--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

> Historically there certainly seems to be quite a bit of confusion of
> the concepts of syllable and word -

I have to agree with this - word breaks in many First Nations
languages have also been arbitrary, they differ according to who is
writing. Also some Cree do write in an informal English orthography
with syllable breaks. Syllabics were also written in private letters
without word breaks early on.

So I was not accurate in saying that children match symbol to word,
but rather that they have a "pre-phonetic" stage, sometimes
called "ideographic", "morphemic", "where print represents meaning" or
some such thing.

I have seen children put down a letter for a 2 syllable word and I
then I wait for the next syllable but they continue with the next
word - also few grammatical endings or function words depending on how
significant it is. What would be the best term for this?

Suzanne