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b-hebrew - Re: Re[4]: Hebrew & Aramaic again

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  • From: Ian Hutchesson <mc2499 AT mclink.it>
  • To: Biblical Hebrew <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Re[4]: Hebrew & Aramaic again
  • Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 22:42:16 +0200


At 21.24 21/07/99 -0400, peter_kirk AT sil.org wrote:
>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.

I recognize what I guess are cognates in Italian and English. What is so
hard in the basic idea that you simply cannot understand??


Ian

>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.





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