of comprehending the patterns of German pronunciation of words, made
more deceptive by the fact that English and German are quite closely
related via Anglo-Saxon ancestry. As an English speaker, there is a tendency
to imagine that letters will be pronounced in German in the same way as in
English; but this is exactly not the case, so that pronunciations have to be
re-learned, and this is facilitated by generalizing from example to example,
especially because often the learning is done in the form of looking up
words in a dictionary, so that the visual symbol of the alphabet appearsfirst
and the ability to pronounce it second. /Z/ in German is pronounced like
/ts/, /w/ as /v/, /eu/ as /oi/, and /v/as /f/. A pattern therefore
emerges in which across a whole spectrum of utterances the same phenom-
enon is found and remembered, thereby translating into a‘rule’(or course,
there can be context determined‘exceptions’, described as such once the
terminology of rules is adopted). The question of pattern exerts itself even
more strongly at the level of grammar, because to make a comprehensible
statement about events in the world grammar is needed to link the seman-
tic elements together. Grammar by itself does not encapsulate all meaning,
because a statement can be perfectly grammatical but still appear as non-
sense in the sense that it cannot be successfully connected to experience.
Chomsky’s famous example can be cited here: the expression“colorless
green eyes smoke furiously”violates several experiential codes. With mod-
ification, an analogous statement that does confirm to sense can be brought
into play:“the deep green-colored eyes seemed to emit smoke when s/he
was angry”. Grammar itself can, however, be said to carry meanings such as
‘this is a transitive/intransitive verb’and‘subject verb object’in the word
order in English where a tagmeme (ordering device) operates across the
words themselves and the directional drive or aim of the statement hangs
on this grammatical point. Also, of course, this whole superstructure of
clusters of semantic reference and grammatically coded orderings is itself
built on an infrastructure of basic patterning that is the system of phonemes
and overall phonological features that enable everything else to work.
Phonemes are, in turn, built on differences of sound, in other words they
are tied to speech, not written forms of language–which is why spelling
words is a challenge, especially in English which has taken in and domes-
ticated a great deal of vocabulary from other languages, preserving or more
often altering the pronunciations of the words incorporated into the stream
of the language.
Our point here is simple. Language ability depends not only on an
ability to perceive patterns but also on an added ability to synthesize
8 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE 77