Section 3A Essay

The children of the ZingZang culture learn language in multiple ways, before being submerged into the knowledge capsule at one year, mothers will hum to their children our language. Mothers also sing to their children to teach them parts of our language. The ZingZang children only learn one language. Our children only experience cooing and babbling as their prelinguistic vocalizations, because by the age of 12 months, we submerge them in a capsule that gives them full language understanding and capacity.

                In addition to teaching our language at a young age, in our culture we have an emphasis on equality. This means that in our language we use gender neutral terms for addressing the public. In ZingZang culture, children and adults are also seen as equals. You may only call someone a child if they are under the age of 10. This is because at the age of ten they are expected to begin doing their part for our society. They learn everything they need to know about language, survival and success when submerged in the capsule at one year. So for us age does not mean the same thing as it does in other cultures. We do not rob our children of a childhood we give them 9 years after receiving the essential knowledge to be a child. Our kind progresses much faster than others with language. One of our most prominent values is kindness, so in our language there are no words that express hate and anger.  With no access to a word for these kinds of feelings, people do not express these negative feelings onto other people in our culture. The most important value in ZingZang life is preservation of life. We believe that all things are living and it is our duty to keep it continue its life. Our food strategies are simple, we plant, grow, and harvest all of our food. There are no words for fast food, or restaurants, or dine in. Nothing to express someone else preparing our food for us. We prepare our own food at home. Our cultural emphasis are harvesting enough food not only for our own families but for the other families if they have a small harvest. We all share the food that we grow with those who need it. Since planting and harvesting is a big part of our culture, we have many words in our language to describe plants and shades of green.

Moreover, our language came from the oldest ancestors of our people. When they inhabited our planet may moons ago they saw a potential for a flourishing society.  They began wandering our planet and touching everything they could. They cataloged every place they went, with pictures of what it looked like and name for each thing in that specific place. The ancestors wanted to create a way where no matter what family you came from, you would all get the same amount pf education.  As the men began putting together all the cataloged places and words they had into a language, the women started building a capsule of knowledge, so that each child learn all necessary things for survival, language being one of them. Surprisingly our language has been pretty stable throughout ZingZang time. The Biggest change has been the addition of new plant life words, resulting from the creation of hybrid plants in our culture. We have used our skills to create new plant forms. In our culture we use the nature around us for healing, at some point we discovered that the combination between two plants was better than just using one. However, since we have a high value on preservation of life, we did not want to use both plants each time, so we tried to find a way to make a hybrid. This would mean we could still use the medication, but we would not be depleting the plant life forms in the process. As hard as we try to keep everything on our planet living, not all things last forever. The plants we do not use, that we just nourish and keep living, start to produce less and less offspring. Through the years some of these plants have died of or become something different. The names of the plants that have died off have been lost from our language from lack of use. Fortunately, the reborn plants receive new names to get added into our language. So as things die we indeed lose language for these things but when new things emerge we quickly make names and add them to the language.

Further, our language does not express emotion well, we have simple words that express love, sadness, happiness or gratitude. These words are some of the simplest of words in our entire language. We do not use language to show affection. Most of our expression of emotion comes from our body language and other nonverbal communications such as facial features. If we do not like something we scrunch our noses and faces up real tight to show discomfort and overall dissatisfaction. When we want to express happiness it is done in two ways. One with a big smile and arms held out wide, and two with a smile and a two hands on abdomen. The first display of happiness is usually associated with happiness to see someone, or something that has just occurred sparking joy inside a person. The second is used to just show overall content and pure happiness. When we greet someone, we do not say anything, we place our hands on the other person’s chest to connect to their soul and acknowledge their existence. When we are leaving a place or trying to say goodbye, we touch backs of the other people around us and go about our day. When we do speak we make direct eye contact with the person we are speaking to. If we are in a group of people we try to make eye contact with each person throughout the conversation. In our culture it is normal to be in very close proximity to one another even in public speaking. We consider everyone family, so it is common for people in group discussion to all be within arm’s reach. People in ZingZang culture like to express their commitment to our sun and moon gods by using colors from our various plant life, and tattooing themselves with symbols of our gods and writing to the gods.

