The New Reading

Remember the hullabaloo about the New Math when it hit elementary schools?  I am just the age group who had to learn the New Math because that's what my kids were learning. Nobody then worried about the New Reading because reading was reading and how could it ever be anything else?

That was 40 years ago.  And, lo and behold! There is a New Reading, a whole new way to read using our old alphabet. Surprisingly, nobody's making a fuss over it, so far as I know.  I suspect it's that those who haven't been reading on eReaders, don't realize that the experience is vertical as much as horizontal.  Those who have eReaders, often don't reflect on what you can do with eBooks that you can't be do with paper books.

Well, I'm 77 year old, certainly eligible for the Old Fogy Cohort. I taught myself to read, my mother said, when I was 3 years old.  So, I've been reading--voraciously I may add--for 74 years, 73 of them on paper books.

For me, my re-education began, as so much does, with SIL, who got a Kindle 2 years ago. When asked her favorite electronic device, she named her Kindle.  Since I had introduced her to the iPhone, I was surprised.  She urged me to try the Kindle, especially since I had no room for books when traveling in my RV.  In fact, despite my floor to ceiling bookcases all over my house, I had problems finding space for new books.  Every time I bought a new one, I had to rearrange shelves, send some books to the Siberia of our attic, and, of course, dust every shelf and book.  I'm sure that part of my physical agility is owed to my physical book gymnastics. 

However, the Kindle drove me nutty. When you turned a page, you got an afterimage of the previous page.  SI.L told me to blink when I turned a page, but I couldn't get in sync with blinking and turning.  I know millions do. In fact, TRK, my erstwhile colleague and neighbor, who introduced me to a Kindle early on, snidely commented that I saw things other people don't.  That may well be true, but I saw what I saw and couldn't read that way.  The new Kindle Fire has eliminated that problem, but that's not the point here. I mention it only to be fair.  In any event, whether you liked it or not, those early eReaders were pretty much the old reading, but in a convenient package. 

When finally I broke down and got the first 7" color Tablet from Barnes and Noble, I was delighted.  Of course, SIL and I got into a running debate about our different readers.  Then, one day, she emailed me with "What I love about my eReader"  I agreed with them all. You can carry your whole library with you wherever you go, find your place instantly in a book, and the like.  Then came the Kindle Fire and the upgraded Nook Tablet.  Naturally, although we'd argued about which to buy, we ended up with different choices, and both loved what we got.

Then came the revelation.  You can do things with an eReader Tablet that you can't do with a physical books. First SIL ecstatically wrote me about reading memoirs of Arab women.  As she was reading, she googled the place names they mentioned, including streets, descriptions of the Souks, customs, Islamic beliefs, even the clothing that they  mentioned. She even found pictures of the men's outfits worn on special days. Of course, on a color tablet reader, the Kindle Fire, she saw vividly. (It was as vivid on the Nook Tablet).  I pointed out to her that she couldn't have done that with a physical book.  For one thing, she couldn't have googled.  Yes, she might have delved into encyclopedias or other reference books, or gotten up and gone to her computer to google things.  However, all this would interrupt the reading experience.  Instead, by placing her finger lightly on a word, she was given its definition and if she wanted more, she just lightly touched Google. When she finished reading about that item, she seamlessly returned to the text. 

I had a similar experience reading an Enhanced Edition of Kafka stories.  When Kafka mentioned a street, I was able to see instantly that street and how it looked in his day.  Similarly, important people he mentioned responded to a finger touch, explaining who they were and showing what they looked like.  I even saw the room Kafka wrote in.

Both SIL and I had discovered the joy of reading vertically as well as horizontally.  That is the greatest change in reading since Gutenberg.  SIL gives another example, one in which she found out far more than the author of the book had said.  We were both reading The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes. Early on, he says that Joseph Banks went with Captain Cook to Tahiti to observe the Transit of Venus, but he doesn't say why this was important.  Well, SIL doesn't let anybody off for not giving the whole story, so she Googled "Transit of Venus," and not only found out why it was so important, but also it will occur again in June 2012.

