An Experiment with Memory

Language learning both in children learning their native tongue and in adults learning foreign languages quite clearly happens to a large extent in the unconscious mind. But - paradoxically - most strategies for language learning that are currently extant seek to utilize the resources of the conscious mind as the theatre of intellectual activity. I dont want to criticize existing methods as much as explore other options. What can we discern of the workings of the unconscious mind as we set out to tackle a new foreign language? Children Learning their Native Language

Children absorb their own language unconsciously using imitation and experiment. The process clearly calls on both conscious and unconscious spheres, as one aspect of it is a triggering of the construction of word and phrase forms, based on experiments with what has been heard and retained. There is an analogy with adult language learning in that slightly flawed versions of language may occur, as the result of the derivation of rules which ultimately do not coincide with the paradigm; as is later discovered. Adult Learners of a Foreign Language There must be a spectrum of difference in language learning abilities related to the biological efficiency of the brain of the learner. It is wellknown that languages are best absorbed young, when the brain is more flexible; but with ageing is there simply a decrease in agility, or does a more rich and varied picture emerge, within which the unconscious workings of the mind are able to play a more significant part? Four Levels of Unconscious Memory As a starting hypothesis, let us sketch some different levels of operation of unconscious memory. Our findings will be radically transformed later. In seeking differing levels of phenomenological difference it seems reasonable to posit a sliding-scale upon which to map the varying degrees of contribution and co-operation of the conscious mind. The closer to the surface of the mind memory events occur the more prevalent and predictable seems that portion of the input which comes from the conscious sphere. Conversely, the deepest memories seemingly entirely unconscious in origin apparently arise autonomously, with no obvious triggering from above. Between these two extremes must lay a vast hinterland of intermediate scenarios.
LEVEL ONE: WORDS IN THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE RECENTLY HEARD

Im making the assumption that a true experiment with memory must involve an individual on a journey of discovery, and showcase a person actively engaged in focusing on innovative ways of retaining an alien tongue. The first level of mind that most accessible to scrutiny seems cluttered with the bric-a-brac of conversations in the foreign tongue which one has recently had, or odd words in it half-remembered, all mixed up and floating somewhere on the margins of memory. Its axiomatic that none of this can be sufficiently clearly recalled to the extent that it comes to the surface of the mind in an identifiable lexical form: its more like Sherlock Holmess lumber room. Should such clarity occur, however, we would be dealing with:
LEVEL TWO: WORDS CLUSTERING IN MEMORY, APPARENTLY ARISING FROM IDENTIFIABLE STIMULI

The second level down seems to consist of words and phrases of apparently arbitrary origin, clustering around a single maybe perceivable phonic stimulus. These elements are like guests who check into a hotel room for a full week. They seem to remain obstinately in the mind for a few days, until replaced by something else. Moreover, their number seems limited. In the present state of my memory, I can perceive just now about four such words. Unlike the material at the first level, the contents are clear and may be inspected. Moreover, no effort seems to be required to locate them. They seem to have attached themselves to my mind as burrs attach themselves to ones clothes as one walks through a summer field. For example, at present, at this level, I can perceive one Georgian word, phartoke meaning area one Japanese word futats meaning two; and one Russian word vtaroya second (feminine form). I discern that I acquired these words in 2011, 1980, and 2010, respectively; the last in the course of study, the other two in real=life situations. And its obvious that what triggered their remembrance was a distinct linguistic event which I must have experienced recently, involving a word in Georgian beginning with f or v or ph . Again.

its axiomatic that Ive no idea what the trigger was: Im left just with that which came to the surface of the unconscious mind. And to extend the hypothesis and strengthen it slightly, I find that in the course of reflecting upon this, a fourth word emerges at Level Two, although maybe not quite accurately: vetrui . Its a Georgian word meaning, I will say. v is of course phonetically very close to f. But as for its correctness both as remembered here and transcribed, I cannot vouch. I just know that this is roughly what one says if one wishes to say that one will tell someone something later. I know also that it is so treacherously close to the Georgian form for I said and that until the two are distinctly recognized, the use of either cannot be depended upon absolutely. My electrician said to me vetrui last week, about five days ago, referring to when he could supply me with a new junction-box. So this was a word acquired in 2012. Whats exciting is both the richness of the reaction of the unconscious mind to a hidden stimulus; and the bizarreness of the response. Its a bit like visiting the Delphic Oracle, or speaking to the fairground avatar in the film Big. My hope is that a daily indwelling in the whole area of ones unconscious memory may lead to synaptic changes, clarifications, restructurings, and the beginnings of the development of more helpful responses with greater learning potential. At this second level in my case also resides the music I last heard. My mind blocks out all superficial musics encountered but retains with great vividness anything classical and of artistic value. For this reason, in spite of my love of it, I have to make efforts to isolate myself as far as possible from the hearing of any classical music, as this will interfere with the pristine workings of the unconscious mind. Such a procedure, in my view, is a sine qua non of being able to compose any new and original music, inasmuch as its source if it is to be authentic must always be profoundly unconscious. Just now I hear a small Mendelssohn-like phrase in F Major played by a string quintet (during the school fte) in a film which I have been studying with some attention with my class, Mike Figgis The Browning

Version. An interesting aspect of this second level of unconscious memory is that gentle, almost unconscious, meditation on what is currently there seems capable of triggering the crystallization of further, related, material. For example, by just this small depression of the clutch I can segue into another great moment from the same film: a setting of the hymn, Praise My Soul, The King of Heaven enriched with Peter Newson-Smiths splendid and original descant and soaring harmonizations. But I hear it in F the key of the string quintet fragment whereas I am fairly certain that in the film it was in B flat. That was to relate it to the G Minor of the opening sequences music, and presumably to allow the boy trebles sufficient altitude for the descant. This tells us two interesting things: firstly that the unconscious mind seeks to smooth out differences, and to establish harmonic links between the objects it stores; and secondly, that it has modes of operation which are watertight and not pervious to the influence of conscious knowledge: that it operates, indeed, entirely independently of it. While writing this, indeed, memories of Schuberts Octet also in F Major have also clustered briefly in my mind.
LEVEL THREE: THE PLAYGROUND OF UNCONSCIOUSLY-TRIGGERED MATERIALS

Level Three ought to be the great Ultima Thule of the mind: the area where unconscious memory deposits its riches when rightly stimulated. This is an area with which in the right frame of mind one ought to be able to work.
LEVEL FOUR: THE TERRITORY OF DEJA-VU

At this very deep level originate perhaps the insights of experiences of dja-vu and half-remembered figures and images from dreams and visions. This area may be likened to the radar screen of a remote provincial airport: it is usually blank. However it was this area that the Renaissance art of memory sought to stimulate by structured exercises of focused recollection. It always remains open to us to repeat the experiment

Who knows whether, if the rest of the unconscious mind is primed with sufficient care and attention, numinous and valuable material will not appear here as well? It is the Double Helix area; George Herberts Land of spices, something understood.

