Literacy

That sounds like the Rain Man of illiterate - more fun to watch maybe, but less common or even less likely. My limited experience has been that people classified as illiterates here in the States can get by on some basic stuff. They're just exposed to words everywhere they go, as opposed to some cocksucker on Deadwood who can't write his name.

I wish I knew what Devin was saying here, but I have yet to learn to read..

Believe it or not, poor kids in the states can live in shitty homes located in neighborhoods with non-existent tax bases. If nobody teaches you to read at home and you're always one of sixty kids in a classroom headed by an ambitionless nitwit with minimum credentials, it's completely possible to grow up in the states without learning to read. The "achievement gap" in the public school system and the unequal distribution of funds in that system are two of the major civil rights issues of our time.

Are there people without severe learning or behavioral disorders that don't pick it up? Because it just seems impossible that you wouldn't learn the language just by the sheer amount of exposure you have to it.

I was bombarded with books at an early age, so I tend to agree. I still feel bad for the extremely illiterate, but I have a hard time understanding how that actually happens.

So if you moved to Japan you think you would just learn to read and write kanji from exposure to traffic signs and TV without being actively taught by someone?

I never understood Spanish until I started learning from people who pretty much only spoke Spanish and kinda forced me into learning it. A handful of classes helped, but being immersed in the culture was way more of a benefit than having someone read shit off to me.

Not trying to deny the worth of having a teacher, I'm just saying that you have to get out there and dive into it alongside the lessons in order to make it work.

I think most of us would pick up some. Besides, I'm pretty sure an adult's capacity to learn a new language is completely different from a child who was born into the culture that speaks it. And then there's the fact that the kids do have someone actively teaching them.

It just seems to me there would have to be some sort of learning disability, or a behavioral disorder... something; assuming intelligence is in the normal range.

Not necessarily. The English language consists of thousands of unique sounds, whereas Japanese features about 240. Becoming functionally literate in Japanese is difficult, yes, but the becoming phonically proficient in it is contingent upon knowing what syllables to put an emphasis on.

English as an entire language is difficult as fuck due to all of our grammatical rules, but broken English is easy. One of my friends moved here from Honduras and picked up a fairly strong grasp of English within three years. He still has pronunciation issues and I'm definitely not going to try to diagram any of his sentences any time soon, but he's fully capable of communicating in an understandable fashion and his reading comprehension is surprising considering his limited experience with the language itself.

Same thing for a lot of people on Facebook and Myspace.

You seem to be making a couple of mistakes here. First, you seem to be confusing "picking up a few words" with becoming completely literate. There is a complete difference between being an adult with a working understanding of at least one language and "picking up" words from other languages and trying to master even your native language's written form without proper instruction. Your understanding of the structure of your own language and the use of its individual parts allows you to draw connections between the same individual parts and structures of other languages. Illiterate people usually have some command of the spoken language, which is, in itself, extremely hard if you think about it. Reading Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations might be of interest to you if you're genuinely interested in the problems of language.

Secondly, if you actually study language, English is one of the harder languages to learn to learn. Why is that the case? Most other languages have relatively clear cut structures and influences. English--especially American English--is a completely different story. English is the most crossbred bastard mutt of a language there is in the world. It has all the other issues of the Germanic languages (its evolution from the dialect of the Alemanni people to the modern day version). However, unlike their brethern, the English speakers went out and tried to conquer the world a few different times and actually succeeded at holding vast tracts of the world under their influence for significant periods of time. (Hence, the reason we have fun facts like the number of English speakers in the People's Republic of China outnumber the number of English speakers in the USA and UK combined.) The result is we borrow a lot of elements from other languages indiscriminately. If you add to that the sheer number of homophones that exist in the language and how undecided we are on things like whether or not we're still using the subjunctive, then you get a hint of the idea of what a huge undertaking learning the language as a first and second language is in reality. When you come from a good family and school or school system, its easy to overlook its difficulty. (Edited to clean up a couple errors).

So is there such thing as total complete illiteracy? I kind of doubt it.

Okay, you're just an uncharitable person who isn't actually interested in discussing the issue. This is just another bait thread. I've got it.

What are you freaking out about? What Devin says is that it's hard to believe a person could be completely illiterate in todays society. If after years your mind hasn't begun to make the neccesary connections when you're immersed in a language 24/7, something is wrong. No one has ever taught me German but you can only see Polizei written on police cars so many times before you make the connection.

People throw around the term "bait thread" on here like Gideons hand out Bibles.

If only we could read those Bibles.

There's no bait here. Devin doesn't buy the idea of total illiteracy, and he's basically right.

I'm going to go ahead and assume that Winslet's illiteracy in the film was heightened to make some sort of point. Because, no, there's no way that an adult of even minimal intelligence could avoid comprehending at least a few written words.

I find functional literacy far more disturbing, as it's surprisingly commonplace, but it probably wouldn't make for a very interesting movie, outside of the world of the After School Special.

Go back to the first post. The question is concerning the veracity of

It's not a bait thread, it's just that I buttoned this shit up on post #2. Thankyew.