SIL and I discovered another bonus.  When I upgraded from the NOOKcolor Tablet to the Nook Tablet, since SIL wanted to read some of the books she knew I had, I sent her my NOOKcolor.  Naturally, it had on it, all of the books in my library.  I quipped, "In the olden days, we shared books. Now we can share libraries."  What was remarkable is that she discovered that in our combined libraries of over 300 books, we had only one in common. So, she sent me a Kindle registered to her so I could access her library, and she kept the Color registered to me so she could access mine.  In both  instances, any new books we bought, went on the Nook or Kindle, respectively. In other words, every addition to our libraries became immediately  accessible to each of us.  On both Kindle and Nook, you're allowed to have up to 6 people registered to your name, and every purchase goes automatically onto everyone who has the device.

There's yet another advantage to this.  On all eReaders that I'm familiar with, the reader can highlight and/or leave a note on any passage.  These are kept in the Table of Contents of each book under the tab "Highlights and Notes."  Touching on one takes you immediately to the correct spot. (You can choose not to have them display on another reader.)  Early in our joint readership, SIL made it clear that she expected my comments, and, in return, she would provide hers as well.

On the previously mentioned The Age of Wonder, a 600 page tome, we both commented as we were reading.  Then, SIL commented on many of my comments, so I commented on hers.  What is wonderful about this is that you see what pops into someone's mind as they read.  Yes, with physical books, you can read reviews, but these are quite different from the spontaneous thoughts that run through your mind as you are actively reading.  That you can't get from physical books, or you can't get them organized in the TOC as you do in eReading.  If I want to recall exactly what SIL thought about a certain phenomenon, all I have to do is go to the TOC, find the comment, and touch on it to go to the page it's on, That's quite different from trying to decipher handwritten notes on a paper page, much less trying to find the one you want.  And, the comments often give you new insights, which spur you on to new conclusions.

If two septuagenarians find themselves reading so differently, and with so much more depth, using eReaders, what about children who are used to vertical reading by the time they're  7  or 8?  How will they react to the classics in physical book form?  Will they accept reading in conventional texts on any topic?  I think not.  Schools will have a harder row to hoe with the New Reading than they did with the New Math.  Then again, if they adopt electronic reading devices, kids who would never have willingly read paper books, may well enjoy electronic ones.  There are even Vooks, books with embedded audio, animation, and video clips in the text. Of course these are also examples of vertical reading.

Have a laugh on me!

Gil got me on my last post, pointing our that I had misspelled both infinite and infinity--in a post about literacy.  Well, when I went over the post, I found several other apparent misspellings. Sorry, Gil, but they were typos.  Each one involved a missing i.  The computer I was using has a very stiff keyboard, and I type very rapidly,  Apparently, when I zipped though words, I didn't hit the i hard enough.

Don't get me wrong. I was still wrong for allowing those mistakes to get published.  Had I run spellchecker, I would have caught the errors.  Instead of the post I planned to do tonight, I corrected the offending one.  Anyways, thank you for pointng out the errors in that post.  I needed the comeuppance.

It's 1AM now. I'll try to write a very different post tomorrow, one on the new reading.  Reading as we know it, is changing--and, I think, for the better.  You may be appalled, but whatever stance you take, there is no getting around what is rapidly becoming fact: reading is becoming a very different experience from what it was even three years ago..

Literacy in the 21st Century

In book and product reviews,  comment threads,  forums, both online and  in print, I regularly see spellings like "kneed (something)," "nock on wood,"  "way a certain fact," ''in financial straights," ,, "eat mete," "see nice cite," and "shutter at a thought." Apparently, many people today don't know when an n sound at the start of a word is spelled as kn or n.  They are confused about which spelling to use in homophone sets like weigh and way, beat and beet, shutter and shudder, not to mention sight, site, and cite.. 

In the last five years of my teaching, I noticed such spelling errors escalating, although the confusion between kn and n hadn't yet appeared by 2008, the year I retired.  Both the examples above, kneed for need, and nock for knock, first appeared to me in the past two weeks.  I'd never before seen (spelled by someof my  students as scene) those particular errors.  Oh, in the same time period, I also came across knew for new. Literacy as we know it, has been eroding concomitantly with disregard for reading. When I saw the knew-new error types, it struck me that loss of spelling conventions has been occurring in stages, and this is the latest stage, but probably not the final one.

Knowing how to spell was a badge of literacy and, by implication, of intelligence since the 16th century at least.  Yes, English spelling was already inconsistent and sometimes downright wacky even in the 1500's when the first spelling reformers, called orthoepists began lobbying for sanity in spelling.  English orthography, the relation between visual spelling and auditory pronunciations, is a mess.  It has been virtually since its inception. Centuries of customs have aggravated the situation.  In the days when literacy skills had to be mastered by the relatively  small ruling class, this was not so important. 

