The recent lively discussion centering around Suzanne McCarthy revealed
the idea that some people don't perceive consonants and vowels separately,
apparently in Tamil, among other scripts. If I followed the discussion
correctly, it seems that they might generally and easily perceive
syllables, at least in some sense and at least part of the time.

By now, probably most Qalamites know the the "whole word" method of
teaching reading is one topic leading me to express restrained (?)
fury... No need to make more nasty noises in proliferation.
Nevertheless, it has been a point of curiosity why intelligent and
presumably literate people seem to be so crippled when asked/required to
pronounce words in print that are new to them, as well as unusual.

Pondering this, it occurred to me that a loose analogy might hold:
"Whole-word" people probably don't explicitly understand the distinction
between vowels and consonants; it seems possible that they derive
very-elementary phonetic interpretations of very-small letter clusters
implicitly, perhaps being at a loss to explain how they do so. Some
evidence of this is the attempts at phonetic respellings that sometimes
amount to little, if any, more than simply re-typing with separators for
the syllables of the word. (E.g., encapsulate: "en cap su late"). (Further
thought: If, indeed, the "whole word" people have significant difficulty
splitting a word into syllables, does that explain the acceptance of the
typographic horrors of line breaks within words (E.g., W\altham, where the
\ represents a line break), as well as less-frequent hyphenation that's
not done automatically by word processors?)

Indeed, only recently have I come to realize that image memory, so
essential to reading CJK, is probably important to all readers of
alphabetic scripts. It also appears that teaching by phonics offers no
reinforcement of visual memory whatsoever, causing the relative epidemic
of homophone absurdity that seems to have begun with the onset of phonics.
(My favorite: A local newspaper headline about an exfoliating refurbished
carillon: "Bells to peel again".)

It was really helpful to read Marco's tutorial syllable charts; I'd quite
forgotten that, as a method of teaching reading.

{I'm falling further behind in reading recent Qalam; sorry.}

My regards to all,

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
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