induction for new teachers: a guide for NQTs induction tutors, coordinators, and mentors. Teacher Development, 15(1). Marketing Donut, (2014). Six things you need to include in a job description. [Online] Available at: http://www.lawdonut.co.uk/law/employment-law/recruitment-and-employment-contracts/six-things-you-need-to-include-in-a-job-description [Accessed 28 Dec. 2014]. Moylett, H. and Stewart, N. (2012). EYFS Development Matters. 1st ed. London: Early Education. Pre-school.org.uk, (2015). Safeguarding | Advice and resources | Pre-school Learning Alliance. [Online] Available at: https://www.pre-school.org.uk/providers/support-and-advice/430/safeguarding [Accessed 3 Jan. 2015]. Prior, V. and Glaser, D. (2006). Understanding attachment and attachment disorders. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Silver, F. (2015). Three Major Theories of Motivation. [Online] Business Entrepreneurship azcentral.com. Available at: http://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/three-major-theories-motivation-1260.html [Accessed 6 Jan. 2015]. Shu.ac.uk, (2015). Print version | PGCE Early Childhood Education and Care (0-5) with EYTS (graduate employment route) Part-time course. [Online] Available at: http://www.shu.ac.uk/prospectus/course/1279/print/ [Accessed 5 Jan. 2015]. Streetdirectory.com, (2015). Assessing Your Progress At Work. [Online] Available at: http://www.streetdirectory.com/travel_guide/190857/careers_and_job_hunting/assessing_your_progress_at_work.html [Accessed 5 Jan. 2015]. Appendix One Job Specification Appendix Two JOB DESCRIPTION JOB TITLE: Room leader JOB LEVEL: 3 Job Description Room Leader To be a leader of a team, providing an emotionally secure, warm, stimulating and safe environment, appropriate to the needs of individual children. There must be excellent knowledge of the Early Years foundation stage and implement these in your daily work. This is a basic job description that must be implemented at all times, extension of this job description is essential to promotion and enhancement within the setting. Main Duties and responsibilities Over viewing planning sheets and record keeping of all the staff in your room Ensuring routines are followed Ensuring new decisions are taken on board Ensuring all staff in the room know all information needed Ensuring that all policies and procedures are being followed by all staff Being a role model to the other staff in your room Understanding all policies and procedures of the nursery Manage staff effectively, ensuring ratios are maintained throughout the setting Overseeing the professionalism of all staff in the setting Welcome all children and parents to the nursery Provide a wide range of activities for the children individually and as a group appropriate to their needs and developmental stages. Putting out and setting up the nursery and storing away equipment appropriately. Encourage all the children with their language development Maintain a clean and tidy nursery and garden area and ensure all equipment and toys are clean and in good order. Encourage and supervise clearing and tidy up time Provide a high standard of health and hygiene Change nappies and encourage children with toilet training and personal hygiene Help children at meal times and then tidy and clear away afterwards Act as a key person for a group of children as allocated by the management team, ensuring attachment theories are respected. Work in partnership with parents, consulting and sharing information with them about the needs and progress of their children Filling in all the appropriate records for your key children and ensure they are always up to date Attend all staff meetings To undertake all training and give feedback to the other members of staff also implement this in your work Ensuring all staff stick to the policies and procedures of their setting. Page 1 of 15 Pin 1320743Central Bedfordshire College

Hemingway and Symbolism Essay -- essays papers

Hemingway and Symbolism Ernest Hemingway and Symbolism Ernest Miller Hemingway is a well-known American author who wrote in the twentieth century. He has written several novels such as, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea. The Sun Also Rises was finished on April1, 1926 and was published in October of 1926. The Sun Also Rises was Hemingway's expression of his own life. He had changed the names of his friends and some of the details, but the real identities of the characters were obvious to anyone in Paris. The Sun Also Rises encapsulates the angst of the post-World War I generation, know as the Lost Generation. This poignantly beautiful story of a group of American and English expatriates on a sojourn from Paris to Pamplona represents a dramatic step forward for Hemingway's evolving style. Featuring Left Bank Paris in the 1920's and brutally realistic descriptions of bullfighting in Spain, the story is about the flamboyant Lady Brett Ashley and the hapless Jake Barnes. Ernest Miller Hemingway is an American author who has penned several novels and short stories; one of his works is The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. Hemingway was raised with the conservative Midwestern values of strong religion, hard work, physical fitness and self determination; if one adhered to these parameters, he was taught, he would be ensured of success in whatever field he chose . As a boy, he was taught by his father to hunt and fish. When he wasn't hunting or fishing his mother taught him the finer points of music. Hemingway never had a knack for music and suffered through choir practices and cello lessons, however the musical knowledge he acquired from his mo... ...ause the baby will ruin both of their lives. Next is the character of the woman who shows contrast, and supports the qualities of â€Å"the girl†. She is called â€Å"the woman† because she is older, and the reader is to assume, wiser, and experienced. The â€Å"girl† talks about â€Å"having a fine time† and â€Å"trying new drinks† which shows that she is still young, living a life of ease, experiencing a lot of things, where as the woman brings these â€Å"new drinks† to the girl. This displays the woman as mature, older, and experienced because she is working instead of â€Å"trying new drinks†, and â€Å"having a fine time.† She is no longer yound leisurely trying new drinks, she is working trying to earn a living. She is an indirect supportive device of the theme in that she the opposite image of what the girl is. The woman further defines the symbolic qualities of the girl, in other words.

Compare and Contrast the Ideas and Techniques of the Poets in the some

Compare and Contrast the Ideas and Techniques of the Poets in the some of the Love Poems we have Studied Love is a very popular topic for poetry. This is because love is one of the only things that there is no scientific fact no true definition and can be thought of in so many different ways. Poets can use poems to portray all the different types of love that people feel, romantic, young, stereotypical, fake, possessive, physical, the list is endless. Three poems that portray some of these are â€Å"The Flea†, â€Å"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning† and â€Å"A Woman to her Lover†. I like the poems â€Å"The Flea† and â€Å"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning† by John Donne because of the imagery and metaphors he uses to give us an understanding of both poems. I also like the poem â€Å"A Woman to Her Lover† by Christina Walsh because it gives a woman’s view of love. This gives a significant contrast to Donne’s poems. â€Å"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning† is a good contrast to â€Å"The Flea† since in â€Å"The Flea† the man who is talking is trying to persuade the woman to sleep with him when she is trying to refuse. Whilst in â€Å"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning† the man speaking is trying to persuade the woman being apart from each other will not break them up. In both poems Donne uses very strong imagery as a persuasive technique. For example there is a very good and strong in â€Å"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning†. Donne uses a compass to define the woman and the man moving away from each other. He uses the idea of the compass by making his lover the pointed end that stays in the same place and him being the end that has the lead attached which moves back and forth. Donne uses the image to show how even if he moves back and forth, ... ...elebration of their love. Christina Walsh talks of the music of the spheres, this is because as the planets moved the planets made music so joyous the heavens rejoiced in their love. This is a strong and another Biblical image to show how greater love the woman wants to have with her lover. â€Å"And we shall have the music of the spheres for bridal march† These three poems represent three couples who seem completely different because of the way they want to show their love but also alike. â€Å"The Flea† is an example of the stereotypical desire for physical love, â€Å"A Woman to Her Lover† is an example of a woman who is expecting this stereotypical love but yet wants true and holy love. Finally â€Å"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning† is an example of this pure and great love that does not have physical needs, the love that the woman in â€Å"A Woman to Her Lover† wants. Compare and Contrast the Ideas and Techniques of the Poets in the some Compare and Contrast the Ideas and Techniques of the Poets in the some of the Love Poems we have Studied Love is a very popular topic for poetry. This is because love is one of the only things that there is no scientific fact no true definition and can be thought of in so many different ways. Poets can use poems to portray all the different types of love that people feel, romantic, young, stereotypical, fake, possessive, physical, the list is endless. Three poems that portray some of these are â€Å"The Flea†, â€Å"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning† and â€Å"A Woman to her Lover†. I like the poems â€Å"The Flea† and â€Å"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning† by John Donne because of the imagery and metaphors he uses to give us an understanding of both poems. I also like the poem â€Å"A Woman to Her Lover† by Christina Walsh because it gives a woman’s view of love. This gives a significant contrast to Donne’s poems. â€Å"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning† is a good contrast to â€Å"The Flea† since in â€Å"The Flea† the man who is talking is trying to persuade the woman to sleep with him when she is trying to refuse. Whilst in â€Å"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning† the man speaking is trying to persuade the woman being apart from each other will not break them up. In both poems Donne uses very strong imagery as a persuasive technique. For example there is a very good and strong in â€Å"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning†. Donne uses a compass to define the woman and the man moving away from each other. He uses the idea of the compass by making his lover the pointed end that stays in the same place and him being the end that has the lead attached which moves back and forth. Donne uses the image to show how even if he moves back and forth, ... ...elebration of their love. Christina Walsh talks of the music of the spheres, this is because as the planets moved the planets made music so joyous the heavens rejoiced in their love. This is a strong and another Biblical image to show how greater love the woman wants to have with her lover. â€Å"And we shall have the music of the spheres for bridal march† These three poems represent three couples who seem completely different because of the way they want to show their love but also alike. â€Å"The Flea† is an example of the stereotypical desire for physical love, â€Å"A Woman to Her Lover† is an example of a woman who is expecting this stereotypical love but yet wants true and holy love. Finally â€Å"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning† is an example of this pure and great love that does not have physical needs, the love that the woman in â€Å"A Woman to Her Lover† wants.