2: An Alien Tongue Its perhaps conventional wisdom that in acquiring a new language, one is to some extent hampered by the modes and conventions of ones native one. It follows that languages which most closely resemble ones own ought to be the easiest to learn. Georgian and English higher-level words On a structural level, Georgian closely resembles English as it has evolved with its rich admixture of Greek, Latin and French elements. One can predict that a higher-level abstract word such as performance can be reliably decoded from similar cognate constituent parts in the word as it appears in Georgian. And so it turns out. We have, in English, a prepositional head sequence per, a verbal fragment form- and a noun-creating adjectival suffix -ance. The Georgian word is shesruleba with each component exactly mirroring that of the English word: sruli is the verbal part (it means complete); she- corresponds to per; and -eba equates to -ance. In many a Georgian word, she- means from out to in (shedi , for example, is said when inviting people to step from the kerb into a minibus) so for the Georgian mind a performance is something which is has been made complete by some outward agency towards some inner psychological destination.

And it is clear from this example that when a sufficient sample has been assembled, a Georgian student should sail through numerous similar abstract English words of European origin; and that an English student of Georgian should likewise make easy progress through many similarly-placed Georgian words. Small allowances for different levels of semantic overlap will have to be made: shemtkhveva, for example, means incident she- apparently covering both Latin per- across and in-, into; with mtkhv- being a root (so far as I can see) related to cause/make happen ; with -evajust being functionally similar to eba : a noun-creating adjectival suffix, or (less explicitly) abstractive element. Georgian and English lower-level words At a lower level a reverse (even a nightmare!) scenario obtains. Georgian is a concise, inflected language like Latin or Greek. It is of similar antiquity to them, but unlike them has evolved very little since its halcyon days. It therefore has few of the small buildingblock words of English (a in up the at on beside, for example) or (where it has them) buries them in suffixes and infixes within larger blocks of linguistic matter. So while, for a Georgian, the prime difficulty is this huge arbitrary scattering of such little words throughout English all looking similar, all infuriatingly concise, all very precisely nuanced and indispensable for the decoding of even very simple English for the English learner of Georgian, the problem is quite the opposite: important semantic data, essential for the understanding of quite simple phrases, in which concepts of direction and agency are involved, seem to lie buried in a seamless web of individual spoken words. damirekavs, for example means, ring me; daurekavs, I will ring you. The mi and the u are astonishingly hidden (for higher level markers) in an ostensibly modern language. French, by contrast, with its appelle-moi and je tappellerai is crystal clear indicating quite explicitly, via its sonic patterning (the strong m and

t) to whom the telephoning responsibility devolves. Conversational Georgian has another problem in that it rushes by so fast that there is little time even to pick out the existence of the markers in heard speech, far less to situate them contextually in the words into which they are interfixed. A Proposed Solution Higher-level words will, obviously, come out in the wash. But because the lower-level (and conceptually simpler) parts of language which contain important data for elementary communication are embedded too deeply for on-the-hoof decoding, a prophylactic strategy must here be adopted (the word is Greek, , and means, to guard or prevent beforehand). We will have to code all the words we encounter; and place them in a database from which they can be recalled in harmonious groups. We will need a sample of something like the first 3000 words in each language. And we will have to work on both English and Georgian simultaneously.

3:

Learning Strategies

GLOBAL STRATEGIES IN LANGUAGE-LEARNING If it is admitted that its a good strategy to separate out top-down and bottom-up strategies in language-learning, what is the battingorder for their deployment? My whole meditation on this issue proceeds from a critique of the premise that (in general) learners are assumed to be able to apply top-down strategies premier abord and yet get results.

The lack of results being generally overlooked, its perhaps time to focus on alternative game plans. As a counsel of perfection, I would suggest that the ideal might be to marshal both kinds of approach, initially in succession; but ultimately in tandem: from the lower-level view to the higher. HAECITTAS (thisness) The whole emphasis in a bottom-up approach is to confront the learner with what Duns Scotus would have called the haecittas of the material. Thats to say, to draw attention if only implicity to what makes the familiar interesting. There are for example six possible visual learning categories for the small letters of West European languages: the humpy letters m n u h; the circle-based letters a b d e g o q p; the dotted letters i j; the stiffly-marching or straight-stroked letters x v w z k (l y) these in turn may be made from one, two or three strokes and finally the feminine or curly letters c r s ; and the stubby letters t f. This is essentially a child-like view. I adopted a similar view when first confronted with the Georgian script: (1) aios (2) bgxnmZzT (3) dlRr (4) kpvfc (5) ke (6) uj (7) Wq (8) tJh (9) Sw These represent (1) a i o s; (2) b g z kh n m dz z t (light); (3) d l gh r; (4) k (light) p v f ts (light); (5) k (light) e; (6) u j; (7) ch (strong) k (strong); (8) t (strong) dzj h; (9) ts (strong) ch (light also known as ts) From such a humble, low-level view, based on self-evident visual cues, one can proceed to other classifications drawing on higher-level knowledge and deploying preliminary topdown analyses; and get to know the Georgian letters from a

variety of other points of view; just as one may classify and view ones friends from many different points of view and might draw for them (if one should so wish) a variety of valid Venn diagrams. 4: Defining the Sample - English The word samples needed for my experiment in linguistic memory will be quite different for the Georgian and English wings of the diptych. But they share an ideal size: around 3000 words. Drawing on existing corpora, we see that Dolch has a list of 220 words from childrens story books in English in 1930s America (along with 95 nouns, making 315 words) that MacMillans English World textbooks up to a low intermediate level can usefully provide about 300 words more; that worldenglish.org has a list of the 100 most frequent verbs; and that finally, the words of the revised 2284word General Service List can be added, giving a total of ca. 3050 unique words. And into my (what turns out to be) 3054word list I have also input the 554 words my students have mastered while engaged on basic-level material Enchanted Learnings website. The whole issue facing the learner (and indeed the teacher) is that it is as hard for the Georgian student to grasp English words as it is for an English native speaker to get the hang of many Georgian words. Neither postponing indefinitely the idea of communicating in full sentences, nor prematurely fasttracking it rather, just temporarily circumventing it I aim here to provide materials (and a means for their analysis) at a more microcosmic level which in time should yield a rich harvest of memory-friendly data, acquaintance with which can be made bottom-up. There is a dialectical relationship between top-down and bottom-up views; and one needs a good instinct as to when

