Michael- A Little Bit of LEXology

A Little Bit of LEXology

One of the projects I have been working on a lot recently is assisting with the translation of the Yo Sakakibara's book into English (the working English title is Sing the Sounds, Children). Pretty much I serve as a native-English, university-educated reader who helps suggest the proper words, with proper connotations based on the LEX philosophy. The translator does an amazing job, but when there are such complex ideas written in a traditional Japanese matter (with added poetic or vague style), it can be hard to know exactly what the philosophy is. We work to make it applicaple to the potential U.S. reader.

I also 'attempted' to assist the chairman, Kenshi Suzuki, with a speech at one of our older youth workshops. I say attempted because I don't think I was really much help. His voice was weak that day and we had many international guests so he wanted to whisper to me what he wanted to say and I would use my voice to tell the workshop. It was quite hard!

Anyways, I have been swarming in LEXology recently. I continue to be amazed by and in agreement with what I have encountered. One of the things I got really excited about was the Flower Model of language acquisition from Chapter 7. Really simplified, there is a universial basic structure (UBS) to all language. Multilingual people are able to embrace this structure (the circle in the middle) and keep pedals for the differences that exist between languages (pronuncation, grammar). The more languages, the more reinforcement for the UBS and the better the language ability. Traditional foreign language focuses too much on the differences and not enough on the similarities! But that's just the tip of the iceberg! You'll just have to read to find out all the rest...

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