Sound Navigation and Ranging SONAR :: sonar sound wave waves

Missing Images SONAR, as it is most commonly known as has been around since the beginning of time. Animals have used this technique and survived because of it for millions of years. Among the most common are bats and dolphins. Daniel Colloden used a bell to measure the speed of sound underwater in 1822. After the Titanic sunk, the idea of using sound underwater to locate objects, primarily icebergs, was taken up by inventors. Lewis Richardson, a meteorologist, was the first to file a patent for an echo locator one month after the Titanic had sunk. In 1914, Reginald Fessenden made an experimental unit, which was able to detect icebergs within a two-mile range, but it could not determine the direction. During World War I, with the invention of submarines came the need to locate them. Research of underwater sound location was a primary focus for the British. Both the U.S. and Britain were researching what would be Sonar, and it was kept secret throughout the war. By 1922, units were being produced and by 1923, they were being equipped to naval vessels. Throughout the war, Britain referred to this underwater locator as ASDIC, which was the Anti-Submarine Detection Investigation Committee. This committee, however, never existed. The name was just a cover-up to keep the actual detector secret. The term SONAR came from the Americans, who used it as the equivalent of RADAR. The term ASDIC was terminated in 1948 when NATO was formed and signals were being standardized. Sonar utilizes sound propagation to detect objects, navigate, and communicate. Through acoustic location, Sonar can be used to find an object and tell how far away that object is. As shown above, a transmitter sends out a pulse of sound towards an object, the sound wave is then reflected off of the object and sent back to the source. The distance of the object is determined by the amount of time it takes for a reflection to return after the pulse is sent out. This can be affected by several factors such as the density of the media which the sound is traveling through and if the object itself is moving or not. To find the direction of the object, several receivers are used to signal when a reflection passes by them. The above picture shows an initial wave being sent out in all directions.

The Origins and Development Book

THE ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE This page intentionally left blank THE ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE S I X T H E D I T I O N John Algeo Based on the original work of Thomas Pyles   Australia †¢ Brazil †¢ Japan †¢ Korea †¢ Mexico †¢ Singapore †¢ Spain †¢ United Kingdom †¢ United States The Origins and Development of the English Language: Sixth Edition John Algeo Publisher: Michael Rosenberg Development Editor: Joan Flaherty Assistant Editor: Megan Garvey Editorial Assistant: Rebekah MatthewsSenior Media Editor: Cara Douglass-Graff Marketing Manager: Christina Shea Marketing Communications Manager: Beth Rodio Content Project Manager: Corinna Dibble Senior Art Director: Cate Rickard Barr Production Technology Analyst: Jamie MacLachlan Senior Print Buyer: Betsy Donaghey Rights Acquisitions Manager Text: Tim Sisler Production Service: Pre-Press PMG Rights Acquisitions Manager Image: Mandy Groszko Cover Designe r: Susan Shapiro Cover Image: Kobal Collection Art Archive collection Dagli Orti Prayer with illuminated border, from c. 1480 Flemish manuscriptBook of Hours of Philippe de Conrault, The Art Archive/ Bodleian Library Oxford Compositor: Pre-Press PMG  © 2010, 2005 Wadsworth, Cengage Learning ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced, transmitted, stored, or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, scanning, digitizing, taping, Web distribution, information networks, or information storage and retrieval systems, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For product information and technology assistance, contact us at Cengage Learning Academic Resource Center, 1-800-423-0563 For permission to use material from this text or product, submit all requests online at www. cengage. com/permissions. Further permissions questions can be e-mailed to [email  protected] com Library of Congress Control Number: 2008930433 ISBN-13: 978-1-4282-3145-0 ISBN-10: 1-4282-3145-5 Wadsworth 20 Channel Center Street Boston, MA 02210USA Cengage Learning products are represented in Canada by Nelson Education, Ltd. For your course and learning solutions, visit www. cengage. com. Purchase any of our products at your local college store or at our preferred online store www. ichapters. com. Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 13 12 11 10 09 Preface The Origins and Development of the English Language, Sixth Edition, continues to focus on the facts of language rather than on any of the various contemporary theoretical approaches to the study of those facts.The presentation is that of fairly traditional grammar and philology, so as not to require students to master a new theoretical approach at the same time they are exploring the intricacies of lan guage history. The focus of the book is on the internal history of the English language: its sounds, grammar, and word stock. That linguistic history is, however, set against the social and cultural background of the changing times. The first three chapters are introductory, treating language in general as well as the pronunciation and orthography of present-day English.The succeeding central six chapters are the heart of the book, tracing the history of the language from prehistoric Indo-European days through Old English, Middle English, and early Modern English up to the present time. The final three chapters deal with vocabulary—the meaning, making, and borrowing of words. This sixth edition of a book Thomas Pyles wrote some forty-five years ago preserves the outline, emphasis, and aims of the original, as all earlier editions have. The entire book has, however, been revised for helpfulness to students and ease of reading.The major improvements of the fifth edition have be en retained. A large number of fresh changes have also been made, especially to make the presentation easier to follow. The historical information has been updated in response to evolving scholarship, new examples have been added (although effective older ones have been kept), the bibliography has been revised (including some new electronic resources in addition to print media), and the glossary has been revised for clarity and accuracy. The prose style throughout has been made more contemporary and accessible.The author hopes that such changes will help to make the book more useful for students and instructors alike. v All of the debts acknowledged in earlier editions are still gratefully acknowledged for this one. This edition has especially benefited from the critiques of the following reviewers, whose very helpful suggestions have been followed wherever feasible. James E. Doan, Nova Southeastern University Mark Alan Vinson, Crichton College Jay Ruud, University of Central Arkans as Elena Tapia, Eastern Connecticut State University J. Mark Baggett, Samford UniversityMy former doctoral student and now an admired teacher and Scholar-in-Residence at Shorter College, Carmen Acevedo Butcher, made a major contribution by suggesting improvements in the style and accuracy of the work, by providing new references for the bibliography (including electronic sources), and by reviewing the entire manuscript. My wife, Adele S. Algeo, who works with me on everything I do, has assisted at every step of the revision. Her editorial eye is nonpareil, and her support makes all work possible—and a pleasure. John Algeo vi PREFACE Contents PREFACE v chapter 1 Language and the English Language:An Introduction 1 A Definition of Language 2 Language as System 2 Grammatical Signals 3 Language as Signs 5 Language as Vocal 6 Writing and Speech 6 Gestures and Speech 8 Language as Conventional 8 Language Change 10 The Notion of Linguistic Corruption 10 Language Variation 11 Correctn ess and Acceptability 12 Language as Human 13 Theories of the Origin of Language 13 Innate Language Ability 14 Do Birds and Beasts Really Talk? 14 Language as Communication 15 Other Characteristics of Language 16 Why Study the History of English? 