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Dyslexic in English but not in Chinese
bmsleight writes "Research published in Nature and other sources has found that there is no one cause for dyslexia; rather, the causes vary between languages. The finding explains why one can be dyslexic in one language but not another language. Wow, time for me to learn Chinese."
Any pointers to free good-coverage Unicode font for Win32/WinCE?
-- js7a
One is a phonographic language and the other is ideographic. Not a big surprise. (Hint: 'Hukt on fonics' doesn't work for the Chinese.)
"So conclude researchers who have found that Chinese children with reading difficulties have different brain anomalies to their Western counterparts"
So why is it a brain anomaly if you or I have reading difficulties? I mean, were we genetically disposed to read, or hunt and gather? I think it's a mistake to assume a "normal" brain reads well and an "abnormal" brain doesn't. It's not like natural selection has created a pool of "good reading brains".
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
In a similar vein, I had a linguistics prof in college (a couple decades ago, so this isn't a new idea) who was involved in a study comparing the reading problems of children in the US and Israel. One of the points of interest was dyslexia.
/. can handle Hebrew letters: //, . (Hmm ... That doesn't look too good when I hit Review. Oh, well. ;-) What would be a serif in English is a distinguishing part of some Hebrew letters.
Hebrew and English turn out to be rather different in this regard. The main differences are: Hebrew has no pairs of letters that are the same except for rotation or reflection, while English has a lot of them. Thus the b/d/p/q set shows a single form that occurs in four different orientations. Also, Hebrew has no upper/lower-case distinction, which is also a source of confusion in English. (It does have a print/script distinction, which presents the same sort of problem, to a lesser degree.)
OTOH, Hebrew has a number of letters that differ in only tiny details. Let's see if
Anyway, comparing reading problems in different writing systems is an old source of research funding. There's a fair amount of literature on the topic.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
We might observe that most American-made dictionaries have long called themselves a "Dictionary of the American Language", not English.
;-)
Linguistically, of course, American is a dialect of English. But there is general recognition that "English" properly refers to the dialects spoken in England.
Then there are the Aussies who insist that they speak Strine, not English.
I'd imagine that the learning problems are similar in all three.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
You haven't tried to discriminate between my zhao and wo. Spelling errors are entirely possible in Chinese. Each character is composed of a set of strokes, and the repetoire of strokes is fairly small. Substituting a hooked vertical for a straight vertical, or a narrow horizontal for a wide horizontal, will change the meaning and pronounciation of the character.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Heh. I hope you get a few "funny" mods.
;-)
Of course, the same thing happens in print. Some fonts turn these sets of letters into glyphs that don't quite reflect or rotate into each other. But this doesn't help the 5-year-olds much, since it's really an example of another problem: the many different forms of the same letter in different fonts and scripts.
Another sort of problem that is nearly unique to our Roman alphabet: The pairs "cl" and "rn" can look like "d" and "m" in a lot of fonts and scripts. So "clear" can be nearly indistinguishable from "dear". I've seen cases where it was difficult to decide whether they meant "modern" or "modem". This is similar to the problems in Hebrew with the nearly-identical letters.
But if you want a really nightmarish writing system, take a look at Arabic. OTOH, it can be really pretty.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
And what about ebonics?
Yup. The linguists usually call this BVE (Black Vernacular English), or sometimes BVA (Black Vernacular American) and classify it as one of the four main North-American dialects of English. It's interesting because it's primarily a social dialect rather than regional like the other three. Linguists also like it because of its radical differences from the other North-American dialects.
A big fuss has been made over this dialect, for social and political reasons. But linguists like to consider themselves scientists, so they mostly ignore such subjective (and sometimes moralistic and/or racist) attitudes. BVE under any name is linguistically significant and quite worthy of study.
Of course, linguists would say the same of Navajo, Chinook, Hawaiian, and Cajun French. Linguistic interest and political/social importance aren't particularly related.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I don't have any problems with written language, but written sequences of numerals are terribly problematic. The numbers (almost literally) jump around, switch places, and imposter for other numbers. This makes even simple math problems a nightmare. In high school, I got a solid D- in Algebra, followed by an A in Geometry the next year -- because geometry was all about proofs, shapes, and logic, without any of those messy numbers! :)