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Grex > Language > #15: Ipso facto, QED and illegitimi non carborundum. | |
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| 25 new of 65 responses total. |
tsty
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response 25 of 65:
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Aug 11 19:27 UTC 1992 |
Let them argue, but, "no, it's not possible to learn a language
the same way as a child does, when you are an adult," wiith the
singular exception of an amnesia victim, who has been impaired
to the child-like state of mental development.
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griz
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response 26 of 65:
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Aug 15 05:14 UTC 1992 |
I agree with you, TS, but there's plenty of evidence to the contrary.
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arthur
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response 27 of 65:
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Aug 15 16:33 UTC 1992 |
Could you summarize some of it for us?
Would you be willing to say that an adult can pick up
language just by listening and not taking formal courses?
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tsty
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response 28 of 65:
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Aug 15 19:21 UTC 1992 |
Oh, sure arthur, that's the fastest way to become communicative, learn
by listening. But after learning a first language that way, AND THEN
studying it in school for formailty's sake, the second language learned
nowhas TWO supports sted of one, the ear-model and the mind-model.
re griz's #26, after some consideration, the only situation where I
would +easily+ believe the "evidence tothe contrary" would be if there
was absolutely no written exposure tothe first language, nor any
structural education existing; in other words, exclusively verbal
andwithout any *reference* to anything except a coupling of sound
to thing.
In taht case, the adult with one language thus learned, would *have*
to learn the second language in the same was as a child does. Even
tthat though, has the referant of "knowing" that "this thing in my
hand is attached to the sound 'stone' in my native tounge so I can
expect that this thing in my hand will have a different souund association
in this new language I'm learning." But I'll accept that condition
as being too similar to the first language learned to quibble with
teh difference learning the second language.
Nouns, of course, would be the easiest to learn first, the "names of
people, places and things," if I remember correctly.
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arthur
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response 29 of 65:
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Aug 16 13:53 UTC 1992 |
We perform written and spoken language quite
differently. When we are taught a foreign language, we
are taught it *as though* there is no difference between
the two different linguistic usages. Not only are the
two usages of language different, but the 'reality'
taught by grammarians does not always match the way
people really use the language.
If one wants to learn a language the way it is
*really* used, the only way is to learn by listening.
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tsty
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response 30 of 65:
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Aug 17 08:31 UTC 1992 |
Personally, I would prefer the co-op approach, both verbal and written
simultaneously.
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arthur
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response 31 of 65:
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Aug 18 20:14 UTC 1992 |
Doing both together does help, agreed. If nothing else,
the written approach gives you vocabulary and the
upper-crust approach to the language.
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davel
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response 32 of 65:
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Sep 3 23:20 UTC 1992 |
To pick up again on the question raised in response #24:
An adult can't learn a language entirely the way a child does. Learning the
first language develops skills, & skills that tie in with important
reflexes. You can't help *trying* to apply them, any more than you can
avoid trying to catch yourself when you fall (unexpectedly). (I include the
simple act of trying to keep your balance when I say "catch yourself".)
Now, some of those skills are definitely out of place in the second language,
and other ones are needed. So there's some unlearning to do, which the
child avoids, but also some skills the child must develop from the beginning
which the adult can take for granted & just learn to apply differently.
An analogy. I've played guitar for too many years (I started learning when I
was 15.) Much later, I got a mandolin. I've picked around on the mandolin
a reasonable amount, off & on, but never really studied it too much (playing
it, I mean). When I first started the guitar, I spent incredible amounts
of time trying to learn simple chord changes. I'd carefully, one at a time,
put down the first finger, then the next ... and when I'd try to start
shifting to a new chord I'd move the wrong finger - looking right at it the
whole time! Now, in some ways a mandolin is quite diffferent from a guitar.
Everything's squeezed together (I have fat fingers), the tuning is straight
fifths, for that matter each "string" is actually a course of two strings.
Picking technique is greatly affected. But even so - I wanted to play a note,
I just put my finger down & picked the darn thing.
When I took (beginning) modern Hebrew some years ago, at the Hillel
Foundation, several people in the class had a lot of a particular kind of
trouble. (This was NOT an immersion situation, you understand.) They'd
say, "How can they say such-&-such - it doesn't make sense!" when plainly
the problem was that that's not the way we do it in (contemporary) English.
The teacher, a native Israeli, had a similar problem; when the same Heb. word
had several glosses (silly, stupid, crazy, odd, ..., for example) & people
asked her which one it REALLY meant, she'd complain that English had all
these different words for the same thing. Our (linguistic) experience
shapes our perception, hence the way we learn.
