suzmccarth wrote:

> Phonological awareness divorced from visual script characteristics
> is very problematic. I don't know where to start. How can I explain
> that people become aware of how to discriminate, identify, label and
> segment sounds in words *because* these sounds are representated
> separately in the script. If this is not done, as it is not, in a
> syllabic script, then these phonological skills are variable. Some
> people learn them and others don't. Some people will never learn
> them.

See the articles by Aronoff AND Daniels AND Faber in the Milwaukee
volume (Downing, Lima, and Noonan, The Linguistics of Literacy, 1992
[1988]) -- and the postscript by Ong, who didn't bother showing up for
his keynote address, showing that he was utterly unable to grasp this
point. Maybe if he'd come and talked to us, he could have gotten it.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...