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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29306 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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This is slightly off-topic, but I think it's worth noting that most other languages don't have as much of a problem with this.

Teaching to read in a more regular system—like Hangul, as @07mk said, for example—ends up resulting in a much easier time than English's system where the same letters have come to indicate several different sounds, due to changes in pronunciation.

There is also some reason to think that syllabaries are usually better than alphabets for learning languages, despite the larger character set required. Syllables are a more natural unit of speech, and so there isn't the whole process of learning to deconstruct a syllable into or assemble a syllable from its constituent sounds that one has to go through to get accustomed to the use of an alphabet.

This paper was really interesting.

Teaching to read in a more regular system—like Hangul, as @07mk said, for example—ends up resulting in a much easier time than English's system where the same letters have come to indicate several different sounds, due to changes in pronunciation.

Sure, Hangul is easy. But I bet it's taught as it's designed -- this subcharacter means this sound, this other subcharacter means another sound. They're probably not teaching "whole syllable" (i.e. 김 is Kim, 문 is Moon, etc) nor "whole word" (서울 is Seoul, 학교 is school, 핵무기 is nuke, etc). That would be crazy, ignoring all the design features of the syllabary. The Latin alphabet is older, more irregular when used for English, and more evolved than designed by now, but it's still crazy to ignore it.

I hadn't meant to bring up Hangul as an example of a syllabary, just of regular spelling (I was originally going to put Spanish, but then remembered that I had seen someone mention Hangul, so I figured I may as well acknowledge that instead).

Although, after looking on google scholar a little (and only a little—I'm sure there's a lot more to read) the abstract here seems to suggest that they usually don't process it letter by letter?

This article by the same author, says that children are usually taught using "a CV chart of possible syllables" with children learning syllables (well, leaving off the coda, so not quite whole syllables) before they learn to recognize the alphabet, so it looks like they actually do think of them more like syllables? This is a little surprising to me.

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