What is language?
I just realized that this blog's current title is a total mistake. It is something I once believed, before thinking about more critically about the subject: That language is something you can learn by studying it. I don't believe anything of the sort any longer.
Let me tell you what I mean. (If you've stumbled upon this post after the upcoming title change, it used to be erroneously called: "Studying Language").
For one thing, you can learn a lot about a language, or about language in general, by studying it: that is what linguists do, and incidentally, what a lot of language learners think they should do. But the study of a language is not, in any way, shape, or form, "language learning."
For one, you don't acquire any language skills by studying a language (see references). Why?
Because natural languages are not simply vocabularies organized by grammar structures. If they were, machine translation would have been perfected long ago. The first attempts at MT used grammar; they discovered that, not only did grammar-based programs fail to provide accurate translations, they were also a huge waste of computational resources.
Nowadays, they've turned to the same thing we, as language learners, need to use: frequent exposure to natural language structures.
Likewise, it is a huge waste of cognitive resources to try and analyze each and every sentence word-by-word. Is that how you're reading these words right now? I should hope not...
So, I ask: What is language? I think there are two surprisingly obvious, essential features of language that ought to inform us, as students of the Tibetan language in particular, moving forward...
What comes to your mind if I say the word "apple?" Chances are it's not the word itself, nor is it a dictionary definition explicitly describing the fruit. Instead, the word "apple" most likely conjures up a mental representation of some sort; perhaps an image of the prototypical apple, or even a taste or memory. A sense-impression of some sort.
For example, if I say "mushy apple," you will have a different reaction than when I say "crisp, juicy apple"—the language is standing for your real experiences of actual apples.
Actually, you may have noticed that, even thought I'm writing these words, I am effectively speaking to you (look at the verbs I used in the above paragraph). Written language symbolizes spoken language: that's why we learn to read by sounding things out, by being hooked on phonics, and yes, even though we abandoned the connection to orality as quickly as we can say "ka kha ga nga," we even began our Tibetan language studies with a rough approximation of Tibetan pronunciation.
So what does this mean for learning a language? It means that, to truly understand a word (or group of words), we need to create this link between the sound and the mental representation. We need real experiences in real contexts with real people.
I can hear the naysayers now: "But classical Tibetan is a dead language." Let me point you, for one, to Tournadre, Manual of Standard Tibetan, p. 26: Literary and spoken Tibetan “share the same basic grammar and are very similar lexically... with a knowledge of one it is possible to read the other without too much difficulty.”
Since language is primarily oral, it only makes sense to begin first with spoken Tibetan, and gradually gain competence (both reading and writing) in literary, just as native speakers do. Modern Icelandic speakers can read 1,000 year-old Old Norse epics; it shouldn't be surprising that speaking Tibetan is a huge leg-up in reading classical texts.
Let's also remember that the Tibetan literary tradition is also primarily oral; that being able to speak the modern tongue gives us access to the emic perspectives of native scholarly traditions; and that the Tibetan script's lack of interword spacing belays its orality.
If you're buying what I'm selling, how do we create connections between sounds and real experiences? Research suggests that an average of 14 exposures (to the sound in a context we understand) is needed to internalize a word; but it doesn't end there...
Being exposed to language over time gives a cumulative weight to the meaning of words (and groups of words, and how groups of words may interact).
Our concept of “tea,” for example, is not any one specific cup of tea we drank. It is not the 14th cup of tea we drank, the moment we may have internalized, “Oh, that’s what ‘tea’ means.”
It is a little bit of every cup of tea we ever drank… Not only that, but who we drank it with; where we drank it; when; and how. It's even times we understood tea was being drank by others, and the contexts that they drank it in.
Perhaps you have tried Tibetan tea. Somebody gave you a cup and said, “Here, it’s tea.” You tasted it; it was salty and buttery, and somewhere deep inside, if not aloud, you said, “No it’s not. That’s not tea.”