In that scenario, you're familiar with the alphabet, you already have command of a language in its written form, and it's very similar to the actual English word. In that scenario, I have no doubt an illiterate person would associate the word "Polizei" with "police" if it was connected to the image aurally. However, I seriously doubt he'd recognize the word "polizei" either on the vehicle or when presented to him on a piece of paper.

How a person learns language is not dissimilar to how a person learns mathematics: he learns it in steps. First you learn the alphabet, then simple words, then simple words and structures and so on and so forth. If you are never shown the basics, you just don't get it. I know college students from disadvantaged backgrounds who started college with a middle school level understanding of grammar and I've encountered high school students who couldn't order from a fast food menu because they couldn't read it. Those menus are largely simple words, graphics, and numbers. Reading and writing are skills. Like any other skill, if you aren't taught the skill and given the chance to practice the skill, chances are you won't develop the skill. (edited for early morning error.)

Depends on the chain. "Chalupa supreme" probably looks pretty intimidating to someone who's never learned to spell things out phonetically.

I never learned to spell phonetically. I know all the rules, I just don't hear words the right way. I have what they call an audio dysfunction. On the other hand in the 6th grade I had a 13th grade ready comprehension.


I have some understanding of functional literacy, from my father side of the family, but I am not sure they they are all that normal. My grandmother for example had at best a 3rd grade education, but she was self taught because of the fact she was running and owning her own businesses. My father never learned how to read or write in school, because his mother did not understand how schools functioned( she also worked for more then 12 hour a day for 6 days a week), and the fact he was the school Jock. After school my father got the bug and by the time he was 20, he was reading Plato, Immanuel Kant, and Descartes.

What's a Gideon?

I take it writing was subpar?

http://www.gideons.org

It's a Bill Hicks line, but thanks for the link.

"Who ARE the fuckin' Gideons?", actually, but I've never been anything less than a pedantic ass.

In an interesting comparison with the choads I see on, say, myspace or IMDb, take the folks fighting in the civil war. Anyone studying the conflict to even a small degree has seen the letters these folks wrote to one another. A good portion of the soldiers were, by our standards, illiterate to degree painful to behold. Yet they were unfathomably eloquent. If you took the time to correct for spelling, you'd discover some of the most touching examples of human discourse in the english language. Here were twenty year olds capable of relating difficult emotions, heartfelt sadness and reasoning mature beyond their years. Yet, in a great many cases, they had so little schooling, they could barely read or write.

It's not my intention to derail and I don't know if this actually contributes anything new to the core discussion here, but Devin's post immediately makes me think of it. Especially the grave and glaring differences I see between twentysomething farmboys in the mid nineteenth century and supposedly well-educated suburban softies in the early twenty-first.

I kind of always wondered the same thing about the Elizabethan English in Shakespeare's plays; did people actually ever talk like that? If so, why do we not continue to speak in a similar manner? I imagine economy of language/efficiency is the main reason; the language evolved from being an unwieldy, metaphor laden instrument to the more streamlined, get-to-the-point conveyor of information it is now. But if in fact even "uneducated" people of the day spoke & understood language like this, that's a pretty impressive feat we seem to have lost the knack for. Shame, really.

As you said, language is ever evolving. In addition to the creation of new words, rules and elimination of other words.

I wouldn't hold Shakeperre as a source for how people talked at the time. People were iliterate.

I think the eloquence also comes from the need for people to visualize what they were talking about. This is seen in novels at the time and especially in Dickens for example.

And I salute anyone who can learn this language as the grammar is a contradicting pain in the ass.

This is an interesting discussion. I developed a love for language when I first read Shakespeare as a boy, and I still read it frequently to this day. It's possible that my ear has becomed tuned to the poetry and iambics he used in writing... but that's neither here nor there.

What I did want to bring up, is that there was an interview with a man in Al Pacino's "Looking For Richard" that struck me very hard when I first heard it... and still does.

"If we think words are things and have no feelings in words, then we say things to each other that mean nothing. But if we felt what we said,
we'd say less and mean more."

Then he turned to a guy behind him and said...

"Spare some change?"

Sorry... just rambling again.

I can understand that. Take any manual or corporate double-speak document. There's a volume of words that mean nothing.

I know in Elements of Style there is an emphasis on cutting down on words and such as eliminating the use of "certainly".

Not really. If everyone did, Shakespeare wouldn't be regarded as such a master of the language, right? Plus, he was typically writing in verse, which requires control and a natural fluidity. English speakers may have a tendency toward iambic pentameter in their speech patterns (thus its popularity for English poetry), but I doubt that anyone's ever consciously adhered to it in casual conversation.

Your average Elizabethan Englishman didn't walk around spitting out brilliant insights, dropping puns on a whim, and constructing metaphors to floor rivals and impress women. Antiquated vocabularies can give the illusion of eloquence, but it's always up to the individual in terms of creative usage and personal expression.

That makes senese. I imagine common english peasent folk probably talked ala that one guy in Hot Fuzz. In which you couldn't understand a damn word.