On the Origins of Language

To develop a unique language, it's helpful to know what a language actually is. That's where I started, in the science classroom on the third floor of the King School.

After quickly taking down attendance, and introducing myself, the class, and Project Ellipsis, I gave the first instruction of my professional teaching career: talk like a caveman for five minutes. It turns out that five minutes really is a long time for a nonsense task, and students started getting bored, so I cut them off two minutes in to ask why I had them do it. No one had any idea, so thus began a brief discussion on the origins of language. We eventually got around to my main point, and the lesson of the day: phonemes.

In 2007, I had the privilege of being among the last students of Larry Johnson while he was at SMFA, taking a class called Word Games upon which many of my lessons for this unit were based. One of the first (if not the first) things Larry taught us about was the existence of phonemes, the smallest units of language. For those of you not in the know, a phoneme is a concept representing the smallest, most basic sound that can be made by the human vocal system. We concentrated on phonemes found in the English language, which you can find here. The rest of the day was spent deconstructing words into phonemes, and seeing if we could recombine the phonemes to make new words. This exercise was based off one I did with Larry - I deconstructed the word "exit" and used the phonemes to create common words (sit, zit, exist, ticks) and put them into a text-sound poem.

The end of class was spent attempting to read a text-sound poem by Larry called Voyage and discussing what exactly was going on. Homework was to come up with thirty random words, which would be assembled into a text-sound art poem the next day. This did not work so well, so I won't go into it.

Week Two of Tools for Communicating explored the development of the English language. While Larry had a class on this as well, I really have to give credit to my high school English teacher Michael Frost (no relation to Robert) for turning me on to Old English, and indeed I pulled a few pages out of Mr. Frost's teaching methods.

After a travesty of a condensed history of the Vikingss, the Normans, and Old English (a.k.a. Anglo-Saxon, or Englisc), we turned to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (which I read for Mr. Frost four years ago), which came into the world in Middle English. I read to them, in my best Shakespearian accent, the first ten lines of the Tales (transcribed into Modern English characters), then projected them along with Modern English translations:

1 Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
(When April with its sweet-smelling showers)
2 The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
(Has pierced the drought of March to the root,)
3 And bathed every veyne in swich licour
(And bathed every vein [of the plants] in such liquid)
4 Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
(By which power the flower is created;)
5 Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
(When the West Wind also with its sweet breath,)
6 Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
(In every wood and field has breathed life into)
7 The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
(The tender new leaves, and the young sun)
8 Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
(Has run half its course in Aries,)
9 And smale foweles maken melodye,
(And small fowls make melody,)
10 That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(Those that sleep all the night with open eyes)

Naturally, their minds were blown.

We then discussed the differences we saw between Middle and Modern English. I opened the next part of the lesson with a question: where does the word "ain't" come from?

Yes, it's a word.

This led us to the exercise of the day: thinking of a "future" English. As an example, I gave my impression of a near-future Bostonian English where 'R's literally didn't exist and every vowel became a pronounced short 'A' sound, which actually ended up sounding like a monotone Southern accent (think of the worst JFK impersonation you've ever heard). We then moved on to dialects.

The language studied at the King School is Mandarin Chinese, of which I happen to know a little from studying in Beijing for a few months. I know some Cantonese from growing up in a Cantonese-speaking family, as well as a few phrases in my maternal grandparents' Toyshanese dialect. Minds were again boggled as I presented the phrase "I eat dinner" in what sounded like three different languages. I asked students to guess how many dialects of English existed (I found there are two primary dialects - American and Queen's [British], with regional varieties falling under one of the two).

We got into these regional varieties as well, by discussing and impersonating accents. I myself speak naturally with a slight New England/Boston accent (it comes out more when I'm angry), which no one noticed until I began speaking with my best approximation of a "neutral" American accent ("TV English" as I like to call it).

By the time we finished our discussions, we were getting close to the bell, so I started giving out random scenarios off the top of my head ("If cats spoke English and took over the world, what will English sound like in a thousand years?") and had the class respond with random phrases.

In retrospect, I'm thinking that some of the text-sound art stuff was a little conceptually lofty for middle schoolers, although we didn't spend a lot of time head-scratching. Everyone had fun, though, which was encouraging for me as a first-time teacher.