Re: [Phys-l] Fuzzy language

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

*
>     It seems to me that English can subsume these  foreign language
> forms, quite readily.
>   Perhaps other languages too can be molded more to the foreign heart's
> desire?
IF you read the rest of the post, it is actually clear that one language can
not subsume other languages.  The structure of the language determines how
you think.  So to change a form you have to give up other forms.  English
has discarded most tenses of words and to think like a Russian you would
have to make English incredibly inflected, even more so than French or
German.

The basic mode of ranking things in time with absolute spatial coordinates
could not be done by English speakers because we do not have an absolute
sense of orientation unlike some other languages.  But we do have a sense of
relative orientation.  So mirrors might pose difficulties in other
languages.  Perfect pitch comes naturally to Mandarin speakers, but not to
English speakers, the list goes on.  Actually right/left are value
judgments, and mirrors really reverse front to back.

The one thing that is an advantage in English is the strong agent object
grammar which can be used in physics.  But if the language like Spanish does
not have this it may make things like interactions more difficult.  But this
strong agent object grammar also may make us more judgemental.

But the main point that I make is that when teaching physics students must
learn to use language correctly, or they will have confused conceptions.
The verbal (written) description is just one of the 4 ways of describing the
physics the others being graphical, pictorial, and math equations.  If
students lack one of these modes of description, they will not have good
understanding.  I find that the verbal is the most difficult because
students will assume the listener knows the antecedent, but I can not allow
that.  By using words like "it" students confuse the motion of the objects
with the line on a graph.

So students have to learn a new way of speaking, almost like learning a
foreign language.  And to get them to learn their physics grammar has to be
corrected and refined.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX