“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
The Pocket Full of Boners illustrated by Dr. Seuss. I loved his books, like One Fish Two Fish, Oh The Thinks you can Thinks, The Lorax, The Butter Bat… They really influenced me. They were so interesting.
Theres a mathematician, a physicist and an engineer on a train going through Scotland. The engineer looks out the window and says "Oh! Look! A brown cow. All cows in Scotland must be brown.". The physicist says "No, no. All we can say is that some of the cows in Scotland are brown.". The mathematician then says "NO, NO! All we can say is that there is at least one cow in Scotland, at least one side of which must be brown.
Below is my submission for Anthopology 45. My school work doesn’t always reflect my real,exact views since my goal is to get a fine grade.
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My ethnocentrism involves languages. My father is from the United States of America and my mother is from Brazil. I was born there in Recife and I grew up on the path for normal Brazilian Portuguese for my younger more vulnerable years. After some time we moved into the US and have had permanent residence here ever since. Getting a North American enculturation has made me lose my fluent Portuguese. My family gets Brazilian TV channels which I can follow well enough and my mom still speaks it around but otherwise I am immersed in English. My vocabulary is very poor and you need to speak slow and clear but I can survive and relearn it all back if needed.
I’m really not qualified to talk about why MY languages are enlightened but I’ll act like I am because of my ethnocentrism. I’m proud of my first language but I know I have detached from it. I look at it and hear it and wish I had it back. It sounds very fluid and structured logically. It seems to convey more information through an emotional channel that “should” be universal to understand. Maybe what I really like is not the language but the relation to a Brazilian attitude which was what I first connected with. Plus I think English-Brazilian accents are hot on women except on my mom.
I like English in a complimentary way. It seems expressive and very good at transferring information. It isn’t uniform in the syntax but it can be extended and bent many interesting ways making it very malleable. I appreciate this a lot in music even though I seem to only listen to the phonetics. The language is dense with history, jargon, and remixes of many parts of other languages.
Portuguese is a Romance language whereas English is Germanic. When I hear German I ask my self if that is what English sounds like to nonspeakers and I feel grossed out and put back in my place. English and Portuguese are both indo-European languages but, most importantly (to me), both have been in my head and thats where my bias comes from. I would have to appreciate every language on Earth to maybe give an objective comparison of all these properties I have listed. Most likely is that every feature I’ve doted on is found in all languages and Portuguese and English are actually boring and inefficient. I think it would be cool to have clicks as a phoneme here so we English is, for sure, not completely awesome yet.
