Re: Accessing alternate glyphs from plain text From: Leonardo Boiko ([email protected]) Date: Tue Aug 10 2010 - 13:05:36 CDT
> On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 13:15, Doug Ewell wrote: >> Your handwritten A and mine may look different, and both may differ>> from a >> typewritten A, but they have something in common that allows us to >> identify >> them with each other. > I have problems with this argument too. For example, consider the > following text: > YOURHANDWRITTENAANDMINEMAYLOOKDIFFERENTANDBOTHM > AYDIFFERFROMATYPEWRITTENABUTTHEYHAVESOMETHINGIN > COMMONTHATALLOWSUSTOIDENTIFYTHEMWITHEACHOTHER. > This is written in a similar manner as texts were written in the past, > before spacing, punctuation and lowercase came into being. Now it > certainly has “something in common that allows us to identify” it with > your original text. E.g., for most uses (but not all), we don’t mind > adding modern punctuation and casing to ancient texts and saying it’s > the “same” text. Nonetheless, by transforming your text I clearly > lost some information. We don’t want to remove spacing and > punctuation from plain text, even though the historic examples show > that they’re not “strictly necessary”. (As you know, our plain text > can even mark _different_ kinds of spacing, as you’re seeing if > you’re > reading this plain-text sentence in a variable-width font.) > There’s some information lost when we render our “plain text” as > ancient text. Similarly, there’s some information lost when we render > handwritten text, typeset text, or computer “rich text” to plain text. > It seems to me these two losses are different only in degree, not in > kind. > To run with your example, my handwriting certainly can go well beyond > just “looking different” than a typewriter; it can actually encode > significant linguistic information that the typewriter cannot. I have > a letter whose author, in a moment of emotional distress, wrote the > sentence “to hurt myself” several times, and in each time the words > get larger and more slanted, with more irregular forms. This graphic > resource is a representation of features of speak intensity, speed, > intonation &c., which is to say, it has pretty much the same role as > punctuation. If you encode her text in plain text, and even in rich > text, you lose this linguistic information. The only way to keep > something I’m willing to call “the same text”, in this case, would be > an image. > It’s all a matter of intended use. >> The whole premise of reading and writing is that we >> look below the surface to the identity of the letters and the meaning>> of >> the >> words. > No, the whole premise of reading and writing is to represent language, > which is spoken, in a visual manner. Nothing to do with letters; > letters are just tools for representing language. You cannot read > without re-creating sound images in your head. Only after the sound > image is recreated is that you reach the “meaning” (even, contrary to > popular myth, in the case of so-called “ideographs”). Plain text can > encode some features of the spoken language, but (obviously) not all. > Some of the features left out might be considered important for some > texts, in some uses. Nietzsche prose employs a lot of italics (which > are typographic marks of something like emphatic stress in speak); if > you take away the italics, the resulting text simply isn’t “the same” > —everyone who uses Nietzsche texts (philosophy students, &c.) is > interested in keeping the italics. Hmm. Readers, when they read, do imagine -- to some degree -- sounds; also readers do seem to rely some on punctuation of various kinds (when reading in languages that have punctuation); see: http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED029763&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED029763 But I do not know to what extent all the punctuation is translated into sound. Written and oral stories for example do share many features; but if you think about what writing has done to texts you will start to think that the process of reading must be a bit different than the process of listening: writing has changed texts according to many researchers. (For one thing: there are no longer so many "formulas" that are repeated with regularity in stories; other kinds of repetition are lost too in written texts; there may be less syntactic and semantic parallelism at least in English writing -- but this depends in part on the writer.) Yes I do imagine sounds when I read. That's part of it. Most of your email I sounded out; however I did not sound out at all "tty" in your text; I recognized it though and hardly tripped up on the fact that it was not pronounceable as a word in the sense that I could put the letters together into a syllable; I then went back and reread "tty" and pronounced each letter and asked myself if I had missed anything by not doing so but I don't think I had. (I'm can provide lists of resources on relationships between written and oral language -- if anyone is interested; email in private though.) > The question here is what’s the cutoff point; where do we draw the > line about what information goes into plain text, and why. In my > humble opinion there seems to be no clear “why”; the line seems an > entirely arbitrary technological artifact, a remnant of intuitions > developed due to limitations of the typewriter, the teletypes, and > early tty-style computer terminals. This is not a bad thing. I’m not > dissing plain-text or saying we should abolish it or encode italics or > anything like that. But by the same token I don’t consider it some > special, unique representation of “true meaning”. Plain text is to me > simply yet another attempt to represent language, and like all similar > tools, has its strengths and weaknesses—in particular, like all > language representation tools, it can encode some kinds of “meanings” > and not others. On this point I agree; in most communication, non-verbal language, intonations, and such count for more than words for the most part. So here is another aspect of reading: reading between the lines. (But if everyone goes around expecting everyone to guess what they really meant to say, some of us will go "bonkers" I suppose.) Written text can encode things that speech cannot or at least sometimes encodes things quite differently than speech; when we red-line something or mark it for review for instance -- we'd have to do something quite different in speech -- and I don't think we pronounce what we do in speech when we read red-lining. Best, C. E. Whitehead [email protected]
