Regular font for human beings to learn to write

Tim ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au
Sat Oct 4 07:50:53 UTC 2014


On Fri, 2014-10-03 at 10:55 +0100, Ian Malone wrote:
> It's not universally how letter sounds are taught in any case.

That's true, but in a given locality, you're going to be teaching your
students the same ones.  And you start with the words that fit the
rules, then progress through the exceptions.

> Letter names are not the same as sounds.

That was the point that I was making, but it's not coming across very
clearly, because this thread is missing the vital oral part of this
language discussion.  Once it finished uploading, this may help:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd-pxArglMI

While we are venturing off the list topic, it does become important if
you play with speech synthesis.  Many years ago I wrote a small program
that kids would use to match colours and their names, for example.  It
used a speech synth to tell the kids what to do, so they could use the
program by themselves, instead of a human helper having to explain
everything as it went along.  Some of the kids took to it like a duck to
water.  I demoed the program to some teachers, and while the computer
was saying what to do, one of the kids walked up from nowhere and did
what he was supposed to do.  Previously, it'd had been quite a chore to
manage the same function without oral instructions.

Getting the speech synth to pronounce things correctly, though, meant
deliberately mispelling things behind the scenes.  Most of the time, you
just had to spell odd words phonetically, but sometimes you had to
seriously go out of your way to get the right pronunciation, because
whoever wrote the linguistics rules for the synth hadn't covered
everything adequately, and adding exceptions to the synth wasn't an easy
thing to do.  What *wrong* words I had to use, instead, to get it to
correctly say "country," instead of mispronouncing it like "count" as in
"counting money," is best left to the imagination.  But it was two
hyphenated words, the second word was "tree."

-- 
tim at localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp

Linux 3.16.3-200.fc20.i686 #1 SMP Wed Sep 17 23:07:44 UTC 2014 i686

All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point trying
to privately email me, I will only read messages posted to the public lists.

George Orwell's '1984' was supposed to be a warning against tyranny, not
a set of instructions for supposedly democratic governments.



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