RE: lects

From: Jay Lemke (jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Date: Thu Apr 06 2000 - 19:34:46 PDT


Nice to have Martin's example, and the young woman's text.

It seems many of us did not have much trouble reading it, and familiarity
of context and expectation does play a role. So does having it sit there
for as long as we need to transact with the znaks and znachenies in search
of a plausible smysl ...

by the way, "bart simpson mode" seems like a wonderful push for some of us
in the direction of getting at least Martin's reading-smysl if not the
student's writing-smysl ... the phrase is a znak like any other, but it's
znachenie specifies a relatively concrete niche, with limit contextual
distribution, and a lot of multi-media evidence (if you watch Bart Simpson
animations) for something very smysl-like ... I think this is often the
goal of literary writing in our culture, to push the znachenie resources of
conventionalized abstracted meanings far enough toward concrete, emotive,
personally felt dynamical meanings (smysl) that readers (some readers) are
likely to feel as well as understand what is said, to recreate (or create
akin) the felt sense of meaning-in-feeling-and-doing that the writer
expresses. Perhaps more often than we realize, success at this depends on
indexing activities that are experienced in very bodily and multi-modal
ways; so that it is, again as Peter emphasizes, not just the semiotic
resources of language, but those of many other modes of meaning, that
readers bring to bear in "writing" their interpretations/responses to a
text ....

back to Wales ....

Where again it seems plausible to me that the student was either
deliberately using welsh orthography in writing english as a subtle protest
(or way to make a boring and negative task a little less so) or was using
welsh spelling simply as a tool to put english words on paper when she was
not familiar enough with their standard spellings ... I suppose the most
exciting possibility, for me, would be that for her there is not yet the
sharp division between the two Languages, artificially forced by different
orthographies, or at least that in their written forms there is still that
much commonality between them (though in spoken forms there may be other
salient differences that do keep them more apart, while still allowing,
maybe even inviting us to mix them).

The relationships between written and spoken language are still
under-theorized in my opinion. We have too many easy answers to a rich,
complex, and ambiguous relationship that can shift with time and
experience, with speakers, with situation, and certainly across cultures.

JAY.

---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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