At the rate software is improving, I suppose computers will be able to read to us, and write down what we say as well.
During the early 1990s I had lunch regularly with a librarian. We discussed archiving on a regular basis. Ken Burns's Civil War documentary was still pretty new. She used to say, "You want to write the source material for someone to use in 120 years to make a documentary like Burns's? Acid-free paper and pigment-based ink, my friend. And descendants willing to keep your writings in a trunk somewhere dark."
...why and whether kids still have to learn to write by hand in our modern age.
There seems to be a consistent body of work showing that taking notes during a lecture reinforces memory, and taking notes longhand reinforces more than typing on a keyboard. That's the pseudo-academic in me speaking, of course.
For the last twelve years or so I've been using a little note-taking application that I wrote myself. There were just too many cases where pasting in an image, or having a live URL, or even just searching for a keyword seemed to justify it. Recently I've been considering going back to paper and pen.
I thought about using an Ipad with an Apple Pencil, which has gotten very much like paper and pen (so long as you don't use the eraser much*). Unfortunately, Apple has seen fit to put handwriting recognition into the OS, and insists on putting a little line under anything you write/draw that it thinks might be a date or time. I've seen many complaints about it, and people asking why Apple can't make it optional.
* One of the reasons I always took notes in ink while I was doing research work was because sometimes I wrote down something that I thought was right, and two days later discovered I was mistaken. With ink, you have to grab a different color pen and put in a dated bit with the correction.
Doing recursions on the calculator was also among my first experiences. I did not yet understand though why certain functions would yield the same result independent of start value after pressing the key repeatedly (converging on x=f(x)).
I played with an electronic calculator when I was a kid. It allowed me to start recognizing patterns in numbers, particularly when performing the same calculation recursively. I'm reasonably sure I wasn't typical in that regard, but I wanted to mount some meager defense of electronic calculators.
First we smash all the (electronic*) calculators.
Get the logarithm table and/or the slide rule back.
That's how one teaches the basics!
In all seriousness, I work as a tutor and by now mainly for math. Before one can teach them abstract concepts, they need to get the basics right and that means calculations (preferably without electronic help). I see no justification to teach set theory** when they get still puzzled by "Is 123 divisible by 3 without residue?" or "What's the square root of 81?". If that's 19th century, then Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser!
To me that sounds like the unfortunate discussion about why and whether kids still have to learn to write by hand in our modern age. Why learn orthography when there are spellcheckers? And what by the way is the use of kids reading fictional literature of guys long dead or ancient (pre-1990) history?
Yes, understanding should have priority over rote learning buy everyday math is still mostly basics. And I am cynical enough to say that we are failing there already. Imo math at school should concentrate on practical problem solving not Zermelo's theorem.
*abaci will be tolerated
*exception: difference between natural, integer, rational and real numbers.
For any mathematician alive today, mathematics is a subject that studies formally-defined concepts, with a focus on the establishment of truth (based on accepted axioms)
Absolutely, however teaching "formally define concepts, axioms, proofs, etc" are taught in PLANE GEOMETRY, not so much in calculation/algebra type classes.
I’m on my phone, so can’t give links, but I encourage a dive into how japanese teach math vs US methods. A couple of points I remember:
-in the US, people who are goid at math get pushed into teaching math, so they often don’t understand why students make the mistakes they do. A large component of Japanese math education is predictive, so a good teacher should know where students are likely to go off the rails and adjust their teaching
-a passing grade in Japan is 60, which is good for math, if you understand 60% of some concepts, that’s not too bad, and the bulk of math education happens in hs. I recall I was involved with an exchange program that sent selected prefectural students to BC. One student was from one of the lower ranking schools, and was considered the weakest candidate academically. Wasn’t a bad kid, but was on the baseball team, so 95% of his effort was on the baseball field. He went to a BC high school where classes were in mid term and had to take a math test because that was scheduled and everyone was astonished because he had a perfect score.
-students in japan still aren’t permitted to use calculators
-they also don’t give partial credit, which is how I got thru my math courses.
Will try and toss some links tomorrow
Here's a post from Keith Devlin working through some thoughts about the tension between calculation and mathematical thinking. https://devlinsangle.blogspot.com/2018/05/calculation-was-price-we-used-to-have.html For any mathematician alive today, mathematics is a subject that studies formally-defined concepts, with a focus on the establishment of truth (based on accepted axioms), with various forms of calculation (numerical, algebraic, set-theoretic, logical, etc.) being tools developed and used in the pursuit of those goals. That’s the only kind of mathematics we have known.