to apply each. Seamus Heaneys lying down in the word hoard strengthens unconscious memory, making it more ready to play its part in the fully orchestrated score to which a language going at full tilt may be likened. I chose six parameters for the coding of each word, as follows. The letters quoted refers to the columns on my spreadsheet beginning at (B) because (A) is the column for the word itself. In my analysis, the spreadsheet was designed to morphologically situate a given word; the Snip-Its chart to account for it semantically. (B) gives the number of syllables. I differ here from a traditional count in that in fact there are half-syllables in many English words, so that it is possible to have a word like able for example which are one-and-a half syllables long: the shorter, second, part being counted as a halfsyllable. On my chart I record such an occurrence as 15 rather than 1.5 as the latter convention is easier to understand quickly. A preceding star denotes that I am disregarding a frequently occurring word-ending in my count. The number of elements in a word follows (C). This is partly related to the philological components of a word and partly to its intrinsic structure when one learns it. acorn gets a rating of 2; able 1; ability 2; absence 3. Words are coded for the next parameter (D), the number of letters. Many early learning words: cat, sat, mat and so on, are three-letter words, for example. Next (E), the vowels in the word are coded according to the 18 basic vowel sounds in English (including diphthongs) as given in the standard IPA list. Where a figure over nine is involved, I code the occurrences separated by a decimal point; under ten, I run them together (ability comes out as 377 and able 15.5, for example). Again, hidden y sounds, as in accuse are explicitly notated [ i.e. 3.y.12] ; and hidden half-sounded or disputed vowels which may be considered

present in certain English words are given, where they occur, in brackets [ accord: 3.10.(11)] . The type of pattern of occurrence of vowels and consonants in the word comes next (F). We have four cases: (1) words with no unusual collaborations or noncollaborations between vowels/consonants [e.g. bargain] (2) words with heard consonantal clusters [e.g. funny] ; (3)words with phantom, hidden or noncollaborating consonants functioning, perhaps, as pseudo half-vowels [e.g. right, construed as rai - - t or angel, construed a ai - n - jel ]; (4) words constituted in part by what I jokingly call unhelpful neighbours (tsudi mesobeli) : where there is an alliance between the final and ante-penultimate letters of a word; with a jump the intervening penultimate letter (the unhelpful neighbour) upon which or whom the word then ends; having been preceded, of course, by whatever comes before the ante-penultimate letter, and which pushes the off the edge of swimming bath wall and into motion, so to speak. Class 3 words in this list are particularly interesting: their analysis may reveal new ways of understanding how English spelling works. angel for example can be defined as a word whose sleeping consonant g is read twice: once in the course of pronouncing the first part, ai - : for ang; then jel : for gel. Where our corpus reveals other words like this, we will discover much of great interest. Class 4 words are frequently of letter-length 4 and many easy for students to learn in view such word-sets inherent logics: examples would be face, make, gate; and more sophisticated ones, snake, place. (F) is grammatical type I try to innovate as much as possible in my categories here and (G), Semantic Field were I seek broadly anthropological categories for words and their concepts. Its a classic bottom-up approach: the map enlarges its scope as my coding

analysis proceeds. I am using the hierarchical database Snip-Its as an initial matrix for this material. We see the evolving chart of hierarchical dependencies on the left, and on the main screen, the entry for the part of the program which is currently being accessed: cf the screenshot, Figure 1, below, where we see accident coded 5.1. None of this is intended to be exhaustive, because once coded, sorted and grouped, words will be amenable to further secondary and tertiary analyses, which may further/completely change our imaginative/mnemonical landscape.

Figure 1: Snip-Its: The matrix for (G) Semantic Field/ anthropological categories. We see the first seven categories

and their sub-categories emerging from an analysis of around 25 words

5: Zenos Paradox It is well known that considered mathematically the speeding hare will never catch the tardy tortoise. The same can be said of memory when it is given an inequitable load. It rebels against completely finishing what it knows is essentially a sub-set of something else; and hence not the main task. If that imaginative drive is allowed to go to sleep as a result of being sidetracked for too long by something on the way, no amount of frantic chasing will suffice to revive it. In this spirit, after coding 60 or so of my 3000 words (working, of course bottom-up) Im keen to change the focus. The exact circumstances of the completing of the coding itself becomes a parameter in the experiment. So its essential to take a top-down view now; and to work in this way on Georgian. Zenos Paradox, however, also offers us an imaginative model for the mature workings of memory when a language is more nearly mastered than is currently the case with my Georgian. There is the dichotomy of the patient accretion of bottom-up elements versus those imaginative swoops of the mind when it successfully finds a missing piece of the jigsaw. Second, it is a true metaphor of the always incomplete language-learning process; whereas language learning methods generally proceed quite differently: from the erroneous premise that a student will actually complete and then successfully retain everything, if not now, certainly very soon. Finally, if it is looked upon a little differently, Zenos Paradox may also take

on an added meaning. Seen as a race from A to B, the position of the tortoise looks hopeless; but if we also imagine it also to be, simultaneously, a race from B to A, things are rather different. The tortoise knows the route well, and has, generally speaking, already visited more of it than the hare. It can easily reverse its direction of travel and go back in the direction of B to A; whereas the hare must overshoot, and additionally gear himself up for a second dash back the way he came, which will take time, and (above all) fruitlessly expend further energy. However, we shall now play devils advocate and take on the role of the hare, building up a hypothetical model of how Georgian may work, not worrying yet about the inches of the race which we have not yet covered, or maybe will never visit. And to do that we will need to look at a jigsaw text about Van Goghs Sunflowers. 6: Sunflowers 1

The book in front of me, about art (Masters of Art Tbilisi [Palitra L Publishing Ltd, 2011] ) which comprises six jigsaws, has been published in two identical editions, one English, one Georgian. So we should not go too far astray in construing the meaning from the English and thus and attempt to recall/discover how Georgian operates. Georgian is said to be unrelated to Indo-European languages; but thats something I occasionally question. English painter for example surely has something in common with Georgian phermtzeri Sanskrit having pingah, reddidsh and pimsati, he cuts/carves/adorns; while the words for to write in both Russian( fpeesaht) and Lithuanian (piesiu) also beginning with p.

