Re: OT-ish: txt - Could it replace Standard Written English?

Doug Dee wrote:


  In a message dated 3/8/2003 11:17:23 PM Eastern Standard Time, romilly@EGL.NET writes:



    Educational side-note:  It never occurred to me as a child, and we certainly
    weren't taught, that it was possible to count in other than base 10.
    Probably in the 50s, as computers became known, some teacher discussed base
    2; quite accidentally, at age 29 (1963), I learned about other bases and how
    to manipulate them from one of Morris Kline's books
 I learned about other bases in fifth grade (1975/1976). This was a tough
subject for some students -- for all those years, "10" had meant ten, now all
of a sudden "10" could mean eight, or two, or sixteen or whatever base we were
using.

 Well then, you were one of the beneficiaries (or not, there's still argument I
think) of New Math.
 A similar problem arises teaching US-- Anglophone in general??-- students
about elementary linguistics, especially phonetics/phonemics/ phonology. It
takes them a while to make the disconnect from spelling, and learn that "long
e" as in meet is [i], "long i" as in bite is actually a diphthong [aI] and so
on.

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