Re: Easy as ABG


Herman Rubin <hrubin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:dh99qu$1jqs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> In article <43382097.593E@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >Herman Rubin wrote:
>
> >> We do not know how people read English.
>
> >When's the last time you looked at the literature?
>
> We may know how they take in in by eye, but not how
> the brain processes it. The MRI studies on dyslexics
> shows that the way they are taught can effect the
> parts of the brain which are active.
>
> >> It is true that the
> >> eye takes in words, or even groups of words, in a single eye
> >> pause, but this says nothing about how the brain processes
> >> the information. The educationists used this as the argument
> >> to teach reading by the "whole word" method, producing large
> >> numbers of people who could not use the alphabet properly.
> >> They made introductory reading treating the alphabet as a
> >> coding device, and nothing more. The bad results are still
> >> being felt; there is no evidence that using a phonic approach
> >> has any bad effects in reading English.
>
> >As I said just yesterday, phonics alone doesn't help with love cove move
> >bomb comb tomb.
>
> So there are exceptions; phonics still helps.
>
> >> On the other hand, it seems that the Chinese have increased
> >> their literacy by using an early phonetic approach before
> >> teaching the characters. Both Chinas use such an approach.
>
> >> Certainly, an easily recognized "object", whether it is a
> >> string of letters, an ideogram, or a picture will convey
> >> more information than if it has to be decoded. I CAN read
> >> English in ASCII, but it is slow.
>
> >Hunh? We're reading English in ASCII right now. ASCII was invented _by_
> >Anglophones _for_ Anglophones -- leaving out lots of stuff that even
> >popular West European languages need, but not English.
>
> I meant reading English by seeing the ASCII codes, say
> in octal or hex or whatever. ASCII itself would come
> out as 41 53 43 49 49 in hex.

ASCII is method of coding text internally inside the computers and
communication devices. Externally, when the text needs to viewed by
humans it can be represented in many different ways, as you say,
octal, hex, or whatever. One of your "whatever" methods is Text
(i.e. "ASCII").
These are all equally valid external representations of the same internal
ASCII coded message: Hex "41 53 43 49 49", Text "ASCII", Binary
"01000001 01010011 01000011 01001001 01001001",
Octal "101 123...", etc...

When you see letters "ASCII" or "41 53 43 49 49" you have no
way of knowing whether the text they represent was ASCII encoded
or not. How it's encoded is irrelevant. You know that this paragraph
is transmitted in ASCII only because you have been told.

You manage to read one faster than the other only because you
have had more practice reading that one than the others and/or
because that particular external representation was specifically
designed to be read by humans quickly.
But that has _nothing_ to do with the text being internally coded
in ASCII, CCITT, EBCDIC, or anything else.

pjk

> >> The alphabetic nature of languages does have advantages.
> >> Gould, in his book _Russian for the Mathematician_, claims
> >> that one can read mathematical Russian by learning the
> >> grammar, the alphabet, and 40 roots. I have not tried
> >> learning it, but I would replace it by 100, and not just
> >> for the mathematician. The use of international and
> >> Indo-European words helps.
>
> >I don't remember how many words we learned in Russian for Linguists, but
> >it was a 10-week quarter, and it worked. Though what that has to do with
> >"advantages" of "the alphabetic nature of languages," I cannot fathom.
>
> The point was that the alphabetic nature of Russian allows
> a great deal of the "international" vocabulary, and even
> more, to be directly understood. The aim of Gould's book
> was for mathematicians to be able to read ANY mathematical
> Russian with little recourse to a dictionary, for example.
>
>
>
> --
> >Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
> --
> This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
> are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
> Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University
> hrubin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558

.

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