A Lifetime of Pondering

  Discovering a Problem I was the kind of kid who hit upon questions rather than answers. One time, I was thinking about how French kids learned French from their parents and American kids learned English. That process went back to the cavemen, but who did the cavemen learn language from? Verboten In college I asked a visiting teacher how language could have begun and was told that the question was forbidden. It had been banned for a century. I was not going to learn the answer by joining a group of scholars already hard at work on the puzzle. Sijamwona During my days as a Peace Corps teacher I used Swahili. The language had astounded me by how different it was from the Indo-European languages (English, French, German and Latin) that I had studied. One day I answered a question with the word sijamwona, which translates into English as a full sentence: I have not seen him yet. The si- prefix indicates a negative, 1st person singular, nominative (not I); the –ja- affix indicates the not-yet tense; the –mw- is a 3rd person singular, accusative (him); while the last part of the word –ona is the root of the verb to see. As I walked on I thought that English was so different from Swahili that I had to wonder whether what I talked about was really out there or was just an invention of a particular culture. Then I was struck still by another thought. Both English and Swahili had subjects and objects. There was something universal to language after all. ...
Source: Babel's Dawn - Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Source Type: blogs