17 For Further Reading 18 vii chapter 2 The Sounds of Current English 20 The Organs of Speech 20Consonants of Current English 21 Vowels of Current English 25 Vowels before [r] 28 Stress 28 Unstressed Vowels 29 Kinds of Sound Change 29 Assimilation: Sounds Become More Alike 29 Dissimilation: Sounds Become Less Alike 30 Elision: Sounds Are Omitted 30 Intrusion: Sounds Are Added 31 Metathesis: Sounds Are Reordered 31 Causes of Sound Change 31 The Phoneme 32 Differing Transcriptions 33 For Further Reading 34 chapter 3 Letters and Sounds: A Brief History of Writing 35 Ideographic and Syllabic Writing 35 From Semitic Writing to the Greek Alphabet 36 The Greek Vowel and Consonant Symbols 36 The Romans Adopt the Greek Alphabet 37Later Developments of the Roman and Greek Alphabets 38 The Use of Digraphs 39 Additional Symbols 39 The History of English Writing 40 The Germanic Runes 40 The Anglo-Saxon Roman Alphabet 40 The Spelling of English Consonant Sounds 41 Stops 42 Fricatives 42 Affricates 43 Nasals 43 Liquids 43 Semivowels 43 The Spelling of English Vowel Sounds 43 Front Vowels 43 Central Vowel 44 Back Vowels 44 Diphthongs 45 Vowels plus [r] 45 viii CONTENTS Unstressed Vowels 45 Spelling Pronunciations and Pronunciation Spellings 46 Writing and History 47 For Further Reading 48 chapter 4 The Backgrounds of English 49 Indo-European Origins 50Indo-European Culture 50 The Indo-European Homeland 50 How Indo-European Was Discovered 51 Language Typology and Language Families 52 Non-Indo-European Languages 53 Main Divisions of the Indo-European Group 55 Indo-Iranian 55 Armenian and Albanian 58 Tocharian 58 Anatolian 59 Balto-Slavic 59 Hellenic 60 Italic 60 Celtic 61 Germanic 62 Cognate Words in the Indo-European Languages 63 Infl ection in the Indo-European Languages 64 Some Verb Inflections 65 Some Noun Inflections 66 Word Order in the Indo-European Languages 67 Major Changes From Indo-European to Germanic 69 First Sound Shift 71 Grimm’s Law 71 Verner’s Law 73The Sequence of the First Sound Shift 74 West Germanic Languages 74 For Further Reading 76 chapter 5 The Old English Period (449–1100) 78 Some Key Events in the Old English Period 78 History of the Anglo-Saxons 79 Britain before the English 79 The Coming of the English 79 The English in Britain 81 CONTENTS ix The First Viking Conquest 82 The Second Viking Conquest 83 The Scandinavians Become English 84 The Golden Age of Old English 84 Dialects of Old English 85 Pronunciation and Spelling 86 Vowels 86 Consonants 87 Handwriting 89 Stress 90 Vocabulary 90 The Germanic Word Stock 90 Gender in Old English 91Grammar, Concord, and Inflection 92 Inflection 92 Nouns 93 i-Umlaut 95 Modern Survivals of Case and Number 96 Modifiers 96 Demonstr atives 96 Adjectives 97 Adverbs 98 Pronouns 99 Personal Pronouns 99 Interrogative and Relative Pronouns 100 Verbs 101 Indicative Forms of Verbs 102 Subjunctive and Imperative Forms 102 Nonfinite Forms 102 Weak Verbs 103 Strong Verbs 103 Preterit-Present Verbs 104 Suppletive Verbs 105 Syntax 105 Old English Illustrated 108 For Further Reading 111 chapter 6 The Middle English Period (1100–1500) 112 Some Key Events in the Middle English Period 112 The Background of the Norman Conquest 113The Reascendancy of English 114 Foreign Influences on Vocabulary 115 Middle English Spelling 116 x CONTENTS Consonants 116 Vowels 118 The Rise of a London Standard 119 Changes in Pronunciation 122 Principal Consonant Changes 122 Middle English Vowels 123 Changes in Diphthongs 124 Lengthening and Shortening of Vowels 126 Leveling of Unstressed Vowels 127 Loss of Schwa in Final Syllables 127 Changes in Grammar 128 Reduction of Inflections 128 Loss of Grammatical Gender 129 Nouns, Pronouns, and Adj ectives 129 The Inflection of Nouns 129 Personal Pronouns 130 Demonstrative Pronouns 132 Interrogative and Relative Pronouns 133Comparative and Superlative Adjectives 133 Verbs 133 Personal Endings 134 Participles 135 Word Order 135 Middle English Illustrated 136 For Further Reading 138 chapter 7 The Early Modern English Period (1500–1800): Society, Spellings, and Sounds 139 Some Key Events in the Early Modern Period 139 The Transition from Middle to Modern English 140 Expansion of the English Vocabulary 140 Innovation of Pronunciation and Conservation of Spelling 141 The Orthography of Early Modern English 141 The Great Vowel Shift 144 Other Vowels 147 Stressed Short Vowels 147 Diphthongs 148 Quantitative Vowel Changes 149Early Modern English Consonants 149 Evidence for Early Modern Pronunciation 151 Stress 151 Scholarly Studies 151 CONTENTS xi Early Modern English Illustrated 152 Spelling 152 Pronunciation 153 For Further Reading 155 chapter 8 The Early Modern English Perio d (1500–1800): Forms, Syntax, and Usage 156 The Study of Language 157 Early Dictionaries 157 Eighteenth-Century Attitudes toward Grammar and Usage 158 Nouns 160 Irregular Plurals 161 His-Genitive 161 Group Genitive 162 Uninflected Genitive 163 Adjectives and Adverbs 163 Pronouns 164 Personal Pronouns 164 Relative and Interrogative Pronouns 168Case Forms of the Pronouns 169 Verbs 170 Classes of Strong Verbs 170 Endings for Person and Number 176 Contracted Forms 177 Expanded Verb Forms 178 Other Verbal Constructions 179 Prepositions 179 Early Modern English Further Illustrated 180 chapter 9 Late Modern English (1800–Present) 181 Some Key Events in the Late Modern Period 181 The National Varieties of English 182 Conservatism and Innovation in American English 183 National Differences in Word Choice 185 American Infiltration of the British Word Stock 186 Syntactical and Morphological Differences 187 British and American Purism 188 Dictionaries and the Facts 189National Dif ferences in Pronunciation 190 British and American Spelling 193 Variation within National Varieties 194 xii CONTENTS Kinds of Variation 194 Regional Dialects 195 Ethnic and Social Dialects 196 Stylistic Variation 198 Variation within British English 198 World English 199 Irish English 199 Indian English 201 The Essential Oneness of All English 202 For Further Reading 202 chapter 10 Words and Meanings 206 Semantics and Change of Meaning 207 Variable and Vague Meanings 208 Etymology and Meaning 208 How Meaning Changes 209 Generalization and Specialization 210 Transfer of Meaning 211 Association of Ideas 212Transfer from Other Languages 212 Sound Associations 213 Pejoration and Amelioration 213 Taboo and Euphemism 214 The Fate of Intensifying Words 217 Some Circumstances of Semantic Change 218 Vogue for Words of Learned Origin 219 Language and Semantic Marking 220 Semantic Change is Inevitable 222 For Further Reading 223 chapter 11 New Words from Old 224 Creating Words 224 Root Creatio ns 224 Echoic Words 225 Ejaculations 225 Combining Words: Compounding 227 Spelling and Pronunciation of Compounds 227 Amalgamated Compounds 229 Function and Form of Compounds 230 Combining Word Parts: Affixing 230 Affixes from Old English 230Affixes from Other Languages 232 CONTENTS xiii Voguish Affixes 233 Shortening Words 235 Clipped Forms 235 Initialisms: Alphabetisms and Acronyms 236 Apheretic and Aphetic Forms 237 Back-Formations 238 Blending Words 239 New Morphemes from Blending 239 Folk Etymology 241 Shifting Words to New Uses 242 One Part of Speech to Another 242 Common Words from Proper Names 243 Sources of New Words 245 Distribution of New Words 245 For Further Reading 246 chapter 12 Foreign Elements in the English Word Stock 247 Popular and Learned Loanwords 248 Latin and Greek Loanwords 248 Latin Influence in the Germanic Period 248Latin Words in Old English 249 Latin Words Borrowed in Middle English Times 250 Latin Words Borrowed in Modern English Times 251 Greek Loanwo rds 251 Celtic Loanwords 252 Scandinavian Loanwords 253 Old and Middle English Borrowings 253 Modern English Borrowings 254 French Loanwords 254 Middle English Borrowings 254 Later French Loanwords 256 Spanish and Portuguese Loanwords 258 Italian Loanwords 259 Germanic Loanwords 260 Loanwords from Low German 260 Loanwords from High German 261 Loanwords from the East 262 Near East 262 Iran and India 263 Far East and Australasia 264 Other Sources 265 Loanwords from African Languages 265Slavic, Hungarian, Turkish, and American Indian 266 xiv CONTENTS The Sources of Recent Loanwords 266 English Remains English 267 For Further Reading 268 Selected Bibliography 269 Glossary 281 Index of Modern English Words and Affixes 301 Index of Persons, Places, and Topics 329 CONTENTS xv This page intentionally left blank CHAPTER  ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ±Ã‚ ± Language and the 1 English Language A n Introduction The English language has had a remarkable history. When we first catch sight of it in historical records, it is the speech of some none-too-civilized tribes on the continent of Europe along the North Sea.Of course, it had a still earlier history, going back perhaps to somewhere in eastern Europe or western Asia, and long before that to origins we can only speculate about. From those murky and undistinguished beginnings, English has become the most widespread language in the world, used by more peoples for more purposes than any other language on Earth. How the English language changed from being the speech of a few small tribes to becoming the major language of the Earth—and in the process itself changed radically— is the subject of this book.Whatever language we speak—English, Chinese, Hindi, Swahili, or Arapaho— helps to define us personally and identify the community we belong to. But the fact that we can talk at all, the fact that we ha ve a language, is inextricably bound up with our humanity. To be human is to use language, and to talk is to be a person. As the biologist and author Lewis Thomas wrote: The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life. Language is, like nest-building or hive-making, the