Odds and Ends
A few notes, and a little housekeeping...
Learning Languages Inside Out
A few weeks ago, I mentioned the Early Indo-European Online site. I've been fussing about a bit with Indo-European of late, using this site, Fortson's Indo-European Language and Culture and Clackson's Indo-European Linguistics. In particular, I've been looking at Old Irish, which has given me occasion for a few a-has and one big duh:
In the Celtic languages - at least the insular ones - there is an odd feature called initial mutation. This means that the beginnings of words change in certain circumstances, not just the ends. One of the features in Old Irish is "nasalisation," which changes the pronunciation of some consonants as well as causing following words that start with a vowel to instead start with the letter "n". This all seems rather bizarre, but then there came the "duh" moment in which I saw that this isn't necessarily just something the Celts came up with to confuse the hell out of the rest of us.
Looking at the declension table for o-stem nouns, I saw that the forms that cause nasalisation are, by and large, those that end with "m" in Latin, "n" in Greek and, surprise, "n" in postulated proto-Indo-European and Proto-Celtic forms. Nasalization, then, is sort of like the French liaison - the ending sound of a word moving to or affecting the beginning of the next ("les yeux" sounds to be pronounced more like "lay z-yeuh" than "layz yeuh", for example). [Commenter Jared Grubb points out that we do this in English too, as in "a... n-octopus."] Continuing to look through the tables, it soon became apparent to me that while I wasn't ready to systematize the relationship between Latin endings and the initial mutations caused by the different Old Irish forms, the Old Irish table no longer looked quite so bizarre.
I call this finding of patterns a "duh" moment because I should have been more alert to there being some method to the madness of Insular Celtic initial mutations, even if I haven't yet sorted out exactly what it is. Language has its own logic; it's knowing where to look for it that is the problem.
[New material follows from the original post...]
Sometimes, to make sense of a language, you have to look at it from a different vantage point. If you can absorb the forms and just be happy knowing, that's great. But if there's something that just baffles, sometimes the history of the language, an analysis of a sentence that's bothering you with a derivation tree (scroll down to Context Free Grammar in this article to see a derivation tree) or comparison with a related language can help you better learn and remember the point because it's not so bizarre once you see what's behind the language working that way. Call it "learning a language inside out".
[Note: This section has been edited, revised and expanded as the initial version stumbled off before I got to what I actually meant by "learning a language inside out."]
Learn a Language While You Sleep?
Only in your dreams. Tim Ferris had a post on lucid dreaming the other day, and one of the one of the "related posts" was language learning. Bearing in mind that lucid dreaming, the sensation of out-of-body-experiences and the feeling that what's happening in your guided meditation is real are all sort of interconnected, I can see using lucid dreaming, if you're good at it, as a way to get comfy with the idea of going to a foreign language environment. But as far as I know, you can only dream about things you either know or have the knowledge to conjecture, so if you're interested in "sleep learning," your best bet is still to listen to vocabulary tapes right before you go to sleep. After all, if you're having a lucid dream, you'll probably be tuning out whatever is on the headphones or, at best, incorporating it in a way that your making mind might not find so useful.
Housekeeping
I've cleaned up the links at the side a little bit, taking out a few sites that haven't updated in a while. If one of those sites is yours and, darn it, you were going to resurrect it later this month, drop me a note in the comments when you start posting again.
Learning Languages Inside Out
A few weeks ago, I mentioned the Early Indo-European Online site. I've been fussing about a bit with Indo-European of late, using this site, Fortson's Indo-European Language and Culture and Clackson's Indo-European Linguistics. In particular, I've been looking at Old Irish, which has given me occasion for a few a-has and one big duh:
In the Celtic languages - at least the insular ones - there is an odd feature called initial mutation. This means that the beginnings of words change in certain circumstances, not just the ends. One of the features in Old Irish is "nasalisation," which changes the pronunciation of some consonants as well as causing following words that start with a vowel to instead start with the letter "n". This all seems rather bizarre, but then there came the "duh" moment in which I saw that this isn't necessarily just something the Celts came up with to confuse the hell out of the rest of us.
Looking at the declension table for o-stem nouns, I saw that the forms that cause nasalisation are, by and large, those that end with "m" in Latin, "n" in Greek and, surprise, "n" in postulated proto-Indo-European and Proto-Celtic forms. Nasalization, then, is sort of like the French liaison - the ending sound of a word moving to or affecting the beginning of the next ("les yeux" sounds to be pronounced more like "lay z-yeuh" than "layz yeuh", for example). [Commenter Jared Grubb points out that we do this in English too, as in "a... n-octopus."] Continuing to look through the tables, it soon became apparent to me that while I wasn't ready to systematize the relationship between Latin endings and the initial mutations caused by the different Old Irish forms, the Old Irish table no longer looked quite so bizarre.
I call this finding of patterns a "duh" moment because I should have been more alert to there being some method to the madness of Insular Celtic initial mutations, even if I haven't yet sorted out exactly what it is. Language has its own logic; it's knowing where to look for it that is the problem.
[New material follows from the original post...]
Sometimes, to make sense of a language, you have to look at it from a different vantage point. If you can absorb the forms and just be happy knowing, that's great. But if there's something that just baffles, sometimes the history of the language, an analysis of a sentence that's bothering you with a derivation tree (scroll down to Context Free Grammar in this article to see a derivation tree) or comparison with a related language can help you better learn and remember the point because it's not so bizarre once you see what's behind the language working that way. Call it "learning a language inside out".
[Note: This section has been edited, revised and expanded as the initial version stumbled off before I got to what I actually meant by "learning a language inside out."]
Learn a Language While You Sleep?
Only in your dreams. Tim Ferris had a post on lucid dreaming the other day, and one of the one of the "related posts" was language learning. Bearing in mind that lucid dreaming, the sensation of out-of-body-experiences and the feeling that what's happening in your guided meditation is real are all sort of interconnected, I can see using lucid dreaming, if you're good at it, as a way to get comfy with the idea of going to a foreign language environment. But as far as I know, you can only dream about things you either know or have the knowledge to conjecture, so if you're interested in "sleep learning," your best bet is still to listen to vocabulary tapes right before you go to sleep. After all, if you're having a lucid dream, you'll probably be tuning out whatever is on the headphones or, at best, incorporating it in a way that your making mind might not find so useful.
Housekeeping
I've cleaned up the links at the side a little bit, taking out a few sites that haven't updated in a while. If one of those sites is yours and, darn it, you were going to resurrect it later this month, drop me a note in the comments when you start posting again.
1 Comments:
It happens in English too: "an octopus" comes out as "a-noctopus".
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