When you think about it, language is pretty awesome.
You can learn it without meaning to (I will forever know that "aray" means "ouch" in Filipino from working with a woman from the Philippines) or you can study it diligently (how else do you expect to learn Ancient Greek?). However it came to be in your brain, language is really the height of human technology so far (and please please please don't try and pull Steve Jobs into this...).
It's basically a bunch of noises your mouth makes strung together and it enables you to share observations, ideas, thoughts.... If you couldn't speak, everyone would be using sign language. Not that there is anything wrong with sign language- our ancestors were using it for a good while before they got smart enough to start grunting consistently (sorry if this hurts your feelings about creationism/evolution/whatever; I am personally of a strange belief, not typical evolution, that still has humans crawling from the primordial soup) but could you imagine trying to explain neutrinos or political and economic theory with just your hands? Quit your imagining- it would suck. But now, we've thousands of different languages and dialects, each one just a little different from the other. But today, my friends, we will be discussing Italian.
Italian is a Romance language- for all of you's guys who don't know what this is, it is a language based on the Roman language of Vulgar Latin (because let's be serious, those Romans were some nasty freaks). French and Spanish are also some of the fine languages which are included in the Romance languages (English is actually Germanic, but we get a lot of words from French and Spanish. Go figure...). All of this categorization comes from grammar, where the language originated, and a bunch of other crap that you probably don't care about (just in case you do care). But how exactly can we speak Italian without even knowing it?? By falling back on that old ancestral stand-by, using your hands.
Italian Without Words!!
Check these bad boys out. Hopefully, we'll be gesturing Italian in no time! If not, we'll have try speaking Spanish with an Italian accent...
-LuK!
You can learn it without meaning to (I will forever know that "aray" means "ouch" in Filipino from working with a woman from the Philippines) or you can study it diligently (how else do you expect to learn Ancient Greek?). However it came to be in your brain, language is really the height of human technology so far (and please please please don't try and pull Steve Jobs into this...).
It's basically a bunch of noises your mouth makes strung together and it enables you to share observations, ideas, thoughts.... If you couldn't speak, everyone would be using sign language. Not that there is anything wrong with sign language- our ancestors were using it for a good while before they got smart enough to start grunting consistently (sorry if this hurts your feelings about creationism/evolution/whatever; I am personally of a strange belief, not typical evolution, that still has humans crawling from the primordial soup) but could you imagine trying to explain neutrinos or political and economic theory with just your hands? Quit your imagining- it would suck. But now, we've thousands of different languages and dialects, each one just a little different from the other. But today, my friends, we will be discussing Italian.
Italian is a Romance language- for all of you's guys who don't know what this is, it is a language based on the Roman language of Vulgar Latin (because let's be serious, those Romans were some nasty freaks). French and Spanish are also some of the fine languages which are included in the Romance languages (English is actually Germanic, but we get a lot of words from French and Spanish. Go figure...). All of this categorization comes from grammar, where the language originated, and a bunch of other crap that you probably don't care about (just in case you do care). But how exactly can we speak Italian without even knowing it?? By falling back on that old ancestral stand-by, using your hands.
Italian Without Words!!
Check these bad boys out. Hopefully, we'll be gesturing Italian in no time! If not, we'll have try speaking Spanish with an Italian accent...
-LuK!
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