WRTG-101-003

Having an Italian background, I was used to read words as they are written, nothing more and nothing less. But, as I was learning English, I came to realize that it is not the case for this language, but why? I have struggled extensively with silent letters in words such as knight or island, as it seemed crazy to me that someone would not pronounce certain letters if they were so clearly in the word. I have also always wondered why, as English comes mainly from latin, the same root language as Italian. Claire Nowak explains the history of these silent letter in her article "Why Some English Words Have Silent Letters" by saying: about 60 percent of English words contain a silent letter. But these often distressing words weren’t intended to be so confusing. In many cases, these silent letters actually were pronounced, like when “knight” sounded like “kniht” or “bite” sounded like “beetuh.” In the Middle Ages, the English language was rocked by the Great Vowel Shift, a m...

As I was doing research for my paper topic: forensic linguistics, I came across a Ted talk called "Forensic Linguistics Profiling & What Your Language Reveals About you" , which talks about forensic linguistics (the application of linguistics knowledge, methods and insight to the forensic context of law, language, crime investigation, trial, and judicial procedure) and how it could be applied to social media. I really thought this was interesting because so many crimes nowadays are committed behind a computer. From bullying to fraud. In fact, Harry Bradford talked about online harassment, and that around 20-25% of people who experience it online do not even know and never met the person who is harassing them. Forensic linguistics, though, could help fight that. It could analyze these anonymous people's language and deduct information about them such as their age, gender, education and much more. It is truly fascinating how forensic linguistics can be used in so m...

As I was doing my daily Instagram scrolling the other day, an interesting picture by @factonfeed  came up on my feed. Now, Instagram is not exactly known for its source reliability, so I decided to more research. Just starting from my personal experience, I do think that I kind of switch personalities from Italian to English. I believe in Italian I might sound more knowledgable, as I know more words, and I become more extrovert than I already am (in English). The article " Switching languages can also switch personality: study"  states that People who are bicultural and speak two languages may unconsciously change in their personality when they switch languages, according to a U.S. study. Another article that I found on Psychology Today   also mentioned a really interesting quote by a Bilingual person, who says that in English their speech is very polite, and they always say "please" and "excuse me". I do have to admit that I feel a very similar way...

Being a Justice Law and Criminology major, I hope some day to become involved with the justice system. Me and my roommate have a shared interest in law, given that her mother is a domestic violence lawyer and professor at GW Law, and she showed me a video of her mother's students making a "parody" of perfumes ads by using legal terms instead of real perfumes names. While I thought it was really funny, I also realized that in the legal world the use of specific terms is a common skill. But why do we still use such terms (such as Latin words) in legal settings? A study by Peter R. Macleod for Boston College Law review states that; "Court decisions are a valid subject of inquiry into the legal community's use of Latin for two reasons. First, in opinions, judges are talking to both the legal and nonlegal communities. 8 Judges' primary audiences are the attorneys working on the case [...] Second, judicial opinions are influential documents in a wider legal...