Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Ian Hutchesson <mc2499 AT mclink.it>]

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.