in talking about children learning to read, francis spufford points out that we all have words which, having been learnt exclusively from books, we never learn to pronounce correctly. for example, he offers, the word "misled", which obviously comes from the verb "to misle", and which, in common usage, somehow occurs only in the past tense. this is very funny, but also proof that the words you learn exclusively through books aren’t necessarily sesquipedalians. in fact, the longer the word the more clues you have. eg, it’s easy enough with vicariously, which you hear often nowadays, but what about vicar? a few weeks ago, nohrnberg corrected me on "stipend", which i had pronounced with a short i. it occurred to me afterwards that i have never heard the word spoken in my life, though i knew well enough what it was. it also occured to me that while i hadn't got the correct pronunciation myself, if i had heard someone using the word, i would have instantly correlated it to the word I knew as s-t-i-p-e-n-d. that he recognised the word i was trying to say too was also the same sort of reading-translation mechanism at work, isn't it? and that we can do that is amazing. it's amazing because you couldn't with chinese, for example. i could read in chinese since i was four or five, but, there are massive numbers of chinese words i recognise and understand, but never knew how to pronounce. any chinese person can tell you they have the same experience, which is to say that in a sense, we never finish learning to read. in contrast a european language that use an alphabet come with a small compact system of building blocks and if you can spell it you probably can say it. and the reverse is probably true. that being that you can invariably spell a word you’ve never encountered before from its sound, give or take some double letters and unsounded ones. again that wouldn't be possible in chinese. well, alright, english is a little wayward, of course, you just have to know some things, but even given "ghoti" (which, really, after you get over the "ooh how witty" you start to think, oh that's nonsense, the positioning which gives you an idea of pronunciation makes it impossible) and that does help, doesn't it? although i's are always tricky: long i sounds generally in the verbal endings of –ise, which americans spell -ize, which helps. some prefixes (bi), but going on stipulate, you might think stipend was short too. some people read aloud. i don't. which is probably why i have a larger proportion of words in my vocabulary for which i have no preconceived pronunciation. they enter my mind as a configuration of letters that mean something and stay that way until i run into them in conversation. but that recognition is marvellous - that we can find the right match in our store of words is a sign we have learnt to read. and this is perhaps like a character in a book for whom you never imagined a face, but still have developed afeeling or understanding for which, when the movie comes out, you could instantly say if your felt he looked “right” or “wrong”, or was of that one “right” or one ‘wrong” possiblity. (a.s. byatt complained, in portraits in fiction, (which the critics claimed so very absorbing but i could not read, and that would be a first for a byatt essay, but it was extraordinarily pedantic and dry, unlike her usual pleasurable prose) that she objects to real people on her bookcovers because it limits the readers’ imaginations. it’s not that i disagree with that, everyone has their own mauds and rolands. but i'm not sure if portraits in fiction should be portraits rather than portrayals. i'm not sure i usually imagine faces on characters. i think your brain just picks up on the tones. the author describes someone from top to toe, and your brain registers, ah, beautiful woman. ) with chinese words you can occasionally deduce the sound, though very seldom, and you can have no idea how to write a word that you very well can speak and understand. (when i was little, i could never imagine the expression ling xian zhu yan as written characters). with chinese this disjoint sense is far more striking. we haven't finished learning to read.