Sunday 4 December 2005

Blogger is strange. It only lets me post 5 photos a day. Will post more another day then.

Studying for finals. Yup, 10 weeks have past. A full term has passed. Have I learnt much? I don't think so. Sadly. 10 weeks is too short to go in depth, especially since the first 2 weeks is spent doing revision. Brain's not functioning well enough now to blog coherently, frontal cortex is tired. Hippocampus, amygdala, rhinal cortex, medial thalamus have been working hard today. Did I even get the structures right?

Had a discussion on politics over brunch at IHOP yesterday. We talk about the weirdest things over food. Usually it's some bio probs or some argument/ bickering over small things. Now it's politics. Learned quite a lot, about people in power and about education systems. I will want to be around to see the results of the bet between the 2 guys. =)

I think the language in Singapore will be a great topic for linguists to study. From what linguists have discovered so far, children have an innate ability to learn language, well we all know that don't we? We have already seen the Great Experiment (experiment to find out how language originated) being carried out and got results from it. A community of people without a language will develop a form of communication. 1st generation might speak a pidgin (a mixture of 2 languages), if there's some form of language input from 2 sources. Language in Singapore (I mean Singlish, but Singlish has a derogative connotation to it, so I'll just call it Language), is obviously a pidgin. Mixture of English with Malay, Chinese, Hokkien.. Linguists also found out that 2nd generation speakers, people with a pidgin as a first language will creolise the language, meaning that they will create more language rules, more grammar, make the mode of communication more like a fully functional language. Language in Singapore has been around for quite a few generations, it should have developed its own form of grammar. Is there going to be a day when Singlish will be a new language? Is it right for the govt to promote learning of "proper languages"? After all, English wasn't thought to be a proper language before, Latin was the only proper Western language. If there is a decent language environment for children with correct grammar and vocab for both languages the children are going to learn, can they learn both languages perfectly? 40 years down the road, I wonder what Singaporeans will speak..

Thanks people for the compliments on that banana thing.

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