Communication Basics: Word Meanings of Knowers and Teachers

When I was in junior high, I saw first hand a very important lesson.  We had a very enthusiastic French teacher who unexpectedly found herself explaining to her class her frustrations, following her visit to France.  For all of her study of French, the native speakers of France were able to identify that she herself was not a native speaker of French.  She had learned the hard way the difference between being a teacher of French and a knower of French.  Keep this distincion in mind, as I explain some of the language that is written about the basic meanings found in languages from around the world. 

The lesson from my story is not that there is something wrong with being a good teacher of French, as some do mistakenly interpret the story.  This was my own mistken interpreation in the past.  In their minds, there are only two alternatives: going technical or going native.  Instead the lesson is that the ideal would be to first be a knower of French, like the common citizens of France, as well as a teacher of French, like my junior high school teacher. 

Some pieces of my writing are aimed mainly at knowers, others mainly at teachers and others for those who are the ideal combination of both knowers and teachers.  This entry is mainly designed for those who are both.  But it is also to give more confidence to knowers, who understand the basic terminology I have used elsewhere, while maybe not grasping some of the technical language in this entry. My main point in this entry is to show that there is successful and technical scholarship behind the knower's basic five classes of meaning. 

I have referred before to the following classes of meaning:

Wholes (the Total of all its Constituent Parts)
           Amounts
           Relationships
           Actions
           Things

I have just begun to read a volume titled: Lexical Semantics of the Greek New Testatment: A Supplemnet to the Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testatment Based on Semantic Domains.   In it, I discovered this technical terminology:

Words as Signs (for Speakers)
           Characteristics
           Relations
           Activities
           Entities

This language does not surprise me, because Eugene Nida is one of the two authors along with J. P. Louw to write this volume, as they were together the authors of the Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains.   I would guess, without the opportunity to interview both or them or one of them, that this is an updated scholarly vocabulary for Nida's earlier words. 

His terminology was usually simplified to the following classes and usually referred to by the acronym of TEAR.  It is made of the following technical terminology used by translators and their teachers:

Classes of Language (The Total of Four Constituents)
           Attributes (Abstracts)
           Relations
           Events
           Things

This new terminology added to this older terminology that Nida used might not be that convincing for the knower of English or any other language, but the new terminology says to me that they are trying to appeal to other teachers of language (in linguistics and in biblical scholars in this case) among the scholarly community to acknowledge these basic categories of meaning. 

Where in the literature they pulled this terminology from or why they went to this terminology other than my general observation is hard to determine.  But I do regard both Eugene Albert Nida (his more technical full name) and J. P. Louw as important scholars behind my own knowing and studying. 

It is gratifying to see them still working with the TEAR classes as recently as 1992, even while using different words to say much the same thing that Nida said much earlier (at least as early as 1964 in Toward a Science of Translating).  It would be very gratifying for me to be a person  that popularizes Nida's idea of these four classes by my basic language approach, while the basic TEAR method continues to prove itself over and over in its practice among the many languages of the world by Wyclifffe Bible Translators, SIL and other translation organizations.  An added benefit from this technical terminology is that more teachers and scholars would acknowledge the same method as valid not only amoung knowers, but also among teachers. 

If more teachers would be begin from meaning rather than grammar, then I think we would see a revolution in the classrooms worldwide.  Perhaps letting teachers know about the technical vocabulary, that is behind the basics of my popular words for knowers, will help more of teachers to acknowledge meaning and grammar as very important to basic language teaching. 

This would take things full circle and would show once again that the ideal for all French teachers and teachers of other languages is a person who is both a knower and teacher of a language.   I hope this helps all my readers whether knowers, teachers or equally both knowers and teachers.  Go learn and study these basic meaning classes, so you can be both a knower and teacher! 

Sincerely,

Jon