Re: CHAT: The Conlang Instinct

andrew wrote:
>
> Am 12/09 20:14  Gerald Koenig yscrifef:
>
> > My wife thinks its more likely that you may have a form of dyslexia
> > than OCD, and the counting serves to order the words under distracting
> > conditions. She adds numbers skilfully when not distracted, but starts
> > transposing numbers when the phone rings. Dyslexia is of some concern to
> [snip]
> > everyone I know who is dyslexic is very intelligent. I wonder if
> > dyslexia is disproportionately represented on conlang also, giving
> > another possible clue to our group identity. I'm coming around to And's
> I have a tendency to transposed numbers when reading them out.  I don't
> know if this is a form of dyslexia or not, but once since a person
> called it such I've adopted that name for it.
>
        I myself have a form of dyslexia that has nothing to do with
transposing numbers or letters. I've never been diagnosticated as such,
but I know that it exist, so I adopted the name too. I tend to have
problems to understand a written sentence or a written word sometimes.
When I see it, I just can't figure out what it represents, as if I was
looking at hieroglyphs. Or I can read the sentence without a problem but
it seems meaningless for me. It is sometimes very difficult, especially
in exams, when sometimes I have a question I can read, I can read out
loud, but it seems meaningless to me, even if I can understand each word
separately. When that happens, I try to read it aloud to myself (at
least in my head) three or four times (I understand without a problem
spoken questions) and if it doesn't work, I analyse grammatically the
sentence, cutting it into propositions, etc... and often suddenly the
meaning appears to me, and I wonder how I couldn't understand it. I also
confuse words very easily, and when I write down, I tend to skip words
or write them twice even if I'm sure I wrote all words or wrote them
only once.

        To give you an example, in the title "Emoticons for Geeks", for two
days I read "Greeks" and nothing could prevent me for reading that. And
each time the word appeared I read "Greeks". I was nearly about to ask
why using the word "Greeks" for that when this morning I finally
realised it was actually "Geeks".

--
        Christophe Grandsire

        Philips Research Laboratories --  Building WB 145
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        Phone:  +31-40-27-45006
        E-mail: grandsir@natlab.research.philips.com