I need multiple imports

[Roedy Green]

Incidentally, but not too far off-topic (for the newsgroup, if not for this
thread ;-) mangled identifiers like abbreviations and that ghastly "Hungarian"
convention /really/ throw off my ability to read. Perhaps for people who "read
aloud inside" the mangling has little effect, but I can't read the things at
all. I worked for half a year on a codebase that made heavy use of Hungarian,
and by the end of it I was no nearer being able to read that code than at the
start. The same point applies to people who post in "text-ese" -- if you read
8 as the sound "ate" then you'll be able to decode h8 easily (or rather, with
no more difficulty than you would when reading real English), but for folk like
me, h8 is no more meaningful than, say, h7. I hardly ever event try to read
such posts, a simple 'u' for you is enough to put me off.

That is quite a profound insight. Your language processing can handle
either sounds or concepts it already has in its bank. If an
identifier is made up of random letters, you need a totally different
part of your brain to process it.

I attempt to bypass that by making up a pronunciation for a strange
identifier someone has used, that I can on demand turn back into a
string of letters. I might even try to associate some images,
emotions, or colours or personality with it to try to objectify it.
But code with ordinary English words is so much easier, even if the
result is longer. I guess then my speed reader kicks in.

When the code is under my control, the global rename function gets a
workout to remove these names as my first priority.

 

[Roedy Green]

I have also seen the claim (reputable) that Chinese readers read much faster
(on average) than English readers -- presumably because they /have/ to
speed-read/flash-read (as we would call it).

Once Chinese learn an input scheme, they can also type faster too.
Chinese packs far more information into the same screen real estate.
Just look at English/Chinese side by side. Either the Chinese will be
in a much larger font or there will be a lot of white space after the
Chinese.

I did a study of Chinese typesetting circa 1990. One of the things I
found was that Chinese typesetters were able to read Chinese on low
res screens. To my eyes, everything was a blur. I think they must
have learned to read not by the shapes, but by the pixel patterns.

Since there are so many glyphs needed, font choice was very limited.
The state of the art then was optical, a giant grid of photo masks
shifted under a camera one character at a time.

Perhaps today with morphing algorithms there is more variety.

 

[Oliver Wong]

My Newsgroup server seems to have seriously messed itself up; I can't
see the rest of this thread, so I don't know if this has been answered yet
or not, but Chinese characters are composed of radicals, which allows a
knowledgeable reader to "guess at" both the meaning and the pronounciation
of a character she has never encountered before.

It's like the first time you see the word "omnipotent", you can figure
out it comes from the roots "omni" meaning everything or all, and "potent"
meaning powerful.

There's a pretty good Wikipedia article on this topic, with
illustrations:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_character)

- Oliver

 

[Oliver Wong]

To be honest, I don't remember learning to read. Family history has
it that my parents didn't even know I could read; a family friend told
my parents, who said, "That's not possible; she must have memorized
the stories we read her." So the friend sat me in front of a
newspaper, and I started to read an article ...

But I don't remember any of it.

I don't know if that means that I somehow taught myself (seems
unlikely) or if the preschool I attended was teaching me on the sly.
I wish I knew; it seems silly not to know how I learned to read, since
reading has always been such a big part of my life. When I was a
little kid, trying to envision heaven, all I could come up with was
that it must be an infinitely huge library.

I remember teaching myself how to read. I had this smallish wooden
structure that was in the shape of my name "Oliver" which was initially
placed above my door. For whatever reason, it had fallen and broken in two
(perhaps into pieces "Oli" and "ver"). I picked up the pieces on the floor
and assembled them next to each other, but being too short to place them
back at the top of my door, I just sat there staring at it.

My mother had previously thought me the alphabet, and I knew that this
wooden structure was my name, and I knew how to pronounce my name. All of a
sudden, this information came together and gave me the realization that if I
slur the pronounciation of each letter in a word, I get an approximation of
the pronounciation of that word.

That is, my name, written "Oliver" is vaguely pronounced like "Oh El Eye
Vee Ee Er". I looked around for other writings and realized that this trick
seemed to work in general, as I could deduce the meaning of other words
(e.g. "Es Tee Oh Pee" or styopi, which sounds like "Stop").

