Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Basic Linguistic Facts

Contrast the Alexandrian and the Stoic approach to language.
The Alexandrian tended to be empiricists, which has to do with observation and classification of data, and the Stoics were rationalists, that related the function and structure of language with the function and structure of the human mind. At the end, Alexandrian’s view prevailed and satisfied the needs of language at that time.

How did the Roman grammarian Varro develop the notion of word classes?
Varro did not only follow the Greek model of word classes, but went further more. He divided the Greek lexicon into inflected (productive) and non-inflected (sterile) words. Furthermore, he classified the inflected words into four classes by reference to case and tense:
N+C-T
V+T-C
P+C+T
Ad-C-T

Explain what the terms Sandi and Sutra.
Sandi is a term for sounds that occur in rapid/normal speech.
Sutra is a set of rules, in Panini’s case giving information about word formation.

What did the Indians accomplish with linguistics?
They were apologists of the observation of the context to better understand linguistics. Semantics, grammar, phonology and phonetics were topics that occurred in Indian linguistics, that were much more advanced in comparison to Europe.

How did the Greeks develop the notion of word classes?
Stoics developed Plato’s and Aristotle’s study of four word classes then five word classes, while the Alexandrians had eight word classes: noun, verb, participle, pronoun, preposition, adverb and conjunction.

Who was the first linguist?
Panini (Sanskrit grammarian)

How does the work of Johann Christoph Adelung illustrate the progress made in the 19th Century?
Adelung tried to organise languages according to genetic relation, but geographical proximity of language was more important at the time.

What nationality dominated in the 19th Century?
It was the German nationality because of the unification/relationship between language and national identity.

What was the problem of Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm’s Law?
Grimm’s Law tells us that sound changes are systematic and not sporadic. The problem is that this was said before by Rask, Grimm only translated it.

What was the importance of August Schleicher in linguistics?
Schleicher develops the genealogical tree model that makes us understand how languages developed and evolved. Also based on Darwin’s ideas of survival, he tells us that languages are like natural organisms: they grow, mature and die.

How did dialect studies undermind the neogrammarian’s position?
According to the neogrammarians, sound changes are regular, they always occur the same way with a regular frequency, but dialect contact makes sound changes unpredictable.

What did the West learn from China?
Chinese is an isolated language; a tone language with an idiographic writing.
Lexical items (words that can be defined)
Function words (don’t have fixed meaning)

What is Karl Verner’s Law and how did it contribute to the neogrammarian’s position?
Verner says that there must be an explanation to the exception of a rule. Neogrammarians don’t agree with this because for them there are only laws and no exceptions.

Present the modern objections to the genealogical tree model.
Modern linguists objected that dialects come in the latest stage, what seems to make them really recent, which is not true.

What was the importance of Van Name in linguistics?
Van Name compared all four lexical bases found in the Caribbean: French, Spanish, English and Dutch.

What was the importance of Hugo Schuchardt in linguistics?
Schuchardt compares the universalist point of view of Francisco Adolfo Coelho, which considered that the features of Creole languages are due to universal tendencies in second language learning by adults, with the substratist point of view of Adam that believes Creoles are based on languages spoken by those with less power.

What did the neogrammarians like in Ferdinand de Saussure’s article: “The Earliest System of Vowels”?
Saussure said that when a certain sound occurs next to a vowel, it is pronounced like a glide. Liquids, glides and nasals are then pronounced like consonants when they come after consonants, and like vowels when they come before vowels. Neogrammarians didn’t like irregularity.

“Cours de Linguistique Generale”, broad on scope, why?
Saussure realised he was far ahead from the other linguistics.

What is the relationship between Thought and Speech?
They are inseparable. Language is where sound and thought meet. One can not exist without the other.

How did Saussure describe the Sign?
It is made up of two contents: word and meaning.

What is the basic principle of structuralism?
It is the opposition/contrast. Contrasting basic terms used in a discipline to clarify their position in a larger scale.