To tie this back into the question of why Latin a bit: people who've told
me that learning Latin helped them with English appear to have:
- just plain learned new skills, needed (or demanded by teacher) for learning
Latin, which could then be applied to English, and
- had to unlearn some reflexes appropriate to English much of the time but
not always. (Rearrange sentence to suit yourself.)
- And, of course, they got significant insight into etymology, which is
very often useful.
Only the third of these prima facie makes Latin better than many other
languages, and arguably French or German could be nearly as helpful in that
regard. (Better in terms of the original question.) I suspect that the
reason it's been favored & in fact somewhat preferable is that it is a dead
language & has been for a long time. (Even though it was spoken by many
people less than a century ago, as far as I no it didn't undergo the kind
of change a living language does - I'd guess since the late middle ages.)
This allows the student to receive a packaged, neat product - general rules
can be given (with a finite number of stated exceptions). Nobody's going
to suddenly start using an adjective as a verb, out of the blue, & have it
be widely accepted. And yet (I believe - I've never studied Latin myself,
much less original mss) th extant corpus is (or has been) regularized
somewhat in terms of spelling etc - compared to most languages before
the printing press. This makes things more manageable, allowing you to
concentrate on the essentials.
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md
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response 33 of 65:
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Sep 4 17:12 UTC 1992 |
For someone who never studied Latin, you have a pretty intelligent
perspective on it. I studied Latin all through high school and
college (something like eleven semesters) and was comfortably reading
Catullus, Virgil, et al., in the original toward the end, but I never
really got to the point where I sensed the poetry in the poetry, if
you know what I mean. Sure, "Phasellus ille quem videtis hospites"
zooms along like the yacht (phasellus) it describes, but that's
rudimentary compared to my response to "My heart leaps up when I
behold a rainbow in the sky." What it did do was give me a lifelong
sense of the roots of the language I use every day, from something
as mundane as knowing that the name "Aquilina" means "eagle-like,"
not "watery," to stuff as abstruse as Milton's famous "elephants
endorsed with towers" - i.e., with towers on their backs; and it
gave me a stationary (dead, if you will) paradigm against which
to measure my and others' use of English. It also gave me a leg
up on what is being called "cultural literacy" nowadays, but I'm
not sure that's something I wouldn't've developed in my own way
without the Latin. I'm very suspicious of all the talk about
"cultural literacy," but that's another subject.
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davel
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response 34 of 65:
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Sep 5 01:12 UTC 1992 |
Never Latin, & never *anything* to the point of real fluency - but I had my
share of French, 3 semesters of Scientific German For Reading Knowledge, & a
taste of Hebrew (first Biblical, then modern). And my academic background
(ultimately, philosophy - ABD) helped me pick up a certain amount of Latin &
Greek) vocabulary - technical vocabulary, without the grammar or ordinary
vocabulary to use it at all outside that one context.
For me, even as poor as I am at any of these, there's additional power &
beauty in seeing it in the original if I can put it together at all. I have
to translate it, not being good enough to really understand it on its own
terms - I get a kind of doubling, the *meaning* combined with a kind of
eerie flavor (best analogy I can make) of the original.
Anything unobvious on top of this is wonderful. Sometimes (Fr. or Ger.) there
is a consciousness of etymology or of cognates to English words that doesn't
make it through the translation. Sometimes it's something purely in the
original - poetic devices or wordplay or whatever - that adds spice.
I guess I'm fairly good at beginning to learn languages, & it's a pity I've
never really done it. (I'd never try to add something to the French or
German item here, but I can sort of understand about half of them. Of
course, in this context that's simple stuff, & I'm reading it with no
time pressure. I sometimes get a French Canad. station on the radio, &
I get maybe one word of 20 or 50 - but I enjoy just hearing it. Is that
too weird for people?)
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griz
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response 35 of 65:
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Sep 5 20:46 UTC 1992 |
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davel
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response 36 of 65:
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Sep 5 21:29 UTC 1992 |
I don't think I quite got that?
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davel
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response 37 of 65:
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Sep 9 02:20 UTC 1992 |
On the assumption that someone out there hasn't seen it & will appreciate it:
O sibili! Si ergo!
Fortibuses in ero
O nobili! Demis trux
Si vatis innem - causen dux
(This was displayed, framed & in some fancy script, in a classroom in my
high school. (All right, it was the physics classroom.) I am to blame for
the punctuation & any misspellings.)
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tsty
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response 38 of 65:
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Nov 26 21:03 UTC 1992 |
<< I just GOTTA find some of my Latin books, damnit, just GOTTA!>>
V E R Y loosly, it is the "cause of light" (mispelling of lux up there)
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davel
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response 39 of 65:
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Nov 26 21:18 UTC 1992 |
No, it was "dux". (I believe the words are all genuine Latin words, but
the whole is not Latin.)
