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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Foreign Names
 "Simon St.Laurent" wrote: > > >> ... In Korea, for example, > >> English is everywhere and most Koreans can recognize the words even if > >> they can't pronounce them. > > > >I find the same with Korean words. > > What? I can pronounce Korean words but can't understand (99.9% of) them. > Perhaps I missed the meaning of Don's phrase (it was in American). I was making a distinction between recognition and understanding. I have found through a number of experiences that when I need to do so, I can usefully recognise words in other scripts, memorise them and make associations between similar words or words in groupings. I cannot pronounce them, and cannot understand them as words. Perhaps a Korean confronted with an "English" XML vocabulary would understand more - but I suspect that a diet of Mickey Mouse and MacDonalds is not any particular preparation for "understanding" simple words like "contract", "ISBN" "B2B" or "entity" let alone the more highly jargonistic words specific to narrow fields which crop up. The meanings of words or phrases such as "hedge automata" or "architectural forms" bear little relationship to natural language anyway (hedge means completely different things to a gardener, a computer scientist or a futures trader) and might as well be in other scripts or languages - you learn the concept and learn to recognise the pattern of glyphs and associate it with the concept. The only reason a Korean _might_ understand the English more readily than vice versa it that they are forced to get more practice. The question seems to boil down to whether this situation should be reinforced or not. > Hangul is great that way. I spent a long time in a Wendy's once sorting > out a menu item to come up with 'wen-di hom-bur-ger'. In Japanese of course they even have a special script used (largely) for foreign words so you can easily recognise which ones are likely to read something like that! Philip Nye *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ *************************************************************************** 
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