Our text begins: Vinsent Van Gogi Hollandeli Phermtzeri da Graphikuli ; and then an opening paragraph: During different periods of his life, Van Gogh worked as an art trade broker, teacher and clergyman: which in Georgian is: skhva-da-skhva dros of other-and-other time Van Gogi iqo Van Gogh was samkhatvro savaCHro phermis komisioneli a painting-merchant-firms commis mastsavlebeli da modzvoveli teacher and priest. Second sentence: ris shemdegats presumably, after which things- ra meaning what and shemdeg next; with ats as a kind of adverbial formant in postposition 27 tslisam at the age of 27 gadatsqvita khatva sheestsavla he decided to paint to learn/take up the study of (?) Just as I did for English, I have decided to code the new Georgian words. For their consonant patterns which strike me as their most salient feature I have constructed a simple table (Figure 2- one and two vowel word)

A word such as ena language an e and then an a - would get a coding of 11. The tables for 3 and 4 syllable words would naturally be more extensive, giving a theoretical total of (5+625=630) options for a Georgian word of up to 4 syllables: Now to cater for all possibilities would make for a very unwieldy table, even if we restricted ourselves to four vowel words as a maximum. The twentyfive combinations which have accrued for each of a,e,i,o,and u above (nos 6-30) would each need 25 entries taking us to 155 entries before we even came onto considering fourvowel words, which are really the norm in Georgian. So I thought of a short-cut: jump directly to the four-vowel words but limit the table to 155 entries to be read in a particular way, viz: for four-vowel words, except those with an initial a (whose series is complete) only those where for the possibilities (w,x,y,z,) x = y do we read all off all 4 vowels: for the rest we must be content with a coding based on the first 3 of the 4 vowels, always reading from the second column: a procedure sufficing for 3-vowel words as well. Where there is a lacuna (for example, if we code sheidsleba (e-i-e-a) meaning maybe proceed as follows: from the second column as starting point (viz. at Entry 81) jump over an unfruitful column; and where necessary jump up for the entry to read from; thus sheidsleba is coded 78 - with just 2 of its 4 vowels figuring. To emphasize this flexible approach, I have coded three and four vowel words not from 31 but from 51, leaving a gap of 20, which may in itself act as a mnemonic division of some perspicuity (Figure 3):

Figures 3/4 Four- and Three- Vowel Georgian Words Our words samkhatvro and savaCHro would get a coding of 54; modzoveli 168; gadatsqitva 61; khatva 6; and sheestsvla 81 Theres not much point in coding loan words, or easy words which I already know and which the reader may infer: this study is meant to document a learning curve in action. The journey of a thousand miles which starts under my feet should be just that: Zenos tortoise has already left his starting blocks. Whats of great interest are the characteristic roots of Georgian which - using Snip-Its - we can lay out as an

anthropological schema of the language, much as we did in our Semantic Field category for the first 3000 English words. And with the same program we can build an ordered, bottom-up chart of these encountered roots (see Figures 5, 6b, 7 below. )

Figure 5: Snip-Its Georgian roots organized by initial consonant

So far, three important roots have presented themselves: khat- paint; tsqv- begin and stsav learn. Weve also seen stsav- in mastsavlebeli*, while mostavle is pupil: there is some crossover, in Georgian as in German, between the concepts of studying and learning.*teacher

Vowel patterns in Georgian have an advantage over those of English: there are only 5 not 20 vowel possibilities (diphthongs do present themselves from time to time but seem generally capable of being split) The learning challenge is to pin down the territory with the vowel coding; while stimulating the remembrance of the complex consonant clusters separately, using our table focusing on root forms. The combination should prove ideal for unconscious memory.

7 :

Sunflowers (2)

Georgian has a prefix of fixity, sa- which we saw in savaCHro meaning literally, I think, merchant house (for art works); and one of personality m- , which we see in mastavlebeli and mostavle. So we can discover another root, vaCH- trade which is there in vaCHari, merchant. Im now making the educated guess that, as in Arabic, its the consonants which are important in the roots of words; and thus classifying this as vch-. Vinsents mteli tskhovlebis : all Vincents life [lit: Vincents all life] ganmavlobashi umtrosi zma Teo ekhmareboda (?) younger brother Theo helped tavis rchenistvis autsilebel tankhas ugzavnida.da saCHiro rchevebs adzlevda.

rchena means to maintain; autsilebeli means indispensible (Ive heard it spoken a little; the other day my Head Mistress said that having a textbook was autsilebeli); tankhleba means to accompany; saCHiro necessary. rchevebs is from rcheva, counsel. dzleva means give, so adzleva means he gave. Thus, the second part of the sentence means, and gave necessary counsel. Ugzvanida is at first obscure, but gza means way, and we are getting closer. But at this point I discover that tankha means a sum of money; and has nothing to do with tankhleba , to accompany. Ekhmareboda clearly means helped ; the dictionary gives dakhmareba and I have used it myself (indirectly, via a translation) when urging the students at my school to help each other. The problem lies with ganmavlobashi. However, shi is a postpositional infix, meaning in ; and gan- a frequent suffix with an apparently strengthening (although also on occasion negating and dividing off) adjectival function. But now I discover that movale means a debtor and movaleoba means to owe; so I guess ganmavlobashi may mean in his debts so that the sense is: All Vincents life in (his) debts (his) younger brother Theo helped. Im assuming mvl- is a root meaning owe. The text thus continues [and] for his maintenance, essential sums sent along.

When the idea of sending along came to me, I was able to factor in way gza : and sure enough, the dictionary gives two words for send gagzavna and gadagvana both incorporating gza. u it now comes to me is a dative, to him , a third person personal enclitic pronoun. Therefore, ugzanida means sent to him. Finally I remember that Georgian, which has no infinitive, can also give a participle sense to verbs like ugzavnida : so jettisoning our temporarily-borrowed and we can have sending along, for his maintenance, essential sums. The full text reads: All Vincents life his younger brother Theo helped him with his debts, sending along essential sums and giving necessary advice. The book has: During his entire life Van Goghs younger brother Theo supported him and offered advice. * Roughly a year later I discovered that my inference a couple of paragraphs above about ganmavlobashi was flawed: ganmavlobashi simply means during, and qualifies a preceding expression of time. I might have guessed that from the absence of a reference to debts in the books translation.

8: After the Theft of Sunflowers

Liszt wrote a wonderful piece of piano music entitled, Aprs une lecture de Dante; and indeed I felt exultant after decoding the above piece of Georgian; with nothing but a 15,000 word Georgian-Italian Dictionary (Bukhnikashvilis: 2011) and a similar English-Georgian one (Sisauris online one in an offprint; maybe 10,00 words) as well as the text itself, of course. I was told when at school that making backwards inferences by looking up likely words from ones own language was a good tactic to employ; and so it turned out. Ill wait for the strange dischords of Georgian in my head to die down and reflect meanwhile on John Cassidys wonderful lines: I left him late, almost at nightfall My head was turning with the stimulus of talk. Any philologist would have envied me; To be received by Jespersen, and shown such courtesy. He walked me to the station. And shook hands. We did not meet again. I found that my passive memory for Georgian was immediately strengthened. I went out and bought oranges at a market stall: simple enough, but the word phortokali came out quicker than the time it would have taken to remember it: there was no conscious reflection about the situation on my part. That's the first time this has happened with Georgian; although on my own I recall that after a prolonged water cut, when I heard a gushing sound at last

in the pipes, I declared (to no-one in particular) tsqali modis ('the water has come back'). * The Snip-Its chart, giving the material encountered to date, looks compact and helpful. It is collated (behind the scenes) with the Excel spreadsheet (above) with the same information. Below: Figures 6b (showing the first five or six entries, open at Space 42 [o-e-i modzveli - tskhovlebis, priest; life] and Figure 7 (with all the words of the text to date included).

