Sometimes what I learn in school is so exciting I just have to share it. Here is a sampling to whet your appetite for LINGUISTICS!We are talking about word classes in our Morphology and Syntax class (also known as Grammatical Analysis). I love that class because I learn how to think differently in a lot of ways. I think the fact that a lot of people in North America are monolingual English speakers is actually really unfortunate, because language totally influences worldview, and vice versa. I learned about the Maa language of East Africa. In this language, there are certain nouns that can be possessed, and certain nouns for which possession is grammatically impossible. For example, for speakers of that language, you can never have "My land" or "your land" or "his meat" or "their meat." It is simply grammatically wrong. Who are we just to assume that land can be owned? For these people, that concept just does not enter their consciousness- it would be like saying "her sky."
It turns out you can learn a lot about a people group just by looking at their language. The Yagua people of Peru have a separate conceptual category for "upriver or downriver." That is, they mark their verbs by where something happened. In English, time is important to us- we mark our verbs by when something happened. Like we have the past tense, present tense, future tense and so on. And we cannot really have a sentence where tense is ambiguous. In the Yagua language, they cannot have a proper sentence where the location, in relation to them, is ambiguous. This shows how important geography is to a language.
So, that is a bit of what we are learning in Grammatical Analysis... perhaps soon I will post an update on what I am learning in other classes!
peace&love
