Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 January 26

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January 26

Ability to read convoluted words and surnames

How do you call the ability to easily read / grasp relatively difficult words and/or surnames at first attempt, after seeing them in writing? Is there a specific name for it? Thanks. 212.180.235.46 (talk) 09:20, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

It's a product of being well-educated. --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 09:40, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

The term "eulexia" can be found, as an antonym of "dyslexia", but it is not in common use. There is also a concept named "hyperlexia", which however is usually applied only to children.  --Lambiam 10:02, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Are you talking about the ability to pronounce such words? If so, studying phonics can give youngsters a head start on that skill. --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:15, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

The query is somewhat vague, but having learnt how to interpret and parse Greek and Latin roots, could often be of help. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 14:59, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

My personal term for this ability is "being literate," but I am perhaps over-cynical. Lacking the ability seems to me to arise mainly in those taught to read by the (in my biased opinion) conceptually flawed Whole language method, rather than via Phonics. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.213.224.157 (talk) 18:09, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

You're onto it. --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:35, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Many highly literate people of my acquaintance stumble over unusual names. Rather than take it syllable by syllable, they just make a random stab at it. Their ages range from 20s through to 70s. I'm sure this is partly a reflection of a cultural thing in Australia where, for a large cross-section of society, it's considered pretentious to be able to pronounce foreign words with ease, and it's almost a badge of honour to display one's ignorance. (My bags are packed, and I'm leaving for Utopia tomorrow.) -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:51, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Considering English orthography is a reason for nationwide spelling bees, I'm not so sure on the Whole language method's demerits... And considering unusual names might often stem from languages with completely different orthographies and being mangled in several ways, the syllable solution might not necessarily help much. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 22:43, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Being Welsh? Clarityfiend (talk) 23:24, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

(e/c)Wakuran makes a good point. The thing about unusual words or names is that they are unusual. If you haven't heard them spoken then you won't know how they are said (one remembers poor little Punch and his "e-wee lamb"), especially if you are one of those poor deluded fools taught by synthetic phonics. I think a knowledge of etymology is helpful, both for understanding and pronunciation and a knowledge of other obscure words and names also helps. As someone who has no memory of learning to read, or of not being able to read (I just sat on Mum's knee as she read to me, and then started reading for myself, and found the attempts to teach me to read a year later when I started school very unhelpful, as the books there were so incredibly dull compared to what I was reading off my own bat at home) I sometimes find it hard to understand how anyone could find it hard. It's easier than falling off a log. DuncanHill (talk) 23:47, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

I'm Swedish/ Norwegian, actually, but Celtic orthography(/ies) is a good point. And me learning reading corresponds rougly with DuncanHill's history. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 01:58, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

The average pre-schooler likely has a very limited knowledge of etymology. That can help when you're better educated, later in life. I don't know abut "synthetic" phonics, but the phonics I was taught will tell you the likely pronunciations of classes of letter groupings. Examples are bike, dike, fike, hike, ike, like, mike, nike, pike, vike, yike. The one that fails the test is "nike", and that's where etymology comes in. --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:47, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Interesting. But how would y'all call someone's ability to read names like Idrus Nasir Djajadiningrat, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow and Phraya Phahonphonphayuhasena promptly off the prompter without fumbling?  --Lambiam 04:10, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

You can't know for sure if you've never seen those words. But you can take a shot at sounding out each apparent syllable (EE-droos Nah-SIRR, etc.), and thus at least make a reasonable attempt at making sense of them - which too few newsreaders seem to actually be able to do. --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:43, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Who mentioned anything about never having seen those words? If you can offer no insight regarding the question ("How do you call the ability ...? Is there a specific name for it?"), why do you keep interposing irrelevant musings?  --Lambiam 14:21, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Why do you keep complicating the issue? --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:38, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

I recall in the 1980s there was a fuss when BBC newsreader Sue Lawley wouldn't attempt to say the surname of Indian cricketer Laxman Sivaramakrishnan and was subsequently accused of racism. [1] If she had just pronounced the syllables (the synthetic phonics method reviled above) or asked the BBC's Pronunciation Unit, there wouldn't have been a problem. Alansplodge (talk) 12:34, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Yes, easily attempted if you go syllable by syllable. Of course, if all else fails, she could ask him. --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:45, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

