Two reports on abilities and disabilities in reading. One from my own experience in reading Finnish (a language I don’t speak, though I have a fair amount of linguist’s knowledge about the language, its structure, and its writing system). The other from our overlord Grabpussy’s approach to reading English (his native language, indeed the only language he can speak). I’ll suggest that the two of us are more alike in our abilities and disabilities than you might have thought.
Report 1. Me reading Finnish. In an anecdote from many years ago, when my daughter E was still a child and had a friend J, equally American but with Finnish-speaking parents. The three of us were in a car in Palo Alto, and J was showing off a Finnish comic book — one of the Asterix series, translated from the French, something like this item:
The Asterix comic book Harharetket ‘Odyssey’ (Finnish harharetket plural of (nominative) harharetki ‘stray trip, wandering, odyssey’
— and her ability to read it, something E and I couldn’t do, she boasted.
Oh, I said, I can read that. Took the comic and read a page of dialogue in recognizable Finnish. (Finnish orthography is wonderfully systematic, and I knew enough about it to turn what was printed on the page into a recognizable pronunciation of Finnish, though with an American accent.)
J objected furiously. “That’s not fair! That’s not reading!”
Well, of course, it was and it wasn’t. From NOAD:
verb read: 1 [a] look at and comprehend the meaning of (written or printed matter) by mentally interpreting the characters or symbols of which it is composed … [c] speak (the written or printed matter that one is reading) aloud …
read-understand vs. read-pronounce. Ordinarily, we take read to be read-understand, with read-pronounce (on its own) an extraordinary special case. So J was entirely right to object; I wasn’t playing fair.
Report 2. Grabpussy reading English. Typically, from a teleprompter. Where he adopts a somewhat singsongy, over-precise speech style with unusual amounts of lip-rounding. Since he hears what he’s saying and he understands spoken English, he gets some — but pretty clearly not all — of what he’s saying (his attention is focused on read-pronouncing).
Meanwhile, there’s plenty of evidence that he simply doesn’t engage in read-understanding. There is no evidence I have seen that he has ever read any whole book, or even a chapter of one (presumably, he got through his various schoolings by avoiding assignments and otherwise by bullying or paying people to give him summaries). He is famous for insisting that briefings be genuinely brief, and either oral or presented through visuals (he has a strong visual orientation, and spends considerable time and effort in designing his visual environment; his difficulties with text are not mere laziness, but reflect a deeper problem).
That is, he looks like a type of dyslexic — there are clearly many varieties, affecting a great many people — who has the resources in money and power to compensate for his cognitive deficit. Alas, he is also an insecure, vindictive, and whimsical moral monster (see my previous postings on those matters), a profound xenophobe, and a pathological liar, who appears to be slipping into a cognitive decline that looks like some type of dementia. But of course he is our overlord, and he’s surrounded by a phalanx of much more competent operatives, so however impaired and foolish he might seem, he is deeply dangerous.
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