My name is Joe Gettinger, and like many of the readers of this post, I am enrolled in PSYCH 17N.
I suppose for introductions in a blog on language, an interesting place to start would be the language of names, certainly with all the fun names we have in our class. In addition to each language having its own set of rules for titles and how people should address each other, often in many languages, names also have a meaning of their own. In some cases this name may be known and have affect in its bearer in his/her daily life, where in other cases the meaning of the name belongs to another language entirely and is not reconized by the person to whom it refers or those around them as a word in its own right.
My name is Joseph Samuel Gettinger. Joseph, being adapted over generations from the biblical Hebrew 'yoseph' means 'he will add'. Samuel, from the biblical Hebrew 'shmu'el', means 'G-d heard', and Gettinger is a family name adapted from 'Guttenger', meaning ' a person from Gutteng'.
I am from a small, 4,000-person town in southeast Tennessee called Madisonville. Last year I deferred my enrollment to Stanford to take a year to study in Israel. One of the reasons for this year abroad was to learn Hebrew, which is the only language I speak other than English.
In one of my trips to Haifa, a costal city with a mixed Arab-Israeli/ Jewish population, I found myself on a street where I could not understand a single word being spoken around me. It was then I decided I was going to take Arabic while here at Stanford.(It can wait a year until IHUM is out of the way.) It would be nice to understand what was being said around me that day, but it is my second reason for wanting to learn Arabic that brings me to 'Language and Society.'
Language is more than a method of communication; it brings with it a window into another perspective, a potential opportunity for new understanding.
But there are many questions about this different perspective which shape how I look at the class. How much of this perspective is language, and how much is cultural? Can language and culture be truly separated? Is culture formed around the constructs of language, or has language been built to fit the needs of the surrounding cultiure?
Thanks for reagind through,
Joe
Here's my map of countries visited.
create your own visited country map
2 comments:
Such a cool place you have visited!
About your point on the relationship between language and culture, it's always interesting to me how countries--after victorious conquest--often forced the conquered people to speak their language as the first part of cultural assimilation.
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