Re: Portals and air

Catja Pafort wrote:

Zeborah wrote:

A certain percentage of English speakers don't attempt to sound out
foreign names or words; they look at it, shriek, "Eek, a foreign
word!" and their brain crashes like a Star Trek computer
encountering "Everything I say is a lie."

How well can you sound out things in English? Trying to sound out
English words is going to put people off for life.

Well yes, that's the thing. That's the way it looks, and yet there
*are* regularities in how native English speakers will sound out a word
they haven't encountered before (e.g. fantasy names, to keep it in
topic).

One big difference between competent non-native speakers of English
(like me) and the native speakers is that they all learned to speak
English before they learned to read and write it; while most of us went
at it either at the same time, or even the other way round. This means
that our spelling is well above average (and our spelling mistakes are
recognizably different from those of the natives). I suspect another
consequence is that we retain our sounding-out "instincts" from the
first language we learned to read, which is not English.

My default sounding-out is German. I do, occasionally, slip into
Welsh, which is *really really inconvenient* when dealing with
Spanish names.

....and then of course there is the aggravating factor that (with the
exception of native Chinese speakers) most if not all our native
languages have a more regular paper-to-voice algorithm. With Italian,
the only doubt is where to put the stress; French and Spanish don't
even have that problem. (I think German neither -- well I never had a
problem, but I don't remember if there are rules or if I just happened
to have a good instinct for it.)

(Going the *other* way now, French is almost as bad as English, and
Italian is easier than Spanish or German, because there are fewer
spelling possibilities for each sound -- but that's beside the point.)

My knowledge of languages is pretty much limited to Indoeuropean ones
(and Slavic languages are a sore point even there), but I'm fairly
confident that there can't be many languages harder to read than
English among those that use alphabetic or syllabic writing.

And yet there are regularities in how native speakers read "new" words.
The human brain is indeed amazing :-)

--
Anna
.

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