Except, that is, when we were at school. By and large, the 19th Century revolution in mathematics did not permeate the world’s school systems, which remained firmly in the “mathematics is about calculation” mindset. The one attempt to bring the school system into the modern age (in the US, the UK, and a few other countries), was the 1960s “New Math”. Though well-intentioned, its rollout was disastrous, in large part because very few teachers understood what it was about – and hence could not teach it well. The confusion caused to parents (other than mathematician parents) was nicely encapsulated by the satirical songwriter and singer Tom Lehrer (who taught mathematics at Harvard, and did understand New Math), in his hilarious, and pointedly accurate, song New Math.
As a result of the initial chaos, the initiative was quickly dropped, and school math remained largely unchanged while real-world uses of mathematics kept steadily changing, leaving the schools increasingly separated from the way people did math in their jobs. Eventually, the separation blew up into a full-fledged divorce. That occurred in the late 1980s. The divorce was finalized on June 23, 1988. That was the date when Steve Wolfram released his mammoth software package Mathematica.[...]
Devlin is really good on matters pedagogical, and always worth the read.
I do tend to think, though, that students will have a very hard time with understanding math (or written communication) if they have not had enough experience with doing the work, and not seen enough examples to get an idea of the possible range of approaches to doing the work, etc.. Early in my teaching I tended not to give enough examples, figuring that teaching the conceptual side would lead students to sort through their own database of examples to see the underlying principles. I've since learned that most students come in having seen and understood too few examples, and having no idea of more than one approach to the tasks they have been called upon to do.
I do a lot more modeling of approaches, and evaluation of those approaches, now that I'm finally starting to figure out this whole teaching thing.
I suppose I can see how, if everybody who knows how to read** has a phone/computer in their hip pocket, knowing basic arithmetic might be less critical than it once was. I'm not convinced, mind, but I can see that it might be.
** At the rate software is improving, I suppose computers will be able to read to us, and write down what we say as well. The reactionaries will no doubt be delighted if illiteracy once again becomes the norm. /snark
I was taught using the School Mathematics Project, which seemed OK to me. But I may not be one of the "normal people".
I suggest that being able to divide accurately with pen and paper is now almost useless, whereas being able to divide approximately in one's head is useful for avoiding fat-finger errors. That is, the underpinnings have turned out to be more important than the algorithms.
New Math was the same sort of thing. It pushed a much broader view of what math was than just the algorithms. Look, long division is done the way it is because hundreds of years of experience informs us that it's the best way to get the right answers when you have to do a hundred division problems a day, day after day. New Math failed when the teachers pushed the broader view but didn't teach the mechanics.
The trouble with New Math was that it was (apparently) designed by mathematicians. Mathematicians who had forgotten that a) you have to build the foundations (mechanics, as Michael says) first. And that b) normal people are not mathematicians -- and that's 99.99% (or more) of the population. They neither care nor need to know the theoretical underpinnings. They just need to know how to do basic arithmetic reliably.
Camel notation* from computer programming would possibly be better: InternalCompustionEngine.
It is interesting that it is widely used in domain names, e.g. KaiserPermanente.org Clearly the sales and marketing folks think it will be easier to parse that way.
I'm not sure if I'd be so harsh on the Roman alphabet. You don't want a system that encodes everything.
Something that floors my students is when I teach them about an abcedary, which is a chart that represents the letters by giving them a word that has the sound (A is for apple, etc) Because Japanese kana are the sound they represent, there is no need to create one.
About Michael's question, I think it would work in romanized Japanese because it is essentially creating an anglicized version of Japanese and the consonants plus the context can give enough clues to read them. However, Japanese don't process near as much text in roman letters, so that would be an issue.
Michael, the scrambling thing is called Typoglycemia. In German it's Buchstabensalat (letter salad) and at a pedagocic course I had to suffer through at university as Badewanneneffekt (bathtub effect, no idea why). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposed_letter_effect#Internet_meme
With long words with completely random letter scrambling it's rubbish even if first and last letter are retained.
"Whole language" may have been a wrong turn if it really resulted in ignoring phonetics (I doubt that it really did in practice), but the fact is that proficient reading requires recognition of whole words.
