Another lecture I really enjoyed this year was the lecture by Teresa Satterfield on Spanish linguistics. I thought this was a great lecture for several reasons;
1. Professor Satterfield was a fun, funny, and interesting lecturer.
I thought she was one of the best lecturers we have had all year, and I got the feeling that most people liked her as well. She was a good speaker and she kept the lecture, which had the potential to be sleep invoking, lively, interesting, and relaxed. It was easy to understand her, and he slides were easy to follow as well as easy to takes notes on.
2. The material, despite initially sounding boring, was actually quite intriguing.
When I saw that she was going to be speaking about linguistics, I was thinking, "Oh great! A lecture on linguistics!", but after learning more about linguistics, I found that it was actually pretty cool. For example, I really liked her discussion on children learning multiple languages. I find it amazing that kids can learn 5 languages at once, and it is also fascinating how the father has to speak the minority language in order for the child to comprehend it easier. It almost like kids have an inherent patriarchal mindset, which is something I didn't know linguistics studied.
3. Her stories and personal references made the lecture more meaningful.
I really like her stories, and she was so funny telling them. It made the lecture hit home more when she told stories about her encounters with matters relating to linguistics, like the story about when she was in the super market and the little Latino boy was talking to her in Spanish, and he said, "Mom, this black lady is speaking Spanish!" and she told him that anyone could speak Spanish. She also brought in her brother, who doesn't speak Spanish, and how that related to Linguistics issues as well. The discussion on Regaeton was also very cool, because of how the Spanish language is almost evolving because of its interaction between different groups of people.
Overall, I thought it was an outstanding lecture and I learned a lot from it, and it also gave me a greater perspective of language. It definitely gave me some motivation to take one of her classes.
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I think that minority languages need defending.
The promulgation of English as the world's "lingua franca" is unethical and linguistically undemocratic. I say this as a native English speaker.
Unethical because communication should be for all and not only for an educational or political elite. That is the position of English at the moment.
Undemocratic because minority languages are under attack worldwide due to the encroachment of majority ethnic languages. Even Mandarin Chinese is attempting to dominate as well. The long-term solution must be found and a non-national language, which places all ethnic languages on an equal footing is essential.
An interesting video can be seen at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670
A glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net
Just a little fyi: Prof Satterfield's lecture was about socio-linguistics which I find very interesting. Socio-linguistics takes a hard core look at how people use language for social purposes. I am a linguistics major and must confess that not every class in linguistics are fun. While I find them all interesting as a linguistics major, I admit that some of them are also very boring and incredibly dense and difficult to comprehend. That's mostly classes in generative grammar that use a lot of upper-level syntax. The linguistics department here offers a bunch of fun and interesting classes, but you should watch it cause you can certainlly end up taking a very boring and difficult class if you're not careful. Although it sounds interesting try to avoid any classes about first language aquisition- 2nd language aquisition is pretty cool though- especially because you can probably draw some conclusions with your own personal experience.
sorry for the typos lol
I think that Professor Satterfield's lecture exceeded my expectations too. When I had read for her lecture I too thought it was not going to be as entertaining as other lectures have been for me. But I think she is an amazing lecturer in keeping attention and throwing in some humor.
That being said when she spoke about about the Reggaeton I found it interesting. Out of the Spanish/Latin music I listen to, reggaeton isn't really one of them so it was cool learning about it. I especially like how she showed how Spanish is changing/evolving with American Slang.
I have Professor Satterfield for a Spanish Linguistics class, so I was interested in seeing what her lecture was going to be like for this class. Although we don't really talk about regaaeton in our class, I was glad that she brought it up in our lecture because I think that it's really interesting how these artists will completely mix Spanish and English and still keep the sentence structure grammatically correct for both languages (well, most of the time, at least).
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