Re: Arabic -- qawsitaliyya?

From: Herb Martin (news_at_LearnQuick.com)
Date: 06/24/04 

Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 00:41:08 GMT

> > It's a crummy system, evidenced by the trouble that even
> > Arabic children have learning to read and write their own
> > language.
>
> How is that "trouble" greater than, say, the abysmal performance of
> American children in a vowelled alphabet?

Articles that I have read -- not scientific studies however -- have
indicated that lack of a printed and fully vowelled 'alphabet' makes
teaching Arabic children much harder and is responsible for some
portion of the higher illiteracy rates.

One would have to carefully factor poverty and other issues to determine
the amount but common sense (which can be wrong) agrees that just
the problem of teaching with this disadvantage is obvious.

> > The writing was frozen in time 1200 years or so ago and has not
> > evolved as most language elements do to improve clarity in the
> > contexts in which the language is used.
>
> Vowel signs are routinely used when an ambiguity is expected, even
> in newsprint. After all, the primary purpose of writing for the native
> speakers is surely not that of making life easy for foreign learners.
> Those can still use elementary schoolbooks and vowelled special
> publications.

But reducing the ambiguity is only part of the problem for the new
reader -- a large portion of learning to read is to recognize the
characters on the page correlated with some auditory information
already possessed by the reader.

If removing ambiguity were the issue, then teaching adults to read
English would be trivial.

Not that the ambiguity doesn't make it worse, but the lack of vowels
and the cursive script are a significant handicap. 

-- 
Herb Martin
"mb" <azythos2@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:668d6151.0406221515.39347d59@posting.google.com...
> "Herb Martin" <news@LearnQuick.com> wrote
>
> > That's just a load of "rationalizing".
> >
>

Relevant Pages

  • Propaedeutic value of Esperanto
    ... Propaedeutic value of Esperanto - Language teaching introductory ... A simplified general learning experiment gives an analogy to the way ... The preparatory teaching conducted by this Institute prepares students ...
    (soc.culture.magyar)
  • Re: Strong AI Thesis (No Chinese room, I promise)
    ... with the idea of a generic learning system at work. ... make vision work better, and language work better, etc. ... Logic, mathematics, and scientific method ology have ... recognized the limitations which linguistic practices im pose on ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)
  • Re: All languages are equally fit
    ... Both mathematical notation and programming languages may have ... A *well-defined* formal notation system has no ambiguity. ... That's not ambiguity in the computer language; ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Gradual Learning, not Reinforcement Learning
    ... You seem to believe that "learning" means acquiring behaviours the system has never exhibited before. ... You use learning HORSE as an example, and posit HOXEL as an intermediate stage, with HORSE as an "ideal" to be achieved. ... Firstly, the system must be capable of "producing language", else it cannot learn the semantic difference between HORSE and HOTEL, both of which are easy consequences of HOXEL. ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)
  • The Gaelic Society of Moscow speaks out!
    ... TEN REASONS FOR LEARNING IT ... ©Gaelic Society of Moscow,2003 ... language if you have few opportunities to use it in addition, ...
    (soc.culture.scottish)
Loading