Monthly Archives: March 2013

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Dothraki Language

Being that tonight is the  season premiere of HBO’s Game of Thrones, I thought I would share some information that I read on the internet. As one of my favorite shows that I look forward to watching,  I particularly enjoy the language of  Dothraki that is used in Essos as opposed to the English that is spoken in Westeros.

Thee language which professor has mentioned in our discussions a few times is actually quite a rich language, and not some made up words that sound alike.HBO hired expert language creator David J. Peterson from the Language Creation Society to develop the Dothraki language – “possessing its own unique sound, extensive vocabulary of more than 1,800 words and complex grammatical structure” – to be used in the series.

As of 21 September 2011, there were 3,163 created words in the lexicon, though far from all words are known to the public. However, there is a growing community of Dothraki language fans, with websites like “Learn Dothraki” offering information on the state of the language. Dothraki is now heard by more people each week than Yiddish, Navajo, Inuit, Basque, and Welsh combined!

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IAT

I did the IAT test 2 days ago and I found it interesting how the test is structure. At first it lets you know which words are associated with what category, religion was blue so whatever word that were associated with religion was blue and good was yellow, whatever words were yellow, they associated with good. I took the religion IAT because I wanted to know what it was going to show at the end of the result because in my opinion, I think every religion says the same thing except in a different way. I believe in every religion, it just depends on how people interpret it everyone has there on point of view. The result of my IAT was just i expected it to be, all of the religion were in the middle..1. buddhism 2. hinduism 3. christianity 4. islam. I think all these religions were in the middle because I didn’t make that many mistake. The test was structure to see if a person makes rational decision when they have to make it in the fast situation. I found it interesting that at first when I took my time I didnt make any mistakes and as soon as it asked you have to do it fast I made few mistakes because it gave you everything that were associted with that religion and good and then all of the sudden it gave you words that weren’t associated with good or that religion. Once you started to press on “i” again and again when you saw the words that weren’t asscoaited with good or that religion you would still press on “i” even when you meant to press on “e” and get that wrong, and that’s what happen to me.

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beyond pro-choice/war on drugs

http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/roe-v-wade-at-forty-beyond-pro-choice/

 

Once we started talking about the “war on drugs/women” and pro-choice vs pro-life I remembered this article by Lynn Paltrow, in which she discussed the many links between the war on drugs and the war on women. I had been pretty aware of the statistics on Black/Latino men making up the majority of the U.S. prison system as a result of the war on drugs, marginalization, racial profiling and other injustices and I hear a lot of people talking about these issues, especially surrounding the legalization of marijuana in certain states and in the recent gun-law debates. I have also heard a lot of people refer to the current justice system as a “new slave system” and I know how corrupt the justice system can be towards anyone of a non-privileged background with some great connections but I never really imagined pregnant women suffering under this system as a result of not only drug laws but laws that completely undermine the civil rights of pregnant women and all women when it comes to birth-control. The statistics she mentions are frightening and she makes a lot of eye-opening points.

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My experience with the IAT

I took the same IAT test that Stephanie and Joey took in class and was highly amused; my results showed all four religions (one was Hinduism rather than Buddhism) more or less in the middle of the chart, but Christianity was in the highest place and Buddhism/Islam tied for the lowest. This annoyed me immensely because I am consciously very critical of Christianity and would have said that of the four it is the religion I like least!

I’m not sure what to make of this result. Do I simply disagree with the test and argue that it demonstrated nothing of any relevance about me? Do I agree that the result is meaningful, and therefore question what I consciously think about Christianity? Or does the test mean nothing more than this (and this was a point Stephanie brought up): because I was raised a Christian, the vocabulary of Christianity is familiar to me, even if I disagree with it. Was the test really only revealing the fact that Christian words are slightly more familiar to me than Islamic, Jewish and Hindu terms?

I tend to think that the answer to that last question is yes. Therefore the IAT on religions isn’t actually testing for prejudice or bias against one or another religion, but for familiarity — I’m not anti-Hindu, just less familiar with Hinduism and the terms associated with it. This  justifies the test that was given in the article by Ogunnaike et al.: that test was measuring the ways in which the language one uses affects one’s  perceptions, and in that context,  the degree of familiarity one feels, the degree of community bond, is highly relevant.

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My connection to Foreign Words

While reading foreign words the concept of association of words with a time and place in my life became more evident.  I cannot say that I connected with the author as he narrates the pain of loosing his father and how that experience served both as a catalyst as well as a filter for his perception of his experiences as the story moved along.  The connection I felt in the story was in his association of words to time and places in his life. He mentions how the same word in a different language, in his case French and Greek would mean the same thing but  to him the meaning would be different because he experienced the words at different points in his life. I could relate to this in my own experiences; when I came to this country I was fluent in Spanish. While the grammar is different in English, they do have some commonality in words. As I began to learn English I would easily see the similarity in some of the words such as doctor, invisible, local, municipal, social. But it was in the words that were not common were the connection to different points in my life became important. The word to love in Spanish is “Amar”  I can associate this word to my early childhood and to my mother, the person I would use the word the most. It was both very natural and very caring for me to say the word. Now when I learned the word in English it really held no special meaning at first since I would barely use it and if I was to use it in a meaningful way it would be in Spanish. It was in my early teens were the English version of the word began to have importance.  To love became an expression of my private preferences, the word became a tool that would help my teenage rebellion. With it I could define my self and define what others meant to me. What I loved became a private affair, to love a person became a burning desire. I did not really know love in itself was, but I wish to understand it and have more than anything else.  Even now as an adult the word invokes different emotions and different points in my life.