JeremyErwin

Re: Grammar/Vocabulary ???

Your point is not so clear as you would like it to be. I contend that individuals, given enough books and writing materials, can develop a high degree of fluency in written english, without necessarily developing an equal fluency in oral english.

Kevin Hewell

Re: Grammar/Vocabulary ???

That makes sense to me. I think Rex was just taking the piss.

Joseph DeMartino

Re: Grammar/Vocabulary ???

Well that is certainly true. It is also true that native speakers of a language will show huge differences in fluency in writing and speaking. Many people who are brilliant speakers without notes can't write their way out of a paper bag, while many professional writers are lousy conversationalists, and bad public speakers even with a prepared text. (Utterly hopeless without one.)

Reading and writing are fundamentally different things than speaking, regardless of the language, and regardless of the writing system (ideographic, alphabetical or some combination of the two.) Speech, including sign language, is arguably a natural phenomenon. We seem to be hard-wired with the capacity for language. Although specific languages are the result of evolution and even deliberate innovation (especially wrt volcabularly), they are not deliberate creations. Reading and writing are - they are artificial.

Regards,

Joe

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andrew markworthy

Re: Grammar/Vocabulary ???

I don't think it's the same here in the UK. Some of this may date back to the UK's rather longer involvement in E Asia (and no, not all of us are proud of the UK government encouraging the supplying of opium to China and backing it up with force when necessary - see First Opium War) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). So 'the Orient' has a rather more prosaic meaning for many individuals.

'Oriental' would, however, in most circumstances be considered rather too old-fashioned unless you were being deliberately archaic. Of course referring to a person as an 'oriental' rather than 'oriental person' would be offensive (the same would go for any other adjective used in this way (e.g. 'the schizophrenic').

It's certainly true in the UK, but it's worth noting that we still have a sizeable population of Chinese people (plus a reasonable proportion of other E Asian peoples, such as Vietnamese people). Indeed, there has been a sizeable Chinese presence in the UK for about 200 years. It is objectively fair to say that a high proportion of them used to work in the laundry business and more recently have moved into Chinese restaurants and takeaways (I cannot think of any UK town or even large village that lacks at least one Chinese takeaway run by Chinese people). Please don't read this as stereotyping - there are of course UK citizens of Chinese descent in many other professions and occupations.

Joseph DeMartino

Re: Grammar/Vocabulary ???

Whoever wrote this clearly doesn't know "most Americans". I don't know any Americans who do this. Most Americans I know are perfectly capable of asking if they're not sure of someone's ethnicity (and it is somehow relevant to the conversation) and of using other cues like personal names to distinguish among at least the East Asian populations most common in a given area.

Regards,

Joe

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Kevin Hewell

Re: Grammar/Vocabulary ???

I was thinking the same thing, Joe.

Adam Lenhardt

Re: Grammar/Vocabulary ???

It still reeks of armchair anthropology to me. "Go experience the wonders of the Orient!" and all of that. But I take your point.Fascinating. I would say that "Oriental" and "Oriental person" would both be considered offensive here, but neither "Asian" nor "Asian person" would be.But there are 8.5 times as many British that are ethnically Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi as there are Chinese; 2,083,759 versus 247,403 Chinese. By contrast, America had 2.7 million people of Chinese origin or ancestry, compared with 1.9 million people of Asian Indian origin or ancestry as of the last Census.Are you sure it's not yourself who doesn't know "most Americans"? Granted, this phenomena is less pronounced on the West Coast and in major cities where there are large Asian populations. But in the rural areas of the country, almost everyone I've met (particularly over a certain age) uses "Chinese" as a go-to over "Asian."

Rex Bachmann

Re: Grammar/Vocabulary ???

JeremyErwin post #241:

Quote:

I contend that individuals, given enough books and writing materials, can develop a high degree of fluency in written english, without necessarily developing an equal fluency in oral english.

Contend as you like. It is irrelevant to the point I've been trying to make. (And, who said anything about an "equal fluency"??? (Hint: it wasn't me (or I?).))

Quote:

Your point is not so clear as you would like it to be.

Apparently not. And the Socratic method seems to be lost on you, since any serious attempt at cogitating over and trying to coherently answer the questions I posed to you might have led you to at least some clarity on the issues at hand.


Fact: People do not communicate ex nihilo. All linguistic expressions are precedented.


