When making the language for food I noticed that we had to decided to use basic shapes of triangles, circles, and even lines as a way to help represent different type of foods that most people usually eat in their daily lives that they could just point to them. We chose use pictures as a way to create a language because we thought it would be the best way to describe the foods we had in mind without it being easily confused with each other. Also, we thought it would good idea use pictures as you could simply combine the two picture if you wanted a certain food. The simple thought of using shapes for food wasn’t the challenge,  but how to create small changes in the food symbols so they can different from one another that are so similar to each other for example, the difference between regular cup yogurt and yogurt that has fruit inside is show through adding circles inside the cup. I have noticed that when creating the pictures we did use the main shape of the food that it is most known as to represent them, like pizza is usually known to people to be in a triangle or an ice cream is a triangle with a curve line on top in alphabetical order.

For this week’s assignment, we had to come up with our own language. We chose to use pictures for each letter like apple for the letter a. Just something simple, easy, and fun. The challenge was trying to figure which animal or object starts with a few letters. We decided to do this because it was simple and it was fun to draw the objects that started with that letter. What I find interesting is that our language was very similar to the language from the very beginning that language was just pictures of animals, shapes, and hand prints. I wonder how people back then communicated back then. Then after coming up with spoken language then there is a written language which was just marks and pictures which look like hieroglyphics for Egypt. I believe that’s how the language changed a lot every century or so. Someone would always find another way to communicate whether it be pictures to first coming up with letters. I think that’s how our alphabet came to be. Over the centuries, pictures would turn into letters. Then the letters would change over the centuries into the letters that we use today to write and type.

In class this week we had to develop our own language. It was very difficult on our own, but luckily we got to work in groups. I did come up with some ideas, but my classmates mainly did the work and I was just their for the ride. The challenge in this was coming up with our own symbols. Even though it was kind of tough to begin with, we made it even harder on ourselves by using symbols for words instead of letters. There was no real reasoning behind the symbols we chose, we just wrote down what popped into our heads. It’s actually funny how language has come a long way. Before the letters we just used pictures and symbols, which is pretty much what ties into the exercise, and it also shows how much humanity has evolved in the past few centuries or so. It was pretty fun make our own alphabet, but if there was one thing I didn’t like it was probably that we could’ve done symbols for letters instead of taking a more difficult route for each word, but nevertheless it was fun. It was very interesting to learn about how much language has changed over the years.

In class we had to design a new alphabet. Our group knew we didn’t want to do pictures so we decided to try and sketch out different ideas for a simple but look somewhat like the alphabet we already know. We started out with a light sketch to see exactly what we wanted to add to the new letter forms. After we officially decided what we were going to use for our new alphabet we went over the new letter forms with a bolder marker so they didn’t look like just lines. I do think that cave paintings are very interesting as well as trying to figure out what they really mean.

When we got the opportunity to experiment by creating our own language I thought that it was a great idea. I believed that it got me slightly acquainted with the difficulty and meticulousness that would have to go into creating a whole new language. There are rules to each language just like ours and deciding what should and should not be seems as though it can become very complicated. When we began to break down the prefixes, suffixes, root words etc. I started to see how things could branch off and change. This makes me think how incredible it must have been for people creating language for the first time. How did they know what sounds to make to create a word? How did they decide what lettering should represent the words they say. Did they do it as they went along? So many questions arise from a topic that I believe people take for granted every day. The ability to communicate with other people is a beautiful thing and it is intensified by the fact that people comprehend what we are saying. It is even more impressive how someone can have strong accents and still be able to effectively communicate with each other and this happens in millions of encounters each day.

There are many different types of languages, the two I hear the most included English, and because I am Mexican many of my elders fluently speak Spanish. Obviously we know that these languages have not always been so easily distinguished. Recently we did an exercise where we needed to create an entirely new language from scratch. First it was a lot more difficult than I thought it was going to be. My group came up with something that wasn’t too challenging but was also based off of our English language and objects we see daily. We started by using the English Alphabet, we listed all the letters and tried to think of simple objects that we could easily draw. For example, we used an apple for the letter A.

We decided it would be more simple to use symbols rather than make up our own new signs. One challenge we realized people may have later on while trying to use this language was memorizing all twenty-six symbols. One thing I also realized while looking at other groups languages is that many of the pictures may have been too complicated to draw or to decipher. I believe our group made simple objects or symbols to depict these letters and that many of them were great choices.

In class we had to create a language, or rather an alphabet for a language, and seeing as to how my group was only fluent in one we based our alphabet off the twenty-six character English alphabet. I enjoyed it; it was fun to revamp letters, it made me feel like I was in grade school and me and my friends had to use secret code when passing notes. I’m sure when people were trying to create the alphabet it wasn’t that much fun though. It really involves some thinking. How is everyone going to be able to understand something? How do I simply pass on information or news clearly? I learned that most of our language developed from simplifying drawings, which I can definitely see as a help when it came to creating a character system for a language but what about the things without pictures? There are just so many things to describe, and messages to relay, that it I know I would’ve had a panic attack if people told me to make up a way to convey all of it through a written language.

Thankfully, none of us had to deal with that pressure and we got to have fun. I enjoyed the hangry language and it was neat to see a group create an alphabet with a variety of stroke weights(wish I would’ve thought of that). I like exploring all the topics we have so far and I’m looking forward to next week.

Creating your own alphabet or language was actually pretty challenging. In my group, we took the easy way out and just created new designs based off of our alphabet. If you were to actually look into other languages than our own, it’s the same as stepping into a new world. Even though many people adapt to the addition to new languages, I myself have a difficult time trying to learn what’s different from what I already know. The romance languages are easier for us to understand because of how simply they are to our on. If you look at other alphabets with different characters like Chinese, Russian and Japanese, more often than not you will find yourself confused with how you’re even going to be able to compute what’s written on that page. But with those who know how to speak languages with more than one hundred characters, they have trouble with learning a language with only twenty-six. Many might ask why learning English would be more difficult than others, but not only do we have several rules to apply with our language, but so much just goes into a way of speaking than just the letters. Simple patterns like conjugation and suffixes added on with the evolution of what at first glance appears to be symbols barely even touches the true concepts of language. It’s really important to think about concepts to explore the world around us.