I have a friend who told me: "I didn't like Tibetan tea until I thought of it as soup." To him, thinking of བོད་ཇ་ in this way lined it up with the cumulative weight of his "soup" experiences. It didn't fit in his conceptual category "tea" very well, but it functioned just fine as "soup!"
Tea =/= ཇ་ . If we translate word-by-word, or use English as our frame of reference, we will be in a constant state of cognitive dissonance with a real understanding of the Tibetan language. Shared experiences are the basis of our shared understanding of what language means. And if we can’t even understand simple, everyday words like “tea” in Tibetan, what hope could we have for understanding something more complicated, like religious philosophy?
Language is a function of the social brain (see references). We build a shared understanding of meaning by participating in a shared story; in other words, language is sociocultural, and inextricably so.
As native speakers of our own languages, we are used to being able to curl up, alone, with a book. If we are university students, we are intimately familiar with self-study. We’ve reached the point where authors can speak to us through their words.
What we’ve forgotten is that it took 10, 15, or 20 years of intensive language immersion to develop that skill; that we were supported by our family and our friends, our teachers and our classmates, and our whole speech community along the way. That we were immersed within the shared story of our own language and culture. So that even though we are engaging with language individually, all of that language is socioculturally encoded…
Not only does all the current research I've ever read support this model; my own experience bears it out. I spent around 7 years trying, in vain, to study Tibetan (first in university classes, then in various programs in India); I learned a lot about the Tibetan language in those years, but I must admit that I developed hardly any language skills.
What I mean is, I certainly had some theoretical knowledge about "how Tibetan works;" but, to my frustration, I had no ability to translate that knowledge into anything useful. I couldn't understand the language if it was spoken to me; I couldn't pick up a book and read it; and I certainly couldn't carry on a conversation or compose even a simple letter.
If language has anything to do with communication (I think we must all admit that it does), I had no communicative skills at all... It was not until I totally abandoned and banished all "grammar study" and all "English language" that I began to learn a little Tibetan.
You cannot learn a language by studying it.
Coady, James; Huckin, Thomas (1997). Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.
—Phonology is used as a processing mechanism during reading for word recognition, a.k.a. “phonemic awareness.” pp. 40-42.
Dunbar (2003). “The Social Brain: Mind, Language, and Society in Evolutionary Perspective.” Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 32: 163-181.
Grabe, William. Current Developments in Second Language Reading Research. TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 3, Autumn 1991. p. 388.
Hastings, Ashley & Brenda Murphy (2004). Implicit Standards for Explicit Grammar Teaching.
—“The researchers suggest that regular encounters with the real language—in other words, comprehensible input—is the true source of grammatical competence.”
Kuhl, Patricia K. (2007). “Is speech learning ‘gated’ by the social brain?” Developmental Science 10:1 (2007), pp 110–120.
—“Social interaction is essential for natural speech learning. The social hypothesis links early speech learning and neurobiology, and sheds light on developmental disabilities such as autism. The hypothesis also relates speech development to recent findings in neuroscience on ‘mirror neurons’.”
Lantolf, J. P. (Ed.). (2000b). Socio-cultural Theory and Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lynn, Jennifer. Need for Speed: The Relationship Between Oral Reading Fluency and the… Capella University, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Proquest 2008. p. 49.
—Oral reading fluency (the ability to read fluidly with proper rhythm and intonation) is one of the best measures for reading comprehension.
Lyon, G. Reid (1997). “How Do Children Learn to Read?” Adapted from her report on Learning Disabilities Research. Testimony before the Committee on Education and the Workforce, U.S. House of Representatives.
Macaro, Ernesto (2006). “Does intensive explicit grammar instruction make all the difference?” Language Teaching Research.
—“Our results support previous findings that explicit instruction [does not lead to]... gains in accuracy in either translation or free composition.”
Mercer, Dr Neil (2015). Oxford Podcast on Education, Language, & the Social Brain.
Richards, Jack C.; Rodgers, Theodore S. (2001). Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching (2nd ed.). Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 5.
