Reading the squiggles

Of course, your own language doesn't look like squiggles (well, maybe some people's handwriting might), but it's certainly hard learning another language and another alphabet at the same time. In Papua New Guinea and in the Philippines, they mostly use the standard Roman alphabet, so learning to read and write a new script at the same time as learning to speak is a first for me.


I have learnt to read the square letters and even the standard cursive font, although I can only read it much slower. But handwriting -- that's another story. If it's really neat, I can slowly work through the letters to figure out what they are (once I put on my reading glasses and figure out which way is the right way up -- and that's not always obvious to me at first glance), but hurried handwriting might as well be in Arabic or something. Even fancy stylish script on things like the name on a can of Coca Cola takes extra work to read (although of course it's easier if it's something like that where you already know pretty much what it's going to say).

And something that really surprised me was concerning the vowels. I knew that the locals don't normally write the vowels -- only the consonants in each word. But I assumed (wrongly) that they always know what the correct vowels are -- well they do know how to pronounce the words, but as the Hebrew language has developed over the millenia, there are some vowel points which are different from each other but pronounced pretty much the same. A final-year high-school student I asked, had to check in a dictionary to check which vowels exactly should be written for the word. (Vowels are written mostly below, but also above and inside the consonant letters. The Hebrew Scriptures, books for very small children, and dictionaries have the vowels written in -- virtually nothing else does.) Bt t lst thr r n cptl lttrs t wrry bt!