what is excatly read/write

[Shiningbrow]

One of the examples I use with my students* is from the song "Nobody" by the Wonder Girls...

I want nobody nobody bah choo...

(But you)

Pronunciation features!! Awesome

 

(* ESL & IELTS teacher)

[Mugen]

15 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

I don't know of any languages that are that completely phonetic... 

Korean is.

Or, at least, it is meant to be. In practice, you often see chinese characters used even in modern korean. But they're very scarcely used. It's nothing like Japanese, which requires you to learn thousands of characters, and to pronounce them differently depending on context...

I remember Bushido treated all 3 writing systems used in Japanese as distinct skills. Which is funny, given how quickly the 2 phonetic systems are learned (and have only 2 very specific exceptions) when compared to the chinese one... Not counting the fact it was based on modern day Japanese...

Edited January 23, 2020 by Mugen

[Shiningbrow]

1 hour ago, Mugen said:

Korean is.

Or, at least, it is meant to be. In practice, you often see chinese characters used even in modern korean. But they're very scarcely used. It's nothing like Japanese, which requires you to learn thousands of characters, and to pronounce them differently depending on context...

I remember Bushido treated all 3 writing systems used in Japanese as distinct skills. Which is funny, given how quickly the 2 phonetic systems are learned (and have only 2 very specific exceptions) when compared to the chinese one... Not counting the fact it was based on modern day Japanese...

Ok.

I certainly don't want to seen as though I'm discounting it. I did actually mean *I* don't know of any...

I do know some Japanese characters are the same as Chinese, with the same (or similar) meanings, but different pronunciation. Sort of like Mandarin and Cantonese.

[Mugen]

3 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

I do know some Japanese characters are the same as Chinese, with the same (or similar) meanings, but different pronunciation. Sort of like Mandarin and Cantonese.

It's more complex than that. Basically, in Japanese Chinese characters can have one (or more) "native Japanese" pronunciation, and/or one (or more) "Chinese" pronunciation(s).

For instance, the character 山, mountain, can either be read "yama" or "san". "Yama" was the word for mountains in old Japanese, and "san" is how the character was read in some part of China, altered by time and adapted to the Japanese phonetic system.

Then, there are also two syllabic and purely phonetic characters, which are used for grammatical use (because Japanese is very different from Chinese and needs it) and to write foreign words. It's possible to write using only one of those syllabic systems, but it looks childish, and confusing because of the huge number of homophones (for instance, 三, three, can also be read "san"...).

Edited January 23, 2020 by Mugen

[GianniVacca]

4 hours ago, Mugen said:

Korean is.

 

It's not. For instance, final -s is pronounced [t] -- hence "internet" written inteones in Korean 🙂

 

But we are deviating. Again, for want of details about the various writing systems, I recommend we use R/W [language] and Speak [language]. Anyway, what good does it do to you to know how to read the Latin script when trying out to figure out the meaning of a text written in Finnish?

[GianniVacca]

3 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

I do know some Japanese characters are the same as Chinese

(off topic)

These is no such thing as "Japanese characters" -- they are just Chinese characters used to write the Japanese language. From the Wikipedia:

Kanji (漢字, pronounced [kaɲdʑi] are the adopted logographic Chinese characters that are used in the Japanese writing system. They are used alongside the Japanese syllabic scripts hiragana and katakana. The Japanese term kanji for the Chinese characters literally means "Han characters". It is written with the same characters as in Traditional Chinese to refer to the character writing system, hanzi (漢字).

[Cloud64]

13 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

Wikipedia: “Scholars assume that reading aloud (Latin clare legere) was the more common practice in antiquity, and that reading silently (legere tacite or legere sibi) was unusual.^[47] In his Confessions, Saint Augustine remarks on Saint Ambrose's unusual habit of reading silently in the 4th century AD”

Thank you. I also found this

https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Manguel/Silent_Readers.html

The problem with this is it’s based on anecdotes, and the Stanford article contains much conjecture. If anything the article points to reading out loud being a habit rather than a necessity to understand what’s been written. Given the number of non-readers, it makes sense that people would be used to hearing text being read out loud, as it had to be to reach a bigger audience. It also mentions cases of people reading silently in antiquity, notably a Greek play where this was acted out, implying that the audience would have been familiar with the concept. While accepting that the scholars know far more about it than me, I’m afraid I don’t buy that the skill of reading silently was ‘amazing’, but am happy to accept that it appeared unusual as it wasn’t done regularly, out of habit rather than out of inability. 
 

Quote

One big problem with silent reading was that the writing didn’t support it. Without punctuation, spaces and in ALL CAPS, ITBECOMESPRETTYHARDEVENFORMODERNREADERSTOREADSILENTLYWHILEMAINTAININGCONCENTRATIONANDFOCUS.

I have no problem with this, nor with the non-standard spelling version. Of course, the amount of reading we do these days is likely vastly more than anyone did in ancient times, damn near all day reading/writing for some of us, so we are far more practiced. That said, a lot like that would be tiring, but I don’t see how it’s any easier speaking it as opposed to reading it silently. 

There’s another rabbit hole to disappear down here, and that’s how the brain processes reading and if there’s any different pathways between turning it into speech and internalising it silently, but that’s for another day

Edited January 23, 2020 by Cloud64

[Akhôrahil]

18 hours ago, Cloud64 said:

I have no problem with this, nor with the non-standard spelling version. 

