Effectiveness of a Wikis-Based Applied Linguistics Course on Learning Outcomes and Attitudes towards the Course
One of the most natural approaches to the problem of origins of natural languages is the study of hidden intelligent “communications” emanating from their historical forms. Semitic languages history is especially meaningful in this sense. One discovers, in particular, that Biblical Hebrew, BH, the best preserved fossil of the Semitic protolanguage, is primarily a verbal language, with an average verse of the Hebrew Bible containing no less than three verbs and with the biggest part of its vocabulary representing morphological derivations from verbal roots, almost entirely triliteral – the feature BH shares with all Semitic and a few other Afro- Asiatic languages. For classical linguists, more than hundred years ago, it was surprising to discover that verbal system of BH is, as we say today, optimal from the Information Theory’s point of view and that its formal topological morphology is semantically meaningful. These and other basic features of BH reflect, in our opinion, the original design of the Semitic Protolanguage and suggest the indispensabilityof IIH – Inspirational Intelligence Hypothesis, our main topic, – for the understanding of origins of natural languages. Our project is of vertical nature with respect to the time, in difference with the vastly dominating today horizontal linguistic approaches.
