"Understanding 'American Girl'" - A Project In Review

11:13 PM Michael Cotter 0 Comments

        So, on Wednesday February 18th my partner, Melissa, and I got to present our first linguistics project to our class. We chose to work around the pop song "American Girl" by Bonnie McKee to analyze rhyme and how pronunciations of words are slurred, stretched, and slanted to make rhymes in pop music. To take this further, we translated the song lyrics into IPA and Russian to demonstrate the visual connection to the rhymes and, with the Russian, to see what rhymes would work or get lost in translation.


        As a team, I think Melissa and I worked very well together. From the beginning, we had a really good chemistry flow and kept in close contact with one another about our progresses and findings in our project - which is why we finished it so quickly. We also both spoke about how much fun we had with this project. By picking something that we both loved like music it motived us to work on the project more often because it was fun.
        I think our visual aids were also "on point" (slang for "satisfying"). I loved the color scheme we had been able to use that accented our video and Bonnie and made the presentation esthetically pleasing to look at. I think the use of our gif pictures kept the audience's attention from slide to slide and our charts were very easy to follow and highlighted the most interesting findings in the song that could be noticed in full in the handouts we provided.
        I loved our video too. Though, obviously, we didn't direct or visually design the official music video, I think the sing-along version with the IPA lyrics was actually really helpful when trying to look at how IPA works. I think it really highlighted the pattern of the way IPA is used and was able to demonstrate how it works in a simple, creative way being that we broke the song down line by line which was matched by the audio and visual of Bonnie's lips.
        I wish we had found a little more of a rhyme pattern with our translation into Russian. I feel like it would've been really cool to find some sounds that carried over, but as Ben said after we presented - "that sound would sound like garbage in Russian."
        Overall, I feel like we were well prepared, well spoken, and genuinely interested in our topic. I feel like Melissa and I worked together really well and I would absolutely work with her again- which is saying something coming from someone who typically hates to work with a partner.


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7:01 PM Michael Cotter 0 Comments


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A Game of Telephone

7:13 AM Michael Cotter 0 Comments


The past few weeks, my linguistics class has been able to collaborate with the ELS department so that we could work on understanding languages other than English. This was mutually beneficial for the ELS students who got to then learn casual or slang English phraseology from primary English speakers.
I was able to have individualized conversations with men and women who spoke Arabic, Spanish, and Portuguese. In my experiences, I was able to grow to understand the love, passion, and determination behind why these students were interested in English.
Lody, a woman from Panama, said that she was learning English because it was an uncommon language in her home area and by learning English she would be able to benefit herself and the advancement of her career.
Another guy I got to speak with primarily spoke Arabic and he was learning English for fun and because he liked Taylor Swift and wanted to understand what she was saying.
I had great conversations about culture, jobs, and media with all of the students who got to come by our class and look forward to doing something like this again in the future.

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Biography of a Word Project - "Bitch"

3:03 PM Michael Cotter 0 Comments


Timeline:
c1000 - (n.) word was first used as "a female dog"
1400 - (n.) Applied opprobriously to a woman; strictly, a lewd or sensual woman. Not now in decent use; but formerly common in literature.
1500 - (n.) Applied to a man but less opprobriously than to women (more lighthearted)
1555 - (n.) "female of the fox, wolf, and occasionally of other beasts; usually in combination with the name of the species"
1645 - (v.) word transfers meaning from noun to verb (Charles Cotton: "thou art now going a bitching")
1747 - (n.) a term used in mining for a tool used to draw up the rods
1777 - (v.) To hang back or idle behind ("Norton bitched a little at last" Edmund Burke "The Correspondence of Edmund Burke")
1823 - (v.) to spoil, bungle, or ruin  
1904 - (n.) A primitive for of lighting - old fat candle (ie: "The Black Flame Candle" in Hocus Pocus)
1930 - (v.) to grumble or complain (accepted into American English terminology in 1930 but not published in this context until Budd Schulberg's 1941 novel What Makes Sammy Run?)
1934 - (v.) to be spiteful, malicious, deceptive

Compounds:
1330 - Bitch-Son - (n.) from Arthur & Merlin meaning, along the lines of the modern, son of a bitch ("Biche sone! thou drawest amis.")
1796 - Bitch-fou - (n.) from Robert Burns meaning drunk and sick as a bitch; beastly drunk; wasted ("I've been..bitch fou 'mang godly priests.")


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Rubric & Grade Sheet for Lingustisics Midterm

12:00 PM Michael Cotter 0 Comments

Name of the Class: Linguistics 06-314-01

Project Title: Understanding An “American Girl” (working title)

Project Overview: In our project, Melissa and I will be translating the song “American Girl” into Russian and the International Phonetic Alphabet and looking for patterns in visual rhymes of the lyrics.

Prepared by:  Michael Cotter & Melissa Gura

Project Contacts:
Michael Cotter – IPA translator & video editor(michaeljcotter@lewisu.edu)
Melissa Gura – Russian translator & PowerPoint editor (melissaagura@lewisu.edu)
        
Project Summary Melissa & I will be using the song “American Girl” to work with for our project. I, in particular, was drawn to this song because it has, what I could consider, interesting rhymes and words for a pop song with a few fun sounds like “whoa” or “oh” that will be interesting to translate to the International Phonetic Alphabet. Melissa will translate the lyrics of the song into Russian and in doing so we can compare words that are vastly different or similar to their English counter parts as well as any pattern that might arise in looking at the end rhyme of the lyrics. I will be working on translating the English song lyrics in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and, again, looking at any patterns shown in the end rhymes of the words and what sounds exactly make the end words rhyme.                       



        
Project Methodology
Ideally, our project will feature a hand-out of the IPA lyrics and we will have a bit of a “Name That Tune” exercise to see if anyone can guess the song from a segment of the translation – likely a segment of the chorus or the title and singer’s name. We will also provide side-by-side of the English and Russian lyrics to allow the class to look for patterns, much like we did in our project. We will present our findings in a short PowerPoint full of charts and other visual aids and we will present the music video for the song with the IPA subtitles running on the screen.

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Some "Alyssa-isms" for Your Consideration

10:18 PM Michael Cotter 0 Comments

Prepare to get gooped! Grap your good Judy, drop the poor me's and live honey.


For me, there's nothing more fun than learning a new word for phrase. I think it's so fun to use language to it's full extent and so does Miss. Alyssa Edwards. "All of you know I like to make my own words up, honey, and some make sense, some don't, and some almost do; so I'm gonna go ahead and define some of the rompery that comes out of my mouth... I was gonna say bullsh*t..."

Here's a clip of some Alyssa-isms so that you can learn some interesting phrases and pull them out and goop your friends. *Clip contains explicit language

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