Re: CHAT: learning to read

On Wed, 16 Jun 1999, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:

>=20
> When my daughter started reading, I soon began to insist that she
> should go back and repeat each sentence with the proper intonation
> once she understood it. That frustrated her no end, so she learned to
> do it right on the fly. (That was when she was 7=BD --- we start school
> late in Denmark. It would probably be beyond a 5yo to do that).
>=20
One of the most interesting things has been watching the development
in intonation of our children - Irina and I are both not exactly
monotonous speakers, and certainly not monotonous readers. Already,
when the youngest two play at reading books to each other, depending
on whether it is a book Irina reads mostly or a book I read mostly,
they reproduce the story with an almost perfect imitation of
either Irina's or my intonation - same when telling a story.
They also have phases where they use a certain intonation, almost
a melody, for all their spontaneous speech. It's sometimes enough
to make us mad!

>=20
> (I'm still amazed at how many people can't read fluently from a
> manuscript --- even if they wrote it themselves. Perhaps rhetoric
> should be taught in schools again).
>=20
Of course! And at least one language from a family the native language
of the child doesn't belong to, from the age of six. Naomi is green
with envy sometimes because the Turkish children in het group get
some hours of Turkish tuition, and she doesn't get a minute of it!

> ObConlang: Can a language be constructed to make it easier for humans
> to parse left-to-right? Other tricks to make it easier to read out
> loud? (No fair saying intonation is independent of parsing!) Putting
> speaker tags before direct speech would be a great help, of course.
>=20
A notation, perhaps, but I wouldn't think that the language itself
would make much difference. If you look at the Broyan Stage language
(provision grammar on my website), you find a language that has
been developed especially for use on the stage - it has all kinds of
attitudinal morphemes, but the actual diction is still dependent upon
the interpretation of the actor.

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt