Dr Robert Winston

Dr Robert Winston

After watching a short video discussing how your language develops when you’re growing up I discovered some interesting facts. Children use a different area of the brain to adults, this area of the brain is brilliant with picking up language easily, and this is also why children find it easier to learn a second language than adults. Children also have a lowered larynx than adults, this is an advantage as it lowers the risk of choking however this leaves less space for sound making it harder to communicate as language was developed to survive. The Larynx naturally drops but 3 cm around the age of 1.

A 16 month old has to use 30 muscles for them to make these sounds. When the larynx drops and the child goes into the toddler stage (2 and a half) they learn around 10 words on average a day. Also through this period children start to learn self-awareness as a child of 2 couldn’t recognise herself in the mirror.  When they get this self-awareness they demonstrate this through the use of 1st personal pronouns, this is when the children realises its needs and knows how to have them met. Children have an instinct for language as they are able to learn new words but also guess what they are. However they struggle with words such as “mice”, a child would think its “mouses” this only happens when its irregular and haven’t learnt that rule yet.

The art of cookery

The art of cookery

This text is an instruction manual for servants on how to get rid of insects from 1700s hundreds, the book was aimed to help the lady of the house as she doesn’t have to instruct the maids tedious duty. The text has a lot of archaric language using language such as Earthen-pan which is an item used within the kitchen back in the 1700s hundreds, or mixt which is the past tense for mix. Throughout the text there is an archaric “S”, words such as Chafflindifh, poffible, fhake or reft are just a few words indicating that this text is from the 1700 hundreds. Other indications showing that this is a dated text is that theirs words such as “anoint” which is a semantic shift called narrowing as its been formed from another word.

The sentence structure also shows the time period as we would consider them to be grammatically incorrect. Examples such as “it will take away your breath” or “let the door stand open an hour before you open the window”. In the modern day these sentences would be “it will take your breath away” and “Open the door for an hour before you open the window”, these show how language has changed as the modern day equivalents are in slightly different orders making the sentence flow differently than today. The spelling of words has also changed, words such as mixt, buggs and finis show that. These showing the time period how language has changed throughout ghe years as this could have been influenced by germantic, Flemish or even French and Latin causing things like this to happen.

the text used is a clear typeface of the times. After the title there is always a bold first letter and the rest of the word. This is a characteristic of texts from this time and is sometimes still found in books today.