A newborn understands that when hungry ze utters \u201cmum-mum-mum\u201d and mother nurses the child. \u201cMama\u201d is a global word phenomenon; I am not sure where \u201cda-da\u201d is grounded but it seems universal as well (and \u201cdada\u201d in Zhongwen is \u201cbig brother,\u201d another term for the father who is the older male; a younger boy is \u201cdidi\u201d). Perhaps \u201cmama\u201d is sensual abstracted; \u201cdada\u201d is abstracted relational.<\/p>\n
Semantics is not our focus. Ludwig Wittgenstein was helpful in teaching that \u201cmeaning\u201d of a word is derived from use, not in the dictionary definition of the word. A Korean colleague asked if I would join him in Korean Kapi, and when I repeated \u201ccoffee\u201d he smiled. \u201cNo, kapi (pronounced \u201ccopy\u201d),\u201d he reiterated. Why not? Pinas says kape, why not kapi in Hanguk?<\/p>\n
My neighbor tells of his wife exclaiming on the parking lot after seeing me with a shirt on: \u201cOh, my, it is Jaime; I did not recognize him with his shirt on!\u201d My neighbor smirked. He saw me often after Soudelor on our walkway without a shirt on when our electricity came rationed, brushing off crusted salt on seashells, sweating out the tropical heat. A New Yorker, he says that his wife \u201cplays with the men\u201d and \u201che with the ladies\u201d when they are in their retirement home in Florida. Once he bumped into one of his tennis partners at the local store and exclaimed: \u201cMy dear, I\u2019ve never seen you with a dress on!\u201d Her grandson stared in disbelief. The tennis attire is short and shirt. The meaning of a word is in the mind of the user.\u00a0<\/p>\n
GOP presidentiable Ben Carson on stage delights his audience by asking them to raise their hands if they remember their b-day, then proceeds to describe what happened. A portion: \u201cThe sound waves had to leave my lips, travel through the air into your external auditory meatus, travel down to your tympanic membrane, and set up a vibratory force\u2026coming down the tract of Vicq d\u2019Azur, retrieving the memory from the medial hippocampal structures and the mammillary bodies, …descending to the cervicomedullary decussation into the spinal cord gray matter, synapsing, and going out to the neuromuscular junction, stimulating the nerve and the muscle so you could raise your hand.\u201d Meaningful? It depends. But Carson impressively raps more than 200 words in a minute. The retired neurosurgeon knows his scientific jargon.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Our broad understanding of how the brain works traces sense stimuli from the medulla oblongata to the emotive cerebellum before it gets to the cognitive cerebrum where the issue of meaning and significance gets articulated in words and numbers. What separates our humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom is the ability to do the three steps (use the brain fully) before acting.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A Peace Corps volunteer in an orientation relates how he took a Filipino shower (with tabo) in his second floor dwelling on his first year when a voice from under the house rang out loudly saying, Tubig (water)! His water had dripped down to the first floor. Being a sport, and to practice his language, the volunteer responded: Dili, midyom lang! The French has expressive garde loo, \u201cwatch out for water,\u201d and loo, indeed, small, medium, or large.<\/p>\n
Across the English channel, the royals employed a royal hind wiper called the \u201cgroom of the stool,\u201d which no longer comes as a surprise after watching Chinese grandmas wipe their child\u2019s heine until they are 6. The Papas get that assignment in Shanghai and environs.<\/p>\n
The Chinese are taught Hanzi with each character given a specific meaning; students learn their English the classical Zhongwen way, ergo each English word has a definite meaning. Learning English the Chinese way visually focuses on the dictionary rather than on audio familiarity.<\/p>\n
English is a phonetic language with less than 50 sounds on its phonemes. We can learn language naturally and directly without coursing it through a native tongue. The brain learns by describing what it sees, hears, smells, tastes, and touches, expresses feelings, articulates ideas and thoughts before formulating actions and deeds. This pattern is universal regardless of ethnicity; it learns and assigns a word for every experience.<\/p>\n
Of course, teaching language is not just a pedagogical refinement. I was asked to teach foreign Soudelor disaster volunteers on Saipan to speak their English, and started with the \u201chear and repeat\u201d method on body parts as a start; I missed the organizer\u2019s role in the learning process. Though not particularly refined in his English, he fancied himself as the groups\u2019 translator, which defeated our pedagogy of \u201chear and repeat.\u201d Listeners remembered his translation word rather than the English counterpart.<\/p>\n
After I asked that he defer from translating and that the learners did not need to defer to him each time I asked a question, I hit a nerve and he immediately declared that we stop as he thought the group would be better off seeking a Caucasian teacher who will pronounce words better.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Korean kapi, anyone?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A newborn understands that when hungry ze utters \u201cmum-mum-mum\u201d and mother nurses the child. \u201cMama\u201d…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[8592,141,8593,122],"class_list":["post-216204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","tag-ben-carson","tag-gop","tag-ludwig-wittgenstein","tag-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216204\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}