I told my mom I figured out how to read, so she gave me a newspaper and
told me to read it. I couldn't. Apparently, the first word of the article
heading started with "Thr..." and I was completely stumped as to what
English word sounded like "Tee Aich Are etc...".

- Oliver

 

[Monique Y. Mudama]

My Newsgroup server seems to have seriously messed itself up; I
can't see the rest of this thread, so I don't know if this has
been answered yet or not, but Chinese characters are composed of
radicals, which allows a knowledgeable reader to "guess at" both
the meaning and the pronounciation of a character she has never
encountered before.

It's like the first time you see the word "omnipotent", you can
figure out it comes from the roots "omni" meaning everything or
all, and "potent" meaning powerful.

There's a pretty good Wikipedia article on this topic, with
illustrations:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_character)

Wow. Thank you. I didn't know about "radicals."

German is a great language for compound words. You can pretty much
make up any word by putting two other words together. Hence the joke
in one of the Neal Stephenson Baroque Cycle books about the
"Buecherradradrad." (Book wheel wheel wheel)

 

[Oliver Wong]

I have also seen the claim (reputable) that Chinese readers read much
faster
(on average) than English readers -- presumably because they /have/ to
speed-read/flash-read (as we would call it).

Depends on how you measure the speed, of course, but if the question is
"given a text written in English and the same text translated to Chinese (or
vice versa), would an Chinese reader read his Chinese text faster than an
English reader read his English text?" the answer is almost certainly yes.

To convince yourself of this, google for "Watch Japanese TV online". The
first few links:

http://beelinetv.com/
http://mediahopper.com/television/106.htm
http://watch.squidtv.net/010302asia1h-04japan.html

are basically streaming video feeds of local channels from Japan.
Whenever there's text captions written in Japanese, these captions will only
be onscreen for a fraction of a second. A Japanese person is expected to be
able to read astonishingly quickly (from the perspective of an English
person, anyway).

From what I understand, English non-speed-readers then to read words by
looking at each character, then combining them to form a word, and then
processing that word. Faster English readers are able to recognize whole
words at a time, and some can recognize whole blocks of words or even whole
sentences at a time.

With Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese, recognizing a whole
word at a time is almost a given, since there's is almost a 1 to 1
correspondence between characters and words.

- Oliver

 

[Oliver Wong]

I did a study of Chinese typesetting circa 1990. One of the things I
found was that Chinese typesetters were able to read Chinese on low
res screens. To my eyes, everything was a blur. I think they must
have learned to read not by the shapes, but by the pixel patterns.

Sometimes the complexity of the character is greater than that which can
be rendered given the font size, and so the characters are simplified. I'm
actually a native English speaker with French as a second language. I'm
trying to learn Japanese, but it's progressing very slowly.

I saw this character that I was trying to look up in a dictionary but
could not find. It looked something like this (please excuse the bad ASCII
art):

--------
| _|_ |
| |_|_| |
|-------|
| _____ |
| \_

So I asked my friend what the heck this character was. She showed me
where it was in the dictionary, and they looked nothing alike. That single
bar at the bottom in my ASCII drawing there was something like a 3x4 tic tac
toe grid with legs:

+-+-+
+-+-+
+-+-+
/ \

The upper part was similarly much more intricate. The thing was, the
tic-tac-toe-grid-with-legs had to be drawn with a height of 1 pixel due to
the font size. So it was rendered as just a 1 pixel thick line.

I have no idea how the Japanese are able to read under these conditions.
Imagine if our character 'a' had to be rendered as a single pixel dot. How
would you differentiate it from o? or e? But apparently, to the Japanese
reader, it's "obvious from context".

- Oliver

 

[Oliver Wong]

In martial arts there's a lot of talk about muscle memory. It's why
repetition is so important. It's perfectly normal to be able to
perform an action, but not be able to describe everything that goes
into the action.

I play dancing games such as DDR and In The Groove a lot
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_dance_revolution). Essentially, there
are 4 panels on the floor in the 4 cardinal directions: up, down, left,
right. On the screen, arrows will scroll upwards pointing in one of the 4
directions and you have to press the corresponding panel as the arrow
reaches the top of the screen. The game will keep track of how many times
you've correctly hit a panel in a row without making a mistake, and calls it
a "combo". If you can do the whole song without a mistake, you are said to
have "full comboed the song" which is an achievement you can typically be
proud of.