Thomson, Greg (2006). Introduction to the Socio-cultural Dimension of Language Learning. Website, accessed: 3 August 2015.
Tournadre, Nicolas (2003). Manual of Standard Tibetan (MST). Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications.
—”It should be emphasized that prosody and accentuation are extremely important for reading Literary Tibetan, whether verse or prose. Even from a grammatical point of view it is essential to make the right pauses and these follow some prosodic rules. If those rules are not applied, the text becomes incomprehensible…” emphasis mine. (Note that Tournadre defines “Literary Tibetan” here as everything from 7th century to modern day). p. 479.
Treiman et al., (2003). “Language Comprehension and Production,” Comprehensive Handbook of Psychology, Volume 4: Experimental Psychology. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
—”Speech is as old as our species and is found in all human civilizations; reading and writing are newer and less widespread. These facts lead us to expect that readers would use the visual representations that are provided by print to recover the phonological and linguistic structure of the message. Supporting this view, readers often access phonology even when they are reading silently.” Pages 527-548.
—“…there is good evidence that phonology and other aspects of linguistic structure are retrieved in reading (see Frost, 1998 for a review)” and “…again, though writing retrieves orthography, phonology plays an important role in this process, just as it does in the process of deriving meaning from print in reading,” pages 10 & 42.
—“…prosody can help resolve lexical and syntactic ambiguities” and “…several researchers (see Warren, 1999) have demonstrated that prosody can disambiguate utterances” and “…if readers translate visually presented sentences into a phonological form, complete with prosody, these benefits may extend to reading (Bader, 1998; Slowiaczek & Clifton, 1980),” page 27 & 28.
Also see neuroscience findings linking rhythm to reading skills, for example: “…researchers found that those who had better musical training also had enhanced neural responses to speech sounds. In poorer readers this response was diminished.” and “It turns out that kids who are poor READERS have a lot of difficulty doing this motor task and following the beat. In both SPEECH and music, RHYTHM (read: PROSODY) provides a temporal map with signposts to the most likely locations of MEANINGful input (emphasis mine).”
Let me tell you what I mean. (If you've stumbled upon this post after the upcoming title change, it used to be erroneously called: "Studying Language").
For one thing, you can learn a lot about a language, or about language in general, by studying it: that is what linguists do, and incidentally, what a lot of language learners think they should do. But the study of a language is not, in any way, shape, or form, "language learning."
For one, you don't acquire any language skills by studying a language (see references). Why?
Because natural languages are not simply vocabularies organized by grammar structures. If they were, machine translation would have been perfected long ago. The first attempts at MT used grammar; they discovered that, not only did grammar-based programs fail to provide accurate translations, they were also a huge waste of computational resources.
Nowadays, they've turned to the same thing we, as language learners, need to use: frequent exposure to natural language structures.
Likewise, it is a huge waste of cognitive resources to try and analyze each and every sentence word-by-word. Is that how you're reading these words right now? I should hope not...
So, I ask: What is language? I think there are two surprisingly obvious, essential features of language that ought to inform us, as students of the Tibetan language in particular, moving forward...
1) Language is primarily oral
What comes to your mind if I say the word "apple?" Chances are it's not the word itself, nor is it a dictionary definition explicitly describing the fruit. Instead, the word "apple" most likely conjures up a mental representation of some sort; perhaps an image of the prototypical apple, or even a taste or memory. A sense-impression of some sort.
For example, if I say "mushy apple," you will have a different reaction than when I say "crisp, juicy apple"—the language is standing for your real experiences of actual apples.
Actually, you may have noticed that, even thought I'm writing these words, I am effectively speaking to you (look at the verbs I used in the above paragraph). Written language symbolizes spoken language: that's why we learn to read by sounding things out, by being hooked on phonics, and yes, even though we abandoned the connection to orality as quickly as we can say "ka kha ga nga," we even began our Tibetan language studies with a rough approximation of Tibetan pronunciation.
So what does this mean for learning a language? It means that, to truly understand a word (or group of words), we need to create this link between the sound and the mental representation. We need real experiences in real contexts with real people.