universal and biologically specific activity of human beings.We engage in it communally, compulsively, and automatically. We cannot be human without it; if we were to be separated from it our minds would die, as surely as bees lost from the hive. (Lives of a Cell 89) The language gift that is innate in us is not English or indeed any specific language. It is instead the ability to learn and to use a human language. When we say, â€Å"Bread is the staff of life,† we do not mean any particular kind of bread— whole wheat, rye, pumpernickel, French, matzo, pita, or whatever sort. We are talking instead about the kind of thing bread is, wha t all bread has in common.So also, when we say that language is the basis of our humanity, we do not mean any particular language—English, Spanish, Japanese, Tagalog, Hopi, or ASL (American Sign Language of the deaf). Rather we mean the ability to learn and 1 use any such particular language system, an ability that all human beings naturally have. This ability is language in the abstract, as distinct from any individual language system. A DEFINITION OF LANGUAGE A language is a system of conventional vocal signs by means of which human beings communicate. This definition has several important terms, each of which is examined in some detail in the following sections.Those terms are system, signs, vocal, conventional, human, and communicate. LANGUAGE AS SYSTEM Perhaps the most important word in the definition of language is system. We speak in patterns. A language is not just a collection of words, such as we find in a dictionary. It is also the rules or patterns that relate our words to one another. Every language has two levels to its system—a characteristic that is called duality of patterning. One of these levels consists of meaningful units—for example, the words and word parts such as Adam, like, -d, apple, and -s in the sentence â€Å"Adam liked apples. The other level consists of units that have no meaning in themselves, although they serve as components of the meaningful units—for example, the sounds represented by the letters a, d, and m in the word Adam. The distinction between a meaningful word (Adam) and its meaningless parts (a, d, and m) is important. Without that distinction, language as we know it would be impossible. If every meaning had to be represented by a unique, unanalyzable sound, only a few such meanings could be expressed. We have only about 35 basic sounds in English; we have hundreds of thousands of words.Duality of patterning lets us build an immensely large number of meaningful words out of only a handfu l of meaningless sounds. It is perhaps the chief characteristic that distinguishes true human language from the simpler communication systems of all nonhuman animals. The meaningless components of a language are its sound system, or phonology. The meaningful units are its lexis, or vocabulary, and its grammatical system, or morphosyntax. All have patterning. Thus, according to the sound system of Modern English, the consonant combination mb never occurs at the beginning or at the end of any word.As a matter of fact, it did occur in final position in earlier stages of our language, which is why it was necessary in the preceding statement to specify â€Å"Modern English. † Despite the complete absence of the sounds mb at the ends of English words for at least 600 years, we still insist on writing—such is the conservatism of writing habits—the b in lamb, climb, tomb, dumb, and a number of other words. But this same combination, which now occurs only medially in Eng lish (as in tremble), may well occur finally or even initially in other languages.Initial mb is indeed a part of the systems of certain African languages, as in Efik and Ibibio mbakara ‘white man,’ which became buckra in the speech of the Gullahs—black Americans living along the coastal region of Georgia and South Carolina who have preserved a number of words and structural features that their ancestors brought from Africa. It is notable that the Gullahs simplified the initial 2 chapter 1 consonant combination of this African word to conform to the pattern of English speech. The lexis or vocabulary of a language is its least systematic aspect.Grammar is sometimes defined as everything in a language that can be stated in general rules, and lexis as everything that is unpredictable. But that is not quite true. Certain combinations of words, called collocations, are more or less predictable. Mild and gentle are words of very similar meaning, but they go with differe nt nouns: â€Å"mild weather† and â€Å"gentle breeze† are somewhat more likely than the opposite combinations (â€Å"mild breeze† and â€Å"gentle weather†). A case of the flu may be severe or mild; a judgment is likely to be severe or lenient.A â€Å"mild judgment† would be a bit odd, and a â€Å"lenient case of the flu† sounds like a joke. Some collocations are so regular that they are easily predictable. In the following sentence, one word is more probable than any other in the blank: â€Å"In its narrow cage, the lion paced back and . † Although several words are possible in the blank (for example, forward or even ahead), forth is the most likely. Some combinations are completely predictable: â€Å"They ran fro. † Fro is normal in present-day English only in the expression â€Å"to and fro. † The tendency of certain words to collocate or go together is an instance of system in the vocabulary.In the grammatical syste m of English, a very large number of words take a suffix written as -s to indicate plurality or possession. In the latter case, it is a comparatively recent convention of writing to add an apostrophe. Words that can be thus modified are nouns. They fit into certain patterns in English utterances. Alcoholic, for instance, fits into the system of English in the same way as duck, dog, and horse: â€Å"Alcoholics need understanding† (compare â€Å"Ducks need water†), â€Å"An alcoholic’s perceptions are faulty† (compare â€Å"A dog’s perceptions are keen†), and the like.But that word can also modify a noun and be modified by an adverb: â€Å"an alcoholic drink,† â€Å"somewhat alcoholic,† and the like; and words that operate in the latter way are called adjectives. Alcoholic is thus either an adjective or a noun, depending on the way it functions in the system of English. The utterance â€Å"Alcoholic worries† is ambiguous b ecause our system, like all linguistic systems, is not completely foolproof. It might be either a noun followed by a verb (in a newspaper headline) or an adjective followed by a noun.To know which interpretation is correct, we need a context for the expression. That is, we need to relate it to a larger structure. Grammatical Signals The grammatical system of any language has various techniques for relating words to one another within the structure of a sentence. The following kinds of signals are especially important. †¢ Parts of speech are grammatical categories into which we can classify words. The four major ones are noun, verb, adjective, and adverb. Some words elong primarily or solely to one part of speech: child is a noun, seek is a verb, tall is an adjective, and rapidly is an adverb. Other words can function as more than one part of speech; in various meanings, last can be any of the four major parts. English speakers move words about pretty freely from one part of spe ech to another, as when we call a book that is enjoyable to read â€Å"a good read,† language and the english language 3 making a noun out of a verb. Part of knowing English is knowing how words can be shifted in that way and what the limits are to such shifting. Affixes are one or more added sounds or letters that change a word’s meaning and sometimes alter its part of speech. When an affix comes at the front of a word, it is a prefix, such as the en- in encipher, enrage, enthrone, entomb, entwine, and enwrap, which marks those words as verbs. When an affix comes at the back of a word, it is a suffix, such as the -ist in dentist, geologist, motorist, and violinist, which marks those words as nouns. English has a small number of inflectional suffixes (endings that mark distinctions of number, case, person, tense, mood, and comparison).They include the plural -s and the possessive ’s used with nouns (boys, boy’s); the third person singular present tense -s , the past tense and past participle -ed, and the present participle -ing used with verbs (aids, aided, aiding); and the comparative -er and superlative -est used with some adjectives and adverbs (slower, slowest). Inflection (the change in form of a word to mark such distinctions) may also involve internal change, as in the singular and plural noun forms man and men or the present and past verb forms sing and sang.A language that depends heavily on the use of inflections, either internal or affixed, is said to be synthetic; English used to be far more synthetic than it now is. †¢ Concord, or agreement, is an interconnection between words, especially marked by their inflections. Thus, â€Å"The bird sings† and â€Å"The birds sing† illustrate subject-verb