Re: Ayeri: Menan Coyalayamoena ena McGuffey

Carsten Becker wrote:

> On Thursday 07 April 2005 01:42 CEST, Gregory Gadow wrote:
>
>  > It might be instructive to look at a reader in an
>  > agglutinative natlang. What would a Turkish primer look
>  > like?
>
> As long as the texts at the page Tim May gave the link to
> include interlinears, it'd be worth to have a look at that.
>
(International Children's Digital Library:
http://www.icdlbooks.org/ )

The handful I looked at, were simply on-line copies of published childrens'
books-- stories, not primers like McG. I actually read the Tagalog "Legend
of Bitter Melon" (cute illustrations!) aimed at ages 3-7, and it seemed to
have some quite complex verbal forms (maybe the adult reader is supposed to
"interlinearize" these for the child?). A related Tag. problem: stress and
final /?/ are phonemic, but not indicated in writing.  No interlinears in
the texts, but a smooth Engl. trans. at the bottom of each page.

Clearly, in a language with a decently phonemic writing system (certainly
Indonesian qualifies, and Tagalog; some Romance languages and German/Dutch
to an extent) the aim in teaching reading/writing is to get the child to
associate _sound_ with _letter_.  English no doubt has to greatly limit the
learner's initial vocab. in order to avoid some of the more egregious
vagaries of our spelling system.

(Most of our conlangs, Ayeri included I think, also boast orthographies with
near one-to-one correspondence.  Maggel excluded...)

One of my native Span. professors, years ago, claimed that there was no need
for a verb "to spell" in Span.; one simply asks, "¿cómo se escribe [e.g.]
"hombre"?" and the answer is, "con ache".

ObConlang: Some of the problems teaching Kash kids to read/write:
--morphophonemic changes due to the nominalizing prefixes añ- and kañ-;
--sandhi rules e.g. karumbi 'my lord' /karun+mi/, nimbutro 'will remember'
/nimbur+to/ and in many compounds-- I suppose an initial teaching text could
put the morphemic breakdown in parens. after the actual written form.
--the occasional penult-stress violations
--inserting w/y before -V case endings on V-final words (required by the
writing system, these w/y's are essentially silent-- associated with the
more general rule, "two vowel symbols in a row aren't permitted")