I can hear the naysayers now: "But classical Tibetan is a dead language." Let me point you, for one, to Tournadre, Manual of Standard Tibetan, p. 26: Literary and spoken Tibetan “share the same basic grammar and are very similar lexically... with a knowledge of one it is possible to read the other without too much difficulty.”
Since language is primarily oral, it only makes sense to begin first with spoken Tibetan, and gradually gain competence (both reading and writing) in literary, just as native speakers do. Modern Icelandic speakers can read 1,000 year-old Old Norse epics; it shouldn't be surprising that speaking Tibetan is a huge leg-up in reading classical texts.
Let's also remember that the Tibetan literary tradition is also primarily oral; that being able to speak the modern tongue gives us access to the emic perspectives of native scholarly traditions; and that the Tibetan script's lack of interword spacing belays its orality.
If you're buying what I'm selling, how do we create connections between sounds and real experiences? Research suggests that an average of 14 exposures (to the sound in a context we understand) is needed to internalize a word; but it doesn't end there...
2) Language is essentially sociocultural
Being exposed to language over time gives a cumulative weight to the meaning of words (and groups of words, and how groups of words may interact).
Our concept of “tea,” for example, is not any one specific cup of tea we drank. It is not the 14th cup of tea we drank, the moment we may have internalized, “Oh, that’s what ‘tea’ means.”
It is a little bit of every cup of tea we ever drank… Not only that, but who we drank it with; where we drank it; when; and how. It's even times we understood tea was being drank by others, and the contexts that they drank it in.
Perhaps you have tried Tibetan tea. Somebody gave you a cup and said, “Here, it’s tea.” You tasted it; it was salty and buttery, and somewhere deep inside, if not aloud, you said, “No it’s not. That’s not tea.”
I have a friend who told me: "I didn't like Tibetan tea until I thought of it as soup." To him, thinking of བོད་ཇ་ in this way lined it up with the cumulative weight of his "soup" experiences. It didn't fit in his conceptual category "tea" very well, but it functioned just fine as "soup!"
Tea =/= ཇ་ . If we translate word-by-word, or use English as our frame of reference, we will be in a constant state of cognitive dissonance with a real understanding of the Tibetan language. Shared experiences are the basis of our shared understanding of what language means. And if we can’t even understand simple, everyday words like “tea” in Tibetan, what hope could we have for understanding something more complicated, like religious philosophy?
Language is a function of the social brain (see references). We build a shared understanding of meaning by participating in a shared story; in other words, language is sociocultural, and inextricably so.
As native speakers of our own languages, we are used to being able to curl up, alone, with a book. If we are university students, we are intimately familiar with self-study. We’ve reached the point where authors can speak to us through their words.
What we’ve forgotten is that it took 10, 15, or 20 years of intensive language immersion to develop that skill; that we were supported by our family and our friends, our teachers and our classmates, and our whole speech community along the way. That we were immersed within the shared story of our own language and culture. So that even though we are engaging with language individually, all of that language is socioculturally encoded…
Not only does all the current research I've ever read support this model; my own experience bears it out. I spent around 7 years trying, in vain, to study Tibetan (first in university classes, then in various programs in India); I learned a lot about the Tibetan language in those years, but I must admit that I developed hardly any language skills.
What I mean is, I certainly had some theoretical knowledge about "how Tibetan works;" but, to my frustration, I had no ability to translate that knowledge into anything useful. I couldn't understand the language if it was spoken to me; I couldn't pick up a book and read it; and I certainly couldn't carry on a conversation or compose even a simple letter.
If language has anything to do with communication (I think we must all admit that it does), I had no communicative skills at all... It was not until I totally abandoned and banished all "grammar study" and all "English language" that I began to learn a little Tibetan.
You cannot learn a language by studying it.
References:
Bruner, Jerome S. (1990) Acts of Meaning. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.Coady, James; Huckin, Thomas (1997). Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.