Figure 6b: modzveli tskhovlebis [o-e-i-]

Figure 7 : Chart showing the first Georgian vowel patterns encountered in the Van Gogh text. Open at Space 42: modzoveli (priest) tskhovlebis (life dat.) Theres no way of making the entries obey any numeric order; which suits the random fashion with which we encounter language.

9:

Let Nothing Affright Thee

I had hoped in my youthful studies of medieval illuminated manuscripts to find some golden mean of intellectual harmony. According to this ideal, Saint Teresas words would have been true for me. However I realize now that harmony must be brought into the fabric of our studies by ourselves, and by the approaches we take to them. For although Isaiahs images of an arrow cleaving the air, and sharpened swords vanquishing intellectual confusion, remain appealing, we live in a quantum universe, where the experimenter affects the experiment. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the study of languages. I have a textbook of Georgian by no means a long book which has about forty learning points per page; the book has more than 200 pages. No-one could master 8,000 learning points; so I must conclude that the book in practice never fulfills its overt aim. Quantum effects will result: people will give up the book at various stages, or will take from it just this or that (which they will also soon forget, if my overall premise is correct). Im more than happy, therefore, to pursue my experiment with memory even when its consequences may seem incomplete and bizarre. Indeed, Im coming to believe that incompleteness and sudden unexpected jumps are, paradoxically, tokens of progress, rather than of confusion.

* After 84 entries of my database of some common English words I sensed it was time to proceed to some preliminary analysis. The study of Georgian and of English had merged into one; and I sensed that the results of now applying a top-

down view to a sample which had been created bottom-up might be very fruitful. The concept of the syllable is a typical dinosaur idea which linguists have taken over uncritically from the days when English and indeed all languages were analyzed as if they were Latin. In Latin verse, clearly, a syllable-count is necessary for the metre; and has, naturally, a symbiotic relationship with it. In imitation, a great deal of English poetry was subsequently written in a similar (that is to say, classical) manner, with scansion and vowel-length determining the finished result; but that is irrelevant to the understanding of English as a living language by modern foreign students. I scored English words beginning with a 5, 10, 14, 15, 20, *20, 25, 30 or 35 according to perceived syllable phenomenology - syllablicity - with typical examples : a all alligator alike admire ambitious address afternoon acrobat, altogether. Principles and Exceptions 5 represents a half-syllable and 35, three-and-a-half syllables; while *20 as in ambitious was used for words which ended in a typical ex-Latin termination the idea being to direct attention there, as its a detail having richer long-term mnemonic potential, and there are lots of words with such endings. 14 was used for two words nearly one-and-a-half syllables long: alike and alive. These are already Class 3 words (see above) with unhelpful neighbours in their endings ( a+i: produced by a and i invaded by k and v ). My idea was to reinforce this perception, drawing attention away from syllablicity in favour of the words Class 3 qualities. However, on reflection I have scored these two words 15 and included them. amaze might have been

coded as a Class 3 word (it has the unhelpful neighbour phenomenon) but since it is marginally longer than the alike and alive it scores 15 and is also here in our tables for the purposes of this chapter. The resulting sample of around 70 words which may be sorted in respect of increasing syllablicity (Figure 8a):

Figure 8a: Sorting English words by increasing Syllablicity

Next (Figure 8b) I apply a sort by sonic feel and/or stress pattern using (1) the subjective categories short flat compact breathed mid-breathe 2-minim (i.e. equal weight) and train

rhythm (i.e. a regular pattern of four short accents) for various sonic feel categories; and (2) the quasi-notational symbolisms 1z and aB to denote stress patterns: here lowercase z is obviously subservient to numeral 1 and the lowercase a subservient to upper-case B (denoting thereby that words with stress on the first part or second part are respectively indicated). While words with immediate stress often stop short, words with stress second always have a halo of continuance to them, which I have indicated thus aB- and aB-(). Examples would be adult and although, respectively although I also have 1z() and 1z-() for absence and absolute (contrast with agent, 1z) : which are words with stress first which do have some sense of continuance and do not stop short. When the different categories are labeled (A to M) we get what would make a very fine English language classroom chant:

Our fourteen categories, A to M may be described as follows, under four main headings: 1 A-C - QUAVER-crochet stress group A - stress on first part, quaver CROCHET, stops short, example actress B - stress on first part, quaver CROCHET, does not stop short, example absence C -stress on first part, quaver CROCHET, does not stop short but has 'tail', example absolute 2 D-E - crochet-QUAVER stress group D - stress on second part, crochet QUAVER, has (obligatory) continuation, example again E - stress on second part, crochet QUAVER, has (obligatory) continuation; but also 'tail', example advantage F - triadic stress with central climax, crochet QUAVER crochet, example amazing 3 G-K - words coded by 'feel' rather than stress; within a general analysis of 'syllablicity': G - breathed - example ache H - compact (i.e. may seem to have a plurality of components but is pronounced so fas*t that the general effect is one of the word being speeded up and compacted) - example albatross I - flat words - very soon over example add J - mid-breathe words - significant softening - example age K -short words - like flat words but in territory more e than strictly consonantal example all 4 L and M : even and regular stresses

L - quadripartite but regular/equally stressed, 'train rhythm', example altogether M - bipartite but of equal stress in each part, example airplane

* That is all very well Kenneth Clark might have said but fine words butter no parsnips. Would you more readily believe a statement by the architect or the finished building? In our context, the question is: would one more readily believe the results of such a chant when practised by a group of foreign language students; or the pedagogues statement of intent? Its obvious this research will go on long enough for me to report back on the efficacy of such a chant in stimulating the students long-term, passive, unconscious memory although my proof will clearly have to be in terms of unexpected quantum effects that such drilling accidentally inspires. From my perspective, however, its more important to avoid a classical temptation, which was so wonderfully depicted almost 1300 years ago in the Book of Kells:

Figure 9: Temptation of Christ on the Roof of the Temple, Book of Kells

With about 3.5% of our sample coded, its easy to get carried away and imagine the learning potential of all the chants which could be developed from our words. With 13 other parameters for each letter, thats around three hundred (25x13=325) pedagogic possibilities, on the basis of one spreadsheet alone assuming it gets finished. But as quantum physicists have recently said in a slightly different context, you cannot go back and measure the detail of the experiment you have just had, without abolishing the existence of that experiment itself.

