How does reading work? How does the brain learn to read? Why can we associate specific sounds to the letters?
In: Biology
Arbitrarily. In the beginning writing was done by drawing little pictures of words and China + Japan both still have pictographic writing systems but those crazy Phoenicians got the idea to break down words into basic sounds that could then be assigned to a much smaller number of symbols which is why we call that “phonetics”. Different languages have somewhat different most-common sounds so they use somewhat different alphabets but whatever the language, its alphabet tends to be the easiest way to begin teaching children all the basic sounds that can be combined to form words so those connections imprint themselves on (most of) our brains at a very formative age.
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