Language Crossovers

[Tante Shvester]

It is very common for children here to recognize brand logos and signs (McDonald's Golden Arches, for example) before they can read.  That way, they can clamor for a Happy Meal when they see the big yellow "M".

[pooka]

The hypothetical vocabulary I am thinking of would be single radical idiograms for everyday nouns and those involved in common sayings.  

[Porter]

You still haven't answered my question -- is this anything more than hypothetical?  Have you seen this happen?

[pooka]

I haven't seen it happen, but another example would be that people can learn numbers without becoming functionally literate.  Numbers are a much more restricted set of symbols.

The dumb thing is that functional literacy actually circles back to the same principle of shape processing that idiograms rely on - thinking of that spam where they scramble all but the first and last letter of a word and you can still read it.  The effect is even more pronounced in handwriting.

P.S.  I've also been contemplating how this relates to Peircean Semiotics.  Going back to the relationship between Cantonese and Mandarin, one theory would be that the visual sign is primary to the verbal sign.  

[saxon75]

You say that it seems likely that people surrounded by idiographic writing will  pick it up through exposure.  I'm asking if you have any knowledge of this actually happening.

I have a hard time imagining that it could be avoided.  People pick up stuff like the symbols on bathroom doors pretty readily, for example.

[Porter]

Of course, the important part of the question is whether it happens more with idiographic writing than with alphabetic writing.  

[Annie Subjunctive]

I would think that if people were just picking things up by exposure, EXIT would be just as easy to pick up as ??.

[pooka]

EXIT in white letters on red or green, sure.  Most of my children have been able to identify that one before they could read.  Exit and exit, not so much.