History of English
(Source: A History of English by Barbara A. Fennell)
The English language is spoken by 750 million people in the world as either the official language of a nation, a second language, or in a mixture with other languages (such as pidgins and creoles.) English is the (or an) official language in England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; however, the United States has no official language.
Indo-European language and people
English is classified genetically as a Low West Germanic language of the Indo-European family of languages. The early history of the Germanic languages is based on reconstruction of a Proto-Germanic language that evolved into German, English, Dutch, Afrikaans, Yiddish, and the Scandinavian languages.
In 1786, Sir William Jones discovered that Sanskrit contained many cognates to Greek and Latin. He conjectured a Proto-Indo-European language had existed many years before. Although there is no concrete proof to support this one language had existed, it is believed that many languages spoken in Europe and Western Asia are all derived from a common language. A few languages that are not included in the Indo-European branch of languages include Basque, Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian; of which the last three belong to the Finno-Ugric language family.
Speakers of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) lived in Southwest Russia around 4,000 to 5,000 BCE. They had words for animals such as bear or wolf (as evidenced in the similarity of the words for these animals in the modern I-E languages.) They also had domesticated animals, and used horse-drawn wheeled carts. They drank alcohol made from grain, and not wine, indicating they did not live in a warm climate. They belonged to a patriarchal society where the lineage was determined through males only (because of a lack of words referring to the female's side of the family.) They also made use of a decimal counting system by 10's, and formed words by compounding. This PIE language was also highly infl
from the site: "Inform is a design system for interactive fiction based on natural language. It is a radical reinvention of the way interactive fiction is designed, guided by contemporary work in semantics and by the practical experience of some of the world's best-known writers of IF"
Post about the value of having students condense their thoughts to six word memoirs. It seems like a great way to promote reflective, thoughtful writing and forces writers to consider the purpose of their pieces.
"Studio 360 explores F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and finds out how this compact novel became the great American story of our age. Novelist Jonathan Franzen tells Kurt Andersen why he still reads it every year or two, and writer Patricia Hampl explains why its lightness is deceptive. We'll drive around the tony Long Island suburbs where Gatsby was set, and we'll hear from Andrew Lauren about his film G, which sets Gatsby among the hip-hop moguls. And Azar Nafisi describes the power of teaching the book to university students in Tehran. Readings come courtesy of Scott Shepherd, an actor who sometimes performs the entire book from memory."
Wordcounter ranks the most frequently used words in any given body of text. Use this to see what words you overuse (is everything a "solution" for you?) or maybe just to find some keywords from a document.
Wordcounter is useful for writers, editors, students, and anyone who thinks that they might be speaking redundantly or repetitively -- and it's free! Eventually, I'm going to expand it so that you can upload documents, but not yet.
This blog post would be fun to turn into a writing assignment: Have minor characters in a novel your students are studying discuss the other minor characters in the manner of Mr. Palmer.
Whether one views these changes as positive or negative depends on how closely one believes writing should adhere to the conventions of formal writing we have hitherto accepted, and how much one supports the goal of establishing the student's authority as a writer. Some writing instructors philosophize that since e-writing tools and e-language will continue to change, they must teach what will not change: the connection between thinking and writing and the ability to articulate what one knows (Leibowitz, 1999). This standpoint will certainly encourage teachers to continue seeking more effective ways of using the e-tools in writing instruction.
This requires not only knowledge that people have thoughts that are different from our own (basic Theory of Mind concepts) but that they also can narrate a story across time and/or sequence so the reader can follow and make reasonable conclusions to avoid confusion (this is called narrative language).
They also have to recognize that people move from ideas (gestalt or main idea) to thoughts (details). To help the reader the writer has to organize his information so that he introduces his idea and then supports it with a reasonable set of thoughts (details).
Big ideas are not enough by themselves - they need details in order that the reader can understand.
1. Teach them how we brainstorm information related to the topic we are going to write about. Most 2nd grade students learn about "brainstorming" through the use of what are called, "graphic organizers". "visual organizers" or "mind maps". This lesson needs to be extended for our students and taught much more extensively.
2. Learn to tell the difference between ideas or what we call in writing "main ideas" and how these are different from "details".
3. Work on pruning their thoughts they brainstorm by creating written outlines to serve as guidance for their work.4. For high school students, learn how to talk understand what an "opinion" is.
To motivate students to engage at this level of thinking and showing their thoughts by creating visual structures such as graphic organizers or visual outlines, we would provide them a grade for there production of these visual thinking supports. Thus, rather than receive a grade for the final written product, they would receive a grade for creating the graphic organizer and then the outline, etc.
By allowing them this time to work on thinking away from working producing written work allows all of us to re-focus and tune up the core skills of writing.