Now do it for 30 pages. 🙂

It's probably easy to overestimate how good people were at reading in antiquity. Us moderns have over a decade of learning how to read, amazing amounts of experience with it, and we're suffused in a world of letters (often with a pleasant layout, too!). You and I have most likely read more text than any single human being did before the year 1500 or so. So when we think of reading in antiquity, picture someone with much less reading experience, reading text that doesn't have spaces, upper and lower case, standardized spelling, paragraphs, or anything like that. That may have been written by poor scribes, or aged into poor legibility. At this point, it becomes a whole lot more understandable that they would sound the letters out in order to understand the text, rather than doing what people like us do when reading, which is identifying the images of words and not reading out the individual letters even silently.

Edited January 24, 2020 by Akhôrahil

[Shiningbrow]

15 hours ago, Cloud64 said:

That said, a lot like that would be tiring, but I don’t see how it’s any easier speaking it as opposed to reading it silently. 

As an ESL teacher, trust me - it makes a difference! Regularly (every class??) seeing students struggle with a word on a page, trying to pronounce it in various ways - finally getting the 'ah-hah' moment when it clicks...  that is, words they've heard and said before (Speak Other) they now recognise on paper (R/W Other).

[Cloud64]

19 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

As an ESL teacher, trust me - it makes a difference! Regularly (every class??) seeing students struggle with a word on a page, trying to pronounce it in various ways - finally getting the 'ah-hah' moment when it clicks...  that is, words they've heard and said before (Speak Other) they now recognise on paper (R/W Other).

 I don’t doubt you, and have experienced this myself when dabbling with other languages, but that’s not the readers I was talking about. I was talking about those who knew how to read, reading their first language and the suggestion that they couldn’t internalise it. Now less regular readers, as there were probably many in antiquity due to there being less written material physically available, may well have found it helped to sound out the words, but regular readers and scribes needing to do so rather than doing so merely out of habit doesn’t add up to me. This boils down to how the brain handles reading, and the brain hasn’t changed, so we wouldn’t expect how it handles reading to have changed. 

Edited January 25, 2020 by Cloud64

[Cloud64]

On 1/23/2020 at 1:34 PM, Akhôrahil said:

Now do it for 30 pages. 🙂

It's probably easy to overestimate how good people were at reading in antiquity. Us moderns have over a decade of learning how to read, amazing amounts of experience with it, and we're suffused in a world of letters (often with a pleasant layout, too!). You and I have most likely read more text than any single human being did before the year 1500 or so. So when we think of reading in antiquity, picture someone with much less reading experience, reading text that doesn't have spaces, upper and lower case, standardized spelling, paragraphs, or anything like that. That may have been written by poor scribes, or aged into poor legibility. At this point, it becomes a whole lot more understandable that they would sound the letters out in order to understand the text, rather than doing what people like us do when reading, which is identifying the images of words and not reading out the individual letters even silently.

I believe I made the same points, though not with the depth you have. A good point re the quality of the material they may have had available. Having just had four fails on a captcha I can sympathise with them, though my out loud was rather more of the ‘What the *%&* is that supposed to %^&*ing be,’ rather than saying the letter out loud

[Shiningbrow]

4 hours ago, Cloud64 said:

 I don’t doubt you, and have experienced this myself when dabbling with other languages, but that’s not the readers I was talking about. I was talking about those who knew how to read, reading their first language and the suggestion that they couldn’t internalise it. Now less regular readers, as there were probably many in antiquity due to there being less written material physically available, may well have found it helped to sound out the words, but regular readers and scribes needing to do so rather than doing so merely out of habit doesn’t add up to me. This boils down to how the brain handles reading, and the brain hasn’t changed, so we wouldn’t expect how it handles reading to have changed. 

I'm going to disagree a bit. But certain not that everyone needed to vocalize, or sub-vocalize. 

As mentioned previously, there are many good reasons to do so. Only *one* of them has something to do with the person doing the reading. And, that is that literacy wasn't as common then as it is now. 

Having sentences without spacing for words, or punctuation, does mean it's easier to understand but trying to sub-vocalize. Especially with poor materials, lighting, etc. 

[Cloud64]

 

9 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

I'm going to disagree a bit.

That’s fine, and I think inevitable with a subject like this. The big trouble we have is that we never can really know for sure. All we have is anecdote and intelligent conjecture, and we can only make our best guesses based on the evidence to hand. 
 

Quote

Having sentences without spacing for words, or punctuation, does mean it's easier to understand but trying to sub-vocalize. Especially with poor materials, lighting, etc. 

I’m assuming auto-correct has done its corrupting work and that you meant to say, “…it’s easier to understand by trying to sub-vocalize.” I would agree, but not that difficult for a practiced reader, though still annoying and ultimately tiring. 

Edited January 25, 2020 by Cloud64

[Shiningbrow]

2 hours ago, Cloud64 said:

I’m assuming auto-correct has done its corrupting work and that you meant to say, “…it’s easier to understand by trying to sub-vocalize.” I would agree, but not that difficult for a practiced reader, though still annoying and ultimately tiring.

Ah crap! Yep, using mobile...

Yes, "by sub-vocalising"..

[tnli]

Even if we take the assumption that our brains have not changed since the antiquity, our writing has. And I believe that with modern writing standards it really is easier to read silently and without sub-vocalization than it was previously with everything written together with no spaces, no punctuation and every other row in the other direction (boustrophedon).

[Bill the barbarian]

2 hours ago, tnli said:

And I believe that with modern writing standards it really is easier to read silently and without sub-vocalization than it was previously with everything written together with no spaces, no punctuation and every other row in the other direction (boustrophedon).

Whatchewtalkingaboutwillis?