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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4627 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 1 of 28 07 February 2013 at 1:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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There are many native English speakers who have serious problems with spelling. English plays fast and loose with phonetics and many words just have to be learned the way they are. Some people don't cope well with this at all.
I was working through my Russian CD course and the tutor said something I found interesting. She said English doesn't "fit" the Latin alphabet very well, whereas the Cyrillic script was designed with Russian specifically in mind. Each sound in Russian is represented by one Cyrillic character. Therefore it is easy to read a word out, or write a word down, once you are familiar with the language and its script. No doubt there are one or two exceptions, but it seems like a highly phonetic system. (Although I believe stress plays a big role in Russian) German is also phonetic in the sense that you can nearly always predict how a word will sound if you see it written down. It's also quite straightforward to write an unfamiliar word down if you hear it clearly. My question is, do these types of phonetic languages have fewer speakers who struggle with spelling? Or fewer cases of dyslexia? Edited by beano on 07 February 2013 at 2:25pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4644 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 2 of 28 07 February 2013 at 2:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Interesting question. As regards dyslexia, this Wikipedia article seems to indicate that different stuides have come to different results, but at least one study seems to suggest that "despite the significant differences between the writing systems, Italian, German and English populations suffer similarly from dyslexia."
As regards people who do not have dyslexia, one could assume that fewer people struggled with spelling. However, I do not think it is so clear-cut. From the languages I know, I would say that not one is close to 100 percent phonetic spelling. For example Spanish, which has a very regular spelling, has nonetheless "anomalities" like a silent h, two letters, b and v, to denote the same phonem, another two letters j and g, to denote the Spanish /x/ sound etc. Many natives also don't know how to use the accentuation rules properly in Spanish. I guess the main difference between a language like Spanish or Italian and English is that once you learn the rules, you will always know how to pronounce a word you see for the first time. That is not the case in English. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Majka Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic kofoholici.wordpress Joined 4662 days ago 307 posts - 755 votes Speaks: Czech*, German, English Studies: French Studies: Russian | Message 3 of 28 07 February 2013 at 2:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Czech is a loose cannon in this. It is pretty close to phonetic. At the same time, children in the school spend at least 8 years learning to write correctly. Our i/y rules need to be memorized, there is no way around it. And then, there are other problems - punctuation, use of capital letters, ě/ně.
Children are reading less and when writing, they don't mind spelling mistakes. Nobody now stands over them and correct them. And the practice did always make all the difference, it has very seldom something to do with dyslexia. It used to be a rule here "if you don't know the right spelling, write it both ways and pick the one which looks better for you". But how can you decide if you haven't seen the word written in a book? Poor spelling was always there, but in the past wasn't simply as ignored as it is now. Writing used be a presentation of somebody - look at the old letters. People with dyslexia have additional problems (they have difficulties, for example, to "see" the difference between b and d). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5061 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 4 of 28 07 February 2013 at 3:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Russian has a complex spelling system, it has also a complex graphics, which leads to the
fact that many learners of Russian do not know what certain Russian letters are needed after years of learning! (For example, they might not understand what letters ь, ъ are needed before vowels, like in семья). English could have a phonetic spelling even with the Latin alphabet. It used to be more phonetic, it's just too conservative. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4777 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 5 of 28 07 February 2013 at 5:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4670 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 6 of 28 07 February 2013 at 6:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
It's not the case in Italian either since I expect that you can come up with several pronunciations for (say) piroscafo or scrivania. If you know how to pronounce paura properly, pausa may still give you pause for thought. Admittedly it's much better than English. Spanish is supposed to be better than Italian (at least going from text to speech) but it too has its quirks, I'm told. Before I started Japanese, most introductory pages suggested that the pronunciation is extremely regular. Yeah, right :-) It's not bad but there are plenty of rakes to trip you up. If you are going from sound to text (so you can look something up, for example) then there are quite a few syllables that seem to have been designed to be so close that finding a cigarette paper to slip between them would be quite tough. Maybe Esperanto is better? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7161 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 7 of 28 07 February 2013 at 6:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
I agree with these guys. The related claim that a Cyrillic alphabet is somehow a "naturally" better fit for the phonological inventories of Slavonic languages than Latinic alphabets is total BS since the matching of sounds to graphemes is arbitrary and reflects how codifiers felt about orthographic depth. In addition Latinic and Cyrillic alphabets are derived from the Greek alphabet which in turn derives from Phoenician script. The idea that English "fits" better in the Latin alphabet (and Russian in the Cyrillic alphabet) smacks of a sort of cultural stereotype from the 18th or 19th century (i.e. "Western" languages - basically Romance or Germanic languages - "must" use Latin, while "Eastern" ones use something else be it Cyrillic, Greek, abijad, kana etc.). What would the tutor quoted in the original post say if I were to retort that English "fits" even better when expressed in "Germanic" runes as seen in Old English? See Cyrillic versus Latin script for more discussion (the originator of the thread has been banned and his posts deleted, and so it can be initially confusing to see my response acting as the first post in that thread). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5061 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 8 of 28 07 February 2013 at 6:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The author of the first post expressed the idea that the Latin alphabet didn't fit
English. But it doesn't matter. Chung, could you tell what was the first post about? Are all posts of banned members usually deleted? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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