I am NOT opposed to people having a good technical sense. The race to get to the moon using the heightened abilities of electronic invention was a great thing. It helped give birth to the microprocessor that drives so many technologies today like the cell phone. As a result, most of us have heard of an Intel microprocessor. But I think there is an invention that could eclipse this improvement of electronic devices. I think it lies not in the direction of an external electronic device, but in the direction of improving our ability to use the minds each of us are equipped with as standard equipment.
The human mind is still a wonder. It has incredible capacities. But lately, I am noticing that technical sense does not mean common sense. Many people have high technical abilities, but their minds have little common sense. Here lies the tragedy, because the mind is capable of both.
I think common sense is greater than the lesser ability of technical sense, but it is when the two are combined together that the greatest ideal is achieved. We seem to have come out of the 20th century with lots of the latter and few of the former. We need now common sense to match our technical achievements.
This is what I believe the majority of people yearn for, when it comes to even technology. I like to call my under-developed smart phone a "dumb phone". More times than not it fails to demonstrate smarts. Rather it shows a great lack of common sense features. It can make a pocket call right after I shut it down. It can start up by simply bumping another object in my pocket. It has immense capabilities, but few of which follow even the most basic common sense.
My goal on this blog in this year will be to lay out what I consider to be a common sense approach to communication based on the very common words that we use to communicate every single day. I hate to state the overly obvious, but the common is found among the very common, and not among the unique or exceptional.
I saw this in a commercial: "Great minds think alike" followed by "Great minds think differently". These slogans in the commercial were meant to be mutually exclusive of one another. But I think they are not. The ideal is common sense, where great minds think alike, and technical sense, where great minds think differently.
I recently realized that my communication basic method of "ARWAT" is not common sense enough. The categories of: 1)Amount, 2) Relationships, 3) Wholes, 4) Actions, and 5) Things are not on a list of most frequent words in English. They are closer than the word categories that I had previously used called "TEAR" with the categories of !)Thing, 2Event, 3)Attribute, and 4) Relation. Recently, I took the final step toward "very common". That is where I found common sense! It is alive and well once you know where to find it.
[Sorry, I have to come back and finish this later. You can contact me if you like to learn more sooner. Thank you.]
Sincerely,
Jon
Showing posts with label technical. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technical. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
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
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
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