RE: SUO: Language & Effect of spelling on dyslexia
John,
. I think you are intimating what was referred to a few
decades ago as "Spelling Reform". IIrc, SR1 was to replace all "or" sounding
phonemes with the "or" spelling (grapheme). There was a string of "SRs",
each to implemented in turn, as the previous was accepted. In USA, of
course, a number of these have already been effectively adopted, which is
one of the main reasons why US English differs to Standard English.
. This amounts to a further variant on issues of simplified
English we discussed some months ago along with ACE, etc.
. The atmosphere provided by maintaining the foreign flavour
of adopted foreign words attracts me, partly because it allows one to
provide more nuances in one's expression. However, not all people interpret
such nuances the same way, and this adds to the ambiguities of English.
. Another issue I see as VERY significant has just arisen
again, as Germany reviews the issues of retaining the purity of Deutsch, and
of retaining it as a distinct language. Of course, many of us are aware that
the Academie Français mandates French vocabulary and spellings in a similar
attempt to maintain the purity of Français from the "bastard" Franglais. I
suggest English is growing in its universality exactly because, as a
heterogeneously derived language, it doesn't try to do this, but rather
welcomes the opposite. As an example, the most recent English example I can
recall of such linguistic policy was the formal adoption of Chinese and
Indian spellings for the relevant names of major cities. Hence "Bollywood"
is an anachronistic slang term referring to the Mumbai film industry.
. As a former effective colony of Scandinavian, French and
German realms, foreign words were forced on England / Britain repeatedly and
from diverse sources. In a classic case of the colony taking over the
coloniser rather akin to the US surpassing UK in economic dominance, English
proudly encompasses these contributions, and welcomes further additions. In
a classic contrast, increasingly people refer to München rather than Munich
as the Anglicisms evaporate, and I think most English speakers see this as
an appropriate acknowledgment of the owners of that city. Note we don't even
say "Englishisms", tho' Anglicism is arguably really the revival of an
original English ("Angle-ish") derived word anyway. "English" itself came
from one of the invading waves of imposed vocabulary that happened to see
the language name also adopted (I'm sure Jon would appreciate this).
. On reflection, I don't see SR as necessarily a particular
threat to this process, but an aspect at present is that words are adopted
unmodified, and this often allows one to know the intended meaning, as
opposed to other words with the same sound (homophones). One would need to
take care in this regard, since one would presumably prefer to retain the
prominence of English.
. The ready adoption of words without amendment possibly also
increases the goodwill of peoples from other languages feeling welcomed by
English. It may also may influence the extent to which they willingly import
English words into their own languages. This is probably assisting the move
toward English becoming a universal language for humankind. The semantic
coverage of English is so broad and up-to-date, that it is probably the
optimum basis for a single universal language.
. For the time being, I could see merit in adopting SR for an
enlarged ACE derivative, but would tend to leave ordinary English as it is,
because of its many advantages and still growing usage.
Cheers Graham Horn
National Data Standards Unit
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare
================================================
Phone: 02.6244.1094
Fax: 02.6244.1199
Email: Graham.Horn@aihw.gov.au <mailto:graham.horn@aihw.gov.au>
-----Original Message-----
From: John F. Sowa [mailto:sowa@bestweb.net]
Sent: Sunday, March 18, 2001 3:26 AM
To: cg@cs.uah.edu; standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
Subject: SUO: Effect of spelling on dyslexia
Human-factors studies are notoriously ambiguous in their implications for
how to design better computer systems, languages, tools, etc.
But the following report gives one interesting tidbit of hard data to show
that a highly regular spelling (as in Italian) makes reading easier for
dislexics in comparison to languages (such as English and French) that have
highly irregular spelling.
http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/aaas-dsi030901.html
For the French translation, see
http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/aaas-dsif030901.html
And for the Italian translation, see
http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/aaas-dsii030901.html
Following is the title and a couple of extracts from the article.
John Sowa
____________________________________________________________________
Dyslexia study in Science highlights the impact of English, French,
and Italian writing systems
English and French are both languages that are said to have an irregular
orthography. In English, there are 1,120 ways of representing 40 sounds
(phonemes) using different letter combinations (graphemes). Mapping letters
to word sounds is ambiguous; this is illustrated by pairs of words such as
mint/pint, cough/bough, clove/love, where you can only read each pair
correctly if you have previously learnt how they should sound.
By contrast, in Italian there is no such ambiguity and 33 graphemes are
sufficient to represent the 25 phonemes. This means that the same letter
groups in Italian almost always represent the same unique sound, which makes
the written language logical and easy to read.
The researchers showed that French, English and Italian dyslexics all did
equally poorly in tests that involved phonological short-term memory,
whereas Italian dyslexics performed better in reading tests, in particular
achieving fewer errors than their English and French counterparts. In order
to determine if this disparity had a neurological basis, the researchers
used positron emission tomography (PET) to visualise regional cerebral blood
flow, and hence neural activity, resulting from exposure to printed
material. Their results prove that French, English, and Italian dyslexics
have the same difficulties in carrying out phonological processing tasks and
reduced activation of the left temporal lobe during reading tasks.