concord. (It is just a coincidence that the singular ending of some verbs is identical in form with the plural ending of some nouns. Similarly, in â€Å"this day† both words are singular, and in â€Å"the se days† both are plural; some languages, such as Spanish, require that all modifiers agree with the nouns they modify in number, but in English only this and that change their form to show such agreement. Highly synthetic languages, such as Latin, usually have a great deal of concord; thus Latin adjectives agree with the nouns they modify in number (bonus vir ‘good man,’ boni viri ‘good men’), in gender (bona femina ‘good woman’), and in case (bonae feminae ‘good woman’s’).English once used concord more than it now does. †¢ Word order is a grammatical signal in all languages, though some languages, like English, depend more heavily on it than others do. â€Å"The man finished the job† and â€Å"The job finished the man† are sharply different in meaning, as are â€Å"He died happily† and â€Å"Happily he died. † †¢ Function words are minor parts of speech (for example, articles, au xiliaries, conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, and certain adverbial particles) that serve as grammatical signals used with word order to serve some of the same functions as inflections.For example, in English the indirect object of a verb can be shown by either word order (â€Å"I gave the dog a bone†) or a function word (â€Å"I gave a bone to the dog†); in Latin it is shown by inflection (canis ‘the dog,’ Cani os dedi ‘To-the-dog a-bone I-gave’). A language like English whose grammar depends heavily on the use of word order and function words is said to be analytic. †¢ Prosodic signals, such as pitch, stress, and tempo, can indicate grammatical meaning. The difference between the statement â€Å"He’s here† and the question 4 chapter 1 â€Å"He’s here? † is the pitch used at the end of the sentence.The chief difference between the verb conduct and the noun conduct is that the verb has a stronger stress on i ts second syllable and the noun on its first syllable. In â€Å"He died happily† and â€Å"He died, happily,† the tempo of the last two words makes an important difference of meaning. All languages have these kinds of grammatical signals available to them, but languages differ greatly in the use they make of the various signals. And even a single language may change its use over time, as English has. LANGUAGE AS SIGNS In language, signs are what the system organizes.A sign is something that stands for something else—for example, a word like apple, which stands for the familiar fruit. But linguistic signs are not words alone; they may also be either smaller or larger than whole words. The smallest linguistic sign is the morpheme, a meaningful form that cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts. The word apple is a single morpheme; applejack consists of two morphemes, each of which can also function independently as a word. Apples also has two morphemes, but one (-s) can occur only as part of a word. Morphemes that can be used alone as words (such as apple and jack) are called free morphemes.Those that must be combined with other morphemes to make a word (such as -s) are bound morphemes. The word reactivation has five morphemes in it (one free and four bound), as a stepby- step analysis shows: re-activation activate-ion active-ate act-ive Thus reactivation has one free morpheme (act) and four bound morphemes (re-, -ive, -ate, and -ion). A word cannot be divided into morphemes just by sounding out its syllables. Some morphemes, like apple, have more than one syllable; others, like -s, are less than a syllable. A morpheme is a form (a sequence of sounds) with a recognizable meaning.Knowing a word’s early history, or etymology, may be useful in dividing it into morphemes, but the decisive factor is the form-meaning link. A morpheme may, however, have more than one pronunciation or spelling. For example, the regular noun plural endi ng has two spellings (-s and -es) and three pronunciations (an s-sound as in backs, a z-sound as in bags, and a vowel plus z-sound as in batches). Each spoken variation is called an allomorph of the plural morpheme. Similarly, when the morpheme -ate is followed by -ion (as in activateion), the t of -ate combines with the i of -ion as the sound â€Å"sh† (so we might spell the word â€Å"activashon†).Such allomorphic variation is typical of the morphemes of English, even though the spelling does not represent it. Morphemes can also be classified as base morphemes and affixes. An affix is a bound morpheme that is added to a base morpheme, either a prefix (such as re-) or a suffix (such as -s, -ive, -ate, and -ion). Most base morphemes are free (such as language and the english language 5 apple and act), but some are bound (such as the insul- of insulate). A word that has two or more bases (such as applejack) is called a compound. A linguistic sign may be word-sized or sm aller—a free or a bound morpheme.But it may also be larger than a word. An idiom is a combination of words whose meaning cannot be predicted from its constituent parts. One kind of idiom is the combination of a verb with an adverb, a preposition, or both—for instance, turn on (a light), call up (on the telephone), take over (a business), ask for (a job), come down with (an illness), and go back on (a promise). Such an expression is a single semantic unit: to go back on is to ‘abandon’ a promise. But from the standpoint of grammar, several independent words are involved. LANGUAGE AS VOCALLanguage is a system that can be expressed in many ways—by the marks on paper or a computer screen that we call writing, by hand signals and gestures as in sign language, by colored lights or moving flags as in semaphore, and by electronic clicks as in old-fashioned telegraphy. However, the signs of language—its words and morphemes—are basically vocal, or oral-aural, being sounds produced by the mouth and received by the ear. If human communication had developed primarily as a system of gestures (like the sign language of the deaf), it would have been quite different from what it is.Because sounds follow one another sequentially in time, language has a one-dimensional quality (like the letters we use to represent it in writing), whereas gestures can fill the three dimensions of space as well as the fourth dimension of time. The ears can hear sounds coming from any direction, but the eyes can see gestures made only in front of them. The ears can hear through physical barriers, such as walls, which the eyes cannot see through. Speech has both advantages and disadvantages in comparison with gestures; but on the whole, it is undoubtedly superior, as its evolutionary survival demonstrates.Writing and Speech Because writing has become so important in our culture, we sometimes think of it as more real than speech. A little thought, howev er, will show why speech is primary and writing secondary to language. Human beings have been writing (as far as we can tell from the surviving evidence) for at least 5000 years; but they have been talking for much longer, doubtless ever since they were fully human. When writing developed, it was derived from and represented speech, albeit imperfectly (see Chapter 3). Even today there are spoken languages that have no written form.Furthermore, we learn to talk long before we learn to write; any human child without physical or mental limitations will learn to talk, and most human beings cannot be prevented from doing so. It is as though we were â€Å"programmed† to acquire language in the form of speech. On the other hand, it takes a special effort to learn to write. In the past, many intelligent and useful members of society did not acquire that skill, and even today many who speak languages with writing systems never learn to read or write, while some who learn the rudiments of those skills do so only imperfectly.To affirm the primacy of speech over writing is not, however, to disparage the latter. If speaking makes us human, writing makes us civilized. Writing has some 6 chapter 1 advantages over speech. For example, it is more permanent, thus making possible the records that any civilization must have. Writing is also capable of easily making some distinctions that speech can make only with difficulty. We can, for example, indicate certain types of pauses more clearly by the spaces that we leave between words when we write than we ordinarily are able to do when we speak.Grade A may well be heard as gray day, but there is no mistaking the one phrase for the other in writing. Similarly, the comma distinguishes â€Å"a pretty, hot day† from â€Å"a pretty hot day† more clearly than these phrases are often distinguished in actual speech. But the question mark does not distinguish between â€Å"Why did you do it? † (I didn’t he ar you the first time you told me), with rising pitch at the end, and â€Å"Why did you do it? † (You didn’t tell me), with falling terminal pitch. Nor can we show in writing the difference between sound quality ‘tone’ (as in â€Å"The sound