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Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

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  • From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
  • To: "Maurice A. O'Sullivan" <mauros AT iol.ie>
  • Cc: unikom_ug AT hotmail.com, b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] A Reply - WAV question
  • Date: Wed, 02 Jun 2004 11:44:24 -0700

On 30/05/2004 09:49, Maurice A. O'Sullivan wrote:

At 11:48 30/05/2004, UUC wrote:

This is close
to what Chomsky says, actually. There is a built-in mechanism in our minds
for understanding the structure of language;


Three days ago a linguist called Larry Trask, who had never accepted this, died.

As his obituary in " The Times " [ London ] of March 28 stated:

>> He rejected any theory that could not be supported through evidence and refuted much that was myth and conjecture. <<

and it went on to deal specifically with this point of Chomsky's

>> Trask was an opponent of Chomsky's theories of Universal Grammar, first proposed in the late 1950s and by this time widely accepted. Chomsky had proposed that some fundamentals of grammar are hard-wired into the human brain before birth, but that some options within it are fixed later by experience. Trask believed that there was no evidence to support this idea, and that it should not be taught as fact. His own arguments were always based on sound knowledge of facts and scientific principles, and he would take the greatest pains to make sure they were understood by everyone from first-year undergraduates to colleagues and competitors. <<

I agree with Trask. But, whether or not it is evidence for Chomsky's wider views about built-in mechanisms, there certainly *is* evidence concerning different rates of language acquisition by children and adults using different methods. And certainly one of the slowest methods, for adults and children, is to work from a grammar book with lists of tenses and paradigms.

From my own experience and that of others I have worked with, it is possible for adults as well as children to acquire a good working knowledge of any modern language within just a few months. The key to this, which is much easier for children than for adults, is immersion in a situation where they are surrounded by the language and are forced to use it. This is painful, but effective. The analytic approach is not very helpful. I understand that children find it easier than adults to acquire the precise phonetics that make them sound like native speakers, but that in other respects adults do better than children if other things are equal. But so often other things are not equal, because adults have many other things which they need to do, or choose to do, which distract them from language learning.

As for biblical Hebrew, things are not so easy because there is no user community. The usefulness of modern Hebrew is debatable. Randall Buth's Biblical Language Center (http://www.biblicalulpan.org/) has tried to set up a biblical Hebrew course based on immersion and natural language learning methods. These methods are a clear improvement over traditional approeaches using grammar books.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/





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