For this task, I have chosen to use Google docs as my voice-to-text. Full disclosure though, I am a huge fan of voice-to-text, and generally, whenever I need to brainstorm ideas or write a long paper, I use the voice-to-text feature to write my rough draft. Truthfully, I think I have actually gotten to a point where I am pretty good at using speech-to-text because I feel comfortable saying things like “comma” and “period” when talking out loud. I prefer using speech-to-text because when I use it, I also turn off my spell check, and that prevents me from going back and trying to fix all the underlined words. Also, it allows me to capture my honest and uninterrupted stream of consciousness, which can be very fruitful when trying to articulate a challenging topic. However, for the purpose of this assignment, I will abstain from my habitual practices and use the feature like it’s my first time. 

Here is my five-minute story that I said through Google text to speech:

When covid happened all of the restaurants near me and coffee shops near me shut down and I really missed my Starbucks when I you know was in school I was having Starbucks all the time every day you know between like classes I grabbed a coffee how to pick me up in the evening and it was strange when everything shut down and then I no longer was able to get my coffee so why I ended up deciding to do is you know buy a espresso machine and where the nicest espresso machines but they were all super expensive so I had to find one on Facebook Marketplace that was a little less expensive and I did and I did I was able to find one for only $100 and the woman was so sweet the woman who sold it to me she said you know here’s this coffee machine it’s served me well let me know if you have any problems and she gave me her being grinder for free as well and we actually hugged it was very sweet and I was super super excited to come home and try on my new espresso machine because I could finally have espresso on ice with coconut milk like I love to get at the coffee shop and I told my roommates Hey listen I finally got this coffee maker it’s an espresso machine it actually dropped Frost milk and you can use it and everyone was super excited we were all you know looking forward to having espresso in the morning to finally having good coffee in the morning my roommates and I all three of us we went to Shoppers Drug Mart one of the few places open during the early part of the pandemic and we found some beans and they were ungrinded beans cuz we wanted to grind our own beans and so we found these no really expensive like $25 a bag beans and we grinded a little bit up and had some espresso together and my roommate Frost their milk and it was all very very exciting for the whole of a pandemic all I had was this espresso every morning and every afternoon it was addicting I used all the time and I’m I was so happy I got it it was well worth the money the only Annoying Thing about the coffee or like the espresso make espresso maker was that my roommates would grind the beans so early in the morning before their classes so they would put in the beans at like 7:00 in the morning when I’m sleeping and it would just the whole morning and I couldn’t stand it and it would just you know make so much noise I literally couldn’t I couldn’t deal with it however once things open up I started getting my coffee again and I stopped using the espresso machine as much but you know what it was so good I definitely think I should pull it back out again give it another go because I save so much money just grinding my own beans and like pressing my own espresso so definitely something I highly recommend to everybody if they ask I’m always looking forward to trying you know new kinds of coffee and it was really fun just being able to like make my own concoctions as well. 

Speech-to-text analysis

The most obvious grammatical error is that there is no punctuation in this paragraph and there is only one period at the end. It’s clear this is a free-flowing story and the microphone captures some of my speech fillers as well, such as “like” and “you know” – which I occasionally say when I am chatting with somebody. There are random letters that are also capitalized when there is no reason for them to be capitalized. Also, some of the words are misspelled and there are a few verbs that do not have the right conjugations. A reader would likely be able to put together the story and know what is being said, but it certainly would not be an easy read. I think if I had scripted the story, it probably would have made it slightly more clear and more concise. The scripted story would likely not have all my filler words or any word repetitions. When using speech to text though, there are several tips and tricks to using it effectively, like saying the punctuation out loud. I did not use any of the tips and tricks, but if I had it planned out I would probably know when my idea is done and I could incorporate punctuation. 

Oral storytelling is very similar to written storytelling in that it has tone and emotion, but oral storytelling is not held to grammatical standards. Oftentimes, in oral storytelling, particularly when it’s anecdotally to a friend, it’s raw thoughts. Oral storytelling relies on the speaker to add contextual elements such as body movements and facial expressions; ultimately, adding layers of meaning behind the language. In writing there is the opportunity to revise, reflect, rewrite, and so on and so forth so that the words we use are perfect and express exactly what we want. As Walter Ong (1982) says “Written words are residue. Oral tradition has no such residue or deposit. When an of ten-toldoral story is not actually being told, all that exists of it is the potential in certain human beings to tell it”. With writing, there is the opportunity to leave the writing and come back to it long afterward, but oral storytelling has an immediacy and is constrained by time.

References

Ong, W. J. (2002). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. Routledge.

In Borditsky’s SAR lecture from May 2017, she addresses how language can change the way we think. She initially premises that language does not change one’s ability to think, but rather what key pieces of information each culture identifies and connects to. This video really resonates with me as somebody who speaks several languages and has always lived in a very multicultural city. I grew up in an English-speaking household but went to a French school where we were only allowed to speak French. I also made French friends, who also only spoke French, and for a period of about a year, my thoughts and dreams were also in French. For that year, I found it incredibly strange that the reflection in my own head was a different language than the one I shared with my parents. The rest of my family, parents, and siblings, are monolingual and it was weird to feel like I was a bit “slower” in my native language. Now, I can hardly speak French and I feel extremely estranged from the language as I haven’t used it in years and really have no place to exercise my skills. As a bilingual speaker, I experienced firsthand the malleability of language. Language is not pre-determined and its existence shifts through time and place, both on a cultural and personal level. 

