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Yiyan Merci, m'sieu that's what I was looking for. Am chewing on it awhile. cheers David ----- Original Message ----- From: Yiyan Wang <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Sunday, January 28, 2001 9:48 AM Subject: Re: Silent reading > Hello everyone, > > I'll try my best by going back to David's initial question. > > I want to make the point what we call silent reading is only silent to others > but not to oneself. From the replies generated by the question I gather the > consensus is that silent reading refers to reading texts silently to oneself > without pronouncing audiably the sounds of the words. However, even if we > don't read aloud, I believe our mind still reads on the basis of assuming the > pronunciation. Sometimes the phonetic assumption could be wrong or different, > but it does not really hinder the reading process. I suspect this applies to > all languages. > > What happens in reading Chinese is not particularly different or 'peculiar'. > The readers automatically pronounce the words according their own > pronunciations, be they southerners or northerns or Cantonese. The same way > Americans pronounce English words differently from the British or the > Australians. Or for this matter, Japanese, Korean, Vitnamese or anyone who's > learnt the script. If we are talking about reading 'texts', rather than > 'words', it does not matter when occasionally the reader comes across a word > that he does not know how to pronounce it. > > What make the Chinese speakers different from other language users is that > they cannot communicate orally to each other because their pronunciations > differ so much that renders each other incomprehensible. > > In contemporary China studies, some scholars suggest that China should be > approached like the continental Europe because of its regional differences. > > It is not accurate to say that Chinese is not a phonetic language. It is > phonetic to some extent (quite similar to that of English as David points > out), although its phonetic indication system differs from abphabetical > languages. A Chinese character is usually made of two or more parts (this is a > generalisation about a human phenomenon called language so there are certainly > exceptions), one of which is often an indicator of how it's pronounced and > another part(s) tells the reader its meaning. One does not have to know the > character's pronounced to know its meaning or vice versa. Classical Chinese > poems often do not rhyme properly with the pronunciation of modern standard > Chinese, for the characters used to be pronounced differently. This has left > for people from certain regions, such Canton in the southeast China, or > Shaanxi in China's northwest, to argue that their pronuciation rhyme the poems > better therefore they are the more 'authentic' Chinese. > > All this started, in my understanding of Chinese history, with the first > emperor of China, the one depected in the film The Emperor and the Assasin. He > unified China around 220 BCE and he did three things that had huge impacts on > unifying China as a nation, namely unification of roads, unification of > measurement and unification of written language. From then on people from > different parts of the Chinese empire could communicate in written forms. > > So, back to square one: when did the Chinese literati start silent reading? > Perhaps sometime in the first century? if there is such a thing as silent > reading. On the other hand, the Chinese have favoured rote learning perhaps > until now. This may mean that many things they read are perhaps read aloud to > help with memorizing at some stage. > > > with best regards, > > Yiyan > > ====================================== > Dr Yiyan Wang > Chinese Studies A18 > University of Sydney NSW 2006 > AUSTRALIA > > tel+ 61 2 9351 4512 fax+ 61 2 9351 2319 > email: [log in to unmask] > ======================================