Ages old debate of reading vs. listening to books

[barryem]

I had no idea how to pronounce "Maori". I googled it and found out so I guess I'm no longer an idiot. But then, I retired in Texas and moved to Arkansas and became a hick so maybe knowing the correct pronunciation of "Maori" isn't enough.

By the way, in Melvyn Bragg's BBC TV series "The Adventure of English" he explains that the variant of English that's changed the least in the past 400 years is that in the southern states of the USA. So if you want to know how to correctly pronounce anything in English feel free to ask me.

Barry

[Apache]

Originally Posted by barryem

I had no idea how to pronounce "Maori". I googled it and found out so I guess I'm no longer an idiot. But then, I retired in Texas and moved to Arkansas and became a hick so maybe knowing the correct pronunciation of "Maori" isn't enough.

By the way, in Melvyn Bragg's BBC TV series "The Adventure of English" he explains that the variant of English that's changed the least in the past 400 years is that in the southern states of the USA. So if you want to know how to correctly pronounce anything in English feel free to ask me.

Barry

But it is changing, since we seem to be getting an influx of foreigners (Northerners) fleeing the cold.
Apache

[AnotherCat]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The standard British pronunciation is "Mow-ri", with "Mow" rhyming with "How", and that's the standard I'd expect a British narrator to use, regardless of how its indigenous speakers pronounce it.

I tend to agree with you Harry. I grew up in a Maori majority community and that is how they pronounced it. And they pronounced the Maori name of the town of that community quite differently to that promulgated by many of those who (often Europeans) now consider themselves experts in the pronunciation of the Maori language.

The latest fashion is to place macrons on various letter "a"s in Maori place names and words as I see stuartjmz is doing with the word Maori - this is an entirely new concept. The practice has been adopted formally for the district I live in and the macroned "a" placed between two consonants in the short place name make those using it in their exaggerated pronunciation sound like coughing sheep as the macron does not really give the correct nuance. Which means, for example, that macron fanatics pronounce the word "Maori" with a first syllable one could confuse with a goat bleating.

The fact is that Maori have long been tribal and still are to a considerable extent, and so pronunciation varies considerably according to where one is (just as it does in England) and there really is no Standard Maori.

As an example I was sent to visit a business by a Maori organization and at reception I gave the name of the Maori organization who sent me. Upon which the (European!) woman receptionist proceeded to give me a curt school ma'am's type lesson in Maori pronunciation telling me I had it all wrong, to which I replied (I had to be polite) that I grew up in a Maori majority community and that is how they would have pronounced it and perhaps they had given me bad habits . I later mentioned my little adventure to the people at the Maori organization which gave them a giggle as they pronounced their organization's name the same way as I did.

So, there are many people around who think they are experts in the matter and it is their pronunciation which stands over all others, often they are European, but their knowledge of linguistics is so poor that they do not understand that there are regional (and social) variances in all languages.

{Disclosure: I am not a fluent Maori speaker but am familiar with the varying pronunciations of many of the words I know. My wife is completely fluent in a number of the Polynesian languages and is a natural speaker of them, and is proficient in Maori).

John

Originally Posted by AnotherCat

The latest fashion is to place macrons on various letter "a"s in Maori place names and words as I see stuartjmz is doing with the word Maori - this is an entirely new concept.

John

Given a particular definition of "new" - I'm not a speaker of Te Reo myself, but have lived my entire life in Māori majority communities (the supermarket in my wife's ancestral hometown appears to have NO internal signage in English), have worked on research projects on the health and status of the language, and have many friends who are L1 speakers. The use of the macron is not less than 20 years old, and even before that existed as a doubled spelling of the vowels. Since some variant of macronisation has been a widespread feature of Māori orthography for at least half of my half-century, with some attestations going back further still, I'm loathe to call it "an entirely new concept"

[AnotherCat]

Originally Posted by stuartjmz

...The use of the macron is not less than 20 years old, and even before that existed as a doubled spelling of the vowels. Since some variant of macronisation has been a widespread feature of Māori orthography for at least half of my half-century, with some attestations going back further still, I'm loathe to call it "an entirely new concept"

Your "at least half of my half-century", so the last 25 years, is all recent in historic linguistic terms.

