From: dalmatia@eburg.com
Date: Sun Apr 19 1998 - 12:05:17 EDT
Micheal Palmer wrote:
> All of their reading was probably done
> aloud anyway, so reading aloud before a group "at a normal pace" would be
> nothing out of the ordinary.
You know, I had never thought about the possibility that "All their
reading" might have been done aloud ~ Imagine our libraries if that
were true with US!! Yet the pace is an issue ~ The simple mechanics
of reading even English ms style writing, even after a LOT of
practice, slows the pace necessarily, unless the text is already
pretty much memorized, and is used as an accuracy check by the
'reader' as he is delivering it from memory.
> Of course, what constituted a "normal pace" is
> debatable. Did they even try to approximate the speed of conversational
> speech, or was it expected that speech guided by a written text would be
> slower?
The illiterate cultures I have spent time in do NOT speak slowly!!
Yet their literate members DO seem to speak more slowly... But this is
not on point... I really want to think that memorization of a text on
the first reading of it was fairly common... And if true, would seem
to have an important impact on our approach to understanding texts,
although I really do not know what, exactly, that might be... You
see, the memorization would probably not be like ours, but would be a
'normal' way that they would read, where the text was in some way just
'naturally' committed to memory, as our 'total recall' folks seem to
do ~ And there aren't many of them around. Maybe we should ask
THEM!! Dislexics might be another source of insight.
Greek structures from the center to the ends ~ Is this an artifice
used by Greek writers, or a natural way that preliterate thinking just
works?
I don't know many answers, Michael, but I've got a huge pile of
questions!!
George
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