Every Word is a Bird We Teach to Sing

The Language Teacher

Part of teaching a language is educating your students' guesses, taming them.
Grammar and memory come from playing with words, rubbing them on the fingers and on the tongue, experiencing the various meaning they give off. Textbooks are no substitute.

Words, regardless of their pedigree, make only as much sense as we choose to give them. We are the teachers, not they. To possess fluency, or verbal intelligence, is to animate words with our imagination.
Every bird is a word we teach to sing.

Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, born in 1859 in Poland, created Esperanto.
He began by randomly assigning meanings to syllables. Each word arose from the steady concatenation of syllables and letters: the longer the word, the narrower the sense. Borges, in The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, informs us that "de" referred to an element in general, "deb" = "fire", "deba" = "flame". "Zana" = "Salmon", was a qualification of "zan" = "river fish", which itself qualified "za" = "any fish"
Then he imagined reviving Latin
Finally he settle on each item of vocabulary fitting into lexical molds of the teenager's devising:
- Nouns end in -o
- Adjectives end in -a
- infinitives end in -i
In ten years, his creation went from a few lines to a language, complete with nouns, pronouns, verbs, proverbs, adjectives, synonyms, rhymes.

I would say perceptions in French are more abstract - like hovering over an experience in a Montgolfier. It's the reason why French thoughts tend to be holistic, and the texts homogenous. Whereas English perceiving is earthier, detail-led, full of quirks.
Racine wrote many plays, but he wrote them with few words: two thousand. Shakespeare's contain ten times more. In French the same word can be made to say several different things.

Oulipo

Writing within constraints: for Parac, as for Calvino, it was an opportunity to pull back from linguistic norms and so avoid stock ways of using words.

A Frenchman, Laurent Clerc, was instrumental in the creation of America's first school for the deaf, in Hartford, CT, in 1817.
Michel is a father of five: all are native signers. Their first sign, at around ten months, is "milk". He clenched his fist. "Like this. Like pulling an udder. They use it to mean "food". They point to milk, crackers, juice and use the same sign. It goes to show how early signing babies can generalize and develop concepts.
ASL grammar is spatial. For instance, leaning forward can also mean the signer is describing something that will happen; likewise, leaning back can indicate that the talk is of what is already in the past.

The Gospels were composed in Hellenistic Greek; the Septuagint, a translation of the Old Testament completed two centuries before the Christian era, was made in Hellenistic Greek.
Saint Jerome, in about 391, in a little cave in Bethlehem, where he had settled, began translating the many books of the Old Testament from the original Hebrew (rather than the Greek translation of the septuagint) into Latin.
Saint Augustine, a contemporary, thought this was a waste of time. God had first spoken in Hebrew; but He had then gone to the trouble of repeating Himself in Greek.
Each attempted to persuade the other of the respective merits of translating from the Hebrew and translating from the Greek.
Eventually, Jerome's bible superseded its competitors. For the next thousand years it was to his Vulgate translation that clergy the world over referred.
In early 16th C Germany, Martin Luther translated the bible into German. Within a generation of his death in 1546, 100k copies of his bible were being read, scribbled in, and argued over.
The bible is the world's most read book - and the most translated, with the complete text available in 554 languages, with the New Testament alone existing in a further 1,333.
Amanab is a language unlike any the Minches would have heard or read about in America. The distinction between horizontality and verticality is essential.

Humans in conversation update and modify social reality from moment to moment. Meanings are broached, negotiated, tussled over. Big things are at stake.