Slow versus Fast: Knowing Where the Spaces Are
A couple of weeks ago, as I sat in the Charles de Gaulle airport lounge on my way back from a Smarter Start workshop in Paris, I was idly eavesdropping on a football conversation between two Italians. I could do this because I speak and understand Italian fluently even though it’s not my native language. And the fact that I could do so was like a breath of fresh air in the midst of all the unintelligible French babble going on around me.
Now my French isn’t all bad and when I concentrate and focus on what’s being said I can usually more or less understand what’s going on. But I was struck by the thought that my understanding of Italian might be helped because Italians seemed to speak more slowly. I remembered having a similar thought concerning Scottish versus English while listening to Scottish janitors conversing in the Aberdeen Public Library.
Mulling things over I decided the “talking slowly” theory couldn’t quite be correct. First of all, I’ve heard many people complain that Italians and Englishmen speak too fast but it doesn’t seem to be a problem for me. And if you’ve ever heard a Geordie talk English, you’d know what fast really sounds like, but again, I don’t have a problem with that; probably because my uncle is a Geordie and I grew up listening to that every Sunday.
So why did the Italian sound slower?
The answer came to me just as we were coming in to land at Heathrow. Italian sounds slower than French to me because I know where the spaces are. This is no brilliant intuition from my part. A snippet of conversation with Caroline about language came back to me from last summer. Because of the ubiquty of the written word, we are accustomed to thinking about language as discrete chunks – words, sentences and paragraphs – all separated by spaces. However, with the exception of fullstops, commas and other punctuation, there are no discernable “spaces” in the actual audio we produce when speaking. Transforming the sound of speech into undersntandable words is nothing more than an exercise in pattern matching.
When we’re not familiar with the language, the pattern matching isn’t so effective and therefore we’re not so accurate at splitting up the audio stream into the correct combination of words that makes sense. In other words, we’re not so good at figuring out where the spaces should be.
A Warm Welcome to May
May has finally come round again with the promise of a great summer in the UK and trees already blossoming up in Aberdeen.
So what’s in store for May? Well, first of all, it’s good to remember those who aren’t having such a good time of it at the moment, like a few people in the Netherlands and those people (and, er, pigs) suffering from swine flu. Not to mention the almost quarter of a million recession victims in Europe.
However, having just come back from an exciting and productive Smarter Start workshop in Paris (and having addressed my fromage-deficiency) it’s time to get back down to business. So here’s what I plan to be doing and writing about this month:
- Top priority this month is putting in some serious spadework into the Smarter Start book we’ve been writing over the past year or so.
- Also, following an impressive response to my tutorial on using WordPress for small websites, I plan to write a detailed follow up tutorial that is less “techy” and more usable for that overwhelming percentage of people who aren’t geeks.
- Another tutorial is in the offing that aims to provide some detailed guidelines on how to structure the process of freelance work (not necessarily web).
- I’ve also been interested in the concept of “Collective IQ” lately because I’ve seen how groups managed to build on each others ideas incredibly fast – a form of “speeded up idea evolution” if you will – and a small thought piece is germinating about that.
- Finally, with MEP Elections coming up in June in Europe, I’m conducting a small research exercise about the Maltese candidates’ web presence and “social media intelligence” in terms of promoting their campaign. Some surprising (and not so surprising) results there!
Enjoy your weekend and public holidays people!
