It was fun reading all those fractured orthographies ... and the discussion
of how, depending on language and writing system, we read by combining
"bottom up" (orthographic-phonological) and "top-down" (genre, register,
discourse, intertextual) strategies.
Perhaps also worth noting that how we learn to read, how we read initially
unfamiliar words and text, and how we read after long practice and on
familiar ground, are all pretty obviously very different practices,
including at the neurological level. No doubt also somewhat different
depending on language and writing system, and on schooled practices and
some aspects of the general culture of reading (e.g. its relation to an
oral tradition, the sacredness of texts, the cultural salience of accuracy,
etc.).
I happen to be teaching a course at the moment that deals with changing
definitions of literacy, reading, writing, etc. and in part with what it
means to read something that counts as writing. An interesting thought in
this vein is that "a reading" of a text has not historically always, or
perhaps even most often, meant a verbatim recitation word-for-word, but
rather a performance that counts in a community as rendering the culturally
important aspects of the meaning of the text, even when we have to fill in
words not there, gloss as we read, correct errors in print, interpret
ambiguities, and make a "good reading", regardless of the marks on the page.
Roy Harris (Oxford, linguistics), who has perhaps thought and written more
on these matters than anyone in the last decade or two (Signs of Writing is
the best of his books on the subject, I think) makes a very good case that
in general writing is NOT a notation of speech, but rather a prompt that we
use to produce a good performance of the sense of the text. At the moment,
and in some quarters of one culture, "good" has come to mean a rather
limited and literalist verbatim-ism. I think there are excellent reasons to
reject that "fundamentalist" position as naive and limiting intellectually.
It has, unfortunately, made common cause with both religious textual
fundamentalism (Christian mainly, I don't know about Muslim) and with the
politics of recent linguistics, which turned away from a view of the
autonomy of written language to a fetishism of oral language as
fundamental. Harris knows that history very well and points to the blinders
it has put on our current view of literacy. (For the links to religious
textualism, see David Olson's _The World on Paper_.)
I don't think one can properly pose questions about the relationship
between orthographic-phonological and discursive-semantic reading practices
outside some fairly sophisticated view of what defines "a reading" of a
text in a particular community for a particular purpose. Sometimes writing
is a notation for speech. But not usually.
JAY.
At 06:10 PM 9/19/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>I just don't get it. I tried scrambling the following abstract and it did
>not
>help to make sense of it at all:
>
>"Txet-only CMC has been cialmed to be iiaecotrtalnlny inenocerht due to
>laitnomtiis imeposd by mengiassg sstymes on trun-tnkaig and rfceeenre, yet
>its ptploauriy cotniunes to grow. In an amtetpt to roeslve this aapnrpet
>pdaraox, this sutdy evueaatls the cerechone of ctpouemr-meaitedd itocaienrtn
>by sivruenyg resaecrh on csors-turn cronechee. The rteslus revael a high
>deerge of dtseirpud adjenaccy, ovalepnpirg egnhxaecs, and tpioc dcaey. Two
>eitnopalxans are ppsrooed to aocucnt for the prtiplouay of CMC diepste its
>rlateive iecreconhne: the atbliiy of usres to aapdt to the miuedm, and the
>aaevtngads of lonoseed cochneree for hgeeenthid itaetiicvntry and luagnage
>paly."
Jay Lemke
Professor
University of Michigan
School of Education
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
Tel. 734-763-9276
Email. JayLemke@UMich.edu
Website. www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
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