suzmccarth wrote:

> <marco.cimarosti@...> wrote:
> Not harsh but enigmatic.

OK, sorry, I'll try to clarify.

> >It is just it
> > this sounded so obvious to me that the kind of analysis
> >required by
> > alphabetic writing is all but natural or intuitive.
>
> Are you saying that it *is* intuitive and natural but
> 'pre-school-age' son cannot do it?

Au contraire! I am saying that segmenting a syllable into "phonemes" (in
order to map them to letters) is *not* an intuitive or natural task.

My surprise rather come from the fact that *you* (a teacher having, AFAIK, a
great experience with pupils of many languages and scripts) even consider
that the contrary may be true.

One needs a specific training (i.e. "school", whether or not this means a
formal institution or family education) to learn this, and this training
involves quite a high level of phonetic abstraction and consciousness:
that's why kids need quite a few month before they grasp the mechanism.

So I *do* agree that people who are *only* literate in a syllable-based
script (such as Chinese) *do* have problems in using an alphabetic scripts.

Actually I have even witnessed that personally: as a teen-ager, I spent
about a year the UK with my family, where I attended a school specific to
non English speaking pupils. About one third of the pupils where from Hong
Kong, and they were only literate in Chinese. I remember that there were
specific drills designed to teach how to analyze a syllable; these drills
consisted in listening to meaningless syllables (such as [bu:] or [Sisp])
from a tape and writing them down in English spelling. As all other
European, Indian or Pakistani pupils, either smart or stupid, I have
attended those drills only for about an hour or two: as soon as I started to
write, i.e. "boo" and "shisp" rather that "bù" or "scisp", the teachers
passed me to another class. On the other hand, most Hong Kong pupils, smart
or stupid, spent several weeks with these drills, and they found them very
challenging.

> He should spend more time
> playing soccer and put off reading until later. :-)

Soccer is less popular that it used to be in my times... Italian kids of my
son's age are all mad for WWE wrestling now; they all wish to be John Cena.

> [...]
> Anyway it all breaks down to whether someone can use a roman
> orthography to input a syllabic writing system without first
> consciously learning alphabetic literacy. Porbably some can and
> some can't. What do you think?

I think that everybody *can* do that, and they certainly do when they have a
valid reason for it, such as learning a foreign language. But learning such
a skill for the *sole* purpose of typing a non-alphabetic script on a
computer is clearly asking too much to a potential computer user. On the
other hand, it is perfectly OK to *exploit* this skill when it is *already*
in place.

And this is exactly what happens with pinyin input methods for Chinese: it
would be mad to ask to Chinese users to learn the Latin alphabet for the
sole purpose of being able to use a computer, but as Chinese schools
*already* trains pupils in it for other valid reasons (learning the sounds
of Putonghua, studying foreign languages, etc.), it is a good idea to
exploit this widespread *existing* skill to implement an efficient way of
inputting Chinese on a keyboard designed for an alphabet.

For Chinese who are *not* literate in pinyin (e.g. older people), there are
alternative input method base on different *existing* skills: e.g.
telegraph-code methods (which rely on training on old telecommunication
methods), or shape-based methods, hand-writing recognition, matrix keyboards
(all of which only rely on the knowledge of Chinese characters), etc.

In the case of Vai, it is in my mind unlikely that someone only literate in
Vai script may wish to use a computer, even passively (i.e., only browsing,
no typing). Have you ever seen a Vai translation of Windows or Unix? A Vai
language newspaper online? A Vai language encyclopedia on CD-ROM? A Vai
language newsgroup? The Vai version of Google?

So, how could (and why should) a monolingual Vai use a computer at all?

On the other hand, if, as probable, a Vai user is fluent in some major
language such as English, then he is also well acquainted with the alphabet
used by that language, and it is a good idea to exploit this *pre-existing*
skill to implement an easy and *economic* Vai input method.

And, as we are talking about dramatically poor countries of West Africa, I
must emphasize again the word "economic"! Special hardware keyboards stuffed
with hundreds of extra keys are a daydream even for major languages such as
Chinese and Japanese, spoken in relatively wealthy countries as China and
Japan... Proposing such a solution for a minority languages spoken in a
small 4th-world country which just exited from 15 years of civil war and
where the 60% of citizens are illiterate is simply fairy-like.

--
Marco