It is difficult to disagree with the fact that it has become recently (in the historic sense) fashionable to macronise (new word that, I think) "a"s, and it is a poor observer who does not see that has accelerated recently (in historic terms). I will only spend my time giving two examples demonstrating macronless (another new word, I think) text in the past and transition to fashionable use.

The first is by referring to Te Rangi Hiroa's well respected work (around 550 pages) The Coming of the Maori published in 1949, new edition 1950. You will have to go a long way to find a macron on anything anywhere in that book, in fact it may be that there are none at all.

The second is H. W. William's Dictionary of the Maori Language (first published in 1844) which at the sixth edition (1957) the word "Maori" is not macronised as you write it, but in the seventh edition (1971) it is.

There are many words that have become much more recently macronised, for example the place name "Kapiti", whereas I think the word "kapiti" itself has yet to transition to having one - but I suspect it likely soon will, and maybe has already done so in the hands of fashionable writers.

I'll leave it at that as we are drifting away from the thread topic.

[OregonJim]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I can't help but wonder what you were reading ebooks on in the 1968-1978 timeframe?

I am not the person to whom this question was directed, but...

I created my first "ebooks", starting in the summer of 1977, by transcribing a number of sci-fi titles directly into a VT-100 terminal connected to a DEC PDP-11. The files (ASCII text) were saved on 8" floppy disks. I did this, in part, to help myself learn the TECO editor - grandfather of EMACS - and also because I had a feeling that soon we would have something portable enough to read these books with. That realization came a few years later with the Tandy Model 100, followed quickly by the Casio Zoomer, Apple's Newton and, finally, the Palm Pilot. Those files I created 41 years ago still survive today, and have traveled from that PDP-11 to an Apple II, IBM PC, Tandy M100, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, Apple Macintosh, Palm Pilot, HP PocketPC, Psion Organizer, a number of cell phones, and finally to my Kindle.

EDIT: Almost forgot - I *also* used that PDP-11 in 1977 (it had 12-bit A/D and D/A converter boards) to experiment with converting audio to digital waveforms, a good decade before digital audio became a thing. Unfortunately, the storage media of the era allowed only a few tens of seconds of capture, so I was not thinking in terms of audiobooks that early.

[barryem]

I had the Tandy version of the Zoomer but I don't recall reading anything on it. I don't think I knew that was even an option. It was a nice device, though. I wrote a hex editor for it when it first became available and there weren't any programming tools at all. I coded some of it in assembly on some other computer, I forget which, and parts of it directly in machine code. I don't even remember what CPU it had now. Probably an 8080 but I'm not sure.

I also had a Model 100. That might have been what I wrote parts of the editor on.

I don't think I ever did anything involving ebooks on these things.

Barry

[OregonJim]

Originally Posted by barryem

I had the Tandy version of the Zoomer but I don't recall reading anything on it. I don't think I knew that was even an option. It was a nice device, though. I wrote a hex editor for it when it first became available and there weren't any programming tools at all. I coded some of it in assembly on some other computer, I forget which, and parts of it directly in machine code. I don't even remember what CPU it had now. Probably an 8080 but I'm not sure.

I also had a Model 100. That might have been what I wrote parts of the editor on.

I don't think I ever did anything involving ebooks on these things.

Barry

My memory of the Zoomer's GEOS OS is a bit hazy, as I only used it for a few months before switching to the HP 95/100/200LX devices (my wife worked for HP at the time). I did have the developer SDK for the Zoomer, but don't recall doing anything substantial with it. Same story applies to a short-lived flirt with the Sony Magic Link.

I do remember that the Zoomer had a built in dictionary and language translator, and its handwriting recognition (Graffiti) and PC synchronization features were what later became the Palm Pilot. I believe it had an NEC V25 processor, which is an 80186 with a Z80 emulation mode. I used that processor in a product we designed around the same time frame. The Palm Pilot had a Motorola Dragonball processor, which was roughly equivalent, though based on the 68000 architecture rather than Intel.