quality of the recording was excellent†) nd sound quality ‘good grade’ (as in â€Å"The materials were of sound quality†)—a difference that we signal very easily in speech by strongly stressing sound in the first sentence and the first syllable of quality in the second. Incense ‘enrage’ and incense ‘aromatic substance for burning’ are likewise sharply differentiated in speech by the position of the stress, as sewer ‘conduit’ and sewer ‘one who sews’ are differentiated by vowel quality. In writing we can distinguish those words only in context. Words that are pronounced alike are called homophones.They may be spelled the same, such as bear ‘carry’ and bear ‘animal,’ or they may be distinguished in spelling, such as bare ‘naked’ and either of the bear words. Words that are written alike are called homographs. They may also be pronounced the same, such as the two bear words or tear ‘to rip’ and tear ‘spree’ (as in â€Å"He went on a tear†), or they may be distinguished in pronunciation, such as tear ‘a drop from the eye’ and either of the other two tear words. Homonym is a term that covers either homophones or homographs, that is, a word either pronounced or spelled like another, such as all bear/bare and tear words.Homophones are the basis of puns, as in childish jokes about â€Å"a bear behind† and â€Å"seven days without chocolate make one weak,† whose written forms resolve the ambiguity of their spoken forms. But William Shakespeare was by no means averse to this sort of thing: puns involving tale and tail, whole and hole, hoar and whore, and a good many other homophones (some, like stale and steal, no longer homophonous) occur rather frequently in the writings of our greatest poet. The conventions of writing differ somewhat from those of ordinary speech.For instance, we ordinarily write was not, do not, and would not, although we usually say wasn’t, don’t, and wouldn’t. Furthermore, our choice of words is likely to be different in writing and in everyday speech. But these are stylistic matters, as is also the fact that writing tends to be somewhat more conservative than speech. Representing the spellings of one language by those of another is transliteration, which must not be confused with translation, the interpretation of one language by another. Greek an be transliterated pyr, as in pyromaniac, or translated fire, as in firebug. One language can be written in several orthographies (or writing systems). When the president of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Pasha (later calle d Kemal Ataturk), in 1928 substituted the Roman alphabet for the Arabic in writing Turkish, the Turkish language and the english language 7 language changed no more than time changed when he introduced the Gregorian calendar in his country to replace the Islamic lunar one used earlier. Gestures and SpeechSuch specialized gestures as the indifferent shrug of the shoulders, the admonitory shaking of the finger, the lifting up of the hand in greeting and the waving of it in parting, the widening of the eyes in astonishment, the scornful lifting of the brows, the approving nod, and the disapproving sideways shaking of the head—all these need not accompany speech at all; they themselves communicate. Indeed, there is some reason to think that gestures are older than spoken language and are the matrix out of which it developed. Like language itself, such gestures vary in use and meaning from one culture to another.In India, a sideways wagging of the head indicates that the head-wagg er understands what another person is saying. When gestures accompany speech, they may be more or less unconscious, like the crossed arms of a person talking with another, indicating a lack of openness to the other’s ideas. The study of such communicative body movements is known as kinesics. Our various tones of voice—the drawl, the sneer, the shout, the whimper, the simper, and the like—also play a part in communication (which we recognize when we say, â€Å"I didn’t mind what he said, I just didn’t like the way he said it†).The tones and gestures that accompany speech are not language, but rather parallel systems of communication called paralanguage. Other vocalizations that are communicative, like laughing, crying, groaning, and yelping, usually do not accompany speech as tones of voice do, though they may come before or after it. LANGUAGE AS CONVENTIONAL Writing is obviously conventional because we can represent the same language by more than one writing system.Japanese, for example, is written with kanji (ideographs representing whole words), with either of two syllabaries (writing systems that present each syllable with a separate symbol), or with the letters of the Roman alphabet. Similarly, we could by general agreement reform English spelling (soe dhat, for egzammpul, wee spelt it liek dhis). We can change the conventions of our writing system merely by agreeing to do so. Although it is not so obvious, speech is also conventional. To be sure, all languages share certain natural, inherent, or universal features.The human vocal apparatus (lips, teeth, tongue, and so forth) makes it inevitable that human languages have only a limited range of sounds. Likewise, since all of us live in the same universe and perceive our universe through the same senses with more or less the same basic mental equipment, it is hardly surprising that we should find it necessary to talk about more or less the same things in more or les s similar ways. Nevertheless, the world’s many languages are conventional and generally arbitrary; that is to say, there is usually no connection between the sounds we make and the phenomena of life.A comparatively small number of echoic words imitate, more or less closely, other sounds. Bow-wow seems to English speakers to 8 chapter 1 be a fairly accurate imitation of the sound made by a dog and therefore not to be wholly arbitrary, but it is highly doubtful that a dog would agree, particularly a French dog, which says gnaf-gnaf, or a German one, which says wau-wau, or a Japanese one, which says wung-wung. In Norway cows do not say â€Å"moo† but mmmooo, sheep do not say â€Å"baa† but m? , and pigs do not say â€Å"oink† but noffnoff. Norwegian hens very sensibly say klukk-klukk, though doubtless with a heavy Norwegian accent.The process of echoing such sounds (also called onomatopoeia) is conventional. Most people assume that their language is the best —and so it is for them, because they mastered it well enough for their own purposes so long ago that they cannot remember when or how. It seems to them more logical and sensible, more natural, than the way others talk. But there is nothing really natural about any language, since all these highly systematized and conventionalized methods of human communication must be acquired. There is, for instance, nothing natural in our use of is in such a sentence as â€Å"The woman is busy. The utterance can be made just as effectively without that verb, and some languages do get along perfectly well without it. This use of the verb to be was, as a matter of fact, late in developing and never developed in Russian. To the speaker of Russian it is more â€Å"natural† to say â€Å"Zhenshchina zanyata†Ã¢â‚¬â€ literally, â€Å"Woman busy†Ã¢â‚¬â€which sounds to our ears so much like baby talk that the unsophisticated speaker of English might well (though quite wrongly) conclude that Russian is a childish tongue. The system of Russian also manages to struggle along without the definite article the.As a matter of fact, the speaker of Russian never misses it—nor should we if it had not become conventional with us. To a naive speaker of English, calling the organ of sight eye may seem perfectly natural, and those who call it anything else—like the Germans, who call it Auge, the Russians, who call it glaz, or the Japanese, who call it me—are likely to be regarded as unfortunate because they do not speak languages in which things are properly named. The fact is, however, that eye, which we pronounce exactly like I (a fact that might be cited against it by a foreign speaker), is the name of the organ only in present-day English.It has not always been so. Londoners of the fourteenth century pronounced the word with two syllables, something like â€Å"ee-eh. † If we chose to go back to King Alfred’s day in the late ninth century, we would find yet another form of the word from which Modern English eye developed. The Scots are not being quaint or perverse when they say â€Å"ee† for eye, as in Robert Burns’s poem â€Å"To a Mouse†: Still thou art blest, compared wi’ me! The present only toucheth thee: But och! I backward cast my e’e, On prospects drear!The Scots form is merely a variant of the word—a perfectly legitimate pronunciation that happens not to occur in standard Modern English. Knowledge of such changes within a single language should dissipate the notion that any word is more appropriate than any other word, except in a purely chronological and social sense. language and the english language 9 Language Change Change is normal in language. Every language