To paraphrase a friend, "No one can get a PhD dissertation out of pushing phonics. You have to claim that something else is better." Or at least that something else is as/more valuable than recognizing the words early on. The new things are all well and good, but memorizing a few hundred words-as-a-chunk is still necessary. You can't sound out "bat" and "cat" forever; at some point it has to be automatic.
There are assorted postings -- the internet has made them more common -- that ask whether you can read "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae." Is this just an English thing? Does Romanized Japanese tolerate the same sort of misspellings for fluent readers?
New Math was the same sort of thing. It pushed a much broader view of what math was than just the algorithms. Look, long division is done the way it is because hundreds of years of experience informs us that it's the best way to get the right answers when you have to do a hundred division problems a day, day after day. New Math failed when the teachers pushed the broader view but didn't teach the mechanics.
"it radically rewrote the rules of literacy for tens of thousands of children seemingly overnight."
There are always stories about how miraculous various programs and phonics in particular are in teaching reading. But surely such programs would have been adopted by now and thus must have been producing undeniable results somewhere. Wouldn't phonics have been adopted in red states (there is an obvious partisan divide on this) and shouldn't those states now be much better in reading performance?
Spanish is almost perfectly phonetic so why do international comparisons put reading performance in Spain below that in the US? Can Japanese and Chinese (who do well on the international comparisons) only learn to read after seeing the romanized versions? Surely people in China were able to read before it was exposed to the West.
"Whole language" may have been a wrong turn if it really resulted in ignoring phonetics (I doubt that it really did in practice), but the fact is that proficient reading requires recognition of whole words. Most children can learn new words both audibly and in symbols very fast, but some may require more help from phonetics.
By the way the Roman alphabet is very poor for most languages (including English), which typically have more sounds. Few languages have only five vowels sounds, like Spanish and Italian (and presumably Latin). Phonetics is presumably helpful in deciphering foreign words, but the simple Roman alphabet will never describe them (except Spanish, etc) accurately even with code books. However some alphabets, such as Arabic, may be even simpler, omitting vowels altogether at times.
It's just convention that one does not write railwaystation or particleaccelerator or internalcombustionengine but imo those are perceived as units.
German also has the useful convention of capitalizing nouns. Using Internalcombustionengine would at least signal it's a noun, even though it starts off with an adjective. Camel notation* from computer programming would possibly be better: InternalCompustionEngine.
The example everyone remembers from college German is Handschuh (hand shoe) as a generic glove/mitten term, Fingerhandschuh for gloves, Fausthandschuh for mittens, Panzerhandschuh for armor, etc. The German is at least consistent. In English, it's another of the English/Norman dualities. Glove is from Old English; mitten is from Norman for mitten; gauntlet is from the Norman for glove. I understand there are more types of Handschuh that correspond to some of the other uses English has piled on gauntlet, like "throw down the gauntlet" or "run the gauntlet".
I'll just go ahead and invite Hartmut to explain how wrong I am :^)
* Off and on for a half-century now I have occasionally tried to adopt camel notation when I'm writing code. It never lasts, and I always go back to underscores: source_index rather than sourceIndex in something I've been writing this week.
A couple of things about reading. It's a bit like second language acquisition, in that no one is guaranteed to acquire reading. There is a basic idea that reading is a interactive process that bounces back and forth between bottom up and top down, but beyond that, there is not much. There is an notion of orthographic depth, but it's often by speakers of one language (usually English) projecting onto other languages.
I tend to think of it a lot like umwelt, which is the unique subjective experience that an organism has that can not be understood by any other organism. Though it doesn't use the word, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" by Thomas Nagel gets at that point. I'll leave it to Harmut to explain umwelt, along with merkwelt and wirkwelt in Uexküll's biosemiotic theory and I've never heard of any linguist taking this up, but I definitely will in another life where I am multi-lingual...
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The law of the letter”
At the rate software is improving, I suppose computers will be able to read to us, and write down what we say as well.
During the early 1990s I had lunch regularly with a librarian. We discussed archiving on a regular basis. Ken Burns's Civil War documentary was still pretty new. She used to say, "You want to write the source material for someone to use in 120 years to make a documentary like Burns's? Acid-free paper and pigment-based ink, my friend. And descendants willing to keep your writings in a trunk somewhere dark."
"
...why and whether kids still have to learn to write by hand in our modern age.
