Phonological Rules

In class on Wednesday, we went further with our discussion on language. We talked about how different languages have different rules and what these rules mean to the language as a whole. I am currently taking Spanish for the first time ever (I took sign language in high school for my language requirement) and of course in that class we are learning about the different rules and so on. On Wednesday morning, my professor asked a student who goes to North Central who is from Nicaragua to come talk to our class. She had us prepare questions to ask him and being that we are in a class for students with little to no Spanish speaking experience, we know the very, very basics of the basics of the language. So, our questions were bland and worthy of …show more content…
In class, we expanded on this to explain that language is symbolic and that symbols are arbitrary, meaning they can vary. We also discussed the many different rules of language. This includes phonological rules, which have to do with how we pronounce words. Phonological rules differ in different languages. For example, in Spanish the letter “e” is pronounced “aye”, similar to how the letter “a” is said in English. Another rule is the semantic rule. This deals with the meanings of specific words. A word can be spelled the same and sound different or two words can be spelled different and sound the same. For example to word “live” can either be used to say, “I live in a house,” or “Live from New York it’s Saturday Night.” Also, the words “poor” and “pour.” Both are pronounced the same but the one can do with a state of wealth and the other can do with how water gets into a cup. These differing meanings can contribute to confusion between people with different languages and even between people who speak the same language. Spelling wise, it can be confusing for a child, and even some adults, to distinguish the differences between “your” and “you’re”. Another set of rules we talked about were syntactic rules. These rules have to do with the structure of language and the ways that symbols in the language can be arranged. Many times, syntactic rules are broken without realizing it. People will write sentences that may sound correctly in their heads but not in real life. This can be due to placing a word in the wrong place, forgetting a comma, or a multitude of other things that can contribute to miscommunication and confusion between people. There are also some words that some people know and others do not understand. In some cases, this is called slang, language used by a group of people whose members belong to a similar co-culture or other group. Using