Week 4 Learning Experience: The good and bad of using a dictionary

A Bad Experience:  Yesterday was not a pleasant language learning day.  I went to the library to study and had to decide on a strategy for that learning session.  I thought to first go through my collection of Terán poetry and see how many words I could identify with my newly learned, Memrise vocabulary.  In scouring the poem Biete bi ‘The North Wind Whips,” I recognized only a few words, ca ‘a plural marker’, ti ‘a/an,’ tu ‘he/she/it’ or ‘who/whom’,  binni ‘people’,  yanna ‘now’ (the word in the poem is followed by the ˈ diacritic, I’m not sure if this completely changes the meaning of this word), nanna ‘to know’, naa ‘I/me’, and laatu ‘you plural’.  Clearly, these are not nearly enough words to gain any meaning from a thirty-six line poem.  In hindsight, I feel that I should have continued through the other poems in this same fashion, even with my minimal vocabulary, because I was at least recognizing my new vocabulary words on my own without having to refer to any reference material, which I find gratifying.  I changed my strategy because of a momentary desire for instant gratification, and decided to look up all the words of this poem using my new pocket dictionary (Britton, 2003).  (Shook’s English translation is not word for word or literal; he has rewritten his literal translations to sound more poetic in the English language.)  This, I discovered, is a horrible way to learn.  I was miserable after an hour of doing this and had only translated half of the poem.  Not all of the words could be found in the dictionary.  I was frustrated with even trying to translate the title of the poem.  Bi means ‘wind’, but what does biete mean?  I looked up ‘whips’ and found three IZ translations for the verb: riguiñe, ruchuche, and rugaze.  None of these words look like a variation of biete.

Verbs: Translating verbs can be difficult because they look quite different in their conjugated form.  There is no infinitive form, but there is a root that gives the semantic meaning of the action.  The verb has three bound morphemic components: a prefix that indicates aspect and voice, the verb root, and a pronoun suffix (Britton, 2003).  Infixes are also used, such as to –si- to indicate the active voice.  Let’s learn about verbs together using the three translations for ‘whips’: riguiñe, ruchuche, and rugaze. 

Using the Dictionary to Learn About Verbs:  Firstly, we can gain some grammatical information from the consonant/vowel (CV) prefix of these words.  Ri- and ru- both mean that the verb form is indicative—used for ordinary objective statements.  From what I have seen in the grammar introduction of my dictionary, there are twelve possible distinct morphemes (ri- and ru- being just two of them) that can constitute a verb prefix.  When I look up a word beginning with ri or ru, does that mean there are redundant entries for every verb aspect? No.  Only these two indicative verb forms are listed.  If a verb is in any other form, such as future or progressive, I believe that I would need to recognize the verb root in order to look for its meaning.  It seems to me that by looking up the verb root, I would find at least words that look similar to the root and would have similar meaning.  (I do not recognize a pronoun suffix at the end of the dictionary verb entries, so I am assuming that the verb root is the result of what is left after removing the prefix.)  This is not the case.  I am looking up guiñe (from riguiñe), chuche (from ruchuche), and gaze (from rugaze) now and find nothing that gives me a clue to the meaning of the supposed root. 

Metacognitve awareness: I believe what is happening in my mind right now is that I am transferring language knowledge from Hebrew to Isthmus Zapotec.  In Hebrew, the three letter verb root can be found in many words.  Many nouns, like in English and Spanish, as well, are created from verbs.  I am trying to find this connection with IZ.  If this were the case in IZ, I would expect to be able to deduce the meaning of unknown words by recognizing verb roots.  I am looking for patterns.  One of the reasons that I think may account for my failure to recognize the ‘root’ is that the IZ prefixes may change the spelling of the verb root.  I have read about some IZ phonological rules that change the phonemes in certain environments.  For instance x + z = s (seeluˈ ‘your ear of corn’ from zee) (Britton, 2003).

Returning to the three words that mean ‘whips’, their meaning does vary slightly.  Riguiñe also means ‘hits’.  A closely spelled verb riguñe means ‘gets roped’.   This made me wonder what the word for ‘rope’ is—doo.  Not even close to the verb; still no connection.  Ruchuche also means ‘beats’ and interestingly, rugaze can also mean ‘bathes’.  At the moment, I still have no explanation for biete.  If it is a verb, the prefix bi- means it is the preterite.  (This is an aspect that Britton (2003) suggests that only an IZ speaker can distinguish.)  If this is a verb, I also believe that the bi- prefix should be followed by a morpheme that begins with a consonant, as I have seen to be the pattern (CV).  Britton actually provides a dictionary entry for ‘north wind’: biguiaa and bi yooxho.  We may be able to presume that bi in biete means ‘wind’.  The word biguiaa is a compound word that combines bi ‘wind’ with guiaa ‘north’ from guiáˈ.  The ete part of the word will remain a mystery for now.  I’ll let you know when I figure out the meaning of this word. 

A Good Experience:  In summary, using the dictionary just to translate word after word is not a rewarding learning experience for me.  It does not really teach me anything.  However, the dictionary, when used for what I call “discovery learning,” can be a very helpful tool.  I have just learned several new things about verbs through the experience that I just talked you through.  Some of these things include: verbs begin with a prefix indicating aspect and voice; this particular dictionary only provides IZ verb entries in the indicative aspect ri- or ru-; verb roots do not seem to be related or recognizable in nouns that have similar meaning; phonological change can occur in certain environments and may be a possible explanation for verb roots not being recognized in other words; the title of  the poem “The North Wind Whips” is not a literal translation; and a noun can be combined with an adjective to form a compound word, noun + adjective.  These new things include becoming aware of what I still need to learn.  It may seem ironic for me to “discover” what I don’t know, but it is an important part of language learning for me.  To know what one does not know is the first step to knowing.  This is just my philosophy of course.  I would be interested to learn if you the reader were able to follow my thinking and methods of discovery.  Do my discoveries only make sense to me, or can others see the same things using my methods and rationale?