Re: Ayeri: Menan Coyalayamoena ena McGuffey

On Apr 6, 2005 2:33 PM, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:
> Something more towards addressing your concern, though, is
> that the subject matter should be readily understandable to
> children, and the expression should be as direct as can be in
> Ayeri.  If that method is more complex than English, it doesn't
> mean (I think) that children will have a harder time learning it
> than they do English.  After all, they will be hearing it all the
> time.  And (and this is important) children actually do learn
> Georgian.  As far as I'm concerned, if a child can learn Georgian,
> *anything* is possible.  ;)
I agree with David.  After all, by the first grade the kids presumably
know how to *speak* their language, although in some seriously
polysynthetic languages it seems that the *most* complex constructions
might not be mastered until the ages of ten or eleven.

I'm not all that familiar with the McGuffey Readers, but from the name
it seems like their purpose it to teach kids to read.  By the age of
seven, they certainly have a good grasp of their spoken language, even
if it's not suitable for formal oratory yet.  Is the written language
is basically the same language as the spoken one?

One thought: I've been learning Tzeltal, a Mayan language of Chiapas,
and the wonderful manual I've been reading uses a somewhat different,
slightly simpler orthography than other works, or the "official"
orthography if there is one.  In it, multi-morpheme words are often
broken up and it's pretended that they're separate, independent words.
 They're not -- they can't appear independently and they don't, if
I've inferred correctly, even satisfy the minimum phonotactic
requirements for words -- but once the basic writing game is mastered
a more official orthography can be easily adopted.

So I've been puttering along, feeling all along that "hey, this is
*easy*!"  Lots of little, monosyllabic words, seems almost analytic.
It isn't, of course, but I'm going to pretend as long as I can.

I can't see that this would really *hinder* the children; perhaps all
that the more "advanced" orthographies do is leave out spaces.  This
seems to be basically what's happening above anyway, moving from parts
to wholes; the only difference is that maybe they won't write the long
"adult" sequences until later.  After all, we learn to print a year or
two before we learn cursive, and I don't think it really hinders us.
--
Patrick Littell
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