I always buy ‘pasteurized’ milk, even when I am in Nepal where many people buy raw milk from the farms and I have to travel a long distant to find a gallon of pasteurized milk.

I cannot remember exactly what grade I was studying at, whether it was fourth or fifth when I heard the word ‘pasteurization’.  In Nepali it is borrowed from the western world.  

Even though the world ‘pasteurized’ is widely used in English language, I believe, many people do not know the origin of this common word. I was looking for a word that would be very unique but common. I am very excited when I find the word which is one of the very first English words that I was introduced with in my life.

Pasteurization is the process of boiling liquid food up to a certain high temperature for a specific length of time so as to kill and minimize the growth of harmful microorganisms.  The process was first discovered by the French Scientist Louis Pasteur around mid 19^th century.  So the origin of the English word ‘pasteurized’ is the last name of a French chemist and microbiologist.

Now let’s look at the formation process of the word ‘pasteurized’. First, the word ‘pasteurization’ came after somebody’s name from the coinage process, which is also known as eponyms (meaning coinage of a word from a name of person or after the name of a place. Next the word goes under the process of Backformation where the noun pasteurization is reduced to a verb pasteurize. Finally, ‘pasteurize’ becomes adjective ‘pasteurized’ by taking suffix ‘ed’ at the end of the verb.

Friends! Buy only pasteurized milk because it has far less microbial than the raw milk.  

A Brief Critical Review of “The Speech Chain”

A Brief Critical Review of “The Speech Chain”

The book I am reading this semester this semester is “The Speech Chain” by Peter Denes and Elliot Pinson and I found this book very interesting for some reasons. As I mentioned earlier, when we talk in everyday life or about speech we never think that what process are involved, just like we never pay attention on how we breath although we breath every five seconds. As the writers suggested, our conversations with other people are chains of four interrelated events. When we start talking, first of all we decide what we are going to talk about and which are to be said to convey a precise message. This event occurs in our brain and is known as the linguistic level. With the completion of the Linguistic Level, our brain sends message to our speech producing organs to produce speech sounds. This process of producing speech sound by the articulators is known as the Physiological Level of the speech chain. The next level of the speech chain is the acoustic level which describes about the physics of sound travelling from our mouth to the listener’s ear. When the sound waves gives pressure to the listeners’ ears, the hearing mechanisms are activated to understand the sound which we call Physiological Level which ends at Linguistic Level of the chain, where the brain of the listener works to understand the message send by the speaker.

I feel myself very informed after reading this book. This book is complete insight about what events are occurred while we produce speech sounds. It is very interesting to know what happens when we talk to people, how we produce sounds, how does the sounds produced by our speech mechanism travel from our mouth to the ears of the listeners and how the listener understands what we are talking about. The writers has done a great job by breaking the process of speech communication into sections and corresponding sub-sections, which, I believe, helps us for easy understanding of the core information. In addition to that, this book is written in very simple English language and with the illustration of relevant diagrams, which are definitely helpful for the people who speak English as second language. Moreover, this book could be the course book for the students who are beginners of in linguistic field. I found this book closely related with our course book while reading the linguistic level of the speech chain. The phonetics and morphology are exactly what we read in the course book. I believe this book could be a very valuable source of information even for those people who are not the student of language; it is worth being familiar with the levels that involve when we talk in our everyday life.

Summary of the reading 2



In my reading of the following chapters I learned about the linguistic organization of the speech chain in more detail. As I mentioned in my previous post that the book “The Speech Chain” is very closely related to our course I learned about phonemes from the book too. Phonemes are the smallest unit of a language, which distinguish the meaning of different words. Phonemes are consonants and vowels and these units form syllables which finally form words. Words are the symbols to denote the objects around us and concept and ideas of ours. Languages are the series and sequences of these words, which are also known as sentences. When forming sentences, words are put in order by following a set of rules. The set of rules is known as Grammar. It consists of phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics.

Phonology is concerned with the formation of phonemes and rules regarding their combinations in building words. Phonology is also concerned about stress and Intonation. These characteristics of language play very important role in adding or distinguishing meaning of it. For example, although “John is responsible for that” and “John is responsible for that” are same sentences due to stresses on two different words, the meaning of these sentences are completely different.

Morphology deals with combination of small meaningful units in words. For instances we add a phoneme ‘s’ on the word ‘book’ to make it plural i.e. ‘books’.

Syntax deals with the rules that are to be followed to make sequence of words which gives meaningful sentences. Sentences forming without a proper syntax are meaningless. In English, for instance, “English is easy to learn” makes sense whereas if we put the same words in different ways such as “easy English is learn to” is weird.

Another important element of grammar is semantics which deals with the meaningfulness of sentences. Sentences can be meaningless sometimes even if it is formed by using proper syntax. The sentence “the books are walking on the street” is correct but it is meaningless because books are non-living things and cannot walk.

