We discussed the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis followed by the Marked Differentiatial Hypothesis. I gave a short presentation on Lado’s article on the complexities of vocabulary learning and teaching. Seemed to go well.

Remember that the MDH only applies to things that relate to implicational universals. Implicational universals are so intriguing! They really blow your mind at times. Further, they make me believe that there is something innately capable of “getting” language.

Let me give an example of one of these implicational universals.
Words for colors appear in the following order:
(purple, pink, orange, grey) -> brown -> blue -> (green, yellow) -> red -> (white, black)

This means that if a language has a word for blue, then it also has words for green, yellow, red, white, and black. This also says that a language that does not have a word for blue will not have a word for brown. Isn’t that crazy?! So, a language, if it has a word for color, will start with white or black. It will then add red, then…

See this for examples:
http://www.putlearningfirst.com/language/research/colour_words.html

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_168b.html

This “implicational universal” comes from Berlin and Kay, 1969, which I just searched on the Internet to see if there was any newer information that might challenge it. I found some stuff:
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/study.html
This site uses the word “universal tendency” rather than implicational universal, denoting that it is a tendency rather than hard and fast rule. However, still the tendency is amazing, no?

Hablamos de lo que es la gramaticalidad. A veces me parece nuevo lo que dice en clase, pero es interesante. Tomamos una encuesta de nuestra intuición del español. Di un discurso pequeño sobre las conjunciones. Después, hablamos mucho de los determinantes.

Here’s the REAL BatCat
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My blog is boring me with all these semi-useful posts. Where’s the randomness? Where’s the fun? Well, I did just see a short in which the maker took a spam letter that he received, put each word in Google Image Search, and then strung them all together while playing the spam letter through a computer reader. Interesting. Here’s a picture I found on Google Image by searching “funny.”

Funny here

Today I missed French class because I went to help a fellow GTA with some moral support. I know how it is to be new and have new classes and feel overwhelmed. So, I wanted to go help where I could. It seemed to work! I’m still thankful for the help I received from Lores back when I started.