Rosetta Stone

[jess tauber]

Phil's last point (the 'cookie-cutter') is well taken- are all languages amenable to a 'one-size-fits-all' approach? It reminds me of the 'shell-books' concept I read about a couple of years ago.

There may be more to resistance to writing one's oral language down than mere cultural inertia- perhaps the brain actually differently processes different types of language, and so some orthographical systems might clash with such processing differences. I remember reading something along these lines with regard to dyslexics.

The same may go for different types of learning environments- for instance secret ritual languages in Australia (according to Dixon) aren't picked up the same way as the main language. And one runs into such issues all the time with regards to ideophones, which play important roles in some languages, yet are scarcely dealt with by linguists, let alone teaching aids.

Creators of electronic tools may be paying way too much attention to the nuts and bolts of the system, and pretty packaging, which are fine in the context of dominant cultural/linguistic facts, and not enough to adapting their tools (or even perhaps shaping them from the beginning) around what may be different truths for other languages.

Jess Tauber
phonosemantics at earthlink.net