A
lie, repeated often enough, will end up as truth.
The bigger the
lie, the greater the likelihood that people would believe it.
Dr Paul Joseph Goebbels,
Hitler's Minister of Propaganda (1933-1945)
I have read in many articles in the internet that there are no dyslexics
in some countries speaking orthographically consistent languages and not only
that; there is no equivalent word in that
language for the word dyslexia. This statement has now appeared in a
reputable paper – The Guardian. A lie repeated long enough.....
I do not know how this got started but one person must have started it
and every other clown in town just copies it as if it were the gospel truth.
I believe that every country has more or less the same percentage of
dyslexics except that most of them are not discovered in countries where the
language is orthographically consistent. In other words dyslexics in these countries will not have a problem reading in their native language. However,
they will be classified as dyslexic when they learn to read in the English
language. As explained in my blog;
dyslexia is not only a problem with reading in the English language but
dyslexics have a problem with abstract words, sequencing, time, fractions etc.
Coming back to where I left off in the first paragraph, I did not have
the time to go around confirming the in-correctness of the statement that there
is no equivalent word in some of the languages for the word dyslexia. I spend
enough time busting the myth that dyslexics have a phonological awareness
deficit. Now, I am trying to bust the common belief, perpetuated by some
sophisticated people, that dyslexics have a reading comprehension problem.
Fortunately for us Geoffrey K. Pullum has done the research and written
about it. He says that he finds it is ‘almost unbelievable that people imagine they can continue to get away
with printing flamingly obvious drivel about language in major newspapers. They
always assume that since there are no linguistic scientists and no
cross-linguistic dictionaries or encyclopaedias’, no one will check on them.’
To set the record straight he says, “The Italian word for
dyslexia is dislessia. Finnish has three words for it, two native and
one borrowed: lukivaikeus (literally "reading-difficulty"), lukihäiriö
(literally "reading-disturbance"), and dysleksia.”
“The
third of the Finnish words, dysleksia, gets about 57,000 Google hits,
and there is an article on dyslexia in the Finnish Wikipedia, so it's not like
nobody in a newspaper editorial office could have found this out. The trouble
is that they didn't do even thirty seconds of research on this.”
The
same thing goes for most of these professors who just copy what is written by
some clown a long time ago. They write some of these articles, I believe, for
nothing more than to make a quick buck on their wares. I agree with Geoffrey
when he says “I am sure I have said this before, but here I am saying it again, for
the Guardian's editors to hear: you just cannot exaggerate the
stupidity of the brigade of morons who carry on the "things they don't
have words for" trope. (I should add that I hope its stupidity.
It may be worse than that: mere bullshit, written by sophisticated people who
know they haven't looked for the relevant facts but couldn't care less.)”
Be wary of some of these so called professors who simply copy things wrongly
written by their predecessors.
You may refer to the article commented on by Geoffrey K. Pullum here:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3001
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