In the subsequent points, I outline six ideas Borditsky brings up and I relate them back to my own experience with language.

1. [3:13] –  Borditsky opens her lecture with an example of how a verb in different languages will change the meaning of a sentence and what is being communicated. After I graduated from my undergrad (well after I stopped speaking French), I spent about 6 months intensively learning Spanish. And knowing French really helped my listening and vocabulary skills but made it unbelievably hard to properly pronounce Spanish vowels, specifically the sound of “e”. Because in French the sound of “e” changes depending on the letters surrounding it, so the sound of “e” can actually have dozens of phonetic sounds, whereas, in Spanish, “e” is always one sound. My only English-speaking classmates found the pronunciation aspect much easier than me but often struggled with the speed of the language because English is a very wordy language. In Spanish, the verb inherently tells the who, and speakers generally drop the pronoun before the verb, making the sentence more direct and requiring fewer words to describe a situation.
2. [6:40] – Borditsky shows a chart that looks at several Navajo verb stems that describe different endings to the verb for eating. The different stems then change the what or the how of what the person was eating. In English, we need to use additional words to provide context, whereas, in the Navajo language, the content is inherently described in the word (Borditsky, 2017). In situational descriptions, finding alternatives to expression is much easier because we can name the physical thing that would otherwise be embedded into the term; however, it’s much more challenging to use appropriately translate or describe a feeling that is explicit in one language but not in another. As a philosophy student, I needed to read a lot of German translations of philosophical texts and an issue I always ran into was that there are no true translations for many of the words that describe feelings. The German language has a far more expansive vocabulary than English for describing the way one feels. Perhaps if the English language had more words for describing how we feel, then we would be more attuned to our emotional needs!
3. [19:15] – Borditsky shares the fact that Russians have different words for light and dark blue, which is interesting considering how many cultures still don’t have a word for the color blue (Borditsky, 2017). When reading “The Oddesy”, Homer described the sea as a “wine-dark” because many ancient civilizations didn’t have a word for blue, but rather saw colors in shades, (dark vs light). Her point also reminds me of a study conducted that compared western conceptions of blue to the Himba tribe which does not have a word for blue because in their language blue is considered a shade of green (Lindsey et al., 2015).
4. [22:00] – Borditsky asks the audience if they speak another language that uses gendered endings, and she shares that the gendered words also change the way the culture perceives masculine and feminine (Borditsky, 2017). As a french student, when I was in elementary school, my second-grade teacher would ask us to line up against the wall before we would enter the classroom and she would individually say a word to each student before entering, in french, and the student needed to tell her if it was masculine or feminine. When repeating the word back to her the student also needed to do the action of either putting their index finger over their top lip (to create a faux mustache) to signify masculine or they needed to bow and pretend to lift their imaginary skirt to signify feminine. So instead of verbally saying if the word is masculine or feminine, we needed to show a feminine or masculine mannerism.
5. [29:18] – Borditsky puts up an example of several different headlines that selectively use different language to describe the situation of Cheney shooting Wittington. And she uses a very comical example of how language can change how information is received by the reader, by pulling a headline from “The Onion” that satirizes the situation (Borditsky, 2017). I think this is a really interesting approach to assessing language because it demonstrates how the words we use, or don’t use, can change how a situation is perceived. I think the example of a new article is really smart because it shows how bias or motive can be interwoven into political writing to change what the reader is encouraged to believe.
6. [36:05] – Borditsky also points out how different cultures count and how different cultures also have different textual methods of documenting counting (Borditsky, 2017). While growing up, my best friend was Chinese and she moved to Canada when she was 12. She was also very good at math, and she told me that one of the reasons why doing math in Chinese was much easier, was because of how phonetically simple numbers were. The phonetic consistency and predictability of numbers in Chinese actually made it easier to do multiplication and division.
7. [40:00] – In one of Borditsky’s concluding thoughts she notes how certain individuals within the Nicaraguan deaf community never learned the signs for numbers, so they struggle to understand how numbers work (Borditsky, 2017). This example reminded me of the history of written language, and that initially, language started as hieroglyphics on rocks in Mesopotamia and for centuries most cultures used oral language to communicate. Math and written communication are very much a learned technology and not inherent in the human identity, despite how dependent modern societies are on written and mathematical concepts. In fact, our familiarity with written language and math is a fairly recent development in human history; during the early Victorian century, many folks did not know how to do complex math or how to read and write.

References

Lindsey, D. T., Brown, A. M., Brainard, D. H., & Apicella, C. L. (2015). Hunter-gatherer color naming provides new insight into the evolution of color terms. Current Biology, 25(18), 2441–2446. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.08.006

Borditsky, Lera. (2017). Lera Boroditsky, How the Languages We Speak Shape the Ways We Think. YouTube. Retrieved April 8, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGuuHwbuQOg.