Tide or New Blue Cheer? The OP's post opens up a can of linguistic theories.
There's some interesting research going on regarding cultures with short discrete alphabets (English, Greek, Russian, German) to represent morphemes (single words) and cultures that use a logographic script of thousands of ideograms (China, Korea, Japan) to represent a morpheme. Logographic scripts also includes hieroglyphs and pre-columbian meso america writing systems.
The concept of movable type was actually invented over a thousand years ago in China, but the standard type set would require more than 43,000 ideograms (single images that represent whole words). However, to be literate in pre-revolution (1950) Mandarin a person could easily get by knowing only 3,000 ideogram/pictogram combinations. And Chinese history is rife with inventions such as the first attempts at lighter-than-air flight (heated paper balloons), the invention of kites, the earliest rocket propellants (for fireworks), canned/pickled food preservation, and just a bunch of other stuff that wasn't part of "western" civilization until a thousand years later. So, the question posed in linquistic research is "Why didn't all the things invented in China fall together and give birth to industrialization?"
Granted, there are a lot of reasons one can use to claim success or failure for Eastern Civilization not being the cradle of modern industrialization (that sprang from metal foundries that accelerated the invention of the steam engine), but metal foundries and understanding the expansion/displacement dynamics of heated water or air were well known to other eastern cultures including, and not just, the Chinese. However what is currently being quietly studied so as not to raise the ire of cultural racism is that smaller, discrete alphabets forced civilizations using them to develop a better mastery of abstract thinking. Cultures that used alphabets of 22 to 32 letters (more or less), were forced to divine more combinations of the same letters to create words from those discrete letter sets to represent and describe their worlds. The theory being that the more abstraction needed to represent and interpret a language also added to a culture's ability to think "out of the box."
But there's also the school of thought that having more than 3,000 ideograms also requires an amazing ability to comprehend abstract ideas. And Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese often use a combination of several ideograms to create a word, which suggests the human brain tends to develop phono-semantic or pictogramic-compounds that can be read phonically.
Therefore, it's interesting that an alleged 55% of people who read English can decipher the example posted by the OP. Although many might think they are reading phonetically, they aren't. They're relying mostly on comparative abstractions of letter combinations to understand the mangled words. Some phonetics is also involved, but not as much. (Whew, I bet none of you thought I'd get back to the OP's topic thread.) :biggrin1:
There is a big movement still in progress to return to teaching students how to read with phonics. Although many students respond positively to learning to read phonically, possibly the majority, those who continue to read a whole bunch once they've mastered a recognizable vocabulary of about 300 words begin to recognize words abstractly. Hence, a lot of people pronounce nuclear as nucular because that's what they abstracted the first time they saw the word. Most people learn to self-correct by going back and sounding out each phoneme (each sound) in the word -- phonetically. And some don't until someone corrects their pronunciation. And a good portion of people who learn to read (even the dyslexic) do not learn to read phonetically. Instead, they learn to memorize the "look" of the entire word, much as someone would read an ideogram -- logographically. For these people, their minds have an easier time "seeing" a whole word rather than reading phonetically. Why? Nobody knows. It's just the way we are. And that's where the other potentially 45% who couldn't decipher the OP's post are, too. (Again, I made it back to the original OP! Wahoo!)
As for the idea that one can think more abstractly because of a discrete set alphabet instead of a complicated logographic writing system, the jury is still out. But it's rather interesting that modern Chinese (a few years before Mao) has been continuously trying to create streamlined versions of the old script, and the majority of people who read Chinese are now accustomed to a simplified Chinese script that fuses more ideograms and pictograms together to create "letters" that can be rearranged to be read phonetically and are therefore multi-morphemic -- but not entirely.
Japanese has undergone the most streamlining beginning with the original borrowing of Chinese ideograms (or ideographs, if that's the term used in your local university's Department of Linguistics) for Kanji (most common nouns and verbs) mixed with Harigana (to create inflectional endings, grammatical particles, and "authentic" Japanese verbs and adjectives) and Katakana (used to incorporate foreign words into the language) and since the 1950s they've commonly incorporated a mess of letters from the Latin alphabet as well as Arabic numerals). Therefore, when walking along a street in Tokyo the brand name SONY is always written and displayed as SONY. Good luck learning Japanese. But with regard to the original investigation regarding discrete alphabets generating cultures better at abstract thought, in my opinion just the daunting task of learning modern Japanese requires more abstract thought than my old brain is capable of.
Still, it's rather interesting that the industrial revolution erupted in Europe/England in the early 1700's rather Japan or China a couple of thousand years earlier. And as an aside jaunt, there's the additional irony that these Eastern cultures now enjoy a current state of over industrialization and can out-produce what were originally inventions from Western culture. It's is something to think about.
But back to the abstract thinking skills engendered by (mostly) Western cultures with discrete alphabets: The USA and Europe are still the centers of advanced linguistic research which requires minds similar to those who romp around inside their heads figuring out String Theory and are obsessed with Dark Matter. When linguistic research is "applied" is when you know were in trouble. Applied linguistic theory has brought us the over-saturation of the information age and how to control mass opinion with some fairly rudimentary linguistic tools. That's why it has become so Orwellian in the last couple of decades. It was not by accident that the spokesperson for Twenty Mule-Team Borax became the "beloved great communicator" for eight years. It took a well-trained actor to use the linguistic framing of "Heh, he, he, now there you go again. . . . " to sooth the frayed nerves of an otherwise frazzled nation. We should just be grateful that Faux Not the News is currently manned by a bunch of young amateurs fresh out of broadcast journalism grad school than a bunch of elder statesmen linguists with Ph.D.s who really know how to pull the strings and push the buttons on how we learn to read and perceive the world around us.
I fear that will change, in time.