is constantly turning into something different, and when we hear a new word or a new pronunciation or use of an old word, we may be catching the early stages of a change.Change is natural because a language system is culturally transmitted. Like other conventional matters—such as fashions in clothing, hairstyles, cooking, entertainment, and government—language is constantly being revised. Language evolves more slowly than do some other cultural activities, but its change is continuous and inevitable. There are three general causes of language change. First, words and sounds may affect neighboring words and sounds. For example, sandwich is often pronounced, not as the spelling suggests, but in ways that might be represented as â€Å"sanwich,† â€Å"sanwidge,† â€Å"samwidge,† or even â€Å"sammidge. Such spellings look illiterate, but they represent perfectly normal, though informal, pronunciations that result from the position of a sound within the word. When nearby elements thus influence one another within the flow of speech, the result is called syntagmatic change. Second, words and sounds may be affected by others that are not immediate ly present but with which they are associated. For example, the side of a ship on which it was laden (that is, loaded) was called the ladeboard, but its opposite, starboard, influenced a change in pronunciation to larboard.Then, because larboard was likely to be confused with starboard because of their similarity of sound, it was generally replaced by port. Such change is called paradigmatic or associative change. Third, a language may change because of the influence of events in the world. New technologies like the World Wide Web require new forms like google ‘to search the Internet for information’ and wiki (as in Wikipedia) ‘a Website, database, or software for creating Web sites, especially collaborative ones,’ from the Hawaiian word for ‘fast. New forms of human behavior, however bizarre, require new terms like suicide bomber. New concepts in science require new terms like transposon ‘a transposable gene in DNA. ’ In addition, new co ntacts with persons who use speechways different from our own may affect our pronunciation, vocabulary, and even grammar. Social change thus modifies speech. The documented history of the English language begins about A. D. 700, with the oldest written records. We can reconstruct some of the prehistory before that time, to as early as about 4000 B. C. but the farther back in time we go, the less certain we can be about what the language was like. The history of our language is traditionally divided into three periods: Old English, from the earliest records (or from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of England around A. D. 450) to about 1100; Middle English, approximately from 1100 to 1500; and Modern English, since about 1500. The lines dividing the three periods are based on significant changes in the language about those times, but major cultural changes around 1100 and 1500 also contribute to our sense of new beginnings.These matters are treated in detail in Chapters 5 through 8. The No tion of Linguistic Corruption A widely held notion resulting from a misunderstanding of change is that there are ideal forms of languages, thought of as â€Å"pure,† and that existing languages represent corruptions of earlier ideal ones. Thus, the Greek spoken today is supposed to 10 chapter 1 be a degraded form of Classical Greek rather than what it really is, a development of it. Since the Romance languages are developments of Latin, it would follow from this point of view that they also are corrupt, although this assumption is not usually made.Those who admire or profess to admire Latin literature sometimes suppose that a stage of perfection had been reached in Classical Latin and that every subsequent development in Latin was an irreparable deterioration. From this point of view, the late development of Latin spoken in the early Middle Ages (sometimes called Vulgar, or popular, Latin) is â€Å"bad† Latin, which, strange as it may seem, was ultimately to become â⠂¬Å"good† Italian, French, Spanish, and so on. Because we hear so much about â€Å"pure† English, we might carefully examine this notion.When Captain Frederick Marryat, an English novelist, visited the United States in 1837–1838, he thought it â€Å"remarkable how very debased the language has become in a short period in America,† adding that â€Å"if their lower classes are more intelligible than ours, it is equally true that the higher classes do not speak the language so purely or so classically as it is spoken among the well-educated English. † Both statements are nonsense. The first is based on the captain’s apparent notion that the English language had reached a stage of perfection at the time English-speaking people first settled America.After this, presumably because of the innate depravity of those English settlers who brought their language to the New World, it had taken a steadily downward course, whatever that may mean. One wonder s also precisely how Marryat knew what constituted â€Å"classical† or â€Å"pure† English. It is probable that he was merely attributing certain superior qualities to that type of English that he was accustomed to hear from persons of good social standing in the land of his birth and that he himself spoke. Any divergence was â€Å"debased†: â€Å"My speech is pure; thine, wherein it differs from mine, is corrupt. Language Variation In addition to its change through the years, at any given period of time a language exists in many varieties. Historical, or diachronic, variation is matched by contemporary, or synchronic, variation. The latter is of two kinds: dialects and registers. A dialect is the variety of a language associated with a particular place (Boston or New Orleans), social level (standard or nonstandard), ethnic group (Jewish or African-American), sex (male or female), age grade (teenage or mature), and so on.Most of us have a normal way of using la nguage that is an intersection of such dialects and that marks us as being, for example, a middle-aged, white, cultured, female Charlestonian of old family or a young, urban, working-class, male Hispanic from New York City. Some people have more than one such dialect personality; national politicians, for example, may use a Washingtonian government dialect when they are doing their job and a â€Å"down-home† dialect when they are interacting with their voters.Ultimately, each of us has a unique, personal way of using language, an idiolect, which identifies us for those who know us. A register is the variety of a language used for a particular purpose: sermon language (which may have a distinctive rhythm and sentence melody and include words like brethren and beloved), restaurant-menu language (which is full of â€Å"tasty adjectives† like garden-fresh and succulent), telephone-conversation language (in which the speech of the secondary participant is full of uh-huh, I see, yeah, and language and the english language 11 h), postcard language (in which the subjects of sentences are frequently omitted: â€Å"Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here. †), and e-mail and instant-messaging language with abbreviations like BTDT (been there, done that), CUL8ER (see you later), CYO (see you online), and LOL (laughing out loud). Everyone uses several registers, and the more varied the circumstances under which we talk and write, the more registers we use. The dialects we speak help to define who we are. They tell those who hear us where we come from, our social or ethnic identification, and other such intimate facts about us.The registers we use reflect the circumstances in which we are communicating. They indicate where we are speaking or writing, to whom, via what medium, about what subject, and for what purpose. Dialects and registers provide options—alternative ways of using language. And those options confront us with the question of w hat is the right or best alternative. Correctness and Acceptability The concept of an absolute and unwavering, presumably God-given standard of linguistic correctness (sometimes confused with â€Å"purity†) is widespread, even among the educated.Those who subscribe to this notion become greatly exercised over such matters as split infinitives, the â€Å"incorrect† position of only, and prepositions at the ends of sentences. All these supposed â€Å"errors† have been committed time and again by eminent writers and speakers, so that one wonders how those who condemn them know that they are bad. Robert Lowth, who wrote one of the most influential English grammars of the eighteenth century (A Short Introduction to English Grammar, 1762), was praised by one of his admirers for showing â€Å"the grammatic inaccuracies that have escaped the pens of our most distinguished writers. One would suppose that the language of â€Å"our most distinguished writers† would be good usage. But Lowth and his followers knew, or thought they knew, better; and their attitude survives to this day. This is not, of course, to deny that there