Explain Saussure’s opposition of “langue” and “parole”.
Langue is the knowledge of a community (shared knowledge).
Parole is the individual use of that knowledge, which can be used differently, depending on the different conditions of life (different speech of the rich and the poor, etc.).

Why according to Saussure there has to be a distinction between synchronic and diachronic?
The sign depends on the system, so according to different systems, signs have different meanings.

How did Saussure change the focus of 20th Century linguistics?
He focused linguistics on synchronic states, not on diachronic sequences as usual.

What analogy did Saussure make on synchronic and diachronic states?
He says that someone who comes in the middle of a chess game is not in disadvantage when compared to the other who was already there because he gets the most important, the present moment.

Explain the importance of the University of Paris in linguistics.
Speculative grammars wanted to turn grammar into scientific methods, by this, they thought they could define word classes and that would be applicable to every language. They failed because you can not start by word classes but by phrases, more complex structures.

Explain the importance of the Renaissance in linguistics.
Opening up of the entire Europe; countries/areas come in contact and learn a lot of new things about other cultures; belief that all languages are different but none are better than the other; printing press is created and it makes people have more access to publications.

Explain the importance of the Port Royal School in linguistics.
They wanted to find out what was universal in all languages; they explained three levels of the human mind: conceiving; judging and reasoning; they succeeded but speculative grammars didn’t.

According to Joseph Scaliger, what are the four families of languages?
Romance (Deus); Germanic (Gott); Greek (Theos); Slavic (Bog)

Define the following terms:
Pidgin: Reduced language that results from extended contact between groups of people with no language in common. It develops when some means of common are necessary. (no native speakers; not a natural language; a language that emerges when two groups of people with no language in common have to find out a way of communicating).
Jargon: Simplified and reduced language based on an “ad-hoc” basis.
Koinezation: When languages in contact are closely related.
Creole: Has a jargon or a pidgin in its ancestry, it is spoken natively by an entire speech community, usually one whose ancestors were displaced geographically so that their ties with their language were partly broken. (Have native speakers; it is a natural language)

What was the first English based Creole?
Sranan, spoken in Surinan

What was the first Portuguese based Creole?
Malayo-Portuguese

What was the oldest record of Creole language?
Creole-French

What was the first Creole really studied by linguists?
Creole-Dutch

What was the earliest recorded Pidgin?
Pidgin-Arabic (spoken in Mauritania)

What are the three types of languages? Briefly explain each.
Isolating
Inflected
Agglutinated

What was Sir William Jones’ important discovery?
He discovered a historical relationship between Sanskrit and Latin, Greek and German.

What did Wilkins want to do to end war?
Create a universal language.

Explain the meaning of Lingua Franca.
Lingua Franca came upon with the Crusades; it was lexically based on the southern romance languages (Italian, etc.). It has two meanings: lexically based language in the southern romance languages and the language spoken between people with no other language in common, as if it was universal. E.g.: French: Lingua Franca of diplomacy; English is today’s universal language.

Explain the importance of William Greenfield in Creole studies.
He compared the grammar between Creole English and English, as well as, Creole Dutch and Dutch.

What important concept did Dirk Christiaan Hesseling introduce on his 1897 article on the origin of Afrikaans?
Netherlands had colonized South Africa (Dutch came to be known in South Africa). They needed slaves in South Africa and took them from Indonesia to South Africa. This made contact between Dutch and Malayo Portuguese (spoken in Indonesia). Hesseling introduced the concept of partial creolization.

How did John Reinecke’s doctorial dissertation change the study of Creole languages?
We have to study the social circumstances of languages.
Sociolinguistics: relationship between social setting and linguistic development.

Why was the phoneticians “Goal of one sound, one symbol” unattainable/unreachable?
It was unreachable because it led to too many symbols which were hard to remember. It was a very complicated system.

What solution did Henry Sweet (1877) suggest for the above problem?
Sweet with his “handbook of phonetics” made a distinction between sounds that depend on the environment (phones), and sounds that trigger a meaning itself (phonemes).

