Stephen Hughes wrote:Stephen Carlson wrote:Stephen Hughes wrote:Would there be much difference between these look-a-likes and the corresponding sound-a-likes for the various major pronunciation systems?
Depends if the quiz is oral or written...
Seriously though, what do you want them to do with the things they read? Most people remember the gist or the meaning of what they have read, and others the sounds, but very few people would remember the spelling and form of the words after the act of reading has passed. Remembering and reproducing the form is a type of productive writing exercise.
For people who read these words and think about them as sounds, there will be a lot more sound-a-likes to be confused than there will be look-a-likes. I mention the major pronunciation systems, because most people don't follow some sort of pronunciation that uses all diacritics in the production of the sound of the language.
Mastery of even memorising a passage to the point that it could be written out accurately from memory doesn't come in one great leap. Take for example Romans 10:13, a popular verse, which most of us will have memorised in English (at least) in Sunday school or youth camps.
Romans 10:13 wrote:Πᾶς γὰρ ὃς ἂν ἐπικαλέσηται τὸ ὄνομα κυρίου σωθήσεται.
If one were to try and master it just by writing and re-writing, the progress would be arduous. The sound of the passage would perhaps be
- pas γar os an epikal'esɛte to ónoma kür'iu soθ'ɛsete
After mastering the sound sequence, there is then a need to put that back into the written form, that can be done either by grammatical knowledge attached to each word, i.e. pas (masculine singular nominative), os (masculine singular nominative relative pronoun), etc. to help the spelling, or by rote learning the sound to the form. It will depend on the learner's mastery of grammar. For me I need three prompts, "subjunctive", "non-articular tetragrammaton" and "future". If my Greek was better, I would recognise "an" as ἂν, which ordinarily goes with a subjunctive. If I understood anything about the use of divine names, then I would know what I need to know to know how to expect this. If I was good at conditionals, I would expect a future in this (second) location. The prompts needed are indicators of ignorance.
Dealing with sound-a-likes is a major part of the process of encoding (and decoding) what is heard, either from outside (as Stephen suggests) or as the language floats about in our minds.
In changing productive speech (or a memorised passage) to writing, we do come from the sounds to the script. By just giving look-a-likes, those other steps are not catered for. To allow for the phenomenon that some people read with sounds in their head, I was wondering whether the sound-a-likes add greatly to the number that the look-a-likes have produced.
To make you exercise more useful, I suggest that you include what I have called prompts here with the recognition. By saying "second person singular of the verb 'to be' ", then the grammatical knowledge or meta-data that made the choice intelligent is highlighted, as it would be in the writing process.