From: mumble@nomail.invalid   
      
   On 05/17/2014 07:32 AM, Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor) wrote:   
   > On 5/17/14 6:15 AM, mumble wrote:   
   >> On 05/16/2014 11:58 PM, J.Pascal wrote:   
   >>> On Friday, May 16, 2014 11:13:06 PM UTC-6, William Vetter wrote:   
   >>>> People who have not had formal education, but have learned primarily   
   >>>> from books, even though they may have learned more than many people   
   >>>> who have completed degrees, can teach themselves to pronounce   
   >>>> unfamiliar words as they are written.   
   >>>>   
   >>>>   
   >>>>   
   >>>> One afternoon, I was talking to a laboratory stockman at his   
   >>>> counter.  He was excited because he had bought a new telescope, and   
   >>>> wanted to use the setting circles to find the Ring Nebula and so   
   >>>> forth, and he was telling me about sidereal time.  He pronounced it   
   >>>> "SIDE REAL."   
   >>>   
   >>>   
   >>> Er....   
   >>>   
   >>> Honest, I don't think I've ever heard that word spoken.   
   >>>   
   >>> -Julie   
   >>>   
   >>   
   >> Back in olden times they had these devices called "dictionaries" that   
   >> contained information on pronunciation in addition to specific meanings,   
   >> and some few were taught to look up the words they encountered which   
   >> were new to their personal vocabularies.   
   >   
   >   
   >      I was taught to deduce meaning from context. This didn't give   
   > pronunciation, though.   
   >   
   >   
      
   I too was taught to deduce meaning from context, which is imo the only   
   way to stay current in an evolving ad-hoc language, by continually   
   reverse-engineering the damned thing.  But the words not clearly   
   determined by context still need to be checked in the lexicon-de-jour   
   unless one prefers to simply guess (which is not uncommon).   
      
   And I was taught that "i [comes] before e except after c", which is a   
   "weird piece" of advice to give children who are attempting to learn   
   (and altogether typical of society in the US, imo).  English is a   
   language in which the number of exceptions probably exceeds the number   
   of cases that follow the rules; anyone who claims that writing English   
   is anywhere near a "science", as opposed to an "art", is basically   
   pretty "wierd" imo.   
      
   Another thing I was taught is that both meaning and pronunciation can be   
   deduced by examining the latin or greek roots embedded in the word,   
   which of course only addresses some cases, not others where the word was   
   Anglicized from some form of Chinese or Martian, or which don't follow   
   the rules "just because".   
      
   People read sequentially and each word they read fires off a   
   generally-ambiguous concept-set as it is read, so if one can manage to   
   string things together so as to narrow the ambiguities away, the reader   
   is likely to receive the meaning.  Maybe; the same thing seems to happen   
   at a more detailed level when the letters of a word are viewed, and   
   sometimes people "read" words that are not actually present.   
      
   Perhaps when finnegans wake we'll have a better chance of communicating   
   with our intended audiences.. or maybe only of "writing in tongues"   
   rather than English.   
      
   Still, giving characters "voices" seems (to me) more a matter of having   
   each character speak from his own agenda, through his own fears and   
   desires, rather than pretending that whether he's from the Bronx or from   
   Minneapolis makes any real difference.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)