Language Change homework

1876 was a huge change for English language, Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone, this means people can communicate privately. There was not a common way for people to talk on the phone.

When the telephone was invented, “Hello” was a very new word to the English language. The Oxford English Dictionary says that “hello” became a common part of English language in 1827.  And instead of being used as a greeting, “hello” had a very different meaning.  “Hello” was used to bring notice to something or to express surprise.

Eg: "Hello! Your horse has stepped in flowers."

However Bell thought "Ahoy" would be the perfect greeting when talking on the telephone. But this did not catch on, instead books were written in how to use the telephone and suggested to greet people with 'hello' however people in the UK pronounced it 'Hullo'.

As phones became more and more popular this greeting of 'hello' was being used to greet people in person, where as greetings such as 'good day' were normally used in a face to face situation the word 'hello' was being used more often. And now today 'hello' is the most common British greeting.

However some magazines suggested saying 'Hallau' to answer the telephone and 'That is all' to end the telephone call. However this never caught on, 'Goodbye' is a established word used to end a meeting/conversation, and at the time this didn't change. (Still today it is the most popular word to use to end a conversation.)  However these days we have lots of different phrases/words to end a conversation.

Eg: "see you", "catch you later". Or goodbye being shortened to just "bye".  Not sure when this shortening happened but it could be when texting came out as people shorten words when texting.

 

As 'Hello' was originally used to express surprise or bring the attention to something, and now is used as a greeting, I think this is synchronous. However I don't think it is used anymore to bring a person's notice to something I think we use "Excuse me" for example "Excuse me, you've dropped your keys." But I do think we use it for surprise, if you see someone in the pub who hasn't seen you, you might go over and say "Hello, fancy seeing you here", although this could still be seen as a way of greeting. So perhaps 'Hello' has gone through narrowing as there are fewer senses of the word than it used to. This may be an interesting discussion as I'm not sure what language change technique it has gone through.

Paragraph from my analysis.

I didn’t expect to see any imperatives either, as they can come across bossy and the audience may react badly to them. However the descriptions from the 1900s all repeat the imperative ‘Think… Oxford bags and Bay City Rollers’ The stative verb and added ellipsis gets the reader to take in the imperative and pause to imagine this certain time period and what was going on at this particular time. The imperative cleverly puts the garment into context while getting the reader to imagine themselves in this certain time period. 

Interesting..

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1136904/RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN-Isnt-time-Golliwog-Squad-finally-grew-up.html

Childrens reading.

There is a debate on which method should be used when teaching children how to read. These methods are:

Look and say,
Children learn the shapes of words instead of breaking them down phonologically. They recognise the whole word or sentence, children are normally presented with a card that has the word on and will most likely have a picture that relates to the word so as to help them link them together.

Phonics/synthetic phonics,
This is the breaking down of words and understanding the sounds of each letter and then combining them to create a word. Normally the caregiver will start with simple words such as 'dog' and then develop onto more complex words such as 'eat'. The child will need to know the alphabet before using the phonics method.
This method however has been criticised as the English language has many different ways to pronounce a sound that may be spelt the same (eg: cough, through, ect.).

Jeanne Chall identified six stages of reading development. She studied children from toddlers to age 18. She found is interesting that our motivation for reading changes.

Stage	Description	Age (years)	Key Characteristics
0	Pre-reading and pseudo-reading	Up to 6	'pretend' reading, turning pages, repeating stories. some letter and word recognition predicting single words or the next stage of a story
1	Initial reading and decoding	6-7	Reading simple texts containing high frequency lexis. Estimated 600 words understood
2	Confirmation and fluency	7-8	Reading texts more quickly accurately and fluently. Pay attention to meanings of words and texts. Estimated 3000 words understood
3	Reading for learning	9-14	Reading for knowledge and info. becomes motivation
4	Multiplicity and complexity	14-17	Responding critically to what they read and analysing texts
5	Construction and reconstruction.	18+	Reading selectively and forming opinions about what they have read.

 

Reading schedules.
They are purposely staged in different levels of difficulty to help children stretch and aquire lexical and semantic knowledge and grammatical understanding. The aim to build children's confidence and show examples of things such as good behaviour and politeness strategies which helps children develop pragmatic understanding.

Key features:
Lexical repetition
Syntactical repetition of structures
Simple verbs
One sentence per line
Anaphoric referencing
Limited use of modifiers
Text image cohesion

http://www.parentdish.co.uk/kids/how-your-child-will-learn-to-read-at-school-and-what-you-can-do-to-help-reading-at-home/
http://www.theschoolrun.com/school-reading-schemes-explained
http://www.readingrockets.org/teaching/reading101
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-19812961
http://www.education.com/reference/article/reading-development-stages-Chall/