Language & Communication, Sam Stangl

In the 3 articles that we read, I found that language is a barrier between cultures, but it is not solid: the barrier can be broken and passed with the right use of words, phrases, and body language, even. I especially loved the article about Hamlet, and how the man learned about more than just what the story means when considering it from the elders' perspective, but also learned more about the metaphors connecting cultures that people can compare to universally. He used their language and their word use to explain Hamlet as a story that they would like, one that they could understand and relate to. Also, I like the anonymous quote from the third article that reads, "it is not the case that a man who is silent says nothing." This, to me, sums up a large amount of information into one short sentence, and it is completely true. A man who is silent is a man with much more on his mind, usually, and he may be saying something without ever opening his mouth. It is possible, and it happens with people around the world.

The textbook says a lot about communication and language. It tells how there are dialects within a culture, and they do not sound like the formal and "correct" way that the language is spoken, but they are understandable, and they logically represent the idea that a person want's to convey. The example was the use of ebonics in English language: ebonics is considered by some more than others to be another correct form of English that should be taken as seriously and read as fluently as formal English.

I think that a culture's vocabulary shapes their concepts of reality in a drastic way. For example, the African people in the first article about Hamlet did not believe in a significant afterlife, and thus did not have a word for Heaven, ghost, or those kinds of things. They did not understand the concept of a person's soul or spirit roaming the earth to seek out unfufilled duties in order to rest in peace. And for them, there was just no need to. Thus, the language we use affects the way we see the world, because it determines what we think exists, and how we think things work. However, what we see in the world also determines the vocabulary we need, as we are likely to be able to come up with a word for something even if there is no literal term for such a thing. In English, there is almost no way to come up short of a word, especially because you can piece words together to create your own word with its own meaning, but it is understandable because of the similarity to other words that are used to create this word.