However, today, the mandate is that everyone should master accepted spelling as proof that they are educated. skills.  It takes an unduly lengthy time for someone to learn vagaries of English spelling. The only orthographic system which consumes a longer time is the 100,00 or more characters that Mandarin insists upon.  However, there is a Romanization of Mandarin which is akin to a true alphabet: one symbol for one sound.

The first true alphabet, concocted by the Greeks,  heralded a revolution in writers' being able to present new ideas in writing.  It allowed the infinity of possible sentences in any language to reach wider audiences than do conversations or even public lectures,  The alphabet made it possible to record original--as well as banal--thoughts so that both contemporaries and posterity could grasp them. This doesn't mean that oral language is inferior in any way to written language.  There is an infinite number of spoken utterances possible in any language.  New and unusual things can be spoken as well as written.

Before radios, writing allowed information and ideas to be  promulgated more broadly without the author's being present. It also could be used to save the exact wording in which an idea was framed.  In speech, if you repeat your ideas, you may do so in a variety of different sentence forms.  There are always different ways to say the same thing.  We've all had the experience of reporting that X said Y.  When the listener asks, "What did he really say?" meaning  'what words did he actually use', you might get a bit flustered and say, "I don't know exactly what he said, but he said..."  We don't recall the exact words used.  We recall the meaning and then re-encode that meaning in our own words.  Writing allows us to freeze both the thought and verbatim expression of it.

In cultures with writing, often spelling correctly, according to custom , is the equivalent to speaking with the right dialect to be regarded as intelligent.  Why then is English burdened with such an inconsistent, illogical alphabet? Nowadays people have to master orthography for virtually every job, but our spelling chaos hinders widespread mastery of it.  This impinges on reading as well as writing skills. My next post will explain the history of our misspelling system.  Here, I will simply lay out inconsistencies not explicable by rules.  Again, a later post will show what rules do apply to subsets of written words, but, first, as a poem states, "dearest creatures in Creation" let us look at ea.

The ea is technically a digraph, two letters to indicate one sound.  However, this digraph may indicate the vowel sounds in earth, hearth, heat, great, teat (as also spelled "tit,"), head, hear and heard, eight separate sounds in my lexicon, not counting the pronunciation of  create along with its noun form, creation.  Including these, the combination ea represents nine different sounds in English orthography.  Since every pronunciation of ea can be conveyed by other single letters or digraphs, the stage is set for chaos.  It is a wonder that educated people, at least, have for so long endured and passed on what is considered standard spelling.
 You may list every word you can think of with the ea digraph to try to discover what determines these different pronunciations.. I have tried, as have others better than I.  The conclusion? There is no reason except for historical accident. Are we,  then, supposed to teach a 7 year older about 18th century dialect variation to justify the mish mash of spelling?  Those kids aren't fooled a bit by claims that these spellings are enshrined for some ineffable reasons.  It's bosh. We'd be better off to say honestly that written English needs an overhaul.

Then, what about the initial n sound, as in need, knee, know, no, knew, new and the final n sound spelled as gn as in sign, reign (as opposed to rein, or rain), deign as opposed to Dane, feign as opposed to  fame.  

Most of us recall written words that we thought were pronounced  a certain way, only to discover how laughably wrong we were.  For instance, I knew there was a word, laughter, that rhymed for me with daughter.   The fact that I never heard anyone say "lawter" when talking about laughing didn't bother me.  There were loads of words that appeared only in print, but never in speech. Certainly,  I knew of laugh,with the gh pronounced as f.   I just figured that daughter rhymed with laughter.   My father, an immigrant arriving in the U.S, in 1924 was punctilious in his pronunciation.  However, he  would say that things went "aw + ree."  He learned much of his English vocabulary from books and, given English spelling,  awry  admits of that pronunciation.   When in the hospital having my first baby, I heard an obstetrician speaking of another infant born with a "wry" neck. Wry, pronounced "rye" immediately jolted me. I knew the word wry meaning 'twisted,' as in a "wry smile." I realize that the baby's neck was twisted in some way, not having anything to do with rye, as in bread. As soon as I realized that my father's awry should be pronounced  "aWRY".

Speaking of how we both knew certain words only in print, and others in speech,  my friend Michael and I discovered that as children, we both knew two words that meant 'the highest, the best.'  In speech it was "epitome" with the final e pronounced "ee,"  However, in books, it was "epiTOHM" without enunciating  the final e. We both recall our"Eureka" moment when  we realized they were the same word.