This is how my name is pronounced

My name is Indra. Linguists can pronounce my name very easily. They would pronounce my name as [inðrə] On the other hand, whenever I say my name to the non-linguist native English speakers, nobody could understand how to pronounce it in the first shot and I have to spell it out. When I spell my name to them, they pronounce it as [indrə] which is not correct. I do not blame them because the consonant [d] always sounds [d] not [ð]. Now I have learned how to make them pronounce my name correctly. I would tell them to say “in” first, then to pronounce ‘th’, just like they would pronounce the first two letters in the word ‘the’. The last two letters in my name is to be pronounced as they would do the last two letters of the word ‘opera’.

What I understood so far...

Dear Professor and fellow classmates,

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have been reading the book "The Speech Chain". Reading the first few chapters I learned that we as human being do not put as much of our effort in understanding our spoken language as we do on the writings or readings. Many of us do not realize that speech is the center of any languages.

In the book the writer defines the speech as chain of events. To make it more clear he provides a example of two people engaged in a converstion. In the very begining of the conversation the first speaker decides what the person is going to talk about; his brian starts working in finding correct words and putting them in gramatical order. This process of selecting words and puting them in correct order is known as linguistic level. This level ends at phisiological one in which the brain of the speeker send message of linguistic process to the organs involved in speech mechanism. The speech mechanism works and produce sounds according to the messages received from the linguistic level, whihc is a physical process known acoustics level that ends at the listener. At the lisner side, "the process is reversed" (Denes). The listener hears the physical sound waves, produced by his companion, with the the help of the sound mechanism existing with him and then his brain starts percieving the message.


In the chapters coming I will be lerning the corresponding events occured in the each level of the of speech chain in details.

Why I decided to read the book "The Speech Chain"



Dear Professor and my fellow classmates,

For the research project I will be reading “The Speech Chain: The Physics and Biology of Spoken Language” By Peter B Denes and Elliot N Pinson. While conducting a mini research on the books listed on the syllabus, all of them looked equally interesting and of importance for me; it was very difficult to choose one over the others. I have decided to choose this book for a couple of reasons which I am going to mention below.

First, I felt that the book is written in very simple English language which for me is easy to comprehend. I am a non-native speaker of English. I believe, mastering over a book written in an advance level of English language would consume a significant amount of time and effort which I cannot afford now because I am taking three more classes in this semester (1^st session), although it could benefit me in the future.

Second, after reading the information about the books and the very beginning sections of the book, I believe that it has a very close relation to the course – Introduction to Language. I further believe that it benefits me significantly to the better understanding of the course.

Like the title of the book suggests the book is all about the sequence of the events when we speak. Although we make speeches every now and then – like other regular activities in our lives – we take it for granted; we do not pay much attention on how the process of speech is formed. The writer suggests that a speech is a chain of events which consists of deciding what we want to deliver, arranging words following the grammatical rules governing the systematic language, activating our voice mechanisms and producing sounds and so on.

I am excited!

Good luck for your readings all of my fellow classmates.

my relation to the Nepali language



Nepali is my first language in which I can comfortably speak, read and write. In addition to Nepali, I can understand two more languages; English and Hindi. Hindi and Nepali have the same origin that is Sanskrit. I learned English before I learned Hindi. Most of the private schools teach English from kindergarten in Nepal. English is taught from class three in public schools. I attended a public primary school and started learning English from class three. Although I would understand some of Hindi I learned it almost everything about Hindi only after I graduated from a junior high school.

People’s whose native language is Hindi do not easily understand Nepali but the reverse is true although the origin is the same and most of the words are very close. More Nepalese youth learn Hindi now than before because of their easy access to the Hindi movies.

I believe that I learned the words of daily use at home. My grandparents, parents, brothers and other relatives are the teachers of my spoken Nepali language. I learned basic writings at home too. People mentioned above taught me to write the basic alphabets and to construct basic words.

Nepali has three different words to address seniors, junior and people of the same age groups or friends.
I always wonder why there are so many languages throughout the world even though we all human beings? Did we use a same language to communicate at the beginning and deviate later? If that is the case what is the language we as human being used first? At what point the deviation began? I think human language is developed with the evolution of human brains. I believe that people has to communicate with each other when they start living in community together. They had to use signs and expressions to instruct somebody about something, which later evolved as language. But the question remains why the different words to express the same things?

The thing that fascinated me a lot in the acticle "You are what you speak" by Guy Deutcher is the language of the Australian aboriginals. It is amaizing that how they determined the direction. When I was in Nepal I could tell the directions easily because we have a lot of mountains and other natural objects. However, When I was in Australia and when I moved from one place to another I could never tell which direction is what. The same thing is happening when I am in the USA. I was considering a direction as the East but it turned out to be the west next morning when the sun rises. I live in sunnyside and now I am used to it, so I can point to the every proper direction but when I go to the Bronx or any other places the problem remains the same. I wonder how the Australian aboriginal would determin directions if they were brought to a country far from their homeland.