LANGUAGE AND LEARNING
©2009 by Michael Riversong
Communication is spiritual. Language is physical. It is the agreement we presently use on this planet to communicate with each other.
Each language has unique characteristics that both reflect and perpetuate fundamental cultural assumptions. Many aspects of history become embedded in languages as time flows. These items are worth studying in themselves but are beyond the scope of this work.
Languages are related in families which can be found to have broad characteristics stemming from fundamental structures dating before recorded history. Some families are large, and others may only include one language.
It should be noted that there is a physical difference between languages spoken by seafaring and landlocked peoples. Maritime languages usually have consonants consistently separated by vowels. Examples would include Portuguese, Malagasy, Greek, and Japanese. Hawaiian is the most extreme example, with many vowel sounds put together uninterrupted by consonants. Landlocked languages usually have consonants put together extensively. Examples would be Russian, German, Australian Aboriginal, and Bantu.
Each language is processed on one side of the brain. This has been found by analyzing brain injury data. More data is needed, since language processing characteristics are known for only a few languages at present.
Since language is physical, violations of its operation will have physical effects. This manifests most dramatically in the area of vocabulary. It has been found that whenever someone is studying and goes past a misunderstood word, a part of the brain literally shuts down. Drowsiness, blanking out, and/or fidgeting will result. Eventually, if language difficulties are not handled, a student may drop out of learning entirely. Noah Webster was on the right track when he put together the first dictionary of American English, helped to standardize spelling, and made vocabulary lessons an integral part of education.
Often, simple lookups of words in an age-appropriate dictionary will handle study difficulties. But sometimes more is needed, and it takes a lot of persistence on the part of a teacher to track down and clear up misunderstood words. There are all kinds of reasons why somebody might have a block against certain words. Some of that may have to do with the context in which some words were originally presented, and some is downright mysterious. It has been noted that only after a student uses a new word correctly in at least 3 sentences does it become a real possession.
Vocabulary content of languages is extremely variable. An example of a language with a small vocabulary would be Lakota, which has about 20,000 words. In any language with a relatively small vocabulary, emotional and contextual content is extremely important. Chinese has about 80,000 written characters and up to 150,000 words total. Russian has about 500,000, and Spanish a similar number.
When working in languages with relatively small vocabularies it is essential to recognize nonverbal content such as emotional context, body positions, environment, and morality. Some languages were never intended to be written. A few languages such as Sanskrit and Latin now exist only in written form. These differences must be recognized as a foundation for any success in learning.
We should note that the ideal time to learn a foreign language is usually between the ages of 12 and 15. At that time, language processing circuits of the brain tend to be especially flexible. In general it seems that about 25% of all humans cannot readily learn any other language besides the native one learned during infancy. About 25% of all humans tend to be natural linguists and can pick up languages within about 3 weeks in a new environment. The rest are somewhere in between. Musicians and actors are often good linguists because they are used to imitating sounds. It's been known for musicians to get in trouble sometimes because they are able to imitate a native accent extremely well even without knowing much vocabulary. In any event, language material learned during the flexible period will tend to stick with people throughout the rest of a lifetime.
COMMENTS ON LANGUAGE FAMILIES
INDO-ARYAN
By far the largest language family is known generally as Indo-Aryan. Origins appear to be along the shores of the Baltic Sea around 3500 BC. The key languages that helped researchers link up this family were Lithuanian and Sanskrit. Their fundamental vocabularies are very close.
Several commonalities exist among languages in this family. Nouns tend to be emphasized more than other word types. Although word order may vary, sentence structures are similar. Many of these languages have an emphasis on gender of nouns.
Among the languages in this family are: Hindi, Urdu, Iranian, Armenian, Russian, German, Latin, Greek, Spanish, French, Romanian, Gaelic, Welsh, and English.
CHINESE
In numbers of speakers this is currently the world's largest family. China's history has kept it isolated for many years. Therefore, geographic distribution of this family has always been limited. Most of the dialects are built around single syllables voiced in various tones. In modern times it has become customary to make up new words by using combinations of existing one-syllable words. Sentence structures can be oddly similar to English, but small particle words are used to indicate time, position, and class of object.
Written Chinese is an interesting case. Characters are built up from small elements which have meaning in themselves. It was originally intended that the written characters could be applied to any spoken language. There are pronunciations traditionally associated with many character elements, but those do not necessarily coincide with any modern pronunciations.
TURKIC
Intense controversy exists among linguists concerning the relationships with several other languages. Finnish, Hungarian, Mongolian, and Manchurian may or may not be related. More research is necessary.
It is important to note that the structure of sentences in the Turkic languages has distinctive characteristics. Certain syllables are added to verbs or nouns to build relationships in time and space.
Languages definitely known as related to Turkish include Azeri, Turkmenian, Uzbek, and Chuvash.
SEMITIC
Vocabulary and possessive structures are distinctive in this group. Some scholars believe that this is the world's oldest and most continuous family.
Arabic, Hebrew, Assyric, Amharic, and Maltese are the main members. Relationships among these languages are easy to spot.
JAPANESE
This is the most important isolated language in the world. It is unrelated to any other, according to most research. It is possible that Japanese is a blend of other languages, which most natives feel is definitely not the case. One interesting characteristic of this language is differing vocabulary structures depending on the relationship one speaker has with another. Few other languages possess this characteristic, and generally in a milder form, including Australian Aboriginal and Navajo.
Japanese was the first language to be found processed on the right side of the brain, but only for native speakers. This means it is processed in the same circuits used by most humans for natural sounds and music. There may be other languages with this characteristic, but they have not been found yet.
Written characters were taken from the Chinese language. Otherwise there is absolutely no relationship between the two languages. Actually, Japanese has three writing systems, used in various combinations.
ENGLISH
It is good for students to know that English has the largest vocabulary of any language in history. Estimates range from 4.5 million to 9 million words! Its structure allows for the formation of new words from combined syllables, foreign sources, and abbreviations.
English is a blended language. Its foundation is ancient British which was in the Celtic subfamily and is now extinct. Layers of Anglo-Saxon (related to German), Danish, and French were added. In modern times many words have been added from Greek and Latin. A few words came in from Arabic, Tagalog, Japanese, and other languages.
With such a large vocabulary it becomes easy for students to become literally lost in the language. In any region where English is dominant there will be a distinctive core vocabulary of spoken words. Some variations exist among regions. These words differ significantly from many words that are either archaic or scientific. Most technical fields and many occupations have jargon of their own. There are legal, medical, literary, and scientific variants of English that can be completely unintelligible to most speakers. Except for the field of psychiatry, these are all unified by dictionaries. Thus, a good dictionary is one of the most valuable tools any student can have. If a student wants to go into any specialist field, the first step should be obtaining the appropriate special dictionary.
Original Draft 3/17/09