I'll close with one parting observation. One of the few inviolable rules of English pronunciation of spelling is that a vowel followed by one consonant and a final unpronounced  e, makes the vowel long, as in mate, mete, tine, note, and cute, as opposed to mat, met, tin, not, and cut. Why, then, have we tolerated epitome, with a short o and a very non-silent e? 

Hanging Out

Google has a new feature: "Hanging Out," which is a Skype or Face Time for Google.  It allows me to set up a group of 9 or 10 people who can discuss issues face to face.  Most interesting is that it allows speech to be heard.  I don't want to add people to this group unless they want to be part of it. If you do, send me your email address or other identifier for Google and I'll add it to the group.  This will no doubt be most interesting when discussing how we pronounce certain things.

On this same note, I am recording various Texan accents.  Does anybody out there know how I can insert audio clips in my blog posts?  The variation here in central Texas is very interesting and nobody has done any detailed studies of it.  As I travel to New Mexico, I' m sure I'll come across other interesting differences. I already know I have to go back to Arkansas to record the accents there.  The relation to Texas is obvious.  Both are Southwestern, but Texarkanas, for instance, is its own variety.

I want to publish a 5th edition of Language the Social Mirror as a Vook with audio clips of dialects from all over the United States, and video clips of body motion, eye gaze, facial expression, gestures, and personal space.  However, I need to find people who know how to write the code to insert audio and video clips into the text for an eBook version.  Obviously, they would be considered as joint authors in this endeavor, sharing in all royalties.  If you know any programmers who would want to help make a Vook on the topic of speaking and body motion, please either tell me who they are, or tell them to contact me at

echaika@providence.edu

Since it's possible to publish such books directly to Pubit and to Kindle, we don't have to worry about persuading publishers.  We need to upload the book to eBook publishers. Then we can advertise it on Goodle Ads and Goodreads and other such venues.  I do have to find out how one gets a Vook text added o Barnes and Noble Textbooks, as well as Kindles.

 We could publish it as an eBook at a reasonable price.  Heinele, the publisher of the 4th edition has priced it far too high for most buyers, but I own the electronic rights to the material, so long as I don't recreate the 4th edition verbati, which I wouldn't do. There's plenty of new research to write about. Also, I'd have to rewrite to accommodate the text to the audio and video clips.  I'm fine with audio clps, but I do terribl with a video camera. I have a tremor in my hands that screws up videos.  e

Thsee are exciting times for new ways of propogatingitdeas and information.

Mea Culpa

Oh dear. Evelyn has roundly criticized me for criticizing someone who commented on a blog post on the grounds that it wasn't pertinent to my point in the original post.  Her view is that a blog is like a conversation in which, of course, inevitably, extraneous matters are brought up.  My view, which may be erroneous, is that a comment should be relevant to the point of the blog post.  However, I'm open to suggestions.  Should comments be limited only to the issue discussed in the  blog? Or, should I consider as valid, comments which are not directly relevant to the blog? 

What Evelyn was commenting on were the comments on "The Power of Mentioning" that offered reasons for why people bought a Kindle instead of a Nook.  I have no quarrel with anybody's choice of brand of anything.  My point was that the Kindle Fire became entrenched in people's minds because it was mentioned so often in the media.  I also pointed out that, objectively, the Kindle Fire is inferior to the NOOKcolor and the Nook Tablet.  However, 5,000,000 Kindle Fires have been sold.  I haven't a clue about how many Nook Tablets have been sold, but I's sure it's far fewer than Kindle Fires.

I have no vested interest in either product.  I don't care who buys which.  My point is, however, that you buy what you've heard the most about, and most people have no idea that Barnes and Noble has two 7 inch color Tablets.  Regardless of their worth relative to the Kindle Fire, Barnes and Noble's sales are way lower than Amazon's because the media consider Amazon to be news.  They don't consider Barnes and Noble Bookstores newsworthy.  Consumers consume what they see and hear mentioned.  The media are powerful swayers of opinion.  This has been scientifically verified.

Anyways, please tell me, should I be more lenient with commenters? Should I not have told those who commented on why they bought Kindles that their comments were beside the point?  I'm feeling quite guilty about my reactions.  Am I so mentally a Professor that I demand a needless rigor in discussion?  What do you think?

