Wednesday, May 12, 2010

brain and dyslexia. implications.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100510075529.htm

"When you are reading, you are essentially saying things out loud in your head," said Cutting. "If you have decreased integrity of white matter in this area, the front and back part of your brain are not talking to one another. This would affect reading, because you need both to act as a cohesive unit."
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D: this implies that a language should be able to be spoken.
Heaps of silent or unpronouncable consonants could not be 'sounded out' in one's mind.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

web address options. horse before cart.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10100108.stm

Arab nations are leading a "historic" charge to make the world wide web live up to its name.

Net regulator Icann has switched on a system that allows full web addresses that contain no Latin characters.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are the first countries to have so-called "country codes" written in Arabic scripts.

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D: to say 'use the Roman alphabet' is every bit as centric as saying 'learn to speak English' (more on that later).

Even IPA would be a better choice.

How many people send out resumes (resumays) but it looks like rezooms?
Cache- cash 'n cashay.
And so on.
On my PC, I at least knew alt-0233 would duplicate that accent.
On a Mac, I don't even know that.

We're recreating the tower of Babylon!

D: maybe HIOXian and Decimese should be both considered as INTER - inter-writing, inter-language.
Not first, not last. Just interface points for translation purposes.
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A bad day at work.

I was trained on a gate at an auto factory. We deal with incoming big rig trucks.
I console myself that the following story has unfolded a number of times with other people.
1) we use low fidelity hybrid radio/cellphones I've never seen before
If you speak too loudly, as in when agitated, they distort.
If agitated, you likely speak faster.
Now toss on a foreign accent.
I actually cannot understand what is being said. Particularly when the shipper flips out. Which happens a lot.

I have some minor auditory processing problem. It rarely affects everyday life.
However, I am unable to pick out words with enough background noise (and work in a bar...).
I cannot understand toddler babbling until around age 3.
In French, I cannot parse word boundaries worth a damn.
And I cannot figure out an accent to save my life!

http://kidshealth.org/parent/medical/ears/central_auditory.html
Kids with APD often do not recognize subtle differences between sounds in words, even when the sounds are loud and clear enough to be heard. These kinds of problems typically occur in background noise, which is a natural listening environment. So kids with APD have the basic difficulty of understanding any speech signal presented under less than optimal conditions.

Accents are the one thing we don't teach immigrants to stop using. I imagine it would be very hard.
But it means somebody with a good grasp of English grammar and vocabulary can still be unintelligible to me...

The guy training me uses hearing aids. Even he does better!
But, wow, getting name spelling from the truckers takes a while.
English letter names have terrible acoustic clarity.
(Thus my suggested alternative to NATO callsign letter names.)

D: maybe this contributes to my interest in a simplified aux-lang.


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Aside:

Core fonts for the Web was a project begun by Microsoft in 1996 to make a standard pack of fonts for the Internet. The fonts were designed to:
Be highly legible on screen;
Offer a wide range of typographic “timbres” within a small number of typefaces; and
Support extensive internationalisation.
These design goals and the fonts' broad availability have made them extremely popular with web designers.

D: this mirrors many of my concerns for HIOXian.