std.stream.Stream.writeable [Way off topic]
Bruce Adams
tortoise_74 at yeah.who.co.uk
Thu Nov 15 16:53:28 PST 2007
Jarrett Billingsley Wrote:
> "Bruce Adams" <tortoise_74 at yeah.who.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:fhhnat$1dtg$1 at digitalmars.com...
>
> > Just a thought but is it even possible to be dyslexic in an idiogrammic
> > language?
> > The order of the symbols in a word doesn't affect its meaning so much if
> > indeed at all.
>
> I'm not meaning to insult you, but where did you hear that? Word and
> morpheme order in Chinese is just as important as in any other language.
>
> And Japanese, while borrowing several thousand Chinese characters, is of
> absolutely no linguistic relation to it. It's also written in a mix of
> ideograms and phonetic characters, not pure Chinese characters.
>
That's linguistic drift for you. And as you point out neither Chinese nor Japanese are 100% ideogrammic anymore if they ever were.
Modern examples like bliss show how hard it is to express certain concepts that way.
http://www.blissymbolics.org/workshop.shtml#structure
As I understand it dyslexia affects people at the level of letters not words. There are at least two problems. Tranposing symbols and failing to distinct symbols that are similar, typically by reflection or rotation. I was just speculating as to whether the ideogrammic components of the language contribute to making these kinds of error less likely.
Other possibilities are that the education system is better or there is a genetic basis that is less common in the east. Studies should easily be able to prove or refute these kinds of link if there genuinely is a difference in occurance.
Following up with some research it seems I'm not entirely bonkers. Apparently there is a difference in frequency the language does make a difference. Except it could be to do with being a tonal languages or not rather than just the ideograms or both.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/050408.html
Some more heavy going research only for those into cognitive
psychology & psycholinguistics.
Naturally when you think about it there are going to be multiple points in the the cognitive pathway where things can go wrong and therefore multiple types of reading problem.
http://tinyurl.com/yp9h4y
Regards,
Bruce.
More information about the Digitalmars-d
mailing list