On teaching approaches

[Rudolph Troike]

I concur with Claire Bowern and someone earlier who was commenting on
Apachean. Nouns are prominent in European languages, and awareness of
this leads to emphasis on nouns in early teaching -- even testing, such
as the Peabody test for linguistic maturation. Muriel Saville-Troike
did a comparative study of English-speaking and Navajo-speaking children's
response to picture cards depicting simple scenes such as a child holding
the handle of a wagon. English speakers just said "(a) girl" and "(a) wagon",
merely identifying the objects in the scene, whereas the Navajo children
said (in Navajo) the equivalent of "girl pulling wagon", or less fluently,
"pulling (it)", focusing on the action as the central point. Approaching
the teaching of verb-focused languages by teaching isolated nouns does no
good at all, since it misses what Sapir saw as the "genius" of the language,
and as Claire noted, makes it impossible to formulate even simple propositions
about any sorts of actions or events. Indeed, in context, sentences in many
languages lack nouns as Subjects and Objects, where these are obvious, and
use only verbs, with either attached pronoun prefixes or suffixes, or zero
pronominalization. (This is true not only for morphologically complex
languages such as many American Indian languages, but even for isolating
languages such as Chinese or Vietnamese.) Since pronouns are developmentally
late in appearing, if one wished to start anywhere it would make most sense
to start with verbs.

    Rudy

P.S. In many languages, what translate as nouns in English are often
derived verbal phrases, as "food" would be "what-one-eats" or "one-eats-it".
So even there the verb is primary.