A poet slips

[Tom Givon]

When I learned to read Arabic on the kibbutz (Maabarot) as a child, our 
textbook was of written COLLOQUIAL Falastini Arabic. We never got to 
Classical (after 1949 things changed...).  That book may still exist, 
you might track it down. It was easy, a cinch really. I concluded it was 
really just Hebrew with a few trivial transformations in Phonology & 
Grammar. (I was 7 years old & a bit naive then). Then 7 years ago I sat 
on a few sessions of a faculty study group at UO who were trying to 
learn Arabic (post 9/11...)--from a Classical Koranic grammar book. Boy, 
it was like pullin' teeth. But Leonard Bloomfield said it already, and 
well, in 1939 (or was it 1943?).
Cheers,  TG

==============


john at research.haifa.ac.il wrote:
> Tom,
> I've been trying for several years to get Israeli Arabs and Jews to seriously
> consider the possibility of educating Israeli Arabs in a written version of
> their spoken language, as you suggest, at least through 3rd grade. I can send
> you some things I've written on this topic, with a lot of cross-linguistic
> data. But thus far, it isn't working. As with most aspects of 'the situation'
> here, politically active Arabs think that the solution is to pursue the same
> self-destructive strategy which they've been following for almost a century but
> with even more vigor and steadfastness (e.g. Masalha points the blame at the
> Arab media because they do not 'provide the linguistic richness of formal
> Arabic') while Jews are basically content to let the Arabs stew in their own
> juices so that they can reap the benefits. There may, however, be hope for the
> future in the form of the radically increased usage of written forms of
> colloquial Arabic dialects in electronic media such as Facebook, blogs, emails,
> etc., by Arabic speakers below the age of 30, which will soon come to seriously
> threaten the status of classical Arabic in the same way that the invention of
> the printing press overturned the linguistic hierarchy in Western Europe by
> overthrowing Latin. I'm working on this too. We'll see what happens.
>
> I realize that Masalha as well as the researchers he referred to don't
> necessarily know what they're talking about regarding the brain. But the
> general point is still potentially significant--that the connected script which
> Arabic uses as well as the multiple forms which many Arabic letters have may be
> a significant obstacle to literacy, however this may be related to processes in
> the brain.
> Best wishes,
> John
>
>
>
> Quoting Tom Givon <tgivon at uoregon.edu>:
>
>   
>>                                       A GREAT POET CAN STILL GET IT WRONG
>>
>>          I  came  to know of Salman Masalha ("Arabs, speak Hebrew!",
>> Haaretz/English, International  Herald  Tribune  9-27-10) accidentally
>> by stumbling a on his truly  great quote:
>>                "All fixed identities are imposed from the outside.
>>                  Whoever  has a clear identity knows it can assume
>> multiple forms".
>> In the context  of Palestine/Israel, what a breath of  fresh, rare
>> clarity.  Still, like the rest of us mortals, a  great poet can on
>> occasion get it wrong  too, and Mr. Masalha--may he be forgiven; pun
>> intended--surely got only one third of the story right. At first, he was
>> led astray be the academic researchers he cited, who claimed that the
>> lagging reading skills of  Israeli-Arab students is correlated  to
>> lagging  R-hemisphere  activity,  then explained this neurological lag
>> by suggesting that the Arab script requires more contextual analysis.
>> But  it is the R-hemisphere of the human cortex that is more context
>> oriented, less automated. If Arab-reading students required more
>> contextual labor, it should have been registered as a higher
>> R-hemisphere activity, not lower.
>>           Works by M. Posner, S. Petersen, M. Raichle and S. Dahane,
>> among  many others, have established  beyond  reasonable  doubt  that
>> written words in all languages (English, Mandarin, Hindi, Amharic,
>> Hebrew, Arabic, etc.) are  decoded automatically in an L-hemisphere
>> module on the boundary of the occipital and temporal lobes (just past
>> Brodman's Area 19), along the ventral visual object-recognition
>> 'stream'  that flows  from the back to the front of the L-cortex. And
>> the L-cortex is in general responsible for  the more automated--less
>> context-dependent--processing of language (as  well as visual, motor and
>> other skills). The visual word-recognition module is,  in turn,
>> recruited  from  the pre-existing  visual object-recognition
>> ventral-stream  module. A considerable amount of life-time practice and
>> repetition is required to affect this late-cultural adaptation. The
>> human brain is not (yet) genetically configured  at birth for
>> visual-word recognition, only for visual-object recognition. A similar
>> cultural adaptation, this one for math, has been shown for (Dahaene &
>> Cohen, 2007; see recent article in The New Yorker by Oliver Sachs)
>> in the L-pareita lobe, an area originally configured for analysis of
>> object-location in space.
>>               Mr. Masalha  then, on his own, points out to a more
>> plausible right answer: Arab students, in Israel as well as all over the
>> Arab world, are  not  taught literacy in  their native language
>> (Falastini, Maghrebi, Masri, Yemeni, etc.), but in a frozen literary
>> instrument harking back 1,400  years or more. That is, in a foreign
>> language. The discrepancy would be  just as great  if  Israeli kids were
>> taught  their Hebrew literacy  first in the language of Genesis; or if
>> French  students  were taught literacy  first in the language of  La
>> Chançon de Roland, Guilhome de Machaut, or Chrê tien de Troyes. Or
>> English-speaking  kids in the language  of Beowolf. As far as my frail
>> guessing powers go,  remedying the situation would be much easier by
>> combining two well-known verities of second language acquisition: (a)
>> Teach them  both early, together--'co-ordinated bilingualism'. And (b),
>> teach literacy first in the student's spoken native language; only then
>> gradually 'stretch' it to more literary genres.  This method, bhy the
>> way,  was suggested in the late 1930's by no other than  L. Bloomfield,
>> in a book outlining a  'phonics-first ' literacy  program for native
>> English speakers. Rather than depriving Israeli-Arab students of
>> literacy in their own--equally glorious--native language, just teach
>> them smart.
>>                For  his last culprit, the presumed--tho  hardly
>> unique--vulgarity  of Arab media, Mr. Masalha lapses into well
>> recognized  prejudices of  the educated classes. While readily endorsing
>> his aesthetic sentiments about modern media, I would still like to point
>> out that the 'vulgar' genre is  much closer to the Arab students'
>> spoken native language, and  if anything should facilitate the easier
>> initial acquisition of  native-language literacy. Respectuosamente,
>> ma'-salaam,
>>
>>
>>                                                       T. Givón
>>
>>     
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