Michael Kreutz » Linguistics

Greek in America

Michael Kreutz — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:37:47 +0000

http://tovima.dolnet.gr/print_article.php?e=B&f=15184&m=B61&aa=1

How to Learn a Language in Six Months

Michael Kreutz — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:36:50 +0000

Alas! it all depended on a very small error. I had simply mistaken the organ. The organ of language … is not the eye; it is the ear. … The word was in my eye and not in my ear. the fact expressed by it had not penetrated to, was not graven upon, my intellectual substance, had never been received by my faculty of representation. … I had wearied my arms to strengthen my legs. [80]

In the school of Nature the child does not spell; never does it spel isolated words. It knows, understands, enounces nothing but complete sentences.

The child, going from act to act, articulated either aloud or softly to himself the expression of this act; and this expression was necessarily the verb. This was the last revelation (or the last but one), and perhaps the most important.

How shall I trace waht this revelation was to me? The verb! Why, it was the soul of the sentence. …

The verb appeared to us as the pivot axis of the linguistic method parcitesed by Nature. This sole insight contained in the germ a whole revelation in the art of teaching lagnuages. [83]

Biology and Linguistics

Michael Kreutz — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 20:41:23 +0000

Did you ever believe that speakers of tonal and non-tonal languages have genetic differences? This is what the findings of two researchers at the University of Edinburgh boil down to. Says the Economist about a statistical analysis of two of the genes that cause microcephaly when they go wrong:

Picking apart a thicket of possible correlations, Dr Dediu and Dr Ladd found no general links between human genetic and linguistic characters.

But one feature—whether a language uses pitch as well as vowels and consonants to convey word meanings—stood apart. Those, such as Chinese, that encipher meaning in pitch are called “tonal languages”. Those that do not, like English, are “non-tonal”. And it was versions of Dr Dediu’s and Dr Ladd’s two microcephaly-related genes that matched the 49 populations along tonal and non-tonal lines.

Dr Dediu and Dr Ladd believe the evolution of tonal and non-tonal languages interacted with the evolution of these genes. Certain alleles could have predisposed people to a tonal-language structure. That tonal language, if used by individuals with whom communicating well is particularly helpful, could then reinforce selection for those alleles. Probably not coincidentally, the two alleles that are associated with non-tonal languages evolved recently in human history (some 5,800 and 37,000 years ago) and show signs of being strongly beneficial to their carriers.