are standards of usage, but only to suggest that standards must be based on the usage of speakers and writers of generally acknowledged excellence—quite a different thing from a subservience to the mandates of badly informed â€Å"authorities† who are guided by their own prejudices rather than by a study of the actual usage of educated and accomplished speakers and writers.To talk about â€Å"correctness† in language implies that there is some abstract, absolute standard by which words and grammar can be judged; something is either â€Å"correct† or â€Å"incorrect†Ã¢â‚¬â€and that’s all there is to that. But the facts of language are not so clean-cut. Instead, many students of usage today prefer to talk about acceptability, that is, the degree to which users of a language will ju dge an expression as OK or will let its use pass without noticing anything out of the ordinary. An acceptable expression is one that people do not object to, indeed do not even notice unless it is called to their attention.Acceptability is not absolute, but is a matter of degree; one expression may be more or less acceptable than another. â€Å"If I were in your shoes† may be judged more acceptable than â€Å"If I was in your shoes,† but both are considerably more acceptable than â€Å"If we was in your shoes. † Moreover, acceptability is not abstract, but is related to some group of people whose response it reflects. Thus most 12 chapter 1 Americans pronounce the past-tense verb ate like eight and regard any other pronunciation as unacceptable. Many Britons, on the other hand, pronounce it as â€Å"ett† and find the American preference less acceptable.Acceptability is part of the convention of language use; in talking about it, we must always keep in min d â€Å"How acceptable? † and â€Å"To whom? † LANGUAGE AS HUMAN As noted at the beginning of this chapter, language is a specifically human activity. That statement, however, raises several questions. When and how did human beings acquire language? To what extent is language innate, and to what extent is it learned? How does human language differ from the communication systems of other creatures? We will look briefly at each of these questions.Theories of the Origin of Language The ultimate origin of language is a matter of speculation since we have no real information about it. The earliest languages for which we have records are already in a high stage of development, and the same is true of languages spoken by technologically primitive peoples. The problem of how language began has tantalized philosophical minds, and many theories have been advanced, to which waggish scholars have given such fanciful names as the pooh-pooh theory, the bow-wow theory, the ding-dong theory, and the yo-he-ho theory.The nicknames indicate how seriously the theories need be taken: they are based, respectively, on the notions that language was in the beginning ejaculatory, or echoic (onomatopoeic), or characterized by a mystic appropriateness of sound to sense in contrast to being merely imitative, or made up of grunts and groans emitted in the course of group actions. According to one theory, the early prelanguage of human beings was a mixture of gestures and sounds in which the gestures carried most of the meaning and the sounds were used chiefly to â€Å"punctuate† or amplify the gestures—just the reverse of our use of speech and hand signals.Eventually human physiology and behavior changed in several related ways. The human brain, which had been expanding in size, lateralized—that is, each half came to specialize in certain activities, and language ability was localized in the left hemisphere of most persons. As a consequence, â€Å"handed ness† developed (right-handedness for those with left-hemisphere dominance), and there was greater manual specialization. As people had more things to do with their hands, they could use them less for communication and had to rely more on sounds.Therefore, increasingly complex forms of oral signals developed, and language as we know it evolved. The fact that we human beings alone have vocal language but share with our closest animal kin (the apes) an ability to learn complex gesture systems suggests that manual signs may have preceded language as a form of communication. We cannot know how language really began; we can be sure only of its immense antiquity. However human beings started to talk, they did so long ago, and it was not until much later that they devised a system of making marks on wood, stone, or clay to represent what they said.Compared with language, writing is a newfangled invention, although certainly not less brilliant for being so. language and the english la nguage 13 Innate Language Ability The acquisition of language would seem to be an arduous task. But it is a task that children all over the world seem not to mind in the least. Moreover, children in daily contact with a language other than their â€Å"home† language—that of their parents—readily learn to speak the other language with a native accent. After childhood, however, perhaps in the teen years, most people find it difficult to learn a new language.Young children seem to be genetically equipped with an ability to acquire language. But after a while, that automatic ability atrophies, and learning a new language becomes a chore. To be sure, children of five or so have not acquired all of the words or grammatical constructions they will need as they grow up. But they have mastered the basics of the language they will speak for the rest of their lives. The immensity of that accomplishment can be appreciated by anyone who has learned a second language as an ad ult.It is clear that, although every particular language has to be learned, the ability to acquire and use language is a part of our genetic inheritance and operates most efficiently in our younger years. Do Birds and Beasts Really Talk? Some animals are physically just about as well equipped as humans to produce speech sounds, and some—certain birds, for instance—have in fact been taught to do so. But no other species makes use of a system of sounds even remotely resembling ours. Human language and animal communication are fundamentally different.In the second half of the twentieth century, a trio of chimpanzees—Sarah, Lana, and Washoe—greatly modified our ideas about the linguistic abilities of our closest relatives in the animal kingdom. After several efforts to teach chimps to talk had ended in almost total failure, it was generally concluded that apes lack the cognitive ability to learn language. Some psychologists reasoned, however, that the main pr oblem might be a simple anatomical limitation: human vocal organs are so different from the corresponding ones in apes that the animals cannot produce the sounds of human speech.If they have the mental, but not the physical, ability to talk, then they should be able to learn a language using a medium other than sound. Sarah was taught to communicate by arranging plastic tokens of arbitrary color and shape. Each of the tokens, which were metal-backed and placed on a magnetized board, represented a word in the system, and groups of tokens corresponded to sentences. Sarah learned over a hundred tokens and could manage sentences of the complexity of â€Å"Sarah take banana if-then Mary no give chocolate Sarah† (that is, ‘If Sarah takes a banana, Mary won’t give Sarah any chocolate’).Lana also used word symbols, but hers were on a typewriter connected to a computer. She communicated with people, and they with her via the computer. Typed-out messages appeared on a screen and had to conform exactly to the rules of â€Å"word† order of the system Lana had been taught, if she was to get what she asked for (food, drink, companionship, and the like). Washoe, in the most interesting of these efforts to teach animals a language, was schooled in a gesture language used by the deaf, American Sign Language. 14 chapter 1Her remarkable success in learning to communicate with this quite natural and adaptable system has resulted in its being taught to a number of other chimpanzees and gorillas. The apes learn signs, use them appropriately, combine them meaningfully, and when occasion requires even invent new signs or combinations. For example, one of the apes made up the terms â€Å"candydrink† and â€Å"drinkfruit† to talk about watermelons. The linguistic accomplishment of these apes is remarkable; nevertheless, it is a far cry from the fullness of a human language.The number of signs or tokens the ape learns, the complexity of th e syntax with which those signs are combined, and the breadth of ideas that they represent are all far more restricted than in any human language. Moreover, human linguistic systems have been fundamentally shaped by the fact that they are expressed in sound. Vocalness of language is no mere incidental characteristic but rather is central to the nature of language. We must still say that only human beings have language in the full sense of that term. LANGUAGE AS COMMUNICATIONThe purpose of language is to communicate, whether with others by