Crystal and language

I think one lesson to be gleaned from Crystal's chapter on body language (or body communication, as Crystal suggests) is that it is not as universally consistent as one might expect. I've found that there's often a tacit assumption that while spoken language differs from culture to culture, body language can more reliably span those gaps.
Some body language, such as subtle, involuntary actions like the eyebrow flash may well be universal (7). But even something as seemingly ubiquitous as a smile will have different shades of meaning from one location to the next.
I've had some pretty weird body communication misunderstandings myself. when I was a kid, my family lived in Bulgaria for a few years. Bulgaria is one of the few countries where the physical gestures for "yes" and "no" are reversed (from our perspective). In other words, shaking your head back and forth means "yes" and nodding your head up and down means "no." As you can imagine, this took some getting used to. This was the early nineties and the situation got even worse when the country started opening up more and adopting more western styles and attitudes. Some Bulgarians still shook their head the old way, others didn't. It was kind of a mess.
Moving on, I found Crystal's discussion on the theories of how we learn to read to be interesting. I tend to agree with him in that it's probably a combination of reading by ear and reading by eye. Regarding the eye theory, Crystal states "Readers use their peripheral vision to guide the eye to the most likely informative part of the page. Their knowledge of the language and general experience helps them to identify critical letters or words in a section of text." (123)
The next quote is something of an internet meme. It has questionable origins but it does sync up nicely with the reading by eye theory. "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe." Whether Cambride stands behind this quote is anyone's guess. But it does illustrate the impressive capacity of the human mind to correctly pull meaning from imperfect lines of communication. Not to mention that it spells at least some relief for lousy spellers such as myself, which brings me to my next point...
English is an impractical soup of a language. I've known this for a long time but I hadn't seen the reasons why laid out in such a simple and digestable fashion. The numbers were rather depressing. 3.5 sounds per letter and 13.7 spellings per sound is pretty daunting if you think about, at least coming from the perspective of a child or a non native speaker. It does lend some credence to the spelling reform camp, or even those groups peddling Esperanto. Well, maybe not them.