In teaching a language there is always a problems with talkng about things that for practical reasons can only ever be imagined, and will never be seen. There are no house sparrows here were I live, in fact it can be months that I don't see any type of bird or hear birdsong. Within her closed world, the realisation that language itself could give rise to thought and evoke images of things and sensations was remarkable. Her world became constructed on the categories that language gave her. Coming to language from experience and from our 5 senses is perhaps easier - especially as children we are sensory beings. But as Helen Keller has shown us remarkably, the loss of a sense or other doesn't preclude the acquisition of language - onluy makes it more difficult.Jonathan Robie wrote:"What kind of bird is that", she asked me.
...
"How does it behave?"
"It flutters down to the bird feeder, sometimes it picks bugs off the grill of the car in the driveway. They hop around a lot, they are good fliers. Why aren't you telling me what kind of bird this is?"
"You already know what kind of bird it is. You are asking what we call this kind of bird. We call it a house sparrow."
For most of us who study Greek, we rely only on our senses of sight and (possibly) hearing. For those who self-study it is often just the sense of sight. After thinking about Helen Keller's talk of struggle in acquistion of language I think that hyper-categorisation is (predictable / natural) form of compensation in the learning process for sensory deprivation. The lack of experience leads the learner to mentally create a scene that is just as varigated as they would otherwise have seen.
The other side of sense is interpersonality. We have an innate urge to impress the senses of others and hence communicate our thoughts and feeling to others. That can either happen between people (ideally), with a ball (cf. Wilson) or talking to oneself.
I feel sure that the linguistic isoloation that Paul in Africa and I have suffered give us a similar advantage for our Greek that a writer has if they go up to a cabin in the woods to write (where the need to communicate comes out on paper), or a mediaeval monk or nun that was voluntarily (or forcibly - after a longer time when their unwilling spirit had broken - as is probably in Paul's and in my case) immured and the "senses" could only only come to recognise God in prayer, or in our case in expressing ourselves in Greek and having the natural feeling to "create" a speech community around us.
For us the sensorily deprived, there is still a natural need for a certain ammount of linguistic variation in the world of language that we construct within our minds (following the quote by Keller). It seems to me that most people that feel that need go either of two ways; they either they look for so many grammatical terms and distinctions as Wallace has done or they go deeper into the language and find synonymity, slight differences in meaning between grammatical constructions. You can see from my posts that I have preferred the second path. That was a conscious decision based on the probably end-benefits that either choice had to offer. The problem is, of course, that Greek reference material is not geared up for such an approach to the language. Helen Keller's writings and social activism indicate that she thought deeply about life and considered language and thought as similar, in a similar way to most of us who read the GNT consider the Greek en par with the grammar that describes it. I think that the sensorily deprived life and consequent learning experience of Helen Keller is a good indication of what is possible for most of the students of NTG.
I have taught English to countably tens of thousands of students - mostly in mass classrooms - over these past few years, and there are always a measure of them who compensate for the language learning process by going into research level grammatical analysis in their first or second year - most of them don't emerge again. But mostly they compensate learn the language to some degree or other and move on. It seems that going into categorisation and grammatical differentiation is an accepted "learning stream" for NTG learners, and it is no longer seen as an anomaly, but rather as a desired goal. That still doesn't sit well with me.
Anyway, my reason for introducing these things was to say that Andrew's intrest in grammatical terms and disctinctions seems to me to natural, and I wanted to get his first-hand perception of how he felt at that moment of awakening enquiry - which I now only look back on but can't remember clearly after so many years. It was only a passing though, but now asked can't be un-asked.
