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 brain’s

voracious taste for self-improvement. Any word which has wandered into

one’s 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

one’s 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.

*

It’s 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

Engineer’s 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 ტ -

strong and თ - 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 strong-

sounding word. In Georgian the q sound, known as q’ar , 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. I’m sure

it’s poor alpinism to draw attention to dangers in such a way as to make them

mutate into complexes at an early stage of the student’s 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. It’s 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 I’ve 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; I’ve 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 Sisauri’s 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….