How do you know what the syllables are if you don't know how the word is pronounced? Sivaramakrishnan, unlike many English words, has a spelling which reflects the pronunciation. Try your synthetic phonics on English words and names like enough, through, Wriothesley, St John, etc, and you'll sound like a foreigner. The key is knowledge and experience, not any of the artificial "aids" to reading that periodically get invented. Some of us are old enough to have cousins who had the Initial Teaching Alphabet imposed on them, to make it easier to learn to read, and who have never really recovered. If you don't know, ask or look it up. If you are teaching a kid and they don't know how to say a word then tell the poor little mite, instead of teaching them a set of "rules" that might just work for "the cat sat on the mat" but will actively mislead them once they get on to anything actually worth them reading. DuncanHill (talk) 19:05, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

English spelling is rule-based and phonetic, with exceptions. Learning the exceptions can be difficult, but it's a whole lot easier than not knowing the rules in the first place.

(Traditional English-as-in-England place names, surnames, and in some cases personal names, are among the oddest classes of exception, and we Yanks sort of make fun of y'all about that. I saw a bit somewhere about the British getting their covid "borcestershire shot".) --Trovatore (talk) 19:25, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

The question was about difficult words and names, which I would take to be by definition the exceptions. "Borcester shot" would make more sense that "Borcestershire shot", but even then if "Borcester" is meant to rhyme with Worcester, then the pun doesn't work. Worcester don't rhyme with booster. DuncanHill (talk) 19:34, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

So a phonics-based approach certainly doesn't have the same advantages on those names as it does on more usual words, but even there, as far as I can see, the only downside is that you might think you know how to pronounce it when you actually don't. As opposed to a "whole-language" approach, where if you haven't seen the name before, you don't know how to pronounce it either, but at least you know that.

That is a legitimate criticism, but it hardly seems to justify the comment about "poor deluded fools taught by synthetic phonics", especially when compared with the much greater downsides of trying to get six-year-olds to learn how to pronounce thousands of words individually without letting them in on the systematics. --Trovatore (talk) 19:53, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Wakuran -- The "whole word" method expresses some facts about how experienced fluent readers process written text, but as a way of teaching reading from the beginning, it has many drawbacks. For a number of decades, linguists have been pointing out flaws in the "whole word" method (starting a little while after Why Johnny Can't Read was published), but the educationalist establishment is a strange involuted self-contained world, which is basically impervious to empirical facts and evidence originating outside itself (or at least that's how it seems to linguists). AnonMoos (talk) 17:52, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

I think the WP article for that is Whole language, but Whole word just redirects to reading and Look and say (IIRC the name used in the UK) has neither an article or a redirect. Alansplodge (talk) 21:28, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't really remember anymore how I learnt reading, I just know that the way I read today is by parsing words and sentences as units, similar to what the Whole language method appears like... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 22:21, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

The problem with using that method from the start is that children have to memorise many thousands of letter groups as though they were just symbols, without learning the skills to allow them to decipher words that they haven't seen before. [2] Alansplodge (talk) 23:07, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Wakuran -- I'm not sure why the "Whole language" article says that it first came to prominence in the 1980s. In the U.S. it was more like the 1950s.

I learned to read using the "color method", discussed briefly at Words in Colour and Initial Teaching Alphabet, though I doubt whether we used any official materials published by color-method advocates -- my 1st-grade teacher kind of customized it to her own personal preferences, and the books that we individual students used in the classroom had monochrome text (though there were colored-letter-on-black charts showing letter-color-sound correspondences all around the upper walls of the classroom). Anyway, it seemed to work pretty well for me... AnonMoos (talk) 00:48, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

That Initial Teaching Alphabet does seem like an aggressively bad idea. Try to teach kids to read by first teaching them a completely different system, then make them switch???? That said, if it had worked, then it would have worked. I gather it didn't work very well. --Trovatore (talk) 02:43, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