—Phonology is used as a processing mechanism during reading for word recognition, a.k.a. “phonemic awareness.” pp. 40-42.
Dunbar (2003). “The Social Brain: Mind, Language, and Society in Evolutionary Perspective.” Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 32: 163-181.
Grabe, William. Current Developments in Second Language Reading Research. TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 3, Autumn 1991. p. 388.
Hastings, Ashley & Brenda Murphy (2004). Implicit Standards for Explicit Grammar Teaching.
—“The researchers suggest that regular encounters with the real language—in other words, comprehensible input—is the true source of grammatical competence.”
Kuhl, Patricia K. (2007). “Is speech learning ‘gated’ by the social brain?” Developmental Science 10:1 (2007), pp 110–120.
—“Social interaction is essential for natural speech learning. The social hypothesis links early speech learning and neurobiology, and sheds light on developmental disabilities such as autism. The hypothesis also relates speech development to recent findings in neuroscience on ‘mirror neurons’.”
Lantolf, J. P. (Ed.). (2000b). Socio-cultural Theory and Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lynn, Jennifer. Need for Speed: The Relationship Between Oral Reading Fluency and the… Capella University, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Proquest 2008. p. 49.
—Oral reading fluency (the ability to read fluidly with proper rhythm and intonation) is one of the best measures for reading comprehension.
Lyon, G. Reid (1997). “How Do Children Learn to Read?” Adapted from her report on Learning Disabilities Research. Testimony before the Committee on Education and the Workforce, U.S. House of Representatives.
Macaro, Ernesto (2006). “Does intensive explicit grammar instruction make all the difference?” Language Teaching Research.
—“Our results support previous findings that explicit instruction [does not lead to]... gains in accuracy in either translation or free composition.”
Mercer, Dr Neil (2015). Oxford Podcast on Education, Language, & the Social Brain.
Richards, Jack C.; Rodgers, Theodore S. (2001). Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching (2nd ed.). Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 5.
Thomson, Greg (2006). Introduction to the Socio-cultural Dimension of Language Learning. Website, accessed: 3 August 2015.
Tournadre, Nicolas (2003). Manual of Standard Tibetan (MST). Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications.
—”It should be emphasized that prosody and accentuation are extremely important for reading Literary Tibetan, whether verse or prose. Even from a grammatical point of view it is essential to make the right pauses and these follow some prosodic rules. If those rules are not applied, the text becomes incomprehensible…” emphasis mine. (Note that Tournadre defines “Literary Tibetan” here as everything from 7th century to modern day). p. 479.
Treiman et al., (2003). “Language Comprehension and Production,” Comprehensive Handbook of Psychology, Volume 4: Experimental Psychology. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
—”Speech is as old as our species and is found in all human civilizations; reading and writing are newer and less widespread. These facts lead us to expect that readers would use the visual representations that are provided by print to recover the phonological and linguistic structure of the message. Supporting this view, readers often access phonology even when they are reading silently.” Pages 527-548.
—“…there is good evidence that phonology and other aspects of linguistic structure are retrieved in reading (see Frost, 1998 for a review)” and “…again, though writing retrieves orthography, phonology plays an important role in this process, just as it does in the process of deriving meaning from print in reading,” pages 10 & 42.
—“…prosody can help resolve lexical and syntactic ambiguities” and “…several researchers (see Warren, 1999) have demonstrated that prosody can disambiguate utterances” and “…if readers translate visually presented sentences into a phonological form, complete with prosody, these benefits may extend to reading (Bader, 1998; Slowiaczek & Clifton, 1980),” page 27 & 28.
Also see neuroscience findings linking rhythm to reading skills, for example: “…researchers found that those who had better musical training also had enhanced neural responses to speech sounds. In poorer readers this response was diminished.” and “It turns out that kids who are poor READERS have a lot of difficulty doing this motor task and following the beat. In both SPEECH and music, RHYTHM (read: PROSODY) provides a temporal map with signposts to the most likely locations of MEANINGful input (emphasis mine).”
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