Archaeologica.org

But anybody who could sound the words out, one syllable at a time, could manage that.

I can sound out the syllables in Latin and even Greek..... but I don't know wtf I'm reading for the most part.

Functional illiteracy is reading and writing skills that are inadequate "to manage daily living and employment tasks that require reading skills beyond a basic level."[1] Functional illiteracy is contrasted with illiteracy in the strict sense, meaning the inability to read or write simple sentences in any language.

A functional illiterate could read a Stop Sign....but he couldn't read the owner's manual that came with his car.

OK. But those were reasonably phonetic languages. We aren't talking about English here, where GHOTI = "fish" (enouGH) + (wOmen) + (naTIon)

Reasonable languages sound like they look.

It could be worse. You could be reading hebrew or arabic without vowels....just little dots and dashes all over the page!

I cannot spell worth a dam(?)

One of the greatest moments in my life is when I learned that the rule for abbreviations in English was to drop the vowels.
Until the invention of word processors, I abbreviated a lot.

It isn’t hard to get the meaning if you take in the context.
But then, how to lead someone to the lead mine can be difficult.

It isn’t hard to get the meaning if you take in the context.

But the context can be a bitch when there are no capitals or even spaces between words.


Even the Greeks were a pain in the ass about that.