Rosetta Stone

[Mia Kalish]

There is actually an interesting piece of recent research that I don't have
time to find at the moment that says that sight and sound are processed
together in the brain. 

Put simply, the Western dichotomy of eyes vs. ears is RONG. :-) Cool, enit? 

-----Original Message-----
From: Indigenous Languages and Technology [mailto:ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU]
On Behalf Of jess tauber
Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2007 8:18 AM
To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Subject: Re: [ILAT] Rosetta Stone

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