Idiosyncrasy

Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language

It seems that each person adopts an angle on learning that meshes best with their own unique predilections. Here are several idiosyncratic approaches: 

1. Could an animistic perspective on language, associating it with agentic qualities in a sort of pictographic ecological system organized according to a sense of theos phobos, with a sort of narrative structure complete with numerous evolving schisms and allegiances aid learning? I do not know. In Rome, a slave sitting right behind a powerful general would from time to time whisper in his ear 後ろを見て to remind him of his mortality, "look behind," with the implication "remember, you're gonna die" (memento mori), just as I will. Or the Buddhist sounding opening to the book of Ecclesiastes:  伝道者は言う、空の空、空の空、いっさいは空である。
   
2. Could a perspective on learning that combines insights from both McGilchrist (on attention) and Stein (on education) aid language learning? What unites these thinkers is the importance of value. Stein says we need an educational renaissance and a distributed educational hub network, part of a "Transformative Education Alliance" initiative, to address the multiple crises in society today (seee Education is the Metacrisis. and his book Education in a Time Between Worlds). "Transformative education" is a loose translation of the German word Bildung. How does language, as an early cultural innovation for the purpose of aiding learning, help us to clarify value? 
3. If thought, and language itself, is bound up in ritual, in ways we barely understand, then perhaps language learning can understood as a process of ritual acquisition. Language acquisition then may be thought of as the memorization of culturally embedded "ritual scripts" within a memory "ritual palace". Rituals of greeting and departing, of food preparation and eating, and how these and the linguistic scaffolding surrounding them serve as an aid in clarifying value, according to this approach. And so one might create a list of rituals, whether those of Japan or any culture, to structure language learning around.
4. Can we understand linguistics as the study of ornament? Nikos Salingaros writes that "The means of verbal expression and accumulated culture defining a literary tradition has a parallel in an ornamental tradition and material culture. ...traditional fonts and text formatting evolved towards optimal legibility and psychological comfort, so as to enable reading without visual or emotional distractions. [This] shows clearly how ornament works to make form clearer, sharper, hence more distinguishable. ...successful ornament is integral to the form, and is not merely “added on”. The most effective serif fonts are vastly more complex mathematically than a similar sans-serif font. They show substructure on a hierarchy of decreasing scales. A serif typeface doesn’t simply add end-strokes; the entire font is adjusted so that new, more detailed elements cooperate to define a coherent whole. The font’s line thickness is everywhere different. Correcting an old misunderstanding, ornamentation does not superimpose unrelated structure; rather it is a subtle operation that generates highly-organized internal complexity. It therefore has to be extremely precise in order to be effective." 
5. The uses of poetry in language learning. As mentioned earlier, one can try to write senryū, or at least some kind of poem in Japanese every day. (Maria Ortega recommended this to help us break out of the straitjacket of rules.) Limited language proficiency does limit words, but limiting such tools of the rational mind can permit greater metaphorical power (something poets know well).
   
6. "This story, modified from Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language (p. 210), contains 23 different words arranged to violate English grammatical rules. Yet you probably more or less understood the story. Deutscher used some basic principles that are probably rooted in our ape cognition to construct the story in an understandable way without relying on English grammar. First, he used proximity: words for things that are closer in space are closer in speech. They "go together". This doesn't have to be the case in many languages, but it's our initial inference. Second, he used temporal sequencing: the events in the story follow the events in reality. Third, he relied on nonlinguistic causal structures: research with speakers from diverse languages suggests that actors (subjects) are first in thought. After actors, humans are next inclined to think of objects (patients) and, finally, actions (verbs). You can understand "girl fruit pick" more easily than "fruit girl pick" or "pick fruit girl" even though none are the subject-verb-object that English normally requires." [Found on 6/13/2018.]
   

Which might you prefer? Can you think of others?