There seems to be a consistent body of work showing that taking notes during a lecture reinforces memory, and taking notes longhand reinforces more than typing on a keyboard. That's the pseudo-academic in me speaking, of course.
For the last twelve years or so I've been using a little note-taking application that I wrote myself. There were just too many cases where pasting in an image, or having a live URL, or even just searching for a keyword seemed to justify it. Recently I've been considering going back to paper and pen.
I thought about using an Ipad with an Apple Pencil, which has gotten very much like paper and pen (so long as you don't use the eraser much*). Unfortunately, Apple has seen fit to put handwriting recognition into the OS, and insists on putting a little line under anything you write/draw that it thinks might be a date or time. I've seen many complaints about it, and people asking why Apple can't make it optional.
* One of the reasons I always took notes in ink while I was doing research work was because sometimes I wrote down something that I thought was right, and two days later discovered I was mistaken. With ink, you have to grab a different color pen and put in a dated bit with the correction.
"
Doing recursions on the calculator was also among my first experiences. I did not yet understand though why certain functions would yield the same result independent of start value after pressing the key repeatedly (converging on x=f(x)).
"
All this math talk has me celebrating pi, but not exactly.
Hmmm. I'm thinking exactly, but not precisely.
"
I played with an electronic calculator when I was a kid. It allowed me to start recognizing patterns in numbers, particularly when performing the same calculation recursively. I'm reasonably sure I wasn't typical in that regard, but I wanted to mount some meager defense of electronic calculators.
"
First we smash all the (electronic*) calculators.
Get the logarithm table and/or the slide rule back.
That's how one teaches the basics!
In all seriousness, I work as a tutor and by now mainly for math. Before one can teach them abstract concepts, they need to get the basics right and that means calculations (preferably without electronic help). I see no justification to teach set theory** when they get still puzzled by "Is 123 divisible by 3 without residue?" or "What's the square root of 81?". If that's 19th century, then Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser!
To me that sounds like the unfortunate discussion about why and whether kids still have to learn to write by hand in our modern age. Why learn orthography when there are spellcheckers? And what by the way is the use of kids reading fictional literature of guys long dead or ancient (pre-1990) history?
Yes, understanding should have priority over rote learning buy everyday math is still mostly basics. And I am cynical enough to say that we are failing there already. Imo math at school should concentrate on practical problem solving not Zermelo's theorem.
*abaci will be tolerated
*exception: difference between natural, integer, rational and real numbers.
"
All this math talk has me celebrating pi, but not exactly.
"
Perhaps the greatest calculator, unmentioned in Devlin's article, was Kepler, who worked out his laws of planetary motion from Brahe's observations.
"
Couple of links
https://www.educationworld.com/a_admin/admin/admin074.shtml
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0020739X.2019.1614688#d1e163
There are a ton of pdfs as well.
"
For any mathematician alive today, mathematics is a subject that studies formally-defined concepts, with a focus on the establishment of truth (based on accepted axioms)
Absolutely, however teaching "formally define concepts, axioms, proofs, etc" are taught in PLANE GEOMETRY, not so much in calculation/algebra type classes.
"
I’m on my phone, so can’t give links, but I encourage a dive into how japanese teach math vs US methods. A couple of points I remember:
-in the US, people who are goid at math get pushed into teaching math, so they often don’t understand why students make the mistakes they do. A large component of Japanese math education is predictive, so a good teacher should know where students are likely to go off the rails and adjust their teaching
-a passing grade in Japan is 60, which is good for math, if you understand 60% of some concepts, that’s not too bad, and the bulk of math education happens in hs. I recall I was involved with an exchange program that sent selected prefectural students to BC. One student was from one of the lower ranking schools, and was considered the weakest candidate academically. Wasn’t a bad kid, but was on the baseball team, so 95% of his effort was on the baseball field. He went to a BC high school where classes were in mid term and had to take a math test because that was scheduled and everyone was astonished because he had a perfect score.
-students in japan still aren’t permitted to use calculators
-they also don’t give partial credit, which is how I got thru my math courses.
Will try and toss some links tomorrow
"
Here's a post from Keith Devlin working through some thoughts about the tension between calculation and mathematical thinking.
https://devlinsangle.blogspot.com/2018/05/calculation-was-price-we-used-to-have.html
For any mathematician alive today, mathematics is a subject that studies formally-defined concepts, with a focus on the establishment of truth (based on accepted axioms), with various forms of calculation (numerical, algebraic, set-theoretic, logical, etc.) being tools developed and used in the pursuit of those goals. That’s the only kind of mathematics we have known.
