Roberto Clemente Essays - Roberto Clemente, Clemente, Free Essays

Roberto Clemente Essays - Roberto Clemente, Clemente, Free Essays Roberto Clemente Team: Pittsburgh Pirates Roberto Clemente was born in Carolina, Puerto Rico on August 18th 1934. He was the first Hispanic baseball player to be inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame. He was also the second baseball player to be put on a postage stamp. Roberto Clemente was plagued with back pain during his career, but still he proved to be one of the greatest baseball players of all time. Roberto Clemente had always like baseball. He was also fortunate to join a professional Puerto Rican baseball team at the age of 17. He spent his first season with the Brooklyn Dodgers farm team. He was thinking about quitting because he was treated very strangely. The franchise was trying to hide Clemente from the Giants so when he played good, they would bench him. But when he did bad, they would keep him in the game. Clemente later returned to Puerto Rico after his first, disappointing season to visit his brother, who was dying from a brain tumor. While he was there, a drunk driver smashed into his car and permanently damaged three spinal discs, which would bother him through the rest of his career. In 1954, the Pittsburgh Pirates drafted Clemente for $4,000 and put him out in right field. During his first season he gunned down 18 runners. He got 20 runners out in his second season. In his second season he had a .311 batting average and had 5 homeruns. Then in 1958 he led the National League in outfield assists with 22. In 1960 Clemente had a fantastic year. He hit 16 homers, batted .314 and had 94 R.B.I?s (runs batted in). He led his team to the National League pennant. And shocked the nation with an upset over the Yankees in the World Series. Clemente batted .310 for the series. He won his first batting title in 1961, hitting .351 with 23 homers, 10 triples, and 89 RBIs. Clemente used to overswing the bat and his head would "bob" when he swung a bat. So Clemente started using a heavier bat. After that he went on to enjoy 11 of 12 seasons with his batting average above .300. In late December of 1972 an earthquake struck Nicaragua. More than 6,000 people were killed, 20,000 injured. After hearing that some of the supplies they had sent to Nicaragua were not getting to the right people, Clemente decided to take matters into his own hands. He flew to Nicaragua in a cargo plane and make sure that distribution was carried out properly. On New Year's Eve he boarded an overloaded DC-7 Air Force Plane that he rented for $4,000 to fly to Nicaragua. The plane crashed into the ocean shortly after takeoff. Roberto Clemente was the first Hispanic baseball player ever inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, and in 1994 a statue of him was unveiled at Three Rivers Stadium at the all-star game.

Definition and Examples of Contact Languages

Definition and Examples of Contact Languages A contact language is a marginal language (a type of lingua franca) used for purposes of basic communication by people with no common language. English as lingua franca (ELF), says Alan Firth, is a contact language between persons who share neither a common native tongue nor a common (national) culture, and for whom English is the chosen foreign language of communication (1996). Examples and Observations Ancient Greek around the Mediterranean basin, or later Latin throughout the Roman Empire, were both contact languages. They tend to vary in use in different local contexts, and there is often a great deal of local language interference. Latin, for example, later developed many local forms which eventually became French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and so on. The contact language usually dominates in situations in which the speakers of that language have military or economic power over other language users. . . .When the contact between groups of people is prolonged, a hybrid language can develop known as a pidgin. These tend to occur in situations where one language dominates, and there are two or more other languages at hand.(Peter Stockwell, Sociolinguistics: A Resource Book for Students. Routledge, 2002)The most often cited example of a (bilingual) mixed system is Michif, a contact language that developed in Canada between French-speaking fur traders and their Cree-speaking wive s.(Naomi Baron, Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved. Routledge, 2001) English (or ELF) as a Contact Language- English as a Lingua Franca (henceforth ELF) refers, in a nutshell, to the worlds most extensive contemporary use of English, in essence, English when it is used as a contact language between people from different first languages (including native English speakers).(Jennifer Jenkins,  English as a Lingua Franca in the International University: The Politics of Academic English Language Policy. Routledge, 2013)- ELF [English as a Lingua Franca] provides a kind of global currency for people from a great variety of backgrounds who come into contact with one another and use the English language as a default means of communication. ELF as a contact language is often used in short contact situations, such that fleeting English norms are in operation, with variation being one of the hallmarks of ELF (Firth, 2009). Thus ELF does not function as a territorialized and institutionalized second language, nor can it be described as a variety with its own li terary or cultural products, as is the case with the English language used for instance in Singapore, Nigeria, Malaysia, or India, where WE [World Englishes] have emerged in different ways from much longer contact situations.(Juliane House, Teaching Oral Skills in English as a Lingua Franca.  Principles and Practices for Teaching English as an International Language, ed. by  Lubna Alsagoff et al. Routledge, 2012) ModificationsA very naive view of language contact would probably hold that speakers take bundles of formal and functional properties, semiotic signs so to speak, from the relevant contact language and insert them into their own language. . . . A probably more realistic view held in language contact research is that whatever kind of material is transferred in a situation of language contact, this material necessarily experiences some sort of modification through contact.(Peter Siemund, Language Contact in Language Contact and Contact Languages, ed. by P. Siemund and N. Kintana. John Benjamins, 2008)