Short activitivity to show how flexibile our language is and how d...

This was my favorite response:
 
Explain why you should marry me.
 
 
we hot like the sun
i smell good
i is you’re dream
you is me light
lets get dog together
me and you death together

This is awesome haha!

Poetry Slam c. 10,000 BCE

Absolutely love this activity!

This is a brilliant exercise!
 
I have to imagine that once the conceptualization of language and some basic grammar existed word generation was a much more common thing than it is now. It's only been since the time of Noah Webster that humans have been actively standardizing things like spelling. If we can use Papua New Guinea as a model of pre-agrarian society and consider that almost 12% of extant languages on the Earth are spoken in an area about the size of Texas (and with about 1/5th the population of Texas too), then modern societies are actually severely limiting language (creation, growth, diversity, creativity, etc.) [cross reference: http://www.scmp.com/infographics/article/1810040/infographic-world-languages]
 
Consider that the current extinction of languages is about one every 14 weeks, which puts us on a course to loose about half of the 7,100 languages on the planet right now before the end of the century. Collective learning has potentially been growing at the expense of a shrinking body of diverse language.
 
To help put this exercise into perspective, we can look at the corpus of extant written Latin (a technically dead language): It is a truly impressive fact that, simply by knowing that if one can memorize and master about 250 words in Latin, it will allow them to read and understand 50% of most written Latin. Further, knowledge of 1,500 Latin words will put one at the 80% level of vocabulary mastery for most texts. Mastering even a very small list of vocabulary allows one to read a large variety of texts very comfortably. These numbers become even smaller when considering ancient Greek texts. [cross reference: http://boffosocko.com/2014/07/05/latin-pedagogy-and-the-digital-humanities/ and http://dcc.dickinson.edu/vocab/vocabulary-lists]
 
Another interesting measurement is the vocabulary of a modern 2 year old who typically has a 50-75 word vocabulary while a 4 year old has 250-500 words, which is about the level of the exercise.
 
As a contrast, consider the message in this TED Youth Talk from last year by Erin McKean, which students should be able to relate to: www.ted.com/.../erin_mckean_go_ahead_make_up_new_words

Love it!

I've also just run across a cultural related vocabulary-based speech "generator" with a relatively small vocabulary that could also particularly be used for an exercise similar to Chris Scaturo's. www.crumbles.co/
 
It takes its vocabulary list and allows the user to pick and choose from the short list of words to create their own sentences. These sentences are then "played" by way of short video clips from relatively popular movies/television shows that are strung together in a near natural way. Meant in some ways as a possible internet meme generator, some may find it an interesting/entertaining tool for such an exercise. They have other alternate "vocabularies", for example a Homer Simpson version in which all of the vocabulary is comprised of video clips taken from Homer Simpson scenes of the cartoon "The Simpsons."
 
(Do skim through the vocabulary as some may find a few words racier than some classrooms may tolerate.)

Awesome Chris, I'm going to try it!

Both brilliant. Thanks,

Would anyone like to be Neanderthal Pen Pals? We are doing this now and maybe we could have the kids email each other using only the word's from our own language. It might show how language evolves. You would start only being able to use "your words" but could add the words from the other groups response to your list.