Biblical Hebrew Forum

[peter_kirk AT sil.org]

I'm sorry, Ian, but it is you who are playing with words. Please can 
you explain the difference between "extract meaning" and "understand"? 
Or perhaps you mean "partially understand". It is of course possible 
to understand (and speak, even at native speaker level) a language 
without ever having "learnt" a language in the formal sense of taking 
lessons, studying grammars etc which seems to be what you are talking 
about. But you have in one way or another learned enough French to 
partially understand a French newspaper, and that makes you 
multilingual, to a certain degree, in French as well as several other 
languages.

So, no I do not "admit that it is possible to extract meaning without 
having in any sense learnt a language" because the ability to extract 
meaning (however it may be acquired) is one of the major parts of 
learning a language, and all human language ability is learned. It is 
of course much easier to learn a language closely related to one's 
mother tongue than to learn a very different language, but that does 
not mean that acquiring that ability is not a form of learning.

Peter Kirk


______________________________ Reply Separator 
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Subject: Re[3]: Hebrew & Aramaic again
Author:  mc2499 AT mclink.it at internet
Date:    20/07/1999 19:11

<snip>

The idea that I have put to you is simple enough. What is it that is not 
clear about a person speaking a language that the other does not know,
while that other person is able to *extract significance* from the language?

The first example I gave was that I could, though never having learnt 
French, extract the significance from a French newspaper. Would you in any 
sense term my "ability" bilingualism? Do you admit that it is possible to 
extract meaning without having in any sense learnt a language?

<snip>