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other
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response 40 of 65:
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Mar 11 08:28 UTC 1994 |
Seen years ago above the bed of a U of Michigan student who was a friend
of a friend I was visiting:
Somnambulo ergo sum
She had intended to write "I *sleep* therefore I am".....
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rcurl
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response 41 of 65:
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Mar 11 16:26 UTC 1994 |
What did she write?
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other
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response 42 of 65:
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Mar 11 18:30 UTC 1994 |
"Somnambulo ergo sum." :)
(It means: I sleepwalk, therefore I am.)
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jason242
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response 43 of 65:
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Apr 23 10:34 UTC 1994 |
Anyone know where I can get a copy of teh lyrics to Carmina Burana?
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rcurl
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response 44 of 65:
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Apr 23 21:55 UTC 1994 |
Do you mean Orff's cantata of that name, or the whole works? A
library?
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davel
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response 45 of 65:
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Apr 24 02:00 UTC 1994 |
I would be very much surprised if the UM Music dept. library didn't have
the full text of Orff's setting (and a copy machine, which you'd need if
you aren't UM faculty/staff/student). They might have texts with whatever
we have for music (or reconstructions thereof) of the originals. It
would not surprise me if the UM has editions of the original texts in
other places. In fact, a quick check of Mirlyn shows something like this:
Search Request: T=CARMINA BURANA
UM Online Catalog Search Results: 55 Entries Found
Title Index
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CARMINA BURANA
1 CANTOS DE GOLIARDO CARMINA BURANA <1978> (UL)
2 CARMINA BURANA <1967> (UL)
3 CARMINA BURANA BENEDIKTBEURER LIEDER LATEINI <1956> (UL)
4 CARMINA BURANA CANTIONES PROFANAE CANTORIBUS <1937> music (UL)
5 CARMINA BURANA DIE GEDICHTE DES CODEX BURANU <1974> (UL)
6 CARMINA BURANA DIE LIEDER DER BENEDIKTBEURER <1975> (UL)
7 CARMINA BURANA FACSIMILE REPRODUCTION OF THE <1967> music (UL)
8 CARMINA BURANA II 13 SONGS FROM THE BENEDIKT <1968> sound (UL)
9 CARMINA BURANA LAT DT GESAMTAUSG D MITTELALT <1979> music (UL)
10 CARMINA BURANA LIEDER DER VAGANTEN <1956> (UL)
11 CARMINA BURANA LIEDER DER VAGANTEN <1961> (UL)
12 CARMINA BURANA 20 LIEDER AUS DER ORIGINALHAN <1964> sound (UL)
13 DEUTSCHEN LIEDER DER CARMINA BURANA NACH DER <1922> (UL)
14 GREATER PASSION PLAY FROM CARMINA BURANA <1984> sound (UL)
15 LATEINISCHE UND DEUTSCHE LIEDER UND GEDICHTE <1904> (UL)
16 ORFF CARL <1953> sound (UL)
17 ORFF CARL <1960> sound (UL)
18 ORFF CARL <1964> sound (UL)
19 ORFF CARL <1966> sound (UL)
20 ORFF CARL <1970> sound (UL)
21 ORFF CARL <1974> sound (UL)
22 ORFF CARL <1987> sound (UL)
23 VIVALDI ANTONIO <1969> sound (UL)
24 WINE WOMEN AND SONG MEDIAEVAL LATIN STUDENTS <1884> (UL)
25 WINE WOMEN AND SONG MEDIAEVAL LATIN STUDENTS <1909> (UL)
26 WINE WOMEN AND SONG MEDIEVAL LATIN STUDENTS <1899> (UL)
27 ORFF CARL 1895. TRIONFI CARMINA BURANA CATULLI CARMINA TRION <1964>
sound (UL)
28 SELECTIONS ENGLISH. LOVE SONGS OF THE CARMINA BURANA <1987> (UL)
29 SELECTIONS ENGLISH. SELECTIONS FROM THE CARMINA BURANA A VERSE T <1986>
(UL)
30 CARMINA BURANA ARR. ORFF CARL 1895. CONCERTO IN C MAJOR <1969> sound(UL)
