Re: USAGE: Language revival

On Tue, 23 Nov 1999, David G. Durand wrote:

>
> This is true as far as it goes, but it doesn't actually go that far. Both
> educational access and writing system affect literacy rates. For Turkey,
> the change was important because the old Arabic writing system was very
> poorly adapted to the phonology of the language, and preserved many archaic
> spellings that needed to be learned. The new writing system took less
> education to acquire fluency -- people literally taught themselves to read
> the new script in a matter  of weeks in some cases.
>
Well, I knew about the old Turkish script. But I still maintain that,
compared to the difference education makes, the actual influence of
the actual script is negligable, even if the script is as badly suited
to the language as the old Turkish Arabic script was. It might make a
difference of a few months, but not much more. It's a bit difficult to
test, of course. Children have to be in school for a few years, anyway,
in order to learn the rest of the curriculum. And, when you've only
got a few months of education, just enough to have learnt your letters,
you won't have learnt to really read and write, you will be
functionally illiterate.

>
> There is an English method of teaching reading via the ITA (International
> Teaching Alphabet) -- a phonemic notation for english. Children can be
> taught to read ITA fluently in a very short time. They are then switched
> over to the regular orthography later on. The one person I know who was
> taught this way claims that she doesn't even remember the transition. She
> is very smart however (professor of Sanskrit, Master's degree in Math,
> computer programmer on the side), and may not have had as much trouble with
> the change over as others might.
My father was taught English using that system. After he had already
learnt his letters for Dutch ;-). I've one reading book in the ITA,
an interesting curiosity, but not much more.

>
> There are reasons to preserve writing systems that are hard to learn, but
> that doesn't make them easy. There are also hints that the iconicity of
> non-phonetic writing systems like Han characters actually affect reading
> speed positively. The only measure of this that I've seen is in film
> subtitles: I have read (and casual inspection confirms) that they are
> longer (in words) and displayed for a shorter time than English subtitles.
> Assuming that filmmakers tune the quantity and timing of subtitles for
> comfortable comprehension by their audience, this confirms the notion that
> people can read Chinese faster.
I've had the same experience. When I had been learning Chinese for a
few years, I could read characters very, very quickly. You sidestep a
lot of scanning (not parsing, since I read latin words by the word, not
letter, but it takes longer to move the eye over the extent of the
word). I've often wondered whether character-type scripts are easier for
dyslectic people... But I couldn't find any data on it in the university
library.


Boudewijn Rempt  | http://denden.conlang.org