Anyway, it has happened to me more than once that I saw a certain
sequence of arrows on the screen, and consciously told my legs to do a
certain sequence of movements, only to discover my legs disobeying me and
doing something completely different. And much to my amazement, my legs were
right and my brain was wrong! My legs somehow knew that they knew better
than my brain and had done some other sequence, and yet my combo counter
kept on counting (as opposed to being reset to 0 after a mistake).

- Oliver

 

[Thomas Fritsch]

To be honest, I don't remember learning to read. Family history has
it that my parents didn't even know I could read; a family friend told
my parents, who said, "That's not possible; she must have memorized
the stories we read her." So the friend sat me in front of a
newspaper, and I started to read an article ...

But I don't remember any of it.

I don't know if that means that I somehow taught myself (seems
unlikely) or if the preschool I attended was teaching me on the sly.
I wish I knew; it seems silly not to know how I learned to read, since
reading has always been such a big part of my life. When I was a
little kid, trying to envision heaven, all I could come up with was
that it must be an infinitely huge library.

I remember some events from when I was a 5 or 6 years old:
My mother and I used to drive into the city with a bus. In the bus I
listened to the speaker announcing the name of the next bus-stop and watched
the light-display showing that same name in letters. Finally I was able to
predict what the speaker would say next from seeing the displayed text.
Later I performed my trick ("next bus-stop is ...") when we were driving in
a bus in another city. My parents were rather surprised. Until then they
thought I were memorizing the bus-stops, instead of actually reading them.

Another story (earlier than the above) is told by my parents. [Unfortunately
I don't remember any of it.]
During bad weather I often sat at the window and made a fun of painting the
cars driving through our street. I painted them including their
number-plates with the numbers and letters on it. I didn't see a qualitative
difference between numbers and letters. A and B were just "numbers" to me,
like 2 and 3.

 

[Thomas Fritsch]

Its cute they don't tell you what the old pictogram for S meant.

You're talking about letter "sin"? From the old pictogram you probably
guessed it meant "breast".
I don't know any Hebrew/Arabic to confirm this. But at least it matches
Latin "sinus" with a similar meaning.

 

[P.Hill]

You're talking about letter "sin"?

I was wondering what innuendo Roedy left unspoken, 'cause I was
looking at Samekh which looks like three horizontal lines,
not sin [š].

-Paul

 

[Chris Uppal]

I don't know if that means that I somehow taught myself (seems
unlikely)

Seems quite likely to me. I believe it happens rather often.

I'd even say it's surprising it doesn't happen more often. After all we
clearly have an inherent ability to learn to read, and we clearly can learn
speach spontaneously, so we don't more children learn to read spontaneously too
? Maybe it's just that there are few indications of the connection between the
letters and the words. It would be interesting to know what would happen if a
parent habitually ran a finger along the words as s/he was reading aloud to a
pre-reading child...

-- chris

 

[Chris Uppal]

You're talking about letter "sin"? From the old pictogram you probably
guessed it meant "breast".

I've found one suggestion that original pictographic meaning was "bow", as in a
recurved archery bow. I haven't been able to find /any/ reputable support for
that, though. The same source suggests also that "tooth" (the jagged W shape)
was the meaning in Phoenician. I haven't been able to find support for that
either.

-- chris

 

[Luc The Perverse]

I didn't. In a British-style private school I was taught to memorise
each new word in its entirety -- by the shape of the entire word. In
my second grade in public school they taught the phonics system. I
thought my teacher was nuts when she would say, "what does T say?" I
thought to myself "It doesn't say anything. It is just a mark on the
paper!" I was very literal, back then.

I remember my extreme joy on looking at the word "crab" and suddenly
noticing that there was a connection between the letters used in a
word and its sound. After this revelation, in a matter of weeks I went
from the bottom in the class to top.

Ah the failed Dewey Decimal system for reading!

That stunted many children's development.

However, when faced with a situation like this you were able to apply your
knowledge, problem solve and probably ended up a better reader for it.

Few children have this kind of drive. Those that do tend to make themselves
smart (assuming no handicap).