Why is Saussure’s usage of the terms:
Phoneme: phonetic segment
Phonologie: synchronic phonetics
Phonetique: diachronic evolution of sound
Confusing to the modern reader?
These terms were confusing for the modern reader because they had different terms.

How did Baudouin de Courtenay and Kruts use the terms:
Antrapophonics: analysis of sounds from an accustic point of view.
Psychophonetics: how people feel about what they hear.

How did Courtenay (1895) define the phoneme?
Phoneme: psychological equivalent of speech sound.

What group did Roman Osipovich Jakobson, Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy, and Kurts form in 1915?
The Moscow Linguistic Circle

Which earlier linguists influence the Moscow Linguistic Circle?

Saussure and Baudouin de Courtenay

What group did the three form ten years later?
The Linguistic Circle of Prague

What did Jakobson say as the task of phonology?
1st: He identified each language according to their phoneme.
2nd: He identified distinctive features to formulate general laws.
3rd: He identified historical change in phonological systems.
4th: He supported the acoustic basis rather then the articulatory basis.

How did Trubetzkoy distinguish between constant and suspensible oppositions of phonemes?
Constant: can occur in any environment. (P/b)
Suspensible: neutralized in certain environments. (Bund; Bunt)

How did Trubetzkoy and Jakobson disagree about the fundamental units of phonology?
For Trubetzkoy phonemes are the fundamental units of phonology, but for Jakobson the features are the fundamental units.

How did Jakobson use binarity to describe choices that are in fact multiple?
He tries to reduce everything to yes/no questions. Basically he reduces to +/- choices. (high vowels=+ high – low)

What is meant by Jakobson’s “one mouth” principle?
He meant the use of the same features for both vowels and consonants.

How did Jakobson relate child language acquisition aphasia and phonological universal?
The last sound a child learns are the first ones he/she looses.

How did Jakobson and the Prague School, in general differ from American descriptivists around 1950?
The Prague school was looking for theories and explanations, while Jakobson was more interested in other items.

Briefly contrast British versus the Continental European attitudes towards linguistics.
The British are insularity; they focus only on the British territory and emphasis on pragmatism rather than on the principal. The European concentrates on theory and practice of many languages.

What distinction did Henry Sweet between Narrow Romic and Broad Romic?
Narrow Romic (phonetic): present, as accurate as possible, all relevant facts to the production of sound; applicable to all languages.
Broad Romic (phonemic): particular to certain languages; only indicates distinctions of sounds which correspond to distinction of meaning.

What practical skills did Daniel Jones stress in the training of phoneticians?
Perceiving, transcribing, and reproducing.

What was the crisis in the phonological theory in the 1930’s?
It was difficult to perceive what a phoneme is, it was seen as a segment, but a segment could be either a vowel or a consonant. It is more complex: it has to do with juncture (the way they appear in words).

What distinction did Firth make between Phonematic Units and Prosody?
Phonematic Units: old segmental phonemes.
Prosody: elements capable of extension.

What two traditions of linguistic studies develop in the USA in the 19th Century?
The European tradition: students would go to Germany to study Whitney.
Non-linguistic tradition: the Indian languages were learned.

Who was the first American linguistic of distinction? Explain the subject of his work that received international recognition.
William Whitney. He focused in Sanskrit studies.

Why was Franz Boas a self-taught linguist?
Franz Boas got a PHD in geography, so in what concerned linguistics was the fact he had to go to the field and learn everything by himself.

What was Boas’ view of “primitive languages”?
Primitive languages are believed to be vague and instable, but it is not true according to Boas. He says sometimes people can’t speak languages properly and this is what leads to the misunderstandment.

What did Boas mean when he said that language was a “window on culture”?
When studying a culture, learning its language is a major help and source. There is an intrinsic relationship between language and culture. People are usually more conscious about their culture than their language.

Why did Boas prefer phonetic to phonemic transcription?
He preferred phonetic transcription because he was not a native speaker. He corrected the phonemic spelling to phonetic and told his students to do the same. Phonetic is easier for non-native speakers.