While I have been reading ebooks since 1977, it was little more than a novelty on these early devices. It wasn't until the Palm Pilot came along that it became a daily activity for me. The PP was the perfect storm, feature wise - pocket sized, backlit screen, batteries that lasted a week or two, and easy file transfer to/from a PC.

[barryem]

Yeah the Palm Pilot was what did it for me, as well. I'd read several books on my 95lx and 100lx but when I got the Palm it became serious for me. It was a far better reading experience.

I began with a Palm 3X and later a Palm C3 and finally an E2, which was really ideal.

For everything except reading I found the HP LX series a lot more useful. I could code subroutines on it while at lunch and move them over to DOS on a PC when I got back to work. But it wasn't great for reading.

Barry

[OregonJim]

Originally Posted by barryem

For everything except reading I found the HP LX series a lot more useful. I could code subroutines on it while at lunch and move them over to DOS on a PC when I got back to work. But it wasn't great for reading.

Agreed. I had an application that flipped the text 90 degrees so that you could read it in portrait mode, but the clamshell design made it awkward to hold in one hand. However, the fatal flaw with the LX (for reading) was lack of screen lighting. If HP had added that feature, I might never have been tempted by the Palm.

Now, in an effort to steer this thread back on course...

If someone asks me if I've "read" a book, and I've listened to the audiobook version, I will answer "yes". The method of comprehension makes no difference, as long as the words are the same. If I saw a movie based on the book, I would answer "no" because the words are not the same as the book or audiobook.

The argument that listening to audiobooks somehow makes one less literate is pure and unsubstantiated hogwash. In fact, the opposite case can be made. In order to correctly distinguish homonyms audibly, one must be acutely aware of the context in which these words are spoken. Not so with reading visually - simple spelling will tell you which version of the homonym is being used - no context necessary. Literacy is a prerequisite for both forms, but a more developed literacy is required to accurately comprehend audibly than it is to comprehend visually.

Consider this: Aldous Huxley, Jack Vance, and John Milton (among others) were blind. None could read or write in the conventional sense. John Milton dictated his magnum opus, Paradise Lost, audibly to his companions. I don't consider any of these authors to be "less literate", do you?

[barryem]

Originally Posted by OregonJim

If someone asks me if I've "read" a book, and I've listened to the audiobook version, I will answer "yes". The method of comprehension makes no difference, as long as the words are the same. If I saw a movie based on the book, I would answer "no" because the words are not the same as the book or audiobook.

I often don't recall whether I listened to a book or read it visually. I re-read a lot of books so in a lot of cases I've done both.

A movie isn't the same. Not only are the words different, the story is often different. It's not the same thing. The average movie made from a book is an abridgement of that book at best. At worse it's not even the same thing.

Barry

[Apache]

Originally Posted by barryem

I often don't recall whether I listened to a book or read it visually. I re-read a lot of books so in a lot of cases I've done both.

A movie isn't the same. Not only are the words different, the story is often different. It's not the same thing. The average movie made from a book is an abridgement of that book at best. At worse it's not even the same thing.

Barry

I went to see a movie made from a book I had recently read. The only thing in common was the title and the names of the two main characters. Nothing else matched including the plot.
Apache

[OregonJim]

Originally Posted by Apache

I went to see a movie made from a book I had recently read. The only thing in common was the title and the names of the two main characters. Nothing else matched including the plot.
Apache

Compressing three or four hundred pages of written words into a two hour screen adaptation will never give one an equivalent representation. As you said, they often have little more than the title in common. That's not to say that no book-based movie is worth watching, but it's never equivalent to reading (or listening to) the book.

That brings up another point: is it better to read the book first and then watch the movie, or vice versa?

I'm of the opinion that it is better to watch the movie first. There will be much less disappointment that way. If the movie was good, the book will serve to enhance it and fill in the details. If the movie was bad, the book will serve to right all the wrongs.

[issybird]

You always read the book first.

[OregonJim]

Originally Posted by issybird

You always read the book first.

Why?

If you read the book first, then the movie will nearly always be a disappointment. It can even incite anger and other negative emotion as you are forced to critique its accuracy, consciously or unconsciously. If you watch the movie first, then you have no preconceived notion about how it should be performed. Reading the book later will either validate or correct it, while avoiding the disappointment.