Art from the Levant

Recently we joined the work of another agency to prepare an oral history archive on BME women’s contribution to life in the UK.  We invited women sharing the heritage of Turkish speaking lands to come and take part in the training and the exhibition to follow.  Very few put their names forward!  Is it because culturally women fear self expression, which then results in self censorship?  Whatever the reason, it seems to be a pity.  The ‘Ottoman Traders Guild’ website tries to present the richness of this heritage by portraying an Ottoman Turkish Trading Caravan of the mid-1500s.  According to the information provided at their website, Ottoman Traders capture traditions of music and dance and represent several nationalities in different languages.  They portray caravan characters in full costume.  Out of respect for all faiths, they do not portray any form of religion.  During the Renaissance, which they date as 1520 – 1600 for their purposes, trade was happening either through walking caravans travelling from city to city or by merchant ships.  Caravans established trade routes starting in Istanbul and travelling ‘around the known world’.  
The Guild aims to portray the lives of people who would have come from different social classes and milieus and contributed to the caravan.  Here is what they write:  “Since we portray a walking caravan, we will focus on that. Caravans were made up of people and pack animals travelling in large groups; up to 20,000 people and 300,000 animals have been recorded in a general caravan made up of merchants and pilgrims ...  Smaller caravans would join together to make larger caravans and provide safety in numbers. Occasionally heavy wagons would be used, but this slowed progress and ‘time is money’, (the expression was already in use). An enormous variety of goods were shipped across Europe, the mid-east and north Africa (the Maghreb).”

Language as a conceptual system

Continued – Unfortunately I could not continue with my blog because of a problem which seems curiously not to be culture but gender specific:  stalking.

The Legal Encyclopaedia defines ‘stalking’ as follows: Criminal activity consisting of the repeated following and harassing of another person. Stalking is a distinctive form of criminal activity composed of a series of actions that taken individually might constitute legal behaviour. For example, sending flowers, writing love notes, and waiting for someone outside her place of work are actions that, on their own, are not criminal. When these actions are coupled with an intent to instil fear or injury, however, they may constitute a pattern of behaviour that is illegal. Though anti-stalking laws are gender neutral, most stalkers are men and most victims are women. http://www.answers.com/stalking&r=67 

A colleague is involved in domestic violence related work and she asked me whether there is a word for ‘stalking’ in Turkish.  There does not seem be such a word in Turkish.

Speech Perception

When we read that ‘infants can discriminate among most of the distinctions that are found in languages around the world, even those that they do not hear in the language used around them,' we may think that language teaching and learning is not a big issue. The same text - in Oates, J. (ed.) The Foundations of Child Development (1994) - continues: ‘Babies seem to come into the world with an ability to discriminate sounds, particularly speech sounds, that is in some ways even more acute than that of adults.' This means that it is easy for them to learn any language.

Learning a new language later in life are adults as good as babies? Research suggests that as infants grow up in a particular language community, they seem to lose their ability to discriminate among most of the distinctions that are found in languages around the world. As they get older they are exposed to just a small sample of these distinctions and later in life they can recognize only those distinctions that are used in their own language community.

It may well be that learning a new language as adults requires both developing language skills and the development of metalinguistic ability. Metalinguistic ability is the ability to think about and reflect on language itself. Calling our metalinguistc ability into action involves more than our ability to produce sounds that are recognizable parts of a language.

So, to consider whether it is possible for English speakers as adults to learn Turkish, the following information from the article on ‘Turkish language' in Wikipedia (the free encyclopedia on the internet) may be helpful:

My first blog entry

This is my first blog entry.