Introduction to Linguistics, Summer 2020

---

Room:
Time: Monday, Thursday 6:45PM - 7:45PM
Grades: 7-12
Prerequisites:
Material fee: $0.00

---

Description: This class will meet twice a week. Language is one of the most exciting and unique properties of humans. How many languages are there in the world? How different are, for example, English, French, and Japanese, and what exactly does that difference boil down to? Why are some languages so hard to learn? Is it true that Eskimos have 40 different words for different types of snow? Why is English spelling so complicated, and we skip so many characters while reading (for example, "knight" is read in the same way as "nite")? Do any animals have languages similar to human language? How come it is so easy for all of us to learn our first language, but most people have trouble learning the second and the third? Why do so many people have accents? What is the difference between sounds in world languages? What are the languages with the minimum number of sounds and the maximum number of sounds? How many writing systems (alphabets) are there in the world, and how different are they? In this course, we are going to try to answer these and many other questions from a scientific point of view. We will look at structures of world languages, and we will learn to analyze them from several different points of view by solving some problems. We will touch on different sound systems of languages, a variety of words in languages, and how words are combined into sentences. To participate in this class, you don't need to know any foreign languages (even though you are familiar with at least some languages other than English). Anyone from school grade 7 and up (even parents!) is welcome to learn a lot of fascinating information about languages!

---

Homeworks

No homeworks found