Language Analysis: The Brothers Grimm and Fairy Tales

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Recommended: Similarities between descriptive and prescriptive grammar

Every person on earth knows a language, rather it be spoken or signed. According to the Linguistic Society of America’s website, ("Linguistic Society of America," 2012) linguistics is the systematic study of language. The study of linguistics includes the study of the sub-fields of language. These subfields include; phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax. The English language is a Germanic language, which is branch of the Indo-European language family. Other languages on the Germanic language branch include; German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian.
The Brothers Grimm wrote their book of fairy tales by gathering stories by word of mouth for the purpose of collecting sounds. Jakob Grimm discovered the early Germanic sound shift that can be expressed in terms of natural classes of speech sounds, according to our text book (Fromkin, Rodman, & Hyams, 2014, p. 363) this is known as Grimm's law. There are two different types of grammar; prescriptive and descriptive. Prescriptive grammar is a set of rules about language based on how people think language should be used. Descriptive grammar is a set of rules based on how language is actually used and describes the way one speaks language.
There are four rules of language discussed in this class. The study of phonetics is the study of the sounds of language. The International Phonetic Alphabet was invented to transcribe the sounds of speech which was independent of any particular language and applicable to all languages ("International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)," 2014). The study of phonology is the study of the sound patterns of language. Phonology tells you what sounds are part of your language and what combinations of sounds form words. Phonology also explains why some phon...

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... series]. (n.d.). PBS.
Ellen's Monologue- Crazy alarm clocks. (2011, December 22). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Nrn0DR_tE
Forget what you know: Jacob Barnett at TEDxTeen. (2012, April 09). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq-FOOQ1TpE
Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., & Hyams, N. M. (2014). An introduction to language (p. 363). Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.
His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.dalailamaworld.com/topic.php?t=294
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). (2014). Retrieved from http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ipa.htm
Jacob Barnett. (2013). Retrieved from http://jacobbarnett.com/jacob-barnett.html
Linguistic Society of America. (2012). Retrieved from http://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/studying-linguistics
Tickets to the Show. (2014). Retrieved from http://www.ellentv.com/tickets/

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