An Experiment with Memory - Coda: Pre-empting the pre-emptive

Tablet from Knossos written in Linear B

The chief problem of language learning is to make allowances for the brains voracious taste for self-improvement. Any word which has wandered into ones consciousness even unobtrusively is there for keeps. The problem is that its precise location and embedded strength must be prospected; it must then be transplanted into more fertile soil; and that that fertile soil itself must be organized according to a rational horticultural scheme.

But language learning systems proceed as if there is available simply a tabula rasa (as if one has never heard of this word or its cognates before) or else implicitly presume that such a mental state can simply be willed into

existence. The trouble is that the shards of many half-learnt words clutter ones mind; and will certainly trip up incoming words. Is it not better to come to terms with them by befriending unconscious memory, than to embark on a perilous project which ignores both unconscious memory and what is in it, simply because one is in a hurry to teach a language in the shortest possible time? What is learned fast will be forgotten fast. And it will be forgotten because the seed was forced into a bed which did not suit it; or because it otherwise fell upon stony ground.

Its important to distinguish between the identification of a word and its learning. In my view, learning is not a preliminary process. It should be the final sewing together of many inchoate preliminaries: the dress-rehearsal; the first run-through of the new concerto.

But, again, conventional learning systems hopelessly conflate by failing to identify and distinguish between them the identification and learning stages, as applied to a linguistic datum; and leave the student, rather than the teacher, with the almost hopeless task of phasing every intellectual acquisition on its own idiosyncratic place on a not obvious learning curve.

In such a scenario, a valid but maybe incomplete act of identification of a word or phrase which axiomatically does not carry across into a finished, learnt situation can easily be viewed, erroneously, as an inadequate piece of learning: and frantic efforts may be made to reinforce the complete learning of the given item. These are the techniques one learned at the crammers, at the grammar school for the mark order test; but one may blithely and unquestioningly transfer them into the learning techniques of adult life unless one is a little circumspect.

The task is difficult, but it is not impossible: the initial three thousand words of the language to be learned need to be approached from the standpoint of the first three thousand words of another; and a beneficent ordering or series of orderings needs to be established within that double corpus and carried over into the same words within the new language.

Meanwhile all learning efforts must be suspended: various relationships of acquaintance will have been made, in the course of this, bottom-up. Only at a late stage can a smooth, inclusive, ordered, top-down learning journey attempted: it will build on what has gone before, and will profit from it. At this stage, all half-learned material - all merely identified words - should be capable of inclusion in a harmonious and increasingly complete whole: and that whole ought to have a lucent, explicit and satisfying structure of its own.

Maybe a vision of a moment when one can seamlessly segue through a multitude of words is as illusory as imagining oneself hitting a Tony Jacklin four-under-par; perhaps my situation is closer to the duped client in The Engineers Thumb who consults Holmes after he has been asked to copy out The Encyclopedia Britannica in its entirety on account of his red hair; and becomes suspicious when he has almost got as far as the letter B.

But moving from the hinterland of theory into the valley of insight, I notice that I did indeed in the course of yesterday, July 6th, learn two and a half words of Georgian effortlessly; and because they came effortlessly they seem lodged in one or other of the levels of unconscious memory which I defined in Chapter 1.

The first was pirdapir. I first heard this word when being driven around Tbilisi by taxi and the chauffer asked, Pirdapir? Do you want to go straight on? or Is it [what you want] directly ahead?

My local taxi driver offered to take me to the airport directly pirdapir for sixty laris.

The second word he taught me as well, but he did so on request. There had been a severe hailstorm mid-afternoon; at six he had contacted me so that we could track down an errant mail item of mine.

Figure 21: Hailstone which fell during Bolnisi hailstorm, 6 July 2012

He told me that hail was seTqva . In Georgian there are two t sounds strong and - weak. The spelling with a strong t was obvious from his pronunciation, as was the presence of the q sound. It also seemed intuitively likely that for a strong phenomenon, Georgian would also have a strongsounding word. In Georgian the q sound, known as qar , has been assigned that bugbear status which linguists will insist on sellotaping onto bits of a foreign language which they fear will prove difficult for the learner. Im sure its poor alpinism to draw attention to dangers in such a way as to make them mutate into complexes at an early stage of the students acquaintance with a foreign tongue, just as I am opposed to error correction in the TEFL field.

