Re: USAGE: Language revival

At 1:43 PM -0500 11/23/99, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
>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.
Not really true. You may not write the status dialect of your language
without a long period of education, regardless of writing system. However,
a phonemic writing system does strictly limit the amount that must be known
to read any text aloud, and write down anything one can say. That's simply
not true for more complex writing systems. In Chinese, or even English, a
lot of basic knowledge is required to read _any_ text. And even once basic
facility is reached many texts will contain puzzling or unreadable words.
Ray's example of the spelling "gaol" in english is a perfect example: no
rule that you may know about English spelling will help you to pronounce it
correctly. (Actually the sound of the "l" is unproblematic).

A phonemic script, once learned, makes any text accessible. In a system
with spelling irregularities, or thousands of characters, partial literacy
is possible. In the case of of a phonemic script it is not really possible.


>> 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.
There was a frequently repeated anecdote that there is no dyslexia in
Japan. How true this is I can't really say. The recent research on dyslexia
that links it to auditory perception is interesting in itself, since it
suggests that phoneticism may have real drawbacks for some people, despite
the shorter learning time for phonetic/phonemic systems.

   -- David
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