I gather that it worked well for some -- though they were usually the ones who needed the least help, and would have learned to read adequately using almost any semi-reasonable method. The original idea was that it would be so much easier to learn to read using quasi-phonetic I.T.A. than using messy traditional English spelling, that the time saved at the beginning would more than compensate for the time taken up in transitioning later on, but that doesn't seem to have happened consistently. Where I.T.A. really didn't work is with students who transferred from schools were I.T.A. was being used to schools where it wasn't being used, or vice versa -- some of them had bad experiences which they are still bitter about many years later.... AnonMoos (talk) 04:40, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

As for Sivaramakrishnan, after seeing it in writing for about 2-3 seconds, I can pronounce it relatively easily. Same goes for some other (but not all) foreign names. But, as a native Russian speaker, I would argue that Russian language has a better rendition of foreign names, it's more flexible (e.g. for sh it uses a single letter ш isntead of digraph), so reading and pronouncing Sivaramakrishnan or any similar surname in Russian spelling would be easier for me (all things being equal, that is seeing it writing after a few seconds). 212.180.235.46 (talk) 11:01, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Well, since 'sh' is more or less always pronounced the same, I don't see it as much of a problem. That colonel is pronounced like kernel, and such, is more confusing. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 14:41, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

"Sh" can be a problem. I live not far from a small town in Southern England called Cosham. People born/raised there pronounce this "COSS-hǝm" (in accordance with its actual etymology), but those from elsewhere almost invariably pronounce it "COSH-ǝm" unless and until they learn and adopt the local pronunciation. The same often occurs with other English places ending in –s + ham. Place names in English are often more of a problem than other English words because (I suggest) they often have ancient roots, have mutated through many changes in prevalent ethnicities (Celts, Romans, Saxons, Danes, Normans) and language shifts, and are less commonly encountered in reading. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.213.224.157 (talk) 20:14, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Examples of surnames in which the letters "s" and "h" belong to different syllables: Dutch "Beishuizen", German "Weishaupt", Turkish "İshak".  --Lambiam 21:26, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

And then there's the infamous Schiphol Airport. Rather than "shifol", it's closer to "skip hole". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:14, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

For a native English speaker who's somewhat familiar with Dutch pronunciation rules (they aren't hard and the Dutch language area is fairly close to the UK), it's easy to deduce the correct Dutch pronunciation of Schiphol (/sxɪpɦɔl/). A p followed by an h is usually just a p followed by an h; it's only a digraph pronounced as f in a handful of loans. Why make it hard? If you want it to be pronounced as an f, you write an f. The digraph ch is always /x/, except in a few loans, which is a fairly common sound throughout Europe, although absent from English and native English speakers appear to have difficulty with it. When transliterated to the Cyrillic alphabet, it gets harder. Now the name of the airport is Схипхол, which would also be the transliteration of Dutch Schipchol (/sxɪpxɔl/), allowed by Dutch phonotactics, so a native Russian speaker, reading about Schiphol Airport in Russian, has, even if he knows about Dutch pronunciation rules, no way of telling how this is pronounced in Dutch.

BTW, the suffix -ham is so common in English placenames that I immediately guessed Cosham is pronounced Cos-ham, not Cosh-am or Co-sham. And I'm a native Dutch speaker. PiusImpavidus (talk) 14:21, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Well, an English speaker wouldn't know how to pronounce transcribed names in their original language, either. That's no unique problem. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 12:04, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

That's just dumb luck, though, as most place names in -sham are pronounced with /ʃ/, e.g. Aylesham, Earsham, Gresham, Hildersham, Horsham, Keynsham, Melksham, North and South Walsham, Rampisham, Windlesham. And even when it's not /ʃ/, it can be either /s/ as in Winsham or /z/ as in Bosham. A similar problem exists with names in -tham, which can have either /t/ as in Hartham, Wytham, and Great and Little Waltham, /θ/ as in North Waltham, Grantham, Martham, Meltham, and Wrentham, or /ð/ as in Hotham, Wortham, and Lytham St Annes. The surname Whatham is pronounced in all three ways! 2A02:2121:6B9:BCD1:E8A8:63CC:38BF:123F (talk) 22:42, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

