Book suggestions

[alex gross]

> I'm not sure what I'd do if I ever had to teach in the US. My inclination
> would be to refuse to use dumb-downed materials, but that may be only
> because I have the easy option of not teaching in the US. When I was
> teaching in Germany, all the students could read and write and everything.
> I could even speak tangentially of algebraic equations without losing my
>audience.

> A viewing of Mike Judge's film _Idiocracy_ might help put this kind of
> decision into perspective, i.e. what will be the end result if we always
> dumb everything down, all the time?

Since I've lived and worked in Germany (& in England & in a few other
nations), my first reaction was a bit defensive, to point out that even 
today
far fewer Germans or Britons make it to university than in the US, so
that we're really not dealing with the same population segment.  Or to
decry German insularity, their "Deutschland ist kein Immigrationsland"
mentality & explain that here in the States we deal with a far broader
gamut of cultural backgrounds and needs.

But then I recalled a passage from the German section of my Sixties
book where I discussed possible linguistic differences between
German & English that might account for differences in understanding.
That passage follows, but
                                      WARNING !!!
what you are about to read is somewhat Whorfian & totally violates
mainstream & PC dogmas that all languages are equal & are not
influenced in their structure by cultural factors.

--------------------------------------------------------------
I suspect--if I may be permitted a brief digression--that the difference
here may lie in the nature of the German language, and that the structure
of the German sentence actually allows for the inclusion of more sentence
elements before confusion sets in, that it encourages a longer attention
span—and hence more thoroughness—than sentences uttered in either
the British or American varieties of English.

By this I do not mean merely the usual cliché observation about the
German verb coming at the end and making you wait for it, but from
the gut feeling I have gained from having spoken all three tongues,
German poorly, British English sometimes passably, and American,
well, the way we're supposed to speak it. The sensation I have
when I'm trying out either English or American is that I'm a
station-master sending out a sentence composed of railway
cars. If I get the wrong car in the wrong place, I'm in a lot of
trouble, because I have to haul the whole train back in and start
over or, at best, launch another car out into the middle of the
train and hope it lands in the right place. Otherwise, I have to
send out a whole new train to sit beside the first one, possibly
blocking it from view.

In German, by contrast, there are no stations and no trains.
Rather, I feel like I'm a housewife hanging out laundry on a
line of almost infinitely expandable length. Provided I more
or less follow a few simple placement rules, I can hang
anything anywhere I want and keep adding elements, even
changing or modifying them, up until the time I feel the
laundry line has enough on it. Then I just stop and let other
speakers admire my laundry until they set out a line of their
own. Of course the line is extremely long, and there are a
lot of things hanging from it. But because its construction
has followed all the rules, you can see it all with a single glance.

I can't do this in English. This means I probably have to use a
lot more short sentences and fragments to say the same thing
I can express in one long German sentence. I don't point this
out to revive the old "German Is Best" prejudice propagated
by some scholars several wars ago but merely to explain that
there is a difference. English and American obviously also
have their own distinct virtues, which German, for its part,
cannot emulate.
--------------------------

Not to mention Chinese, most of which I have now lost, though
I did once enjoy what I call a Six-Year Window of Reading
Fluency.  As I recall, a sentence such as:

The man punished the boy who beat the cat for chasing the birds.

would get recast in Chinese as something like:

The cat chased the birds,
the boy beat the cat,
the man punished the boy.

Wonder how Flesch tests would apply to that...?
Does this make the Chinese a nation of idiots?
I rather doubt it...

Anyway, AS WE ALL KNOW,
culture plays no role
WHATSOEVER
in language structure.

Happy holidays to everyone!

alex

**************************************************************
The principal purpose of language is not communication but to persuade
ourselves that we know what we are talking about, when quite often we do 
not.

**************************************************************

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark P. Line" <mark at polymathix.com>
To: <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
Sent: Monday, December 27, 2010 1:05 PM
Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] Book suggestions


> Johanna Rubba wrote:
>> Hey, Tom ...
>>
>> No disrespect, but -- write me up a ten-week syllabus in which I can
>> teach all of that and I'll take you up on it. Be sure you keep the
>> language accessible to, say, a ninth-grader.
>
> Needing to Flesch-test college materials to ninth grade, isn't that sort
> of a root cause of something here?
>
> I'm not sure what I'd do if I ever had to teach in the US. My inclination
> would be to refuse to use dumb-downed materials, but that may be only
> because I have the easy option of not teaching in the US. When I was
> teaching in Germany, all the students could read and write and everything.
> I could even speak tangentially of algebraic equations without losing my
> audience.
>
> A viewing of Mike Judge's film _Idiocracy_ might help put this kind of
> decision into perspective, i.e. what will be the end result if we always
> dumb everything down, all the time?
>
> -- Mark
>
> Mark P. Line
>
>
>
>
>
>>
>> Happy New Year!
>>
>> Dr. Johanna Rubba, Ph. D.
>> Professor, Linguistics
>> Linguistics Minor Advisor
>> English Dept.
>> Cal Poly State University San Luis Obispo
>> San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
>> Ofc. tel. : 805-756-2184
>> Dept. tel.: 805-756-2596
>> Dept. fax: 805-756-6374
>> E-mail: jrubba at calpoly.edu
>> URL: http://cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> -- Mark
>
> Mark P. Line
> Bartlesville, OK
>
>