31 CARMINA BURANA BENEDIKTBEURER LIEDER LATEINISCH UND DEUTSCH. CARMINA
BURANA <1956> (UL)
CARMINA BURANA CANTIONES PROFANAE
32 ORFF CARL <1966> sound (UL)
33 ORFF CARL <1989> sound (UL)
34 CARMINA BURANA CANTIONES PROFANAE CANTORIBUS ET CHORIS CANTANDAE
COMITANTIBUS INSTRUMENTIS ATQUE IMAGINIBUS MAGICIS. ORFF CARL <1937>
music (UL)
35 CARMINA BURANA CANTIONES PROFANAE CANTORIBUS ET CHORIS CANTANDAE
COMITANTIBUS INSTRUMENTIS ATQUE IMAGINIBUS MAGICIS FO. ORFF CARL
<1981> music (UL)
36 CARMINA BURANA DIE GEDICHTE DES CODEX BURANUS. CARMINA BURANA <1974>(UL)
37 CARMINA BURANA DIE LIEDER DER BENEDIKTBEURER HANDSCHRIFT IN
VOLLSTANDIGER DEUTSCHER UBERTRAGUNG. CARMINA BURANA <1975> (UL)
CARMINA BURANA ENGLISH
38 WINE WOMEN AND SONG MEDIAEVAL LATIN STUDENTS <1925> (UL)
39 WINE WOMEN AND SONG MEDIAEVAL LATIN STUDENTS <1931> (UL)
40 SELECTIONS. LOVE LYRICS FROM THE CARMINA BURANA <1993> (UL)
41 CARMINA BURANA FACSIMILE REPRODUCTION OF THE MANUSCRIPT CLM 4660 AND CLM
4660A BAYERISCHE STAATSBIBLIOTHEK MUNCHEN. CARMINA BURANA <1967> music(UL)
CARMINA BURANA GERMAN LATIN
42 CARMINA BURANA LIEDER DER VAGANTEN <1954> (UL)
43 CARMINA BURANA TEXTE UND UBERSETZUNGEN MIT D <1987> (UL)
44 CARMINA BURANA II 13 SONGS FROM THE BENEDIKTBEUERN MANUSCRIPT CIRCA
1300. CARMINA BURANA <1968> sound (UL)
45 CARMINA BURANA LAT DT GESAMTAUSG D MITTELALTERL MELODIEN MIT D
DAZUGEHORIGEN TEXTEN. CARMINA BURANA <1979> music (UL)
46 CARMINA BURANA LATEINISCHE UND DEUTSCHE LIEDER UND GEDICHTE EINER
HANDSCHRIFT DES XIII JAHRHUNDERTS AUS BENIDICT
BEUREN. CARMINA BURANA<1847> (UL)
47 CARMINA BURANA LIBRETTO ENGLISH. ORFF CARL 1895. CARMINA BURANA <1953>
sound (UL)
48 CARMINA BURANA LIBRETTO GERMAN LATIN 1990. ORFF CARL 1895. BRIEFE ZURENT
STEHUNG DER CARMINA BURANA <1990> (UL)
CARMINA BURANA LIEDER DER VAGANTEN
49 CARMINA BURANA <1956> (UL)
50 CARMINA BURANA <1961> (UL)
51 CARMINA BURANA GERMAN LATIN <1954> (UL)
52 CARMINA BURANA MIT BENUTZUNG DER VORARBEITEN WILHELM MAYERS. CARMINA
BURANA <1930> (UL)
53 CARMINA BURANA TEXTE UND UBERSETZUNGEN MIT DEN MINIATUREN AUS DER
HANDSCHRIFT UND EINEM AUFSATZ VON PETER UND DOROTHEE. CARMINA BURANA
GERMAN LATIN <1987> (UL)
54 CARMINA BURANA VOCAL SCORE. ORFF CARL <1937> music (UL)
55 CARMINA BURANA 20 LIEDER AUS DER ORIGINALHANDSCHRIFT UM 1300 AUS DEN
NEUMEN UBERTRAGEN. CARMINA BURANA <1964> sound (UL)
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other
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response 46 of 65:
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Dec 12 15:03 UTC 1994 |
Quo dubitatis, ex flagellatis!
When (or if, I'm not sure) in doubt, whip it out!
(LOOSE translation!)
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carson
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response 47 of 65:
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Jan 17 08:12 UTC 1995 |
hey! a useful Latin phrase! Alright!
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omni
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response 48 of 65:
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Apr 28 04:50 UTC 1995 |
I've been having a discussion with my mom about the phrase "In Hoc Signo
Vinces" in which I maintain that it' a phrase that does mean something
although, I'm not exactly sure. Does someone out there know what this
means?
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davel
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response 49 of 65:
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Apr 28 11:45 UTC 1995 |
I'm not up on Latin enough to be sure you've got it right, but ... this
or something close means "in this sign conquer". It's what Constantine
gave as his reason for converting to Christianity in the 4th century:
he saw a vision of a cross in the sky with that legend on it.
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