Blogpost #2

Karine Irihose

Professor Santos

English 102-042

2 February 2018

“What will happen to a joke when no one can hear it anymore? How lonely those words will be, when their power is gone. Where will they go? Off to join in the stories that can never be told again.”, “The language is the heart of our culture.”

“Learning the grammar of animacy” is one of the topics we talked about this past week, and we talked about how some people speak more than one language, and that if people don’t keep speaking that language, it will be lost. I am from Rwanda, Africa. I speak English, French, and Kinyarwanda, but mostly at home we speak Kinyarwanda. Me and my family, we came to America about three years ago. About last summer, I was trying to tell my little brother, Lee, this story in Kinyarwanda, because that’s the language we mostly use at home, but then after like two minutes, he started looking at me like what I was saying was not making sense. So, I stopped talking for a minute, and then he told me that there are some words I was saying that he does not remember their meaning. So, I had to tell him that story in English. And I felt like it related to this a lot, because as my little brother doesn’t have someone to keep talking the language with, he kind of started to forget the language already, and it doesn’t really take that long to forget a language.

“Making a strong stem is its highest priority at first. It needs to be there for its younger sister, the bean.”

“The three sisters” is also one of the topics that we have read about, and how the corn is the big sister, and the bean is the second born, and how it grows on the corn, and that the squash is the last sister, and how it can follow any direction. My big sister, Marie, who is apparently five years older than me, and since I was young my sister has always been there for me, and like kind of showing me of the way to go and which way not to, and sometime, I have always felt like she is always there for me to grow and wrap myself around her for comfort, just like the bean wrapping itself around the corn.