Describe the tradition that Boas established in American linguistics.
Descriptivist tradition: setting up procedures for analysing language; emphasis on the discovery procedures (specifying the operation). This tradition helps field workers.

What were Sapir’s principal contributions to linguistics?
He was interested in the psychological foundation of language.

What were Sapir’s views towards the relationship of Language and Thought?
Language shapes our perception of the world around us.

Sapir’s 1921 book discusses the system for classifying Language. What did he mean by the following terms:
Isolating: each concept is expressed in a separate word.
Agglutinating: distinct concepts are expressed by distinct non-overlapping parts of words.
Fusional
Symbolic

Briefly contrast the careers of Sapir and Bloomfield and their contributions to linguistic studies.
They were rivals because Sapir operated more on intuitions and insights, while Bloomfield worked on systematic investigating, collecting data first and then comes ups with a theory.

How did Daniel Jones deal with the suprasegmentals?
He just ignored them.

What was the logical positivist/behaviourist approach that influenced the way that Bloomfield tries to make linguistics more scientific?
This approach rejects introspection. There are only two kinds of meaningful utterances: either a logical preposition or a report of sense data. This approach reduces linguistics to more scientific methods – observation, collecting data and proving it. It only approves what can be proved.

What were the good and bad sides of logical positivism/behaviourism?
The bad side is that we also need insights, they can’t simply be rejected, and they just need to be proved. The good side is that both wanted to put emphasis on matters that could be proved and not single opinions. Interpersonally provable and not single opinions.

Why was Bloomfield’s behaviourist approach to semantics unsatisfactory?
People usually talk about things they are not seeing - “displaced speech”. Bloomfield didn’t take this into account, he tried to correct this failure with the term “displaced speech” (talking about things, which can’t be directly observed at the moment of conversation).

How did Robert Hall and Douglas Taylor disagree about the genetic affiliation of Creole Languages?
Hall classified creoles as dialects of their European lexical source languages; Taylor classified creoles as genetically distinct from the source language.

What was the Theory of Monogenesis?
This theory defended that many of the world’s pidgins and creoles could be traced to a common origin. (Relaxification: translation of word for word, from one language to another).

Describe the Decamp’s Model of the Creole Continuum.
Decamp first applied the word continuum to the gradation from the lexical source language (acrolet) to the Creole (basilect). In between we have the mesolect, with the abolition of slavery (for example in Jamaica), people tried to establish their varieties.

What is the relevance of the Continum Model to the history of American Black English?
There was the assumption that a certain variety, a Creole by contrast with other varieties can develop till it at last comes in contact with a major language (in the case of English) and becomes similar to it (American Black English). “Sranan – Jamaican English – American Black English”

What basic structuralist assumption did Chomsky, Halle and Lukoff violate in the 1956 paper on Accent and Juncture in English?
They violated the prohibition against mixing levels: This book reduced the four degrees of phonemic stress to one simple accented/unaccented distinction. This established a nonbiunique relation between phonemics and phonetics. Eg: English Teacher – if you stress that he is English, you stress English; if yu stress that he is a Teacher, you stress he is a Teacher.

What was Chomsky’s first contact with transformational syntax?
Zelling Harris: He proof read a book of Harris and introduced himself to syntax (structural relationships between sentences).

What two factors made Chomsky’s syntactic structures revolutionary?
He puts the syntax at the center of the theory, and before him, the center used to be phonology or morphology. This is quite revolutionary because before language was considered a more human attribute, and therefore difficult to study it scientifically.

What kind of grammar did Chomsky argue for in syntactic structures?
The finite state Grammar and the prose structure Grammar.

What distinction did Chomsky make between weak and strong Genetive Capacity?
If grammar has the capacity to generate all and only the sentences of a language, it is of strong generative capacity- If a grammar doesn’t have this capacity and is of no empirical interest, then it has a weak genetive capacity.
Dr. John Holm, English Linguistics 3 Course
Universidade de Coimbra

Sunday, August 3, 2008

1941 USA

The following chronology lists some important moments in the United States of America during the year 1941. By this time, Americans had come across the Great Depression and were living through the 2nd World War. People were making an effort to economize as much as possible because of the drastic worldwide happenings. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was President in his third term leading the American government. He was the thirty-second President in which, he served from 1933 till 1945 four terms in office. This was a year when no Nobel Awards were attributed to any personality or organization. The worldwide background was dark with terrorism flourishing around the context of the population. All the detailed events are a result of an intense internet research. The chronology is organized by months from January till December of 1941. Such study pretends to present what was happening during that year. As a result, it is expected the understanding of social, political, economical and cultural features that occurred during that year.

January 2: The Andrew Sisters record Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy for Decca Records. The song was a success during the 2nd WW. Also in 1941, Lena Horne records for the first time the classic, Stormy Weather for Victor Records. The Andrew Sisters and Lena Horne were entertainers for the troops during the 2nd WW.

January 6: Franklin D. Roosevelt addresses Congress with the Four Freedoms speech.

January 23: The national hero Charles Lindberg serves testimonial before The House Committee on Foreign Affairs, he recommended the United States to negotiate a neutrality pact with Germany.

January 27: Representatives of the Chief Military of Great Britain and of the United States join together secretly to define strategies of the North American participation in the 2nd WW.

February 4: Roy Plunkett receives a US patent for Tetrafluoroethylene Polymers. The patent was assigned to Plunkett's employer, Kinetic Chemicals, Inc., of Wilmington, Delaware and describes the polymer to be highly resistant to corrosive influences and oxidation. Dr. Roy J. Plunkett, the scientist whose accidental invention of Teflon changed the way Americans cook

March 11: President Roosevelt signs the Lend-Lease Act. This was a program that allowed the United States to supply the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, China, France and Allied nations with a big amount of war material.

April 7: U.S. Naval Operating Base establishes in Bermuda.

April 9: Agreement relating to the Defense of Greenland was signed by the U.S. Secretary of State and the Danish Minister to the U.S.

April 10: USS Niblack (DD-424) depth charges a German submarine off of Iceland in what is believed to be the first act of war between Germany and the U.S. Roosevelt declares the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden to no longer be combat areas and open to U.S. shipping.

May 6: Pepper, a North American senator defends that Americans should occupy Azores and Cape Verdean.

May 12: U.S. Secretary of State presents with Japanese a peace proposal by Ambassador Nomura.

May 27: Roosevelt presents the necessity to occupy the Atlantic islands of Portugal.

May 24: Bob Dylan, American singer-music composer, author, poet and disc jokey was born.

June 14: United States freezes German and Italian assets in America.

June 16: U.S. State Department request all German consulates in the American territory to be closed.

June 19: Germany and Italy request closure of American consulates.

June 21: U.S. State Department requests all Italian consulates in American territory to be closed.

July 7: Roosevelt informs congress that American troops will occupy Iceland in accordance with an executive agreement with that country.
U.S. Navy takes all steps to maintain communications between the U.S. and Iceland.

July 17: General Francisco Franco presents a speech in which he defends the German national-socialism and the Italian fascism, attacking the demo-liberal regimes that were Great Britain and the United States.
U.S. establishes Naval Air Station and Naval Operating Base at Argentina, Newfoundland.

July 19: U.S. Naval Task Force is organized to support the defense of Iceland and escort convoys between Iceland and the United States.

July 26: The United States freezes all Japanese assets because of their aggressive attitude towards the colonial and neo-colonial interests.

July 28: Japan freezes U.S. assets.

Aug 1: The United States announces an oil embargo against aggressor states.

August 14: Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt sign the Atlantic Charter. Both countries agree on the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live. The Atlantic Charter served as a foundation stone for the later establishment of the United Nations, setting several principles for the nations of the world, including the renunciation of all aggression, right to self-government, access to raw materials, freedom from want and fear, freedom of the seas, and disarmament of aggressor nations.

August 18: Roosevelt announces that the United States is ferrying combat aircraft to the British in the Near East.

September 7: German air attack in the Gulf of Suez sinks the U.S. merchant ship, Steel Seafarer.

September 11: U.S. Navy orders to attack any vessel threatening U.S. shipping or ships under American escort.

September 17: Eastbound British trans-Atlantic convoy was escorted for the first time by U.S. Navy.

September 26: U.S. Navy orders protection of all ships engaged in commerce in American defensive water by patrolling, covering, escorting and by reporting or destroying any German or Italian naval forces encountered.

October: The United States deposes Arnulfo Árias from Panama.
Árias was a leader of a dictatorial government with a fascist ideology. The new President of Panama, Adolfo de la Guardiã, compromises himself to restore a democratic regime.

October 1: Three day conference between U.S., Britain and Russia on aid to Russia concluded in Moscow.

October 3: The film, The Maltese Falcon, produced by Warner Brothers premiers in New York City.

October 17: U.S. Navy orders all American merchantment in Asiatic waters to be put in friendly ports.

October 19: A German U-boat torpedoes and sinks the U.S. merchant ship USS Lehigh off of West Africa.

October 23: The animated feature film, Dumbo is first released by RKO Productions.

October 31: The destroyer, USS Ruben James (DD-245) sinks after being torpedoed off of western Iceland. First U.S. Naval vessel lost to enemy action in World War II.

November: Conclusion of the reparations of the Presidents’ faces on the Mount Rushmore.

November 1: Department of the Navy is given jurisdiction over the Coast Guard for the duration of the national emergency.

November 10: First American escorted troop convoy, with more than 20,000 British troops, departs Halifax for the Far East.

November 17: Special Japanese envoy, Subaro Kurusu, meets with the Secretary of State in Washington. A Joint Resolution amends the Neutrality Act of 1939 to allow merchant ships to be armed and enter war zones.

November 21: Lend-Lease extended to Iceland.

November 23: Under an agreement with the Netherlands, the United States occupies Surinam, Dutch Guiana to protect bauxite mines.

November 26: Final proposals for readjustments of American-Japanese relations.

November 30: American proposals for settling Far Eastern crisis rejected by Japanese Foreign Minister Tojo.

December 2: First Naval Armed Guard crew received by U.S. merchant ship Dunboyne.

December 3: Sagadahoc, a U.S. merchant vessel, is torpedoed and sunk in southern Atlantic.

December 6: President Franklin Roosevelt makes a final appeal to the Emperor of Japan for peace. There is no reply. Late this same day, the U.S. code-breaking service begins intercepting a 14-part Japanese message and deciphers the first 13 parts, passing them on to the President and Secretary of State. The Americans believe a Japanese attack is imminent, most likely somewhere in Southeast Asia.

December 7: The last part of the Japanese message, stating that diplomatic relations with the United States are to be broken off, reaches Washington in the morning and is decoded at approximately 9 a.m. About an hour later, another Japanese message is intercepted. It instructs the Japanese embassy to deliver the main message to the Americans at 1 p.m. The Americans realize this time corresponds with early morning time in Pearl Harbor, which are several hours behind. The U.S. War Department then sends out an alert but uses a commercial telegraph because radio contact with Hawaii is temporarily broken. Delays prevent the alert from arriving at headquarters in Oahu until noontime (Hawaii Time) four hours after the attack has already begun.

