Just trying to help:
"i.e." stands for "id est", which means "that is".
replyIn your text, you should rather say "e.g." (exempli gratia), which means "for instance", "for example".
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.
replyWell, 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.
replyThey 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”.
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.
replyIsn'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.
replyEdit: 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.
replyHe didn't use those terms but adopting them from this thread - I learned that day that these really are two distinct modes.