Except, that is, when we were at school. By and large, the 19th Century revolution in mathematics did not permeate the world’s school systems, which remained firmly in the “mathematics is about calculation” mindset. The one attempt to bring the school system into the modern age (in the US, the UK, and a few other countries), was the 1960s “New Math”. Though well-intentioned, its rollout was disastrous, in large part because very few teachers understood what it was about – and hence could not teach it well. The confusion caused to parents (other than mathematician parents) was nicely encapsulated by the satirical songwriter and singer Tom Lehrer (who taught mathematics at Harvard, and did understand New Math), in his hilarious, and pointedly accurate, song New Math.
As a result of the initial chaos, the initiative was quickly dropped, and school math remained largely unchanged while real-world uses of mathematics kept steadily changing, leaving the schools increasingly separated from the way people did math in their jobs. Eventually, the separation blew up into a full-fledged divorce. That occurred in the late 1980s. The divorce was finalized on June 23, 1988. That was the date when Steve Wolfram released his mammoth software package Mathematica.[...]
Devlin is really good on matters pedagogical, and always worth the read.
I do tend to think, though, that students will have a very hard time with understanding math (or written communication) if they have not had enough experience with doing the work, and not seen enough examples to get an idea of the possible range of approaches to doing the work, etc.. Early in my teaching I tended not to give enough examples, figuring that teaching the conceptual side would lead students to sort through their own database of examples to see the underlying principles. I've since learned that most students come in having seen and understood too few examples, and having no idea of more than one approach to the tasks they have been called upon to do.
I do a lot more modeling of approaches, and evaluation of those approaches, now that I'm finally starting to figure out this whole teaching thing.
"
I suppose I can see how, if everybody who knows how to read** has a phone/computer in their hip pocket, knowing basic arithmetic might be less critical than it once was. I'm not convinced, mind, but I can see that it might be.
** At the rate software is improving, I suppose computers will be able to read to us, and write down what we say as well. The reactionaries will no doubt be delighted if illiteracy once again becomes the norm. /snark
"
I was taught using the School Mathematics Project, which seemed OK to me. But I may not be one of the "normal people".
I suggest that being able to divide accurately with pen and paper is now almost useless, whereas being able to divide approximately in one's head is useful for avoiding fat-finger errors. That is, the underpinnings have turned out to be more important than the algorithms.
"
New Math was the same sort of thing. It pushed a much broader view of what math was than just the algorithms. Look, long division is done the way it is because hundreds of years of experience informs us that it's the best way to get the right answers when you have to do a hundred division problems a day, day after day. New Math failed when the teachers pushed the broader view but didn't teach the mechanics.
The trouble with New Math was that it was (apparently) designed by mathematicians. Mathematicians who had forgotten that a) you have to build the foundations (mechanics, as Michael says) first. And that b) normal people are not mathematicians -- and that's 99.99% (or more) of the population. They neither care nor need to know the theoretical underpinnings. They just need to know how to do basic arithmetic reliably.
"
Camel notation* from computer programming would possibly be better: InternalCompustionEngine.
It is interesting that it is widely used in domain names, e.g. KaiserPermanente.org Clearly the sales and marketing folks think it will be easier to parse that way.
"
Charles, I gotta ask, don’t you wonder about quoting an LLM that can call itself ‘MechaHitler’?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/why-does-the-ai-powered-chatbot-grok-post-false-offensive-things-on-x
"
Charles, I gotta ask, don’t you wonder about quoting an LLM that can call itself ‘MechaHitler’?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/why-does-the-ai-powered-chatbot-grok-post-false-offensive-things-on-x
"
I'm not sure if I'd be so harsh on the Roman alphabet. You don't want a system that encodes everything.
Something that floors my students is when I teach them about an abcedary, which is a chart that represents the letters by giving them a word that has the sound (A is for apple, etc) Because Japanese kana are the sound they represent, there is no need to create one.
About Michael's question, I think it would work in romanized Japanese because it is essentially creating an anglicized version of Japanese and the consonants plus the context can give enough clues to read them. However, Japanese don't process near as much text in roman letters, so that would be an issue.