As has been mentioned, the children of our culture know all language by the age of one. This means that instead of gradually gaining more words for their vocabulary over the first couple years of their life, we give them all to them at one. After they have learned the language of our people, the children like to play a game where they make up words to replace specific words in the language to trick the adults. All children participate in this game, but once they begin working in our society they must stop the game and speak properly. For example instead of using the word for using the word for birth mother shimi, children will say shishi. This word has the first half of the original word repeated. It seems like a simple change but for some reason the adults to not catch on. The children go around the houses yelling, “ShiShi! ShiShi!” but the mothers never understand their children. Other words on the list for the game are jari, mimi, panga, mori, and caprisee. These words are the children’s ways of saying sibling, medicine, drink, food, and cup.

  Furthermore, our language and culture are interconnected in all aspects. Our language reflects how our culture operates, and culture is a reflection of how our language is structured.  In ZingZang life, our people do many things. The daily activities of the ZingZang people consist of the men going to do the planting and harvesting of the food and plants. The men go around and make sure that every plant has sufficient water and light, as well as planting new seeds, or gathering plants for medication and healing. Each plant that needs some assistance gets cataloged, each newly planted seed for a plant gets cataloged, and anything taken for healing is cataloged as well. Our extensive vocabulary on plants helps us to identify what plant is what and which plants we need to grow more or less of. The men also have to make sure that the food they have planted is growing properly and nothing has gone wrong. If there is a problem with any of the food that must be cataloged as well. If there is food that is ready to harvest and to be taken back to the main village, the men take proper precautions as to not disrupt the growing of other food and plants in the area when taking up the finished food. On the other hand the women of our culture go to our main village every morning, and run the government. All women of our culture work together cohesively. The women look over all the cataloged papers that the men bring back if there are plants that need to be taken care of more extensively, they will appoint certain men to do the job. The children under the age of ten get to explore and play with the other kids. If the children are over ten then the boys have to go with the men and learn their job as men, and the girls have to go with the women to learn their job. Other activities that the ZingZang people like to do is go to the sacred river and swim or relax and talk with each other. Some ZingZang women like to take their babies to the river and sing to them or hum to them as they watch the other children play. In addition to relaxation or conversation, many ZingZangs like to read by the river as well. One of the most important activities that all ZingZang people participate in, is the giving thanks to our sun and moon Gods. Each ZingZang gets together a gift, it can be made by hand or I could be a plant or a seed. There are no guidelines to what type of gift you bring, as long as you bring something. They then place all the gifts in the sacred river, clasp hands with one another and bow. This is our way of showing our Gods our appreciation.

To illustrate our vocabulary, we use the term living plants for many things. Plant/s= grass, any tree, flower, bush, weeds, roots, seeds, broken off bark, leaves, twigs, fungi, dirt, water. All of these things we consider to be plants because we believe that anything in nature that grows and dies, or flows, and is useful to us but is not human is a living plant. We believe that all of these things are living, because they provide something for our planet. Food=  potato, corn, wheat, seeds, tomato, watermelon, oranges, apples, strawberries, lettuce, onions, peppers, green beans, peas, bananas, chicken, beef, fish. All of these are what we consider food because you can grow or raise every single one of these items. Our food system is all planting and harvesting, as well as raising animals. Furniture= leaf beds, branches, wooden chair, tree stump, wooden table. These are all parts of furniture in our language because we live in inside trees, so a lot of our furniture is made from bark and other natural resources. Animals= chicken, cows, dogs, bugs, fish, birds, turtles, snakes, frogs, lizards. These are all the animals that live on our planet. Chicken, cows, and fish are all animals we use for food. The other animals are either pets or animals that live within the nature.

Lastly, in our culture we see everyone equally, so our language does not have many gender specific, race specific, or class specific words. In fact we do not have any words showing class, because we do not have any form of a class system in our culture. To have these words in our language would be pointless, for they would never be used. The only language difference between men and women, is that the women tend to speak faster and louder than men. This is a result of women being the ones controlling our government and often have to talk to large crowds of people. The men talk softer and at a normal pace because there is no need for them to speak loud and fast. They do all the harvesting and taking care of our plants. Their talking can be soft and still be useful, there are times when calling out to other men that they need to raise their voice, but that is a rare occurrence.