Sign Language and Language Acquisition

The April 1998American Psychological Association's Monitor Online has some interesting articles about American Sign Language and its implications for our understanding of how children acquire language.

Animal Sounds

Animal Sounds illustrates how variable the words that supposedly imitate animal sounds really are.

Phonology

Phonetics: The Sounds of Spoken Language lets you see and hear how the sounds of English, Spanish, and German are pronounced.

Vowels & Consonants lets you hear some sounds English does not use. You can also view an x-ray that lets you see how a "click" is produced.

Parts of Speech

"Jabberwocky" appeared in Lewis Carroll's book Though the Looking Glass, a sequel to Alice in Wonderland.  It may be the most famous English- language example of literary use of nonsense words.  Read the poem and decide what part of speech each of the nonsense words fits.  (In chapter VI of Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty explains the first stanza and says some rather interesting things about words.)

Spelling & the Alphabet

"Ancient Scripts of the World" gives information about a variety of interesting topics, including the origins of our alphabet.

This history of English from the United Kingdom gives many examples of words that came into English from various languages.

Dave Wilton's Wordorigins.org has very interesting information about the etymology of a long list of words.

Sites Evaluated in Oral Reports

These sites have been the basis for oral reports in earlier sections of this class:

• English Grammar 101 
• Grammar Bytes 
• Daily Grammar
• Grammar Rock  (You can find the Grammar Rock videos on YouTube.)
• Word Place 
• Grammar Lady
• Guide to Grammar and Writing is one of the most useful language advice sites online, in your teacher's humble opinion. Its Interactive Quizzes are a good way to test your knowledge of traditional grammar.
• Common Errors in English has been reformatted in a way that makes it easier to use.

Other Points of Interest

The Linguist List links you to sites dealing with a wide range of issues and languages.

Babel Fish Translation, an online translator,  is interesting to look at and can be handy, but be careful--odd things happen when a machine does the translating! (Try translating the WSSU motto into Greek or Chinese and then back into English.)