ARISTOTELIAN ENCODING IN RESPONSE TO "A DISCUSSION OF UNIT 4, COMMENTARY ON ACTIVITY 7"

The comment "Views shared by the dominant culture will be encoded in the word meanings. . .a word's connotation is often an expression of attitudes held by society," can be tested for its validity by measuring it against the arguments of one of the most credible linguists, Alfred Korzybski.

In his seminal Science and Sanity (1931), he challenged many of the accepted concepts of teaching (and learning) and his work had a far-reaching impact on the concept of teaching one language to a speaker of a second language. Among the concepts argued in this book (and which became the foundation for the academic field of General Semantics) he suggests these general ideas:

1) The map is not the territory; the word is not the thing;

2) Any language, since it is a "map" can be called "multiordinal;"

3) To effectively teach "language", one must be capable of teaching the "concept" of language.

Since the tests for validity of the statement in Unit 4 (Commentary on Activity 7), rely on a clear understanding of these three concepts, each will be treated briefly. (NB: All Chinese words in this report use the Yale System of Romanization created by noted Sino-Linguist Y.R. Chao. In addition, the use of quotation marks might seem random throughout this text. They are, however, used in accordance with semantics texts that suggest their use to signify that the word used is totally arbitrary).

. . .
abricated maps and their correct territories (Do their maps need updating? Tossing?). Note that at this point, there is no "right" or "wrong." At this point, the students usually share their sentences and their analyses with each other, and the gradual awareness of their own unconscious use of verbal maps. Once verbal maps have been established, the next decoding step (or breaking down societal encoding of language) is to bring the concept of E-Prime into the concept of verbal mapping. It will be recalled that in E-Prime, the use of any form of the verb "to be" is challenged. Korzybski suggested that E-Prime consists of a more descriptive and extensionally oriented derivative of language that automatically tends to bring the user back to the level of first person experience. For example, if one sees a man, who also has about him the smell of whisky, and who is staggering down the street and then collapsing, one might state "He is drunk." Using E-Prime, the observation would be restated "That man acts drunk," or "That man looks drunk." Note that in both of these E-Prime statements, there is a closer correlation between the use of language and an observation of the situation. What has been eliminated from the statement
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
Dictionary OED, Extensionality ESL, Note E-Prime, Law Identity, Mermaids Fabulous, YR Chao, E-Prime English, Reality Whorf, Tossing Note, Ten Lau, bu shr, verbal maps, english language, bus red, shr shut, map territory, red bus, teacher student, bus = red, jeige shr, red color, red bus =, shr seven ba, teacher student yi, bus red bus,
Approximate Word count = 3349
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)