From: utzoo!decvax!pur-ee!ecn-pa.haamu Newsgroups: net.nlang Title: yes, but are you moving your lips? Article-I.D.: ecn-pa.259 Posted: Sat Jul 24 18:26:02 1982 Received: Tue Jul 27 01:15:30 1982 Let me comment on this impressive statistic: ...children taught to read in a phonetic alphabet acquire 5th grade proficiency (by English standards) by the middle ov grade 2. (I trust I need not attribute the quote.) As a child I was pretty quick off the blocks; even without the aid of a phonetic alphabet I reached "5th grade proficiency" a year or two early. I had a particular talent for translating a group of orthographic symbols into what my elementary teachers (and, apparently, at least one anthropology professor) believed was the essence of a word: its sound. Unfortunately, I never put aside that talent. Even today I still hear every word inside my head as I read it, and I stumble along at about 250 words per minute. The irony is that I was trained for this disability-- by people, however well-intentioned, who mistakenly thought reading ought to be somehow phonetic. And as we all know from reading this newsgroup, the tradition lives on. The process I use to read, called "sub-verbalization" (or something like that) probably also afflicts most of you in one degree or another. It is precisely what speed-reading clinics try to drum out of you. One of these days I'm going to take one of their courses. (The trouble is, I'm still working my way through the brochures.) So if what we want is a nation of 5th-grade-level readers, then I say damn the torpedoes! Let's get on with phonetic spelling reform! Meanwhile, perhaps an entirely *non*-phonetic alphabet, while harder to learn, would provide the greatest benefit to adults. -- Mark Raabe