"
Michael, the scrambling thing is called Typoglycemia. In German it's Buchstabensalat (letter salad) and at a pedagocic course I had to suffer through at university as Badewanneneffekt (bathtub effect, no idea why).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposed_letter_effect#Internet_meme
With long words with completely random letter scrambling it's rubbish even if first and last letter are retained.
"
Is this just an English thing?
According to Grok:
Scrambled Words Across Languages
"
"Whole language" may have been a wrong turn if it really resulted in ignoring phonetics (I doubt that it really did in practice), but the fact is that proficient reading requires recognition of whole words.
To paraphrase a friend, "No one can get a PhD dissertation out of pushing phonics. You have to claim that something else is better." Or at least that something else is as/more valuable than recognizing the words early on. The new things are all well and good, but memorizing a few hundred words-as-a-chunk is still necessary. You can't sound out "bat" and "cat" forever; at some point it has to be automatic.
There are assorted postings -- the internet has made them more common -- that ask whether you can read "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae." Is this just an English thing? Does Romanized Japanese tolerate the same sort of misspellings for fluent readers?
New Math was the same sort of thing. It pushed a much broader view of what math was than just the algorithms. Look, long division is done the way it is because hundreds of years of experience informs us that it's the best way to get the right answers when you have to do a hundred division problems a day, day after day. New Math failed when the teachers pushed the broader view but didn't teach the mechanics.
"
"it radically rewrote the rules of literacy for tens of thousands of children seemingly overnight."
There are always stories about how miraculous various programs and phonics in particular are in teaching reading. But surely such programs would have been adopted by now and thus must have been producing undeniable results somewhere. Wouldn't phonics have been adopted in red states (there is an obvious partisan divide on this) and shouldn't those states now be much better in reading performance?
Spanish is almost perfectly phonetic so why do international comparisons put reading performance in Spain below that in the US? Can Japanese and Chinese (who do well on the international comparisons) only learn to read after seeing the romanized versions? Surely people in China were able to read before it was exposed to the West.
"Whole language" may have been a wrong turn if it really resulted in ignoring phonetics (I doubt that it really did in practice), but the fact is that proficient reading requires recognition of whole words. Most children can learn new words both audibly and in symbols very fast, but some may require more help from phonetics.
By the way the Roman alphabet is very poor for most languages (including English), which typically have more sounds. Few languages have only five vowels sounds, like Spanish and Italian (and presumably Latin). Phonetics is presumably helpful in deciphering foreign words, but the simple Roman alphabet will never describe them (except Spanish, etc) accurately even with code books. However some alphabets, such as Arabic, may be even simpler, omitting vowels altogether at times.
"
It's just convention that one does not write railwaystation or particleaccelerator or internalcombustionengine but imo those are perceived as units.
German also has the useful convention of capitalizing nouns. Using Internalcombustionengine would at least signal it's a noun, even though it starts off with an adjective. Camel notation* from computer programming would possibly be better: InternalCompustionEngine.
The example everyone remembers from college German is Handschuh (hand shoe) as a generic glove/mitten term, Fingerhandschuh for gloves, Fausthandschuh for mittens, Panzerhandschuh for armor, etc. The German is at least consistent. In English, it's another of the English/Norman dualities. Glove is from Old English; mitten is from Norman for mitten; gauntlet is from the Norman for glove. I understand there are more types of Handschuh that correspond to some of the other uses English has piled on gauntlet, like "throw down the gauntlet" or "run the gauntlet".
I'll just go ahead and invite Hartmut to explain how wrong I am :^)
* Off and on for a half-century now I have occasionally tried to adopt camel notation when I'm writing code. It never lasts, and I always go back to underscores: source_index rather than sourceIndex in something I've been writing this week.
"
A couple of things about reading. It's a bit like second language acquisition, in that no one is guaranteed to acquire reading. There is a basic idea that reading is a interactive process that bounces back and forth between bottom up and top down, but beyond that, there is not much. There is an notion of orthographic depth, but it's often by speakers of one language (usually English) projecting onto other languages.
I tend to think of it a lot like umwelt, which is the unique subjective experience that an organism has that can not be understood by any other organism. Though it doesn't use the word, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" by Thomas Nagel gets at that point. I'll leave it to Harmut to explain umwelt, along with merkwelt and wirkwelt in Uexküll's biosemiotic theory and I've never heard of any linguist taking this up, but I definitely will in another life where I am multi-lingual...
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.