Can English be learned with a dictionary alone?

[Evo]

Would you consider Wikipedia an encyclopedia? That's all I use.

I don't oppose it, but it can be wrong or biased. But then, what can't? Always check any source of information against other well documented sources.

 

[turbo]

Yeah, a dictionary adds to your vocabulary, an encyclopedia adds to your knowledge.

Do kids now days even read encyclopedias?

I don't think so. When I was 10, my parents bought a house across the road from where we lived, and my "bedroom" ended up being a walk-in closet with a tiny ell filled with books. The books were cheap hard-bound reprints of classics from the last 100 years or so, and I read those books every night. I had a cheesy WTGrant am radio, and I'd lie there in my bed listening to either Buffalo or Boston every night, reading Verne, Dickens, Twain, Cooper, and others. Luckily, my 5th-6th grade teacher had a large personal library, and she kept loaning me books and assigning reports. When I hit JH and HS, I had no trouble acing book reports, because Mrs. Clark was so demanding and so specific. Even if I was reading Sherlock Holmes stories or some other escapist stuff, she would make me back off from the crime-fighting and tell her about the motivations of the characters. I have a feeling that she was not too keen on Mr. Holmse's substance-abuse, but she was pretty taken with the logic and problem-solving involved in Doyle's stories and encouraged that.

 

[256bits]

Can one learn a new language from a dictionary only?
( Tarzan lived with the apes and he learned how to understand English using only the books his parents had left behind )

Seriously,
Remember the Egyptian hieroglyphs. They were incomprehensible to scolars of centuries past. What was needed was a cipher ( somebody mentioned cypher - I cannot find the post ) and how the Rosetta stone finally came by to fulfil this task, The rosetta stone has on it 3 languages - the hieroglyphs, Ancient greek, and Demontic. Only by comparison was the code of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs cracked.

So no, I do not believe, one could not learn from dictionary alone. One would need outside hints and comparisons.

 

[BobG]

Most dictionaries have pictures.

For example, mine has a diagram of the heart and arteries going into the heart. From that diagram alone, a person could learn the meaning of a few words if he knew his anatomy. The pictures for "antler" would give him the names for "reindeer", "fallow deer", and "moose" provided he had knowledge of deer and related animals. Of course, the picture for "anvil" probably wouldn't help him until he learned at least a few supporting words. Instead of just showing an anvil, it shows a man pounding something on an anvil - it's not clear what the word "anvil" refers to (in fact, one would probably think it's a verb describing the action of shaping metals by hammering). Bench mark would probably leave him totally confused, considering the context in which that word is usually used today (in fact, he might think it's a unit of money).

It would be really tough, but I think there's enough clues that a person could learn quite a few nouns, which could lead to adjectives. For example, "green" is the color of grass" (my dictionary is from the 80's and is in black and white, so they just can't show you the color).

I'm thinking verbs would be really hard to figure out (at least using my dictionary which has no pictures describing verbs). Just by frequency, one could figure out the group of words that must be articles, conjunctions, etc, such as "the", "a", "and", "but", etc. The fact that the English language has no gender would make distinguishing between them a lot harder.

The key would be to figure out the sentence structure. If the person is human and you assume the language will have the same general structure, such as a subject, verb, and direct object, then you can figure out which part of the sentence must be the verb, even if you don't know what it means. From that, you could figure out the pattern for adverbs, and the adverbs that are similar to adjectives could even give you some clue of what the verb is. I'm not sure you could actually narrow that down to a specific verb, though, and that would really make getting the whole language deciphered really tough.

I think you'd need a book that actually showed people committing verb-like activity to really decipher the language.

 

[BobG]

Not really sure that is correct Evo. The Navy based it intelligence measure on how well you did on their language test. They presented a simplified form of Latin and you had to work with it. The better you did the higher they gauged your basic intelligence.

Probably Latin based, in the sense that they followed similar patterns in the languages they invented. But the DLAB test was a pretty fun test. They invented their own languages since the object was to test the person's ability to learn a new language; not test how many languages he already knew. The audio portion of the test was really intense when they started tossing sentences similar to "The presenter was present to present the presents at the present presentation" and the only way you could figure out what the sentence meant was the word endings (since most languages have genders for nouns, standard endings for their verbs, adjectives, etc).

 

[Evo]

I think you'd need a book that actually showed people committing verb-like activity to really decipher the language.

See Spot run!

From "Fun with Dick and Jane", those were the books I had growing up. Our book on health was from the 1920's and gave instructions on how to make pin curls and describes the main girl character getting a "bob".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_and_Jane

 

[BobG]

See Spot run!

From "Fun with Dick and Jane", those were the books I had growing up. Our book on health was from the 1920's and gave instructions on how to make pin curls and describes the main girl character getting a "bob".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_and_Jane

I loved Dick and Jane!

I'd probably like the health book even better, though. Any book where the main girl character gets a Bob instead of a Dick is a good book.

 

[Evo]

I loved Dick and Jane!

I'd probably like the health book even better, though. Any book where the main girl character gets a Bob instead of a Dick is a good book.

 

[DoggerDan]

I think you'd be more successful with their equivalent of See Spot Run.