No to think like that is to think with the old physics. Its to fall into the trap of Kraveishvili and Nakutshrishvilis Teach Yourself Georgian which no-one will ever finish because (like most language-learning books) it ignores three important things: the memory of the user, quantum effects, and the effect that those same quantum effects will have on learning and memory itself. Clearly there are a multitude of paths which will be taken by both myself as experimenter and by those upon whom I may try out the experiment; and each stage on each path will trigger its own set of unique reactions. Its to those that we must remain faithful: its within that matrix that my experiment with memory must to bear its richest fruit, stimulating not just memory, but maybe the creativity of the brain tout court. *

Figure 10: Field of Sunflowers near Bolnisi, Georgia

Vinsent van gogis nakhati larnazi tortmeti mze-sumzirit inakheba akhal pinakotekashi (miunkheshi, germania) we read. Vincent van Goghs painting Vase with Twelve Sunflowers is exhibited at the Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany. nakhati must mean painting: the na seemingly a suffix of instantiaton; the khat the root for paint and the i ending signifying to us that here is a noun. In Georgian counting, 1,2,3 are erti ori sami ; for the teen numbers meti is added and where the number begins with a vowel, a t is prefixed: tortmeti. mze means sun, so its easy to deduce mzesumzir- as sunflower (the dictionary tells us that the word is mzesumzira the form here is in the instrumental case so that the way Georgian has it is 12-sunflowered vase painting.

* Meanwhile a further sort of our English sample above reveals that English like Chinese is actually a tonal language. All words which do not have a strong initial stress should be pronounced piano; those with strong stress first, forte. It will be interesting to see if that rule-ofthumb holds true with a much larger sample (Figure 11).

10: The lesson with Sunflowers

The third meeting of the Bolnisi Summer School, 2012, gave me an opportunity to try out a small experiment in which I could stimulate the students imagination and unconscious memory to the maximum, building on recent researches and material used.

The lesson as planned and delivered contained a number of agreeable strands, designed to complement each other and to build into the mix a maximum of benevolent contrast.

This is feature of great works of art. Munchs The Scream has an opulent tangerine sunset vying with an ultramarine fjord, contrasting with the severe diagonals of the bridge and the wavy lines of the evening sky, themselves in geometrical opposition.

The Mona Lisa plays off mystery and light in the background landscape against mystery and darkness in the figure. The one could not be more alluring: its an imaginary paradise we wish to visit. The other pushes us away: she is there with all her enigma, her reserve: she does not welcome our intrusion.

The use of space in Breughel the Elders Fall of Icarus privileges sea and sky against the earth, and the humble ploughman against the mythical hero; the continuance of everyday life against a cosmic catastrophe which goes unnoticed. (Figures 12-14.)

In a lesson, then, we need the intellectual aspects played off against the lightest play; the severe against the charming; the theoretical against the intuitive; the simple against the complex. As well as this we need an

overarching theme. Munch has anguish; Leonardo, mystery; Breughel, the impersonality of fate. I used Van Goghs Sunflowers: radiance, a child-like simplicity of vision, joy. (Figure 15.)

Figure 12: Edvard Munch The Scream

Figure 13: Leonardo da Vinci The Mona Lisa

Figure 14: Pieter Breughel The Elder The Fall of Icarus

Figure 15: Vincent Van Gogh Sunflowers

My first priority was to place sunflowers in all the rooms to be used and to display themed posters as well as a couple of reproductions of the famous painting in the school. There was also a publicity poster in the local bakers (Figure 16).

Figure 16 mzasumgirit gakvetili poster

Next, it was natural to complement art with musicI wanted a little gentle music in the background. So I chose English romantic music of the early twentieth century Baxs Tintagel and Waltons Violin Concerto particular favourites of mine, which in Georgia (a country so starved of music in spite of having influenced Stravinsky) sounded wonderfully well. It is maybe the sense of nostalgia locked into Georgias archaic rural landscape, whose small field patterns resemble those in Impressionist paintings; or maybe the long starvation of freedom of the spirit which the country has suffered, subconsciously communicating itself to the visitor: either way, these works, which seem to come across a shade faded and histrionic when listened to in England (probably because they live under the shadow of so many

other late romantic, landscape-inspired pieces) have a renewed bloom and a freshness when echoing down the sunlit corridors or a Georgian rural school.

The Bax at full volume greeted the children as they arrived; and contributed to a feeling of summer, out-of-doors, well-being and excitement. The Walton was played without much explanation as a backdrop to the children reading out the short Van Gogh text whose Georgian version I studied in Chapters 6 and 7; and to their chanting of the 74 words of increasing syllablicity which I listed at the end of Chapter 9 (cf Figures 10 and 11 above).

Art and music then needed a play element: so the children tackled the jigsaw puzzles of Sunflowers and the Georgian and English parallel texts which I have been studying; but in a structured fashion which I predetermined. As there are 50 words in the two English sentences about Van Gogh and 50 pieces in the jigsaw puzzles, it seemed natural to link the them: the words were written up on the blackboard and then erased one by one as the children spoke them, simultaneously deconstructing the Sunflowers jigsaw piece by piece from finished to unfinished state. The pieces removed had to be preserved in pictorial

order on an adjacent piece of white card, with a view to their being replaced in their due positions during a re-run of the same pronouncing exercise (Figure 17).

Figure 17: The Van Gogh jigsaw

In the event, second group did not preserve the removed pieces very logically; and were therefore unable to reconstruct the jigsaw; so the first group came to their assistance. Although the pronouncing aspect of the exercise was lost along the way, the activity gave the students a challenge they enjoyed.

When the combination of removing the pieces and pronouncing the words began, I immediately felt a definite frisson suggesting that here was a learning technique of great potential. The feeling was short-lived, due to those mishaps with the jigsaws, but its a moment I would like to capture again if possible.

Wed had three contrasting and quite brief learning curves obviously building up to the high point of painting sunflowers in the art room (whether from life or after Van Gogh remained to be seen.) But before moving on to practical art I wanted the children to come back to the first room and view famous Van Gogh paintings with colour swatches of the colours Van Gogh had used reproduced alongside (Figure 18).

Figure 18: Van Gogh: Cypresses with colour swatch

I had maybe three aims in mind. I wanted to demonstrate that great art if only you can work out how to do it is in essence simple. Second, I wanted the students to think about choice of colours ahead of their contact with the materials, which I had also laid out in colour groups. Finally, I wanted them to respond to simple questions about how many colours and which. The paintings which had been selected for this colour swatch treatment contained only homely objects such as the chair, table and bed in Van Goghs bedroom. The English language element followed on from the artistic one quite naturally (Figure 19).

Figure 19: Van Gogh: Bedroom at Arles with colour swatch

Finally the process was reversed; and a splendid artistic effect followed upon the priming of the students minds, which the earlier parts of the lesson had achieved. The students whose ages ranged from 5 to 13 kept colours clear, worked intelligently and carefully, and produced the paintings which I reproduce in below (Figure 20).

Figure 20: Student Paintings of Sunflowers at the Bolnisi Summer School, 2012

The flowers in front of them were in glass vases; but many of the paintings included earthenware pots, as in Van Goghs original, so I deduce that a transference of ideas had indeed happened, and the children had been inspired by what they had learned of Van Gogh.

Chapter 12: Reflections in the Lily Pond

Fig 21: Monets Nymphas (Paris)

mones ert-ert nakhats shtabeCHdileba: mzis amosvla hkvia. Monets a certain paint-ing Impression: sun rise is called. erti means one in Georgian; ert-erti means a certain. (It is curiously written with a hyphen; which does not serve the same purpose in Georgian as in English, and seems only to be used occasionally in the interests of disambiguation.) Grammatically, subjects governed by what Id call an essentive or quasi-essentive verb of equivalence go into the dative: picture in its unchanged form is nakhati. Im sure its best to avoid thinking about this and just pick it up along the way: its as if a positive charge has been applied to the electrons at the beginning of the sentence and they change polarity. shtabeCHidileba seems a tremendous word, assuredly as semantically complex in its origin as English impression which means a pressing of something in or upon something else; typically a printed page. Sun is mze (genitive: mzis) as we know from mzesumzira sunflower; rise amosvla contains an initial a which seems to have connotations of immediacy and up (Easter is aghdgoma and oriental

aghmosavleti ; aghdgoma is one of those particularly teasy Georgian words which seem to want to reverse sonic direction in mid-word). Clearly, I am sticking to a certain Monet-like scholarly Impressionism in my analyses; but would plead that language was invented before it became necessary to conceive of grammar to explain it (Once the whole is broken the parts need names said Lao-Tzu) . mo in mometsi give me seems to have a feeling across to me, to me; svla in its naked sense seems to mean a going ; De Biasi and Bukhnikashvili have it as andimento in Italian, which means trend. hkvia is the third person of the verb to be called; me mkhvia means I am called.

We find this same root kv in the next sentence: stsored am nakhatis mikhedvit daerkva sakheli mkhatvrobashi ert-ert mimdinareobas impresionizms, rats prangulad shtabeCHdileba nishnavs. Precisely this painting accordingto is called the name in art a certain movement: Impressionism, which in French Impressionism signifies.

Clod mone daribulad tskhovrobda. Monet lived poorly. sadaribe poverty.

Mogvianebit rodesats misi nakhatebi sakhveqnod tsnobeli gakhda later when his paintings universally known became (I deduced universally from kveqniereba world, universe)

khatvars satsualeba the painter the possibility mietsa gave lamazi baghi sheekhena a beautiful garden to acquire. The she- seems to suggest an initiatory set of circumstances, compare sheestsavla begin to learn to paint. The idea of an entire clause governing the verb gave (although unproven) seems the sort of thing Georgian might well do in the interests of concision. Am baghis mtsenaveebis of this garden the plants khatva to paint mas dzlier uqvarda him extremely it inflamed. A conventional translation would go: he loved extremely to paint; but I wanted to bring out the impersonal construction with the dative pronoun mas really controlling the clause as powerfully as a Kings Indian bishop fianchetto; as much as it is technically not the subject of the sentence! Find me the subject! The subject in defiance of grammatical orthodoxy is arguably the segment am baghis mtsenaveebis implicitly in the dative (!) at the start of the sentence: which its best to see as having two loose meta-grammatical identities, first subjective then (by the time you reach the end of the reading of the sentence) that of an object; two successive local inflectional colourations (genitive then dative) as well as being globally in two successive cases (nominative, accusative). The whole thing is quite subtle, and enfolds and changes as the sentence is read:

Figure 22: Semantics in action in a Georgian sentence

The readers mind has thus to keep track of twenty-four successive apprehensions changes of semantic status as it tracks the iridescent shifts of meaning which this simple seven-word sentence generates (see above) over the short maybe three-second period of its being read. That says something for both the elegance and complexity of Georgian! May Georgian readers pardon me for the mistakes and slips which are probably present in the parts of this essay! If I know one thing about the Georgians, they will not be slow in coming forward to point them out! The Georgian books translation (exactly as given): One of Claude Monets works is named Impression. Sunset (sic). In response to this painting art critics labeled one of the trends in art as Impressionism. For some time, Monet lived in poverty. Later on, when his paintings became extremely popular worldwide, he was able to afford to buy a beautiful

garden. Monet was fond of painting the many plants and flowers, which grew in his garden.

Chapter 13: In the Theatre of Ultima Thule

The Setting For most people, languages are difficult to learn and situated imaginatively in a most distant and even ancient place, the Ultima Thule of the imagination. Ultima Thule (maybe Greenland, Norway or Iceland) is of course the mythical place which delimited the bounds of the ancient world for classical geographers such as Strabo and Herodotus.

Fig 23: Thule in Modern Greenland (town of Thule, relocated to accommodate a US air base, in extreme North West of Map)

If music is an incantation, speaking a foreign language is an act of theatre. So when forced into the role of speaking a foreign language when abroad, the Foreign Speaker may be said to be imaginatively in the Theatre of Ultima Thule and by extension in a whole succession of imaginative playgrounds which touch on deep archetypes (Figs 24-27).

Fig 24: Ultima Thule (1539) with whale and sea monster adjacent

Fig 25: The Globe Theatre (1596)

Fig 26: Giulio Camillos Theatre of Memory (1550) which attempted, bottom-up, to stimulate imaginative memory

Fig 27: Hieronymus Bosch: Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1510). Renaissance luminaries advocated strolling in gardens in order to remember and reflect in a cool setting.

So when we break out of the globalized thought-mold of the present age which would have us all speak English, and utter words in a foreign tongue, we are participating in an act which goes back to well before the scientific age. For Georgians, of course, rooted in a tongue as ancient as Hebrew, an opposite but no less momentous transformation occurs when out of context and alone they speak in English.