Joseph DeMartino wrote (post #243)

Quote:

Reading and writing are fundamentally different things than speaking, regardless of the language, and regardless of the writing system (ideographic, alphabetical or some combination of the two.) Speech, including sign language, is arguably a natural phenomenon. We seem to be hard-wired with the capacity for language.

The ability to understand and that of reproducing human speech are inherited competencies (an evolutionary adaptation to what?---nobody knows). There is nothing "arguable" about it. Other higher primates, like chimpanzees and bonobos, can be taught to recognize symbols and push buttons, but they do not and cannot speak. They do not have the vocal mechanisms in their throats to produce human-like speech (Hollywood productions notwithstanding).

According to the scholarly literature I've seen, human babies' brains are stimulated by talk from their caregivers/parents/family/whatever from the time of birth. Those so deprived have shown marked "retardation" in learning abilities and social development. (In fact, if I remember correctly, these findings led to a fad(?) in the 70s and 80s of (American) pregnant women talking to their unborn fetuses in the womb in order to get a "headstart" on the children's brain development.)

Heck, even literate deaf people who "sign"---the system of which is geared to human speech anyhow---try to speak or mouth the words when exchanging communications (with the hearing-capable, at least). (The reports from the literature---about which I know only a little, admittedly---also aver that deaf people suffer much more depression and feelings of isolation than blind people. If valid, that can't be an accident.)

Speech---its perception as well as production---is an active and indispensable part of human brain development, not some unnecessary ancillary habit we "happen" to engage in.

Quote:

Although specific languages are the result of evolution and even deliberate innovation (especially wrt volcabularly), they are not deliberate creations. Reading and writing are - they are artificial.

The abilities to read and to write, on the other hand, are purely learned competencies (the result of a cultural adaptation within given speaker communities).

What needs to be added is what I've already said before:

The latter two abilities are based on and dependent upon the first two. One needs to "crawl before one can walk", so to speak, and, where linguistic communication is concerned, understanding and reproducing speech is the "crawl" to reading and writing's "walk". The latter necessitates and presupposes the former. The reverse is simply not the case. Once you've learned to understand a language and produce meaningful speech in that language, you need never, ever learn to read or write and yet can still be a totally effective communicator. Many of the ancient royalty whose names and deeds come down to us from written history were illiterate in our sense of the word. Reading and writing was done by specialists, whether secular or religious, depending on the material to be dealt with. The rulers usually couldn't read, much less write cuneiform or hieroglyphs. Only priests, scribes, and certain tradesmen did that. Yet the leaders still led and communicated effectively.

I would disagree that they are totally different in kind, despite what's been said here. Each of the latter three skills seems to be hierarchically additive upon the one that came before it: understanding > speaking > reading > writing of course this applies to one's native tongue. With a foreign tongue one can understand and read (passive skills) without being able to produce discourse (active skills: speaking and writing).

If all the media and documents we have today were to disappear tomorrow, we could still communicate effectively (i.e., comprehensibly) with one another; no problem. Could we do it as efficiently without those media as with them? No. Would life be a whole lot harder having to do all the linguistic communications face to face? Yes, indubitably. But we could still manage.

Try turning that around and what do you get? You get nothing useful. All future generations born to read and write without benefit of first learning to understand and reproduce speech? Unthinkable (short of some "sci-fi" evolutionary turn of events).

Even if you pick up a textbook to learn a long "dead" language, your ability and your opportunity to do so are beholden to the fact that the language's records' survival, and even their initial creätion, are totally dependent on there having once have been a viable human speech community, lo, those thousands of years ago to produce the "raw material"---the discourses---for that alphabet/syllabary/or what-have-you to record so that you can sit down in scholarly isolation and learn (of) it.

If you never speak another word in your life and live an essentially hermetic existence so that you never hear another human voice, but have plenty of literature (of all kinds) and writing media (including nonauditory electronic media), you may well feel fulfilled, but your abilities to take advantage of all that would still depend on your having developed in a speech community. How else would you know how to read and write? How else would the media, whether paper and quill or electronic keyboard and monitor, have been developed? Enough knowledge had to have already been conveyed from generation to generation to generate the ideas for those inventions that allowed you to remotely enjoy the fruits of others' thoughts and imaginings. It doesn't happen in a vacuum. It all starts with speech. The spoken language IS the language.

And perhaps this brings us to a niggling semantic, but apparently important, point that is at least implicit in