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.