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@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. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