The preponderance of technology has in fact somewhat minimized but essentially changed the nature of the language we need to cope in international situations. In doing so it has made it a norm that people await instructions in the global language, English at least while travelling and has ironed out the obvious possibility of speaking the local language when in transit situations. The need to speak at all is indeed obviated in many modern scenarios, the advent of internet-booked tickets for example; but I believe this conspiracy of silence in fact in a way heightens the drama attached to the act of speaking a foreign language in the twenty-first century, thereby making it even more appropriate to train for the event in a theatral way. There are two givens in this act of theatre: the scenario in question, determined by the parameter of the circumstances of the interaction in question; and the Foreign Speaker himself or herself (a term I am using with deliberate looseness to denote conveniently a person in a foreign setting trying to communicate in the local language). See Fig 28.

Fig 28: Components of Foreign Language interaction

The Communication System of Language Learning

The Transit Lounge of the airport at which we change flights is probably the first place where we become aware of our inadequacies in communicating in a foreign tongue. Here we invariably find a coffee shop. Coffee shops are much the same the world over nowadays. The passenger must approach the counter and order a drink or maybe a cake or a sandwich. He or she must either ask a question, e.g. Do you

serve wine? or more likely - present a request, Id like (See Fig 29)

Fig 29: Zurich Airport coffee shop

Conventional systems of language learning leave the Foreign Speaker entirely alone with his Kirkegaardian angst sink or swim as if there were some paradoxical merit in being an enterprising Titanic passenger, post iceberg-strike. But what we might provisionally entitle The Communication System of Language Learning - CSLA - recognizes that real language communication almost always involves speaker, listeners, and one or more interlocutors it is a public act in a group setting. Thus the method itself should rigorously involve all three parties in each and every situational scenario. The scenario has two instances: one virtual, the version which in anticipation CSLA affords. The second instance is the live scenario which each of us meets when he or she takes the plunge and finally ends up in the foreign country and thus inevitably in a foreign context. But first moving down the chart let us look at what might be

termed the existential conditions of the Foreign Speaker, as I have delineated them. The trainedness to scenario of the Foreign Speaker is, of course, the state which results in him after CSLA input; as well as a reflection of the individuals prior history of linguistic functioning in a given context. If once you bought a railway ticket at Azay-le-Rideau, youll probably be OK at the Hauptbahnhof in Berlin. On the hoof behaviours are more subtle. This is where linguistic aptitude, commonsense, resourcefulness, imagination and creativity come in. Its the area where the basics of a linguistic knowledge which CSLA hopes to convey to the widest imaginable constituency of users may be converted into the beginnings of fluency. Here always critically constrained, of course, by the circumstances in question is where strategic advantages may be gained by asking for the translations of things in the local language whenever possible; by enquiring (for example) into what is the opposite of a concept; by occasionally seguing into a permitted if off-piste language (a touch of Russian in the course of speaking Georgian, maybe) again to trigger, free-of-charge, helpful teaching from any local interlocutor. And teaching from which one may even if this aspect of the construction of linguistic readiness in properly considered remember things. Inner, mental behaviours would be that whole complex mental dance of anticipations which occurs when we try to make sentences, however ungrammatical, in an alien tongue. Here we will be informed

by hidden mnemonic templates urging us to structure sentences Subject Verb Object, Subject Verb Complement, Verb Subject Complement, or whatever; depending on the language in question and the skills we have to date been able to develop for ambushing in real time its characteristic semantic cadences. Moving back up the chart to Scenario how is the CSLA scenario that essential rehearsal for real life conditions achieved? There are two inspirations here. Firstly, the Blueprint series of English textbooks published by Longman in the late 1980s and 1990s. Just as Classical Music reached its acme with maybe the string quartets of Haydn, so English teaching methodology was at its best around three decades after its initial definition by some enterprising people at Oxford University Press in the 1970s. These Blueprint books premiered the notion of situational dialogues; and no-one since has done it quite so well or so charmingly. In this context I am tempted to quote the Diderot phrase with which Geoffrey Payzant innocuously ushers in his epoch-making book on Glenn Gould: Un sage tait autrefois un philosophe, un pote, un musicien. Ces talents ont dgnr en se sparant. Secondly, Im inspired to take a leaf out of the madrigal-book of the Cambridge-based, English choral conductor Tim Brown. Reflecting on his praxis, Ive determined that the teacher must, with clear signs,

start, progress and stop every micro-drama within the CSLA lesson and thus become not a teacher, but a conductor. Not only that, but conductor should become a transferrable role: the student can and should quite easily take over the conducting role from the teacher in his turn; and thus fulfill the modest but unstated ideal of every pedagogue: Ive taught you all I know. You must now go and study with Horowitz. So it was with Beethoven and Neefe. So I hope it will be on many occasions with CSLA. A small down-beat and an eye glance is all that is required to start the process (Figs 31 and 32) whereas to stop it you make a clear, leveling gesture (Fig 33).

Fig 30: A small down-beat

Fig 31: An eye glance

Fig 32: A leveling gesture to denote stop!

Next, timing. Typically, foreign students speak our sacred English tongue what the French call, the language of Shakespeare too carelessly, and far too fast; and above all without reference to the necessary (and eloquent) counterpoint of silences and meaningful and subservient stresses which give our language its fatidic meanings; and incidentally (correctly handled) ought thereby to make it exponentially easier to master As a result, I no longer trust them to do it on their own. There have to be three parties: (a) the teacher/enabler/conductor (C) (b) the student/Foreign Speaker (FS) (c) the listener (any member of the rest of the class) (L).

As already indicated (a) determines the scenario; and drives it forward from beginning to end and thus indeed interprets it; (b) closely

attends to and follows the given instructions, looking for cues where appropriate; (c) keeps quiet, attentive, and on-message; and follows what is going on closely as he or she will have to do it in a minute.

Its of interest that what the FS speaks is entirely subservient to the scenario and almost subsidiary; in spite of instantiating what contemporary jargon would call the learning goal.

The second standee as the Leicestershire Bus Company would have it is what I call the Stand-In Foreign Person (SIFP). This is the patient student who says Good Morning or Gamarjobat when you say Good Morning or Gamarjobat to him. He has everything going for him. He can serve fictitious coffee. He can play the part of the waiter. Once all these rituals and disciplines are observed, some mnemonic and deep learning will have occurred. He or she can then make the leveling gesture and bring the music of memory to a temporary stop. Its a process which is probably more universal than mankind itself; and will surely go on evolving aeons after the present cohort of human beings has long since left the earth. A small gesture of humility is sometimes important; and hopefully does not go unrecognized

Fig 33: Sir Colin Davis (1927-2013) at the Royal Albert Hall