On teaching approaches

[Richard Zane Smith]

Kweh Rudy Troike,
This is the kind of discussion i appreciate the most from ILAT
Iroquoian languages are motion-action-centered as well(as the sister
language Wyandot)

The example given below about food is a good one
One of our word stems for "to eat"  -gyaha-  can be used to denote action
and substance itself
 "to eat"  or  "the eats"
I think a problem we can have as English thinkers is assuming something is
"either or"
is it yes or no? good or bad?  English has trouble with "it's black but its
also white"
My Navajo mom slips from "he" or "she" in describing an uncle in her
rez-english
(Diné bizaad doesn't indicate gender , so her english might sound "wrong")
Is it wrong when 10,001 Navajos say in rez-english:  "he's going home until
tomorrow" ?
English wants to categorize everything so it can grab it and file it:  "is
it a noun OR a verb?"

We are having a similar discussion about glottal stops and/or echo-vowels
(or "creaky voice" -hate that term!)
Is it  -a'a-  two vowels split by a glottal stop? or is it more like ONE
vowel dented by a glottal stop a'ᵃ   (a-gl.stp-lower case a)
more of a bump? But isn't this an ugly way to discuss our ancestral tongue?

listen! and you will hear it!
our words will flow like water
moving water over ancient stream beds
gushing tumbling over boulders
each stone causes a ripple and its own splash...

Thanks for the good discussion!

Richard
Wyandotte Oklahoma


On Fri, Jan 2, 2009 at 5:14 PM, Rudolph Troike <rtroike at email.arizona.edu>wrote:

> 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.
>



-- 
"if you don't know the language you will only see the surface of the
culture..The language is the heart of the culture and you cannot separate
it."
Elaine Ramos, TLINGIT
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