Are the Louw and Nida discussions available?

MAubrey
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Re: Are the Louw and Nida discussions available?

Post by MAubrey »

RandallButh wrote:Michael's critique should be taken as a hyperbole.
If I were talking about L&N the lexicon, Randall, then I wouldn't have made such a critique to begin with. L&N is very useful within the constraints you mentioned--I think that's an excellent summary! But I wasn't talking about the lexicon. I was talking about their brief monograph delineating semantic theory that Stephen was asking about. So there is no hyperbole in my words. That book is highly problematic on numerous levels.
Mike Aubrey, Linguist
SIL International
Koine-Greek.com
Stephen Hughes
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Joined: February 26th, 2013, 7:12 am

Re: Are the Louw and Nida discussions available?

Post by Stephen Hughes »

MAubrey wrote:
RandallButh wrote:Michael's critique should be taken as a hyperbole.
If I were talking about L&N the lexicon, Randall, then I wouldn't have made such a critique to begin with. L&N is very useful within the constraints you mentioned--I think that's an excellent summary! But I wasn't talking about the lexicon. I was talking about their brief monograph delineating semantic theory that Stephen was asking about. So there is no hyperbole in my words. That book is highly problematic on numerous levels.
The confusion is probably my fault, I started asking about the Lexicon, but then changed to the other volume in the thread a few days later. Despite that there may be a little misunderstand of which one who is referring to in which comment when, the replies here have generally been very helpful.
Stirling Bartholomew wrote:Secondary sources in biblical studies are laced with outdated theory about language. So one must develop a tolerance for this or not read the secondary literature. Academic linguistics is always spinning off new frameworks and biblical studies generally ignores these until they have been around for several decades or longer.
It is the same in linguistics for language teaching. What comes out as textbooks is always a bit behind. I take that as like the FDA, let's see whether it really works before popularising it.
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
TimNelson
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Location: Australia, Victoria, Geelong

Re: Effective vocabulary learning strategies

Post by TimNelson »

Stephen Hughes wrote: Also on the topic of your advice...
MAubrey in [url=http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=2121&p=12479#p12478]Re: E.A. Sophocles[/url] wrote:the research questions that were viewed as important 100 years ago aren't the ones that you're interested in.
I wasn't actually aware that I had an area of interest when you wrote that. I've been thinking about it, and since many of my posts are dealing with vocabulary and especially teaching and learning vocab, perhaps it could be that I have an interest in that field.
Sounds somewhat similar to my field of interest. I've become specifically interested in easing the load of vocabulary learning (which is why I like the textbooks of both Mounce and Ward Powers, who include inflectional morphology for this purpose), and in the use of derivational morphology in easing this load.
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Tim Nelson
B. Sc. (Computer Science), M. Div. Looking for work (in computing or language-related jobs).
Stephen Hughes
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Joined: February 26th, 2013, 7:12 am

Re: Effective vocabulary learning strategies

Post by Stephen Hughes »

wayland wrote:Sounds somewhat similar to my field of interest. I've become specifically interested in easing the load of vocabulary learning (which is why I like the textbooks of both Mounce and Ward Powers, who include inflectional morphology for this purpose), and in the use of derivational morphology in easing this load.
There is a distinction between what is current and what is historical in derivational morphology and inflectional morphology.

Powers mixes the two together and makes it seem that inflectional morphology consists of a plethora of minutiae. While most of them are historically correct at one point of the language or other over from proto-Greek up till the Koine era, people probably never had that understanding of the language when they were speaking, reading or writing it. If taken as a stepping stone to the language it is great, but understanding any type of morphology (or any other grammar system) is not the same as actually understanding the language. The only Latin language that I have regular exposure to is Portuguese and speakers don't consciously morphologise as they are using the language, but do as they are thinking about sometimes. Foreign language learners do that more than others. In Power's system there are usually 5, and never more than 7 elements to be understood together at any one given time, but that level of detail requires a lot of processing. That processing distracts / detracts from the processing of sentence level language - utterances.

In most beginning language learning approaches, the syntactic structures of the language are too often left to learners' intuition. That is usually not a problem because we are all human anyway, and can get some meaning. After the conscious processing of individual words - by whatever means - has passed and they are understood on sight, the sentences and structures surrounding words can begin to be appreciated while reading.

Whatever system of analysis you have learnt a language by, eventually it needs to be learnt to the point where it is no longer needed, and meaning / comprehension is achieved on sight.

Specifically for the derivational morphology, when we are speaking our own languages, we don't analyse too much. I mean like when I use the copula 是 shì (is, be, are, was etc.) in a sentence, I don't think about that
Wiki article [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copula_%28linguistics%29#Chinese]Copula linguistics Chinese[/url] wrote:Before the Han Dynasty, the character 是 served as a demonstrative pronoun meaning "this".
I just speak. Similarly, I don't think about how to make sentences, I just speak them while I think about what I want to say. 80% of my thinking is given to the question of what to say, and 20% to how to say it. As for the derivational morphology, if I'm using a word like 手机 shǒujī mobile phone, I would never think of the component parts of the word - 手shǒu hand 机jī machine - as once separated then now joined, while in the time of speaking. Those type of things are reflective activities requiring different thought patterns analysis as opposed to comprehension. In reading too - you know Chinese doesn't separate words - I'm looking for groupings that make sense, not analysing things to find the components of sense. The actual process of language usage is the opposite to the way that most learners are taught.
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
TimNelson
Posts: 61
Joined: October 17th, 2014, 11:04 pm
Location: Australia, Victoria, Geelong

Re: Are the Louw and Nida discussions available?

Post by TimNelson »

I think I agree with all of that. I still think it's useful to learn some of the endings with their likely meanings, ie. the -τος ending.
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Tim Nelson
B. Sc. (Computer Science), M. Div. Looking for work (in computing or language-related jobs).
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