Reflection on "A Picture of Language" (NY Times article)
I found this NY Times article to be very interesting, as I have not read a lot about the history of teaching English grammar. I thought S. W. Clark's idea of "analyzing sentences by turning them into pictures" was fascinating, because it was a completely different perspective on grammar -- specifically, parsing, which at the time, seemed to be characterized as very much rooted in memorization and recitation. I have never tried sentence diagramming in Hindi, but in the process of putting sentences together, I often have to consider the different word order and sentence structure in Hindi -- for instance, if I were to say "I am eating in my house," the word order in Hindi would be: "I in my house eating am." It's difficult to remember the order of prepositions as well, especially when the sentences become more complex. Thus, it might be a good idea to attempt sentence diagramming to think of word order in Hindi as more graphical, with the lines, bubbles, extensions, etc. It seems to allow language learners a visual representation of the sentence structure, which would be helpful because (as we have studied) learning a language best occurs through a variety of mediums, such as visual representation, auditory help, and more. Although I never became very interested in sentence diagramming from previous experience in elementary/middle school, I think it might be a good idea to give it a try for learning Hindi.
There's another interesting blog about the history/background of sentence diagramming available here: A short personal and intellectual history of sentence diagramming
I also watched a really interesting TED talk about the relationship between language and humanity -- it was fascinating! I've also pasted it below.
Available here: http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_pagel_how_language_transformed_humanity.html
TED Talk by Mark Pagel: How language transformed humanity
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