December 7: Islands of Hawaii, near Oahu - The Japanese attacks force under the command of Admiral Nagumo, consisting of six carriers with 423 planes. At 6 a.m., the first attack wave of 183 Japanese planes takes off from the carriers located 230 miles north of Oahu and heads for the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor.
Pearl Harbor - At 7:02 a.m., two Army operators at Oahu's northern shore radar station detects the Japanese air attack approaching and contacts a junior officer who disregards their reports, thinking they are American B-17 planes which are expected from the U.S. west coast.
Near Oahu - At 7:15 a.m., a second attack wave of 167 planes takes off from the Japanese carriers and heads for Pearl Harbor.
Pearl Harbor is not on high alert. Senior commanders think, based on available intelligence, there was no reason to believe an attack is imminent. Aircraft are therefore, left parked wingtip to wingtip on airfields, anti-aircraft guns are unmanned with many ammunition boxes kept locked in accordance with peacetime regulations. There also were no torpedo nets protecting the fleet anchorage. And since it is Sunday morning, many officers and crewmen were leisurely ashore.
At 7:53 a.m., the first Japanese assault wave, with 51 'Val' dive bombers, 40 'Kate' torpedo bombers, 50 high level bombers and 43 'Zero' fighters, commences the attack with flight commander, Mitsuo Fuchida, sounding the battle cry: "Tora! Tora! Tora!” (Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!).
The Americans were taken completely by surprise. The first attack wave target airfields and battleships. The second wave target other ships and shipyard facilities. The air raid lasts until 9:45 a.m. Eight battleships are damaged, with five sunk. Three light cruisers, three destroyers and three smaller vessels are lost along with 188 aircraft. The Japanese lose 27 planes and five midget submarines which attempted to penetrate the inner harbor and launch torpedoes.
Escaping damage from the attack are the prime targets, the three U.S. Pacific Fleet aircraft carriers, Lexington, Enterprise and Saratoga, which were not in the port. Also escaping damage are the base fuel tanks.
The casualty list includes 2,335 servicemen and 68 civilians killed, with 1,178 wounded. Included are 1,104 men aboard the Battleship USS Arizona killed after a 1,760-pound air bomb penetrated into the forward magazine causing catastrophic explosions.
In Washington, various delays prevent the Japanese diplomats from presenting their war message to Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, until 2:30 p.m. (Washington Time) just as the first reports of the air raid at Pearl Harbor are being read by Hull.
News of the "sneak attack" is broadcast to the American public via radio bulletins, with many popular Sunday afternoon entertainment programs being interrupted. The news sends a shockwave across the nation and results in a tremendous influx of young volunteers into the U.S. armed forces. The attack also unites the nation behind the President and effectively ends isolationist sentiment in the country.


December 8: The United States and Britain declare war on Japan with President Roosevelt calling December 7, a date which will live in infamy.


December 11: Germany and Italy declare war on the United States. The European and Southeast Asian wars have now become a global conflict with the Axis powers; Japan, Germany and Italy united against America, Britain, France, and their Allies.


December 12: Naval Air Transport Service is established.


December 17: Admiral Chester W. Nimitz becomes the new commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.


December 22: U.S. troops under Brig. General J.F. Barnes arrive at Brisbane, Australia. Roosevelt and Churchill open discussions in Washington that lead to the establishment of Combined Chiefs of Staff. Japanese land in Lingayen Gulf area in the Philippines. Japanese patrol boats 32 and 33 are destroyed by Marine gunfire and deliberately run ashore at Wake Island.


December 23: American-British War Council, composed of Roosevelt, Churchill and Navy, military and civilian advisors meets for first time.