 

[Thomas Fritsch]

I've found one suggestion that original pictographic meaning was "bow", as
in a
recurved archery bow. I haven't been able to find /any/ reputable support
for
that, though. The same source suggests also that "tooth" (the jagged W
shape)
was the meaning in Phoenician. I haven't been able to find support for
that
either.

Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protosinaitic> connects the
protosinaitic letter "sin"
to the egyptic hieroglyph <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uraeus>,
meaning the female sun-goddess (pictured as an upright cobra).

 

[Thomas Fritsch]

Seems quite likely to me. I believe it happens rather often.

I'd even say it's surprising it doesn't happen more often. After all
we clearly have an inherent ability to learn to read, and we clearly
can learn speach spontaneously, so we don't more children learn
to read sponatneously too?

I totally agree. Children's ability to discover and learn language-like
stuctures spontaneously must be much greater and broader than we adults can
imagine. A child can even learn reading/writing without having learnt
speaking before. (see below)

Maybe it's just that there are few indications of the connection
between the letters and the words. It would be interesting to know
what would happen if a parent habitually ran a finger along the words
as s/he was reading aloud to a pre-reading child...

Reality took it far beyond that. I remember having read the seizing story of
Helen Keller's childhood.
As a baby she got deaf/blind by an illness, and therefore didn't learn to
speak. When she was 7 years old, Anne Sullivan, a gifted teacher started
teaching "speach" to her. She did it by finger-writing English letters,
words, and sentences into the girl's hand. Surprisingly or not, the girl
learned to "read" and "write" this language in much the same sequence and
speed like other children learn the spoken language: first grasping the
concept of names, nouns and verbs; then expanding the vocabulary, mastering
grammar (prepositions, articles, dependent clauses, ...)

See also <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller>

 

[Chris Uppal]

Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protosinaitic> connects the
protosinaitic letter "sin"
to the egyptic hieroglyph <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uraeus>,
meaning the female sun-goddess (pictured as an upright cobra).

Interesting. If not altogether convincing -- at least for a non-scholar. (To
be fair, the WP article doesn't suggest that the identification is much more
than speculative.)

Remind me how we got on this topic again ? It's not /obvious/ that multiple
imports should require a knowledge of hieratic scripts[*] ;-)

-- chris

[*] Which aren't even represented in Unicode damnit!

 

[thomas_okken]

I observed something that gave me food for thought on how language
works in my brain: I'm normally an excellent speller, and when I made
typos they were always caused by mis-hitting a key, never by using the
wrong spelling for a word.
I never took any typing classes; I only started typing because that's
how you interact with a computer, and I got hooked on programming at an
early age. But, for many years, I would slowly and meticulously hunt
and peck my way around the keyboard.
Then, a few years ago, while writing a report at work, I suddenly
became aware that I was typing pretty fast. Nowhere near a real typist,
mind you, but still, I was using 10 fingers and during my faster bursts
the keyboard would make that "rattling" sound. I was amazed... And soon
after, I also started noticing typos. I wasn't hitting the wrong keys
any more, but now I was sometimes writing "to" instead of "too", "your"
instead of "you're", etc.
Apparently I had formed a new pathway in my brain, where the sound of
words is translated to finger movements directly, and sometimes when my
thoughts race ahead of my fingers, the word hangs in my awareness like
a sound without context, and I pick out a spelling at random --
sometimes the wrong one.
I suppose I could improve further if I got rid of verbalizing in my
head -- going straight from abstract thought to finger movements. Just
a matter of a few more years of practice, I guess.

- Thomas

 

[Roedy Green]

It's not /obvious/ that multiple
imports should require a knowledge of hieratic scripts[*] ;-)

-- chris

[*] Which aren't even represented in Unicode damnit!

how about Cuneiform: 0x10380.

Phoenician is coming in Unicode 5.0

 

[Roedy Green]

Apparently I had formed a new pathway in my brain, where the sound of
words is translated to finger movements directly, and sometimes when my
thoughts race ahead of my fingers, the word hangs in my awareness like
a sound without context, and I pick out a spelling at random --
sometimes the wrong one.

I find that too, and also another sort of error where word with
totally different meaning and slightly different sound came out he
end, as if there were a noisy analog sound channel somewhere connected
to a robot without that had no sense at all of what the words meant.

Another error creeping in often is repeating a word.