Re: What's the weirdest human language?

André G. Isaak wrote:
In article <S9SdnYW_GtGfox_ZnZ2dnUVZ_v-dnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxx>,
Nancy Norton <nospam@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Iain wrote:

Conclusion: English Language Spelling is a good a spelling as any
would-be spelling based on a modern dialect. I'd almost say it was
genius, if it had any signs of having been thought through. It has the
added bonus of being more morphologically organised. The American
variant failes slightly in the latter regard, but not by much.

~Iain

It sounds to me like you've never tried to help a dyslexic learn to read English. There's a reason that English speakers are diagnosed as dyslexic at a much higher rate than, say, Italian speakers. It turns out that the rate of dyslexia in Italy is just as high as in England or America, but because the language is so much more phonetic and regular, more of them are able to cope without special tutoring.

(I'm pretty sure that the study I heard about that had this finding actually did use Italian as the comparison language, but it's been a few years, so I'm not certain.)

Dyslexia is an unfortunate term since it is used as a cover-phrase for a wide variety of very different reading disorders.


Oh, I'm aware of that. Still, most people understand it to mean that a dyslexic finds reading, or learning to read, difficult. If I told people that my son had a mild auditory processing disorder, they wouldn't immediately understand what that means.

Some varieties of dyslexics do encounter difficulties with non-phonetic spellings, but this is certainly not the case with all forms of dyslexia. In some cases, dyslexia results from a subject's inability to process phonetic information at all; in such cases familiar words, including irregular words like 'yacht', 'phlegm', etc. pose no problems, but unfamiliar words, even ones with fully regular spelling, cannot be processed at all.


This is very much how my son's dyslexia showed up. He had no trouble learning the "sight" words such as 'the', 'is', etc. but any word that was "sounded out" had to be sounded out *every* *single* *time* he encountered it - for two full school years! At the beginning of Kindergarten he could sound out words like 'mom'. For "mom" - he'd say "mmm - ah - mmm ... mom". At the end of first grade, he *still* read every single word that way, even if he'd seen and sounded out the word a hundred times. If it was a word ending in a silent 'e', like 'cake' he had to do it twice: "k - ah - k" (then he'd see the 'e' at the end) "k - ay - k ... cake". Yet, his teachers didn't think he had a problem. Over the summer between first and second grade, out of frustration, I told him he wasn't allowed to sound out words any more and made flash cards out of all the words in "Go Dog! Go!" and he learned them. After that, he could simulate reading enough to fool people (and standardized tests), but he still couldn't read comfortably. It wasn't until the end of 4th grade that his teachers admitted that there might be a problem and I didn't find someone who could properly diagnose him until the beginning of 5th grade. The first two times he'd been tested for dyslexia, the tester had only used a test that uses colored blocks to represent the sounds, which enabled him to use his very high visual-spatial abilities to compensate for his auditory problems. Finally, I found someone who used that test (at which he tested at 5th grade level) but also used a purely auditory test requiring him to leave sounds out of words (such as say 'last' and then repeat it but leave out the 's' sound). The two tests generally correlate very well, but my son tested at early 2nd grade on the second test. Therapy made a huge difference and he's a great reader now (he's just finishing 11th grade). He's still got learning disabilities, though. He tests at 99th percentile in things like verbal comprehension but 16th percentile in processing speed.

Comparing the different types of reading orders which do exist, and considering what we do know about the psychology of reading, one thing is clear: reading out words phonetically plays a relatively minor role in processing written language; it is essentially the strategy of last-resort which people use when all other methods fail.

Yet, my son did not become a proficient reader until his difficulty in this area was addressed with therapy. The therapy also addressed his spelling problems, which helped me, too (I'd always been an excellent reader but a mediocre speller), and showed me how completely nonsensical English can be. You should have heard the sentence he was taught as a mnemonic for remembering which words end in "ey"!

Given this, it is not surprising that very few languages (if any) approach perfect phonetic regularity -- it simply isn't a major driving-force in the evolution of writing systems.


Still, some of us have a greater desire, or need, to have the correct pronunciation of words, even if we're just reading silently, than others. My husband and I both read a lot and we both like fantasy and science fiction books. When my son was in elementary school - and still not reading well - I read to him a lot. I was reading "The Lord of the Rings" to him and I had to go on a trip, so my husband tried reading it to him while I was gone. Problem was, my husband is also dyslexic - although never diagnosed. He learned to read by treating every word as a unique symbol and he never even thinks about how to pronounce unfamiliar words. So, when he tried to read Tolkein out loud, he didn't even come close to pronouncing any of the names the way I did. I always try to figure out the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word, even if I'm never going to need to say it out loud. It's just part of what I do to learn a new word. (I'm a self-taught reader. I learned, on my own, when I was 4.)

.

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