The Science Behind the Power of Mentioning

For a wonder, David Eagleman(2011)  has written a readable  book about our brains,  called Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.  Although it is not written in scientific-ese, he carefully describes the experiments that were fashioned to test and prove hypotheses.  On p. 59, I was delighted to find the research behind my post "The Power of Mentioning," in cogent,  clear prose.   I recommend it to you for further reading, if you are so inclined. 

The studies he mentions show, beyond a doubt,  that "with repeated exposure to a product or face, you come to prefer it more."  This is true even of negative publicity. Another study showed "...if subjects had heard a sentence in previous weeks, they were more likely to now rate it as true, even if they swore they never heard it before."

The ramifications of this in an age of mass communication are mind-blowing.  If you watch television and/ or read newspapers and magazines,  you will believe what you are exposed to.  If you hear that Obamacare is socialized medicine and the cause of our deficit, you probably will believe it.

I've asked people who denounced it, what Obamacare entailed. None of them knew.  I also asked them what the cause of our deficit was and they said Obama and social welfare.  One very close friend who  is educated, told me that "20% of all our tax  dollars are sucked up by people on welfare."  Her husband is an ex-military man and they get entirely free medical care from the army for life.  That's not social welfare?  It's paid for by taxpayer dollars.

When I ask people why they have a horror of socialized medicine, they say, "It takes away our freedom."  Huh? Flourishing democracies like Canada,  Sweden, and the UK all have socialized medicine.  What freedom does it take away? Even with socialized medicine, you can choose your own doctors.  You can pay for private care.

Rationality has nothing to do with government..  The mouthings of politicians have everything to do with it.  We are controlled by the media. We might seek out different venues, but we are controlledby those we do.

Spelling and Accents

In one of my early posts, How the Pilgrims Spoke, I showed how we cann use spelling errors to discern how writers actually pronounced words.  It is from spelling errors that we can date r-dropping in British English, for instance.  Children who speak an r-dropping dialect will spell  mark as mock, for instance.  The author of Winnie-the-Pooh was an r-dropping Englishman, so he named the donkey "Eeyore."  Americans completely miss the pun intended when they pronounce the final "ore" with an r.  Christopher Robin pronounced it as "aw," so the donkey's name is actually "eeyaw." Cockney speakers drop h's as well as r's, so the donkey's name is really "heehaw."  To an r dropper, a final "ore" spelling rhymes with the haw of heehaw.

Why am I going on about this again?  Well, Gil commented that the vagaries of English spelling maked it  difficult to know how to pronounce unfamiliar words, especially in another dialect region.  You can tell that someone is not a native New Yorker when he or she pronounces Houston Street like the name of the city in Texas.  In Manhattan, it's "Howstun" with the stress on "How." 

Gil then asked if my last name was pronounced like the ch in chair or the ch in Chanukah. (Actually, I've never met a non-Jew who pronounced that sound in Chanukah, correctly.  My favorite mispronunciation of all time was the music teacher in a Pawtucket, Rhode Island high school who told the band they would be doing some "chunOOkuh" music.  The kids thought he was going to teach them some Native American songs--until he started to play, "I Had a Little Dreidel."

Back to my surname--which is actually my husband's and comes from the Polish Czajka.  Many people pronounce the ch as sh.  I don't know why, but almost everyone does.  When you combine that mispronunciation with r-dropping as some Rhode Islanders do, you get an interesting switch in names, as illustrated in the embarrasment Bill and I suffered at a wedding dinner about 50 years ago.  In order to find what table you were supposed to be seatwd at, you had to find your name tag among a table laden with such tags.   However, we couldn't find our name tag. Neither couldanybody else.  We,of course, wondered, had we sent back the response card?  Were we disinvited?  Finally, only one tag was left.  It was labeled "Mr. & Mrs. William Shaker." An er at the end of a word is "uh" in r-dropping accents. So, Chaika became Shaker. Also, under some circumstances, a final "uh" becomes pronounced as "err," as in "sofa is" becomes "sofer is."

When we lived in Foster, Rhode Island, in a very rural area, my kids were teased as being "salt shaker" or "pepper shaker", the latter being pronounced "peppuh shakuh."

 I know as a linguist, I should know why people mishear ch as sh.  I don't even know for sure if this error in sound recognition is confined to r-dropping dialect speakers, but I suspect it may be.  The name is so odd in Yankee-Irish-Italian Rhode Island, that people hear it as shaker.  People who hear my surname don't know if it's spelled with a final er or a final a.