But be that as it may, I was struck by the similarity of seTqva to the Georgian word for word, siTqva . Georgian seems to have been set up in such a way that the maximum amount of meaning is built into the shortest sonic and perhaps synaptic space; so that one has the impression that no workable combination of consonants and vowels has been left out of count; and that the language has thus achieved a maximum of concision and therefore but only in principle speakableness.

What is strange is the semantic disparity between word and hail when they are close neighbours on what one might imagine as a periodic table of all Georgian words. I note that hail is a post-3000 word: it does not figure in our list of the commonest English words. I have entered them both in their due places in the 175 spaces for Georgian words arranged by consonantality, which I set up in an earlier chapter, where they occupy spaces 16 and 11 respectively. Its may be good too, to identify Georgian words by these number codings. They might be learnable by the semi-conscious memory in the course of making routine handlings of words.but Ive not tried this out; and indeed it would be a time-consuming task * How can I bring into proximity our two words in a more formal way? We will need a new type of chart:

siTqva and seTqva appear top left; Ive put in elva which I learned as meaning either thunder or lightning (it turns out to mean lightning) as being semantically related but structurally a little different.

Figure 22: Georgian words- seTqva, siTva and related concepts

It sounds like a word in a quite different, more European language, and maybe suggests a new category of classification along those lines. The English meanings are given in other puzzle pieces as I think that there are interesting elements here for our quest to construct the anthropology of the language to elicit, for example, the fact that it obviously thinks of hailstones and words in the same collective thought. I have added two sonically related words which unconscious memory supplied; both having the Georgian q or similar: qvavili flower and varskvlavi star. They differ in that (counter-intuitively!) the word for star has not quite such an explosive sound as does the word for flower: q is actually a glottal fricative in Georgian half-way to the notorious

glottals of Arabic (or more familiarly perhaps, to the ugly ones of Cockney); kv is marginally less strong. What they have in common is the immediate treacherous descent onto a v, compounded in the case of the word for star by an immediate ascent after this onto the labial l. But unconscious memory clusters them quite happily alongside hail and word; where I am content to leave them.

Figure 23: varskvlavi - per ardua ad astram; preparing for an immediate ascent onto the labial l

* The second word I learned yesterday was only half-learned. Whereas pirdapir directly crystallized effortlessly - partly because I had heard it before, and partly because it seems to belong to a class of reduplicating words (we have already had an example in skvadaskva dros at one or another time) - and while seTqva was immediately memorable, in one the word for rainbow tsisarTqela needed to be retrieved from Sisauris dictionary (my neighbours had introduced it to me while we were looking at a beautiful example of one

yesterday; Figure 23). For now, all I can tell is that this word seems to contain the suffix for fixity sa which is nice, given the wonderful lines from the Book of Genesis suggesting the paradoxical fixity of a rainbow: I will set my bow in the clouds, and it will be a sign of a covenant between me and the earth. Words for rainbows should be quite primitive in any language, although in English rainbow seems to purely descriptive, rain and bow; whereas in Greek it is iris, which is the source of iridescent. The English word is ancient, but purely Germanic. Consultation revealed that Georgian tsisarTqvela is made up of the genitive of tsa sky (which comes out as tsis) and a diminutive form of sartTqveli belt ending in an a. Not for the first time Georgian comes up with a noble and magnificent word for a wonderful thing.

Figure 24: Rainbow over Bolnisi, 6 July 2012

The Tqv root in the word for belt may have commonalities with the same in seTqva and siTqva but the common source must be deep: if belt is a sa+ noun of fixity, the root which follows is rTqv (the final s of tsis is shared with or overhangs the initial s of the next part of the word). My guess is that these

prefixes must originally have had a special meaning; and for now my maybe perilous hypothesis is that se may signifiy compaction, si expansion and r some kind of local anchoring. When the genitival prefix tsis of the sky is removed we also see that each of these words denoting archetypal concepts begin with s. We will look out for other indices of the Georgian primitive mind as we proceed on these memorable but rare occasions when the language becomes lucid to us: just like the appearance (occasional indeed in Georgia) of a rainbow.