25 JAN 2024 by ideonexus
Neutralization and Homogenization
The simultaneity of two events in the month of July 1975 illustrated this in a striking manner: the linkup in space of the two American and Soviet supersatellites, apotheosis of peaceful coexistence - the suppression by the Chinese of ideogrammatic writing and conversion to the Roman alphabet. The latter signifies the "orbital" instantiation of an abstract and modelized system of signs, into whose orbit all the once unique forms of style and writing will be reabsorbed. The satellization of la...02 MAR 2019 by ideonexus
Reading Wars of the 1990s
WHOLE-language theory holds that learning to read and write English is analogous to learning to speak it -- a natural, unconscious process best fostered by unstructured immersion. In an atmosphere rich in simple printed texts and in reading aloud, small children make a wondrous associative leap from knowing the alphabet to being able to read whole words. Their minds receive print as if each word were a Chinese ideogram. If a word is unfamiliar it can be skipped, guessed at, or picked up from ...Site Words VS Phonics. If English was phonetical, we could focus on one strategy, but because many spellings don't match their pronunciations we must also memorize Sight Words as if they were Chinese ideograms.
18 MAR 2015 by ideonexus
The Importance of Comparative Alphabets
But when I had grasped the facts that spellings are often false, that words can be invented,
and that explanations are often wrong, I found that worse remained behind. The science of phi-
lology is comparatively modern, so that our earlier writers had no means of ascertaining principles
that are now well established, and, instead of proceeding by rule, had to go blindly by guesswork, thus
sowing crops of errors which have sprung up and multiplied till it requires very careful investigatio...12 MAR 2015 by ideonexus