Re: CHAT (POLITICS!!!): Putting the duh in Florida

On Mon, 4 Dec 2000, John Cowan wrote:

> Irina Rempt wrote:
>
> > > > Hmm.  What *is* the literacy rate in the U.S., anyway?  <looking around>
> > >
> > > About 89%, scandalously low for a First World nation.
> >
> > That's really scandalously low. The last figure I read for the
> > Netherlands was 98%, not counting those 5-7% of people over fifteen
> > who are functionally illiterate
>
> Apparently I was overoptimistic.  The definition of "literacy" is fuzzy,
> and English spelling makes the matter harder, but it now seems like
> 23-25% of those over 15 are illiterate or only rudimentary literate
> (they can read a few things), and another 30% are functionally illiterate.
Your figures sound closer to what I'd heard somewhere.  <shrug>

89% strikes me as pretty darn *high,* but then, my head sometimes get
stuck in medieval history.  <laugh>

If you want scandalously *high* literacy rates, go look at your average
*badly* written fantasy novel in a quasi-medievalistic society.  <G>
There are an awful lot of fantasy writers who assume literacy just sort
of happens even without any sort of schooling infrastructure, which I'm
convinced isn't the case.  (There are also occasionally fantasy writers
who *do* think about this, too. OC.)

On an unrelated note, I've been reading Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth
books, which aren't deep, but are entertaining.  But I'm reading his
descriptions of characters running around trying to translate Old
D'Haran, and for the life of me it sounded like there was a bijection
between Old D'Haran and whatever the current language was.  :-p  ("Old
D'Haran" also looks vaguely like hack German--at least the consonant
clusters--but I could be wrong.)

And there was some website out there done by linguists or linguistic
students
who'd analyzed the "Old Tongue" in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books.
As far as they could tell it was a hack job up through book 3 and then
Jordan started trying to regularize the thing.  :-)

If anyone has information on conlanging vis-a-vis the Babylon-5 TV
series, I'd love to know it.  I've just begun to watch the series on
videotape, though I've been seeing my friends play the collectible card
game for a while and trying to figure out what the heck was going on.  I
would love to know what the heck the apostrophes in Minbari words stand
for--morpheme boundaries in an agglutinating language?  My housemate the
B-5 fanatic insisted that it was probably standing in for "schwa," but
when I asked him to pronounce some of the words and listened to the
actors pronouncing them they didn't *sound* like schwa (for which I
forget the Kirschenbaum symbol), and I don't know enough about
linguistics to try to do any sort of analysis myself.  :-(

YHL, rambling