Language workshop with Ramakant Agnihotri: 19th - 24th March, 2013 @ Jaipur
- An individual Reflective learning
· Children have an innate cognitive capability to learn languages. These ability develop with their exposure and experiences.
· Children can have fully functional language even at the age of 3 years.
· Reading is a lifelong skill in which the meaning and interpretation of the written texts depend on the readers' context and experiences.
· The intended message of the author is interpreted by the interplay between Context, Reader and Text.
· Seeing sentence in pieces is a problem and it is simply decoding when we take reading as only identifying letters.
· Reading without understanding the meaning is not Reading.
· The pedagogical implication with reading is that a teacher has to respect the interpretation of the child.
· Only words or sounds or sentences do not make a language. Eg. She mouth her an apple with eats.
· There have to be rule of grammar for sentences to make meaning.
· It is important to know the structure of languages - CVCV (Consonantal and Vocalic sound in sequence).
· In English, there can be three sequence/cluster of Consonantal sounds (the limit) but only starts with the letter "S". For example, SCRIPT.
· The cost of language is free/zero with the CVCV structure (it makes it easy) but once a person messes up with the structure, then they have to pay the price for it. It is difficult to say a word with more than three cluster of consonantal sounds , thus constraints arise.
· Any language can be written in any scripts with minor editing- Devnagiri or Roman etc.
· Knowledge of one language helps understand another language.
· Consonantal sound can be produced for a short time while vocalic (vowel) sound can be produced for longer period of time.
· Consonants cannot exist alone. It always come with Vocalic sound. For example, "B" for "Be", "F" for "Ef".
· Vowels can be a word but consonant cannot be a word. For example, "आ".
· What is Diphthong? It is not a sequence of vowels but a word which glided with Vocalic sound. For example, Kite as KAIT where K and I are highly dominated by AI.
· There are released and unreleased consonantal sounds - For example, the "P" in Pak is released thus hold more value. But the "P" is Kap is unreleased.
· If the last letter in a word is long with vocalic sound, then the previous consonant letter is affected. For example, कमला to be written as KAMALAA is written as KAMLA (KAM_LA_).
· Words like "Come" and "Go" form complete sentences because the subject "You" is embedded with them.
· Certain sounds of language do not exist for another languages but that does not make that language superior. For example, "ड़" for me.
· The pace of the sounds of languages is much faster than the script thus the problem with different sounds for the same script over the ages.
· There is no such thing as Received Pronunciation in practical as it depends on the context of the speakers. what people learn does not apply when they reach home. For example, a person being taught "School" with a pronunciation 'Skul" will still say "Iskul" when he interacts with the community in the context of Sirohi.
· In understanding the pronunciation of others, one has to be as natural in speaking and bring them to their intelligibility to grasp the pronunciation and meaning of others.
· One cannot live without language. It is as important as the air we breathe and the water we drink.
· Learning language is essentially a process of unlearning. It is about fitting in the structures.
· What is Syllabic peak? Syllable is the shortest word a person can speak and we need a syllable peak in order to speak. The sounds in reading "No Highway Cowboys" is an example of Syllabic peak. If there is no vocalic sound, there is no Syllabic peak. Syllable is Universal.
· Language capacity is a very special ability of all human beings have unlike Sports, Music or dance.
· Hindi language has complexities in making plural because of its gender sensitivity. Every noun will have definitely different plurals.
· Because of the system of abstract knowledge, the plurals will automatically come if we know the singular in languages.
· Knowledge of Language and Knowledge about Language is a completely different thing.
· In India, only Khasi language of Meghalaya have followed the same pattern of Subject Verb Object (SVO) like English. The rest of the languages have Subject Object Verb (SOV) pattern in India. Therefore despite is diversities in language, India is known as a Linguistic area because of its SOV pattern.
· A sentence in all the languages is negated by making the negative stay close to the main verb. In English, it is done by putting "Not" between the Auxiliary (helping verb) and the main verb which is in the main clause. The tense of the sentence go according to the Auxiliary. If there is no Auxiliary verb, then it has to be created. For example, "I go there" is written as "I am not going there".
· Questions are asked by adding a word either at the end or at the beginning.
· The blind, deaf and dumb also have fully functional languages like other languages. For example, Sign language is fully translatable therefore it is a language.
· Some sensory input is required to activate the languages in a person.
· Every one spent atleast 80% of our time to talk to ourselves.
· The presence of Universal Grammar is proved by knowing that all languages follow the same/common structure.
· Poverty Index of language? Isolation of an individual destroys languages but flourishes with the company of other languages.
· Metathesis? When "Caku" is said as "Kacu", and "Darwaza" as "Darzawa". These mistakes will be learnt with time and exposure.
· Plato's problem - "How come given so little children acquire so much".
· Literature is another kind of language.
· Children take time to process the input they received. There is lots of gestation period between comprehension and production therefore the Input--> Intake--> does not ultimately result in Output.
· Pedagogical implication - Give children a text which make sense to them.
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