John:
>Two questions
>
>1. Firstly does anyone know what the linguistic term is for
>the "Chinese Whispers Effect" is?
God, I never heard of it before and yet there are sites devoted to the
syndrome:
http://www.newscientist.com/ns/970726/ndeaf_nf.html
To my surprise, it would seem that 50 million people in China are unable to
hear tonal distinctions and "lip-reading is no help when it comes to tones",
the site says. I guess it might be called "tone deafness" :) I'm not so sure
however whether that is such a terrible problem in Mandarin which tends
towards polysyllabism, but certainly in Cantonese, I'd imagine. This is more
a _medical_ problem than a linguistical issue, isn't it?
>2. Can anyone point to a site which gives the phoneme classification
>for the normal typewriter keyboard?
I don't get this question. Does this pertain to speech analysis? Erh.
- gLeN
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Get more from the Web. FREE MSN Explorer download :
http://explorer.msn.com