212.180.235.46 -- The Cyrillic alphabet does have some advantages over Latin, but from the point of view of English-speakers, Russian has inconsistent and sometimes problematic transliterations of simple sounds like [h] and [w], so that Harry Hopkins became "Garry Gopkins" etc. AnonMoos (talk) 22:03, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

The alternative would be to write Хари Хопкинс, which would traditionally have been rendered as "Khary Khopkins", and then pronounced by most as "Karry Kopkins". When a sound in one language simply doesn't exist in another, there's always a less than ideal solution, some less ideal than others. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:12, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

In English, we would always use the original, "Harry Hopkins", so how the Russian transliteration would be transliterated back into English should not be a factor. AnonMoos (talk) 22:16, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

That's an issue with transcription and writing systems in general, though. They're a good fit for one language, but might not be universally useful for another. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 23:42, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

One might say the Latin alphabet is not a great fit for the English language, but it seems we're stuck with it. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:06, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

The combination of the Norman French impact and the Great Vowel Shift messed things up somewhat, I'd argue... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 22:27, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Yes. Mind you, it's still not as incomprehensible as written Irish Gaelic. The mismatch between apparent and actual sounds is even more bizarre than English. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 00:51, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

I recall something about how an archaised Asian orthography might be the world's "worst offender", in this case. (Something about a lot of silent letters present in Sanskrit loanwords, or similar...) Perhaps it was the orthography of the Mongolian script. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 03:13, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Wakuran -- You almost certainly have Tibetan in mind. The worst writing system for a major or semi-major language today (i.e. used by tens of millions of people) is the Japanese system, as discussed by Geoffrey Sampson... AnonMoos (talk) 13:00, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Ah, yeah. Tibetan script, thanks. Japanese writing isn't alphabetic, as much as a cipher. ;) 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:06, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

The Japanese writing system isn't overall bad because it uses syllabary signs (a syllabary can be a very good writing system if it fits with the phonology of the language which it's being used to write) or because it uses logograms (Chinese writing uses logograms exclusively and is better than the Japanese system in many respects), but because it contains many strange complexities and ambiguities. After WW2 there was an attempt to purge some baroque elaborations by limiting the number of common-use kanji to below 2,000 (with additional kanji used in some proper names), but that didn't change the nature of the system (and the less common use of furigana may have increased the burden on readers). AnonMoos (talk) 14:41, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, I actually studied Japanese on a basic level. Whether to read a kanji as its old approximated Chinese pronunciation, as its slightly newer approximated Chinese pronunciation, as its general Japanese pronunciation or as an "adapted reading" could be a highly confusing mess... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 20:17, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

"Null complement anaphora"

§ Null complement anaphora in the article "Ellipsis (linguistics)" states that "the elided complement cannot be a noun phrase". However, one of the examples in the sibling article "Verb phrase ellipsis", described as an instance of such, is this:

         (9) Question: Do you know the score?
             Answer: No, I don't know <the score>.

I'd say that this example is fine in itself, in as far as it is grammatical, but not in that article, which is after all about verb phrases. What I'm unclear about, though, is whether this is rightly or wrongly categorized as null complement anaphora. Is the "cannot" in the first article supposed to mean that noun phrases cannot be so elided? In that case, the example would seem to show otherwise. Or is it supposed to mean that in that case, it is another kind of ellipsis, simply as a matter of definition?

- 2A02:560:42BB:2900:1197:7DA0:1CEB:8C20 (talk) 23:29, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Since "the score" is not a verb phrase, this cannot serve as an example of an apparent exception to the stated verb phrase ellipsis rule; it is out of place in the article Verb phrase ellipsis. It also sounds somewhat off to me; a more natural reply for a native speaker is just  No, I don't.  --Lambiam 03:48, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

One could also say "I don't know it". --Jayron32 12:16, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

True, but then there is no ellipsis but an unelided anaphor.  --Lambiam 14:14, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

I've removed the non-example from the article.  --Lambiam 14:14, 27 January 2022 (UTC)