It is not surprising how the effects of World War 2 hit the United States of America during 1941. The world was in crisis and all societies were experiencing unstable moments. A simple chocolate like the famous M&M’s was related to the war. These Peanut Chocolate Candies were first introduced precisely in 1941 to American soldiers. Moreover, fashion wear was not considered a profitable business. People were going through a period of economization and did not invest on clothes. Mostly the fabricants were interested on the production of uniforms. Funny to say that besides the lack of production of daily wear, nylon stockings became very popular within women, practically replacing the traditional silk stocking. Nevertheless, good things came out as a reflection of the worldwide mess.
Cinema, for example turned into a highly productive industry. It was in 1941 that the Annual Academy Oscar Awards celebrated its 14th Anniversary. John Ford won Oscar for Best Directing with his film, How Green Was My Valley, winning likewise Best Motion Picture. Also, lots of famous European Artists escaped to the United States ending up expanding their works in American territory. Max Ernst serves as an example, a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet held prisoner in France, when the WW2 began, but in 1941 managed to escape to the United States. He was considered to be one of the chief representatives of Dadaism and Surrealism, side-by-side with A. Breton that also arrived to New York that same year. If we consider that Sport victories are in a certain way a nations’ pride, then we should refer some relevant champions in American Sports. In 1941, North American Cornelius Warmerdam hit world records in Pole vault and Lester Sterrs in a Los Angeles competition, also tops world records. In the same way, the New York Yankees win the world championship in baseball.
To sum up, all events during 1941 in the chronology presented are in some way related with the 2nd WW. Plenty of political affairs were happening around the country, while bombs broke the world apart. Pearl Harbor was a relevant issue in the United States, which metaphorically conducted the country to join the World War. Curiosity was that by 1941, employment had risen since the Great Depression, in other words there was a growing labor in all nations’ manufacturing centers, accelerating the Great Migration of African-American workers from the Southern states as well as, farmers and workers from rural areas and small towns. Domestic issues were no longer Roosevelt’s most urgent concern. The society was changing throughout the war, not only in the United States, but all around the world.

Proyecto Español Linguístico: Reglas de Acentuación d Castellano

En la lengua castellana, la acentuación es más fácil de entender, pues hay solo un tipo de acento, lo que se denomina por la tilde. No significa lo mismo que lo que se llama por tilde en la lengua portuguesa, ni tampoco la que frecuentemente se usa para señalar la n del castellano. La ñ representa una letra del alfabeto español. Su función es distinguir la nasalización del la n, como hay en palabras como, niño. Por lo tanto, las reglas de acentuación en castellano son:

  • Las palabras agudas que acaban en vocal, -n y –s: cuando la carga acentual recae en la última sílaba se acentúan.
  • Las palabras llanas que no acaban en vocal, -n, y –s: cuando la carga acentual recae en la penúltima sílaba, se acentúan cuando terminan en consonante, excepto los vocablos que terminan en –n y –s.
  • Las palabras esdrújulas son acentuadas siempre: todos los vocablos en que la carga acentual recae en la antepenúltima sílaba.
  • Las palabras compuestas cuando convertidas en esdrújulas llevan el respectivo acento.
  • Los monosílabos nunca llevan acento, excepto cuando existen dos iguales en su forma pero que tienen distinta función gramatical: el (artículo) / él (pronombre); mi (adjetivo posesivo) / mí (pronombre personal); tu (adjetivo posesivo) / tú (pronombre personal); mas (conjunción) / más (adverbio); si (conjunción) / sí (afirmación o pronombre reflexivo); de (preposición) / dé (verbo dar); se (pronombre) / sé (verbo saber y ser); aun (adverbio de cantidad) / aún (adverbio de tiempo); te (pronombre); té (nombre).
  • Todos los pronombres interrogativos y exclamativos llevan siempre acento.
  • Los pronombres demostrativos llevan acento cuando pueden confundirse con los adjetivos demostrativos.
  • Los diptongos átonos nunca llevan acento.
  • Los diptongos pasan a ser hiatos cuando las dos vocales forman parte de sílabas distintas. Por lo tanto siempre que hay una vocal abierta a, e, o más una cerrada i o u, el acento recae en la vocal abierta; siempre que hay una cerrada más una abierta, el acento recae en la cerrada. Cuando tenemos dos vocales cerradas juntas, el acento recae en la segunda vocal y cuando tenemos dos vocales abiertas juntas, seguimos las reglas de acentuación normal.
  • Los triptongos llevan siempre acento en la vocal abierta.
  • Los adverbios de modo que son formados por adjetivo más –mente llevan acento en el adjetivo.
  • La palabra solo puede llevar acento cuando funciona como adverbio para evitar la confusión con solo adjetivo.

Saturday, August 2, 2008

What Does the Fortune Cookie Say?!?


É no silêncio que nos ouvimos melhor e é quase sempre, na solidão que conseguimos ver mais longe.