On Tue, 08 Jun 2004 07:31:33 -0400, Peter T. Daniels
<grammatim@...> wrote:

> And exactly the same system, mutatis mutandis, was used in the early
> spelling books of Webster and McGuffey. In the olden days, educators
> recognized instinctively that the syllable, not the segment/letter, is
> the minimal unit of speech accessible by the non- or preliterate, and
> sensibly taught reading and writing using it.

Most interesting, indeed. I have silly fantasies of helping willing adults
who learned by "whole-word" no become decently literate w.r.t. phonetic
reading and spelling of unfamiliar words.

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
Opera 7.5 (3778), using M2