A Phraze is a grammatically and syntactically correct utterance in any
language.
"Give it to me" is a Phraze in English; so is "Give me one"; "Give me it"
is a bad Phraze; so is "Give it to I".
A Phrazer has 4 functions:
- 1. It shows you how to construct a Phraze
- 2. It verifies a Phraze
- 3. It translates a Phraze
- 4. It enables you to internalize what a Phrazer does.
Let's see how it does these things.
First, a Phrazer consists of a set of templates, into which you can insert
tokens. Tokens are indexed or keyed so they can't fit into templates
wrongly. For any language, there are only a few templates, but thousands of
tokens. If the language has been properly analyzed, it will be impossible
to put a token into the wrong place in a template. This means you can
construct Phrazes in any language just by using the templates and tokens,
without having to learn the grammar. The Phrazer is the grammar.
Note that this has nothing to do with meaning: you can make up nonsense
Phrazes as easily as Phrazes that make sense. Meaning is not the business
of the Phrazer.
Second, if you take an existing Phraze and check it against the Phrazer,
you can tell if it's bad or not. Of the 4 Phrazes on the second line, the
English Phrazer tells us that the first two are good and the last two are
not. This removes a major problem for learners of a language: how do you
know you're saying it right? If you don't have a Phrazer, you have to bet
that you know all the rules and remember all the rules. So even if all you
speak is English, you can use a Phrazer to verify your Phrazes, bypassing
all the grammar books.
Phrazers translate. Let's say you have two languages, chetu and chake
(chah-keh). You form a Phraze in chetu, then you find the corresponding
template in chake. Next, you find matches for all the chetu tokens in
chake, and slip them into the template. Presto, you've got a Phraze in
chake that means the same as the chetu Phraze. Of course, if the chetu
Phraze was meaningless, the chake Phraze will be too; and if the chetu
Phraze was an idiom, the chake Phraze could be nonsense (but we have ways
of handling that problem.)
Now we come to the last part of what a Phrazer does. The hardest part of
learning a foreign language is learning the grammar and syntax. That's
because you learn it all in your own language - which is not the way you
learned the grammar and syntax of your own language. This could be fine, if
you only want to use the language in carefully-controlled circumstances, in
your own time. For instance, you might be writing in a foreign language,
with a dictionary at your fingertips; or reading a foreign newspaper,
ditto. But this method doesn't work when you're watching a movie, or trying
to make small talk at a dinner party.
Your language brain has a function called grep which handles the business
of analyzing and constructing Phrazes. Grep, in other words, is your own
internal Phrazer. It was trained to handle your language from the day you
were born, working away without you knowing much about it for several
years, handling many random encounters, before it had the templates it
needed for your own language.
If you encounter a second language while all that activity is still fresh
in your mind, grep might carry on, building a set of templates for the
second language. If you only meet the second language later in life, grep
has been asleep for a long time and isn't going to help much. In fact,
because it assumes a template is a template is a template, it's probably
going to get in the way.
Keeping grep in mind, consider the fact that most people's
handedness is on the language side of the brain. Then think about how
people talk with their hands. Why is handedness on the language side? The answer lies in a
neurological phenomenon called reciprocal facilitation. When one area of
the brain is stimulated and becomes active, it facilitates nearby areas. If
one of those areas in turn becomes active, it reciprocates and facilitates
the first area, so the two carry on encouraging each other.
Control of your hand is close to control of your speech organs, so the
language part of your brain determines your dominant hand.
Now, when you use a Phrazer - which you use with your hands, of course -
you are facilitating the language area and prodding grep to wake up and
take notice. Grep deals with patterns, and a Phrazer is a collection of
patterns - the templates - so grep sits up and takes notice and pretty soon
it's learned these new patterns and stored them for use in your new
language. It's that simple and obvious!
Phrazers are so useful that we say - Learning a language without a Phrazer
is like handling a canoe without a paddle!
Try a Phrazer for your favorite language today. You can even use it to ace
the language part of the SAT, or to speak English like a college graduate -
even if you is one!
