Awaking the Dead Hebrew, Part III

Is this ever easy? I mean before I can even get to this part III of the series, David Ker is challenging whether language learning programs like the ones I try to run can succeed and whether English like I try to write it is grammatical. Last thing he said is, "Dang. I think this is about transitivity." (Did Shakespeare say, "Dang"?) I think Ker is still motivated to learn Hebrew backwards. Last thing Mike Aubrey said about that is, "what would be better is if they combined the linguistic stuff with the Greek & Hebrew stuff so that Biblical language study was more intuitive and acquisition-like."

Doesn't leave me much to say. I've got my Kenneth Croft Readings on English as a Second Language: For Teachers and Teacher Trainees right here, and my Wilhelm Gesenius Hebräisches u. Chaldäisches Handwörterbuch over there. All I can think is, "As old as these books are, why aren't they obsolete? Why isn't Aristotle obsolete for them too? And for Noam Chomsky? And Steven Krashen? And even for someone like Robert D. Van Valin, Jr. whose post-Chomsky RRG is 'motivated' by 'analysizing' and 'capturing' the 'interaction of syntax, semantics and pragmatics' of non-English languages so that one of RRG's 'distinctive features' can be 'the bidirectionality of the mapping between syntax and semantics'?"

That's a lot of mumbo jumbo, to use Ishmael Reed's crazy phrase (although he has different meanings that you have to learn). If you think this is an insider conversation, or an inside joke (maybe it is), then you might catch on soon. If you're catching on, then you see how limiting binaries can be, how stifling features are, how theoretically in abstraction (and how much of a pedantic choke-hold on practical stuff) some linguistics can be.

The thesis statement in this Part III is this: "Aristotelian linguistics is not too different from Aristotelian logic, which is not too different from Aristotle's silencing of females and of anyone who didn't acquire his kind of Greek." In Part IV, let's look at the Helen of Hellenism and hear how she learns language. Let's really do listen to Rahab (not) of the Hebrews and watch how she learns Hebrew backwards.

Awaking the Dead Hebrew, Part II

David Ker has a plan: "I’m going to learn Hebrew backwards."

And in this post, I have an opportunity, the opportunity to continue an earlier post "Awaking the Dead Hebrew, Part I."

What I really want to say is this: how linguists think of "language" really seems to determine what they think about how to "know" or to "learn" a language (like dead Hebrew).

(A while back, Mike Aubrey posted on "knowing" a language, which starts to descend from linguistics down into philosophy, and further down into epistemology. How do you know, or know that you know? So now I'm trying to get back to my claim that What you think you know language is sort of spells out How you think you can come to know a particular language. I'm going to postpone that a little by suggesting an add-on to the thesis and by telling some stories. The add-on is this: Generally, male linguists (which are most of them), as early as Aristotle, think of language as something that inherently belongs, by nature, to them--something at which they are deeply competent / something for which they are not blamed if their performance is imperfect; something acquired / not learned. Mike, in comments on Part I, wants me to acknowledge Joan Bresnan's work. So, now the stories. First, against charges that Noam Chomsky's a "traditionalist, . . . an old-fashioned patriarch [who. . . ] never really understood what the feminist movement was all about," Chomsky claims he hired Bresnan and Donca Steriade, according to biographer Robert Franklin Barsky. Maybe this was Mike's point, but I'm not so sure Bresnan has been a good Chomskian, like Steven Krashen has been. Seems like Steriade found her way back to MIT, but from her publications, did not find her way back to Chomsky. Second, women and men can participate in Aristotelian or Platonic--i.e., traditionalist masculinist--linguistics; and most do.

Last week, I had lunch with a Ph.D. in Linguistics who's a native English speaker who's been a student of Japanese in Japan and a user of French in the U.S. and in France, confessing "after a decade in French, I still don't know how to get the writing style right"; and with a Ph.D. in Physics from a U.S. university who's a native speaker of Japanese, confessing "I don't know how to speak English properly, exactly." To make them feel better, I cracked a joke in Japanese, which they both laughed at politely--laughed at, because my Japanese is really funny stuff since I don't know it well; and politely, because I hadn't made fun of her French or his English. During dessert, we talked about my "knowing" dead ancient Greek and Hebrew, but neither asked how. They were more interested in how one of my teachers, who had learned more directly from Tommy Wildcat, gave me some pointers on awaking nearly-dead Cherokee from the now-dead Elias Boudinot / Ga-li-ga-na? Watie).

I'm not sure anyone ever asked Mary Sidney Herbert or Julia Evelina Smith how they awoke dead Hebrew (although their translating is good proof that they did, and here's some blogging on the translating by Sidney and Smith).

I do understand that Ruth Behar is "somebody who understood displacement from an early age" who learned Hebrew (as she had to learn her anthropology that breaks your heart) by "displacing" herself "to try to understand another" by "coming from the outside. . . while trying to become an insider." Behar's father, who reads the Torah, is not speaking to her; she calls it, "A nightmare: Seventy-five translated women are burning in the flames. And there my name, the name I took from my father, is burning too" (page 71).

I am fascinated to read how Mary Douglas starts in awaking dead Hebrew, saying: "It will be painful and a failure." Some time back, I shared this fascination with you, saying:

Douglas is "going to change Hebrew by learning it. Of course, she must change too."

You remember, I went on to conjecture more, saying:

1. There’s no law that tells her What she must learn to “learn” Hebrew.
2. There’s no enforcement officer forcing her to Do certain drills or exercises a certain way.
3. There’s not even a living speaker of ancient Hebrew to negotiate with her various meanings.
4. Rather, there is a good bit of listening, hypothesizing, observing, reading, did I say guessing, failing, and hurting she must do. She may listen to texts and she may read living and dead experts. But she cannot stay the same person and still learn Hebrew. The how requires adult human conversion to one profound degree or another.

Let me backtrack again to the thesis statement of this post: how linguists think of "language" really seems to determine what they think about how to "know" or to "learn" a language (like dead Hebrew).

Mary Sidney Herbert and Julia Evelina Smith and Ruth Behar and Mary Douglas think of language (even dead Hebrew) much differently from linguists such as Noam Chomsky and Steven Krashen.

Such linguists think of language as this abstract thing. At least, it's an abstractable thing. Hebrew of the Bible, for example, is what's written in the Bible. At least, to begin with, it's אָלֶף-בֵּית עִבְרִי or אלפבית. Especially if you're a man (and not a woman such as Mary Sidney Herbert or Julia Evelina Smith or Ruth Behar or Mary Douglas), you don't really have to change. You don't really have to go from the outside in because you're already an insider. (I'm running out of time to say more, or motivation to make this clear just yet. So Part III is coming soon enough. I suppose I may say something about Rahab, who had to learn [not acquire] the language of men, including the Hebrew of some of them. I do think Ker's on to something useful; more then soon enough.)

Awaking the Dead Hebrew, Part I

My friend Linda speaks Hebrew with her kids everyday even though her mother tongue is American English and she grew up bilingual English / Indonesian. They live in Israel, where her husband, the kids' daddy, grew up. They only speak English when they have to.

The conventional wisdom about language learning is that kids do it so much more naturally than adults do post-puberty. "Linda's husband and kids acquired Hebrew. Linda had to get it differently, with much more of a struggle." But there are language theorists who believe (following Aristotle's logic) that language is innate and therefore naturally awakes in any adult as well as any child. Noam Chomsky with his binary "competence / performance" is one such theorist; and the proto-Chomskian Steven Krashen, likewise, has this logical separation "acquisition / learning."

The main problem with Chomsky's construct of language as innate competence that is awaked in performance is that he has to abstract just what "competence" looks like. All the world ever sees or hears is a person's sloppy writing or ever-imperfect speech. Krashen has to do the same thing; except he abstracts the ostensibly natural order of acquisition that should be monitored lest faulty learning gets in the way. What makes Chomsky's and Krashen's ideal Platonism so Aristotelian in reality is that Noam, Steven, and Aristotle all believe that language is the property of a homo sapien and not any other species of animal--Aristotle takes it a step further and says only members of the super race, the Athenian style Greek men, actually speak right and can write correctly; all the others are plant-like (such as females) or are like lesser animals (such as BarBarian men and the men who are Soloi, who mess up the Greek grammar).

Fascinatingly, ironically, even though Noam, Steven, and Aristotle say that this is all natural-born stuff, they feel like they have to write books on it and give lectures on it and teach it to their students who cannot acquire it so naturally as they have. (There are other ways of learning that these three men won't touch; I'll look at them in another post soon. Here's a quick peek at them for those of you who like to read ahead. I'll try to translate some of the ideas in the linked article in less academic English.)

For Linda's kids and husband, native speakers of Hebrew in Israel, there's this other thing: when they go to the museum in Jerusalem and try to read the ancient Hebrew scrolls, they become as non-native as she is. Sure, every one of them can more or less recognize the letters and pronounce them rather fluently. There's just this question of whether they really are awake to the now-dead language.

I say they can be more awake to ancient Hebrew, and that they can awaken it. In another post soon, I'll suggest some of the ways.

HT David Ker for getting us to think about "Learning Hebrew Backwards."