Alternative Layout System

In non-phoenitic languages, i.e. English, many of these methods are painful, especially "Last is First". See "I", but then it's "In", so you need to mentally backtrack some understanding. See "t", but then it's "that", so if you're subvocalizing to read, you need to reform the phoneme because 't' is a different phoneme from 'th'.

Isn't reading more like pattern recognition than parsing letter-for-letter? It seems to work like that for me. There's also the somewhat famous text where each word's letters are jumbled and people can still read it fluently. Maybe that's not the case for everyone, though, and people have different ways of making sense of written text.

Edit: Quick search turned up this article about the jumbled-word phenomenon, containing the example text at the top: https://observer.com/2017/03/chunking-typoglycemia-brain-con...

I once attended a short workshop where the person presenting encouraged us to switch between two modes of reading away from sub-vocalizing and into pattern recognition. The result was much faster reading without loss of understanding.

He didn't use those terms but adopting them from this thread - I learned that day that these really are two distinct modes.

Just trying to help: "i.e." stands for "id est", which means "that is".

In your text, you should rather say "e.g." (exempli gratia), which means "for instance", "for example".

English is phonetic? The writing systems aren't regular in that the same letter can represent different sounds. But they still represent sounds. Indeed, your confusion wouldn't even be possible if they didn't represent sounds.

I think in casual speech at this point (at least in my experience) the two are used interchangeably. In professional or legal settings I'm sure the distinction matters more, but I feel like OP's usage here felt pretty natural to me even though it's not technically correct.

Well, the thing is… when you use a borrowed term from a dead language, in writing, it really sounds wrong to cultivated ears. I really had to double-check that sentence to see if I had parsed it wrongly. Not bragging, just saying.

They cannot be completely interchangeable:

“There are white people among us: i.e. me and my father” is totally different from “…: e.g. me and my father”.

A short word like "that" is read at once, especially because it's common. So no need to backtrack.

A less common word like "phoenitic" or "subvocalizing" is read as you say. However by the end of the sentence we know how to read "phoneme" because we encountered it 3 times in one form or the other.

They aren't interchangeable. "i.e." is equivalent to "in other words". "e.g." is "for example".

> I think in casual speech at this point (at least in my experience) the two are used interchangeably.

How?

They don't mean the same thing.

The distinction matters because i.e. implies English is the only non-phonetic language in existence.

Better to get corrected in an informal setting, than to use it wrong on a formal one.

it's "my father and I"