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’.