Judy,
it's not the same at all, but thanks for the link. If you look at it
carefully, you'll see that there is no way you could get kids to generate their
own 100% error-free English sentences in as short a time as our kids in China
did: six months of practice for a mere 45 minutes per week.
Also, I never said I INVENTED anything. What I did was:
1. RECOGNIZE a work of genius when I saw it and when virtually nobody else did.
This was in 1964 when I took my first linguistics class as a senior in
college. The reason I was able to see what I saw is that I was fluent in five
languages, could read about eleven of them, and had taught languages for eight
years (I began teaching at age of 15 and taught grad students by the time I was
19 while I was still an undergrad
myself). Also, I'd been meditating for almost twenty years by that time--and
had had the attention of a qualified teacher/guru daily for six years. This
was a hugely significant factor in the whole picture.
The guy who'd produced the work that blew me away was himself standing on the
shoulders of giants. His work was based on what teams of scholars on both sides
of the Atlantic had learned from Maharishi Panini in the course of a hundred
years about how to describe a language in terms of its own structure, debunking
traditional (or, more properly, Latinate grammar) in the process as
pseudo-knowledge. Unfortunately, we still teach this pseudo-knowledge all
around the world.
Many of you on this list will know who Maharishi Panini is. The translation of
his work first into German and then into English in about the middle of the
19th century is the birth of the modern Western science of linguistics. In
other words, linguistics is the only Western science that is from its inception
based on Vedic science, and, in my opinion, Western linguists have not finished
learning from Panini yet.
2. I DEVELOPED what I had recognized in the light of generative linguistics
(it was based on structural linguistics only) and in the light of what I
learned from Panini directly, as well as what I knew about consciousness as a
result of my own experience as a meditator. I had several advanced techniques
by the time I was twelve. Panini's work is not just linguistic, but, in a
sense mathematical. Here's what wikipedia says about the Ashtadhyayi:
The Ashtadhyayi is the central part of Panini's grammar, and by far the most
complex. It takes material from the lexical lists (Dhatupatha, Ganapatha)
as input and describes algorithms to be applied to them for the
generation of well-formed words. It is highly systematised and
technical. Inherent in its generative approach are the concepts of the phoneme,
the morpheme and the root,
only recognized by Western linguists some two millennia later. His
rules have a reputation for perfection — that is, they are claimed to
describe Sanskrit morphology fully, without any redundancy. A
consequence of his grammar's focus on brevity is its highly unintuitive
structure, reminiscent of contemporary "machine language" (as opposed to "human
readable" programming languages). His sophisticated logical rules and technique
have been widely influential in ancient and modern linguistics.
The Ashtadhyayi consists of 3,959 sutras (sutrani) or rules, distributed among
eight chapters, which are each subdivided into four sections or padas (padani).
It was the "mathematical" nature of Panini's work that sent me to find the
mathematician G. Spencer Brown. Generative linguistics (a la Chomsky) just
wasn't deep enough. Whether or not Panini work is perceived as "unintuitive"
depends, of course, on one's education, primarily the mathematics education we
get in elementary school, which begins with counting and arithmetic, rather
than the logical structures that underlie counting and arithmetic. Panini is
never unintuitive for me--on the contrary.
What I have done over the years is to develop the "sutras of English." However
creative that process might have been, you cannot say you invented the sutras
of English. They are discovered, not invented. And when I use the word
"sutras" I do not mean "verses," which is how that term is often translated.
Instead I have in mind pure devata--I have in mind the "threads" that connect
the knower with what is known.
As for why Chinese user manuals in English are often so weird--that is because
they are written in what's called "Chinglish" in China. Partly this is the
result of trying to teach English to people who speak a language completely
unrelated to English by means of a conception of grammar and syntax that is
still based on Latinate grammar--a pseudo-system, as I said. A brief look at
the history of how we got this "grammar" will reveal most of the problems with
it. It was developed over several centuries by teachers of Latin for the
purpose of preparing their English-speaking students for the study of Latin.
In other words, if language is a territory, then grammar is a map. These
people were "drawing a map of English" by looking at Latin, an inflected
language, rather than really looking at English, which is a "slot-filler"
language. Also, they were looking at language as an "artifact," a product,
rather than as a cognitive process. Accordingly,
Latinate grammar is an analytical tool (you analyze sentences). Learners need
a building tool first. In other words, you need sutras to "install" the
subconscious software necessary to generate sentences before you can analyze
them after the fact.
----- Original Message ----
From: authfriend <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, February 15, 2008 8:01:06 AM
Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: One for Card -- Why Chinese
user manuals in English are often so weird
--- In FairfieldLife@ yahoogroups. com, TurquoiseB <[EMAIL
PROTECTED] .> wrote:
>
> It starts early, with the blocks used to teach
> kids English:
>
> http://peer- see.com/blog/ chumble-spuzz/ 2006/07/09/
Hey, maybe this is the method Angela was telling
us she invented!
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