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Should spelling be linked to sound? | ||
Tags: Spelling | Pronunciation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Keilan Senior Member Canada Joined 5087 days ago 125 posts - 241 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 9 of 17 07 April 2011 at 10:09am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Hmmm, interesting points against my "ideal" alphabet (which essentially would just be the IPA). I am not fully convinced that A) The IPA is too difficult to learn, if we could learn that in place of thousands of illogical spelling rules or that B) Morphemic variation such as with sits and seez would present much of a problem (the fact that someone says seez instead of sees does not make me wonder if it's really plural in speech, I don't see why reading would be different, I would just accept it as the same meaning).
The parts I would like to think more regarding the dialect differences (which I assumed would work just as well as speaking, but was not accounting for the idea of standardized writing "splitting the difference" in making up for non-verbal hints) and the idea of historical preservation (I do not know what Shakespearean pronunciation was like, and so can't speak to whether or not I'd understand it). And as an off topic note to BartoG, I am very surprised to hear you couldn't understand the spoken English of an Englishman. I have never had trouble understanding any native speakers English from anywhere, Britain included. Have you had many such experiences? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 10 of 17 07 April 2011 at 11:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
These two points boil down to one thing -- when we talk about a phonetic script for a language, we're not asking about a set of grapheme-phoneme correspondences, but a system of them. The IPA is a set, and that's a strength in describing the make-up of languages, it is unsuitable for normal writing. Liaison in French (the phenomenon where a "silent" letter at the end of one word is sounded in the first syllable of a following word beginning with a consonant) looks really weird in IPA, because the second word picks up a seemingly arbitrary sound. Boundary and proximity effects are pretty common across languages, and the s/z thing is one of them. "cans" has a Z-sound because the S picks up its voicing from the N. "Cats" has an S-sound because the S copies the unvoiced T before it. Catalan also does the same thing. "raons" -- the S takes a Z-sound due to the voicing from the N. Catalan also has so-called silent letters -- you don't hear the T in the adjective "different". But in plural, "differents", the S has an unvoiced S-sound, because of the unvoiced nature of the otherwise-lost T.
Within a language, the sound system is surprisingly consisted across dialects. The exact sounds may vary, but they generally still fall into the same sets. If this wasn't the case, we wouldn't understand each other when speaking -- when listening to someone with a different accent, we use linguistic clues to work out which sound represents which phoneme and map that onto our own understanding. An accurate script only has to denote the phonemes, not the exact sound.
Erm... no. Written English is still a sort Hochengelsc, and in school and in public life, we are actively discouraged from using our local variants -- we are expected to take up Hochengelsc entirely. Dialectisation in French and Italian... nope. Dialectisation in Italy and France occurred centuries before there was either an "Italian" or a "French". It had nothing to do with the pressures of writing in an alphabet, and was led by spoken language. It does not support your argument.
Shakespeare is already difficult to read, and editors already mess with the orthography. EG the original was before the orthographic split of U & V became convention in English, so a word like "unloved" was written as "vnloued" (handwritten convention used v in initial position, u elsewhere). And besides, continuity makes Shakespeare look like an idiot -- consider the rhyming lines "For this alliance may so happy prove / To turn your households rancour to pure love." You cannot read that as current English -- I am not aware of a single current dialect that would make that pair rhyme. Your argument was favoured in the first millennium by Romance speakers who continued to use Latin for all their writing. Eventually it just became too difficult to maintain because it was a poor match for their natural mode of speech and they started writing in their vernaculars.
But you can say the same thing about handwriting. You have an idealised S, but no-one writes it exactly the same way twice. There is a small amount of "random noise" from having a sore hand or being tired, or whatever, but there are also systematic changes caused by the letters directly before or after it. The S in "slug" will end higher than the S in "such", because the hand has to go from low to right up at the top of the L, whereas U starts low. Just as letters pull each other out of shape, so do sounds. But this is predictable -- it is systematic -- so we don't need to describe it exactly. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6660 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 11 of 17 07 April 2011 at 4:46pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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As a former teacher of English as a second language and a student of other languages, I can sympathize with anyone learning English and wrestling with our often irregular spelling.
Unlike French or Spanish, English doesn't have an academy that regulates usage or spelling. For that reason, I don't think we'll ever see the sort of spelling reform that some people have dreamed of. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 17 08 April 2011 at 3:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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IPA is so fiendishly complicated becaue it tries to take account of all possible sounds in all possible language. An orthographic system for one language doesn't have to be as complicated. In principle it would be enough to have one sign per phoneme (the definition of a phoneme pair is that there is at least one case where there is a difference in meaning depending on the occurence of one or the other), but you could also choose to indicate phonetic difference, where there isn't such an opposition, but where a phoneme has two or more very different realisations. This would of course lead to a larger alphabet, but still far from the complexity of IPA.
The problem is that those who already have learnt a certain ortography will resent having it changed, even for something better. Besides there are people who think that their orthographic system should convey historical or morphological information, for instance by keeping a certain letter across a table in spite of clear differences in pronunciation. And finally some regions may resent having a spelling that reflect pronunciation habits of the capital or some other place - and the larger the dialectal differences are, the greater the risk that this could happen. So a language like English with a ridiculous orthography, large dialectal differences, which even cross country borders, and an enormous number of users and materials printed with the old orthography won't see radical reforms. In those cases where a reform has been successful (for instance Turkey) it has been happened in connection with a complete change of alphabet. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| JFman00 Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5530 days ago 20 posts - 21 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Russian | Message 13 of 17 09 April 2011 at 12:41am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I think the biggest argument against freezing a writing system in time is the Chinese
character system. Sure, a whole bunch of dialects/languages can read and understand the same text, but the written system is so distantly related to the spoken words. This is not meant as a slight of Chinese characters, however, I don't think I'm alone in being intimidated by languages whose spoken and written forms are worlds apart. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6551 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 14 of 17 09 April 2011 at 2:01am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
What on earth are you talking about? Are Chinese spoken and written form worlds apart, compared to any other language? How can you say 中 is further from the spoken word than zhong1? Sorry if I missed your point. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5448 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 15 of 17 09 April 2011 at 9:18am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I understand this point, and am inclined to agree, up to a point. However, I think the evocation of French liaison and elision gets to the heart of the concerns I'm raising here. Let's take a sentence: "Je suis allé au Musée de Beaux-Arts." How do we write this with a refined spelling? We can write the words in base form 1, the way they're pronounced in isolation: Je sui allé au Musé de Beau-Art. (Note the change in "Musée." We can write them with the base form 2, capturing final consonants that are pronounced in some situations, but not in others: Je suis allé au Musé de Beaus-Arts. (Note the change in "Beaux.") We can write the words in base form 1 or base form 2 according to whether the final consonant is pronounced in the sentence. Je suis allé au Musé de Beaus-Art. The original poster sought "a logical system" where "sound and spelling coincide." As I've shown, confronted with a phenomenon like liaison and elision in French, the problem with devising such a system is not that there is no answer, but that there are at least three, depending on whether you want to telegraph the sounds of words in isolation, the sounds of words in combination or the sounds of words in a particular instance of speech. Stipulating that "beaux" could be spelled "beaus" (or should it be "bos"?) and that the final "e" of "Musée" can go unless you're reading Alexandrines from prior to the Romantic poets, the simplification of French is not as simple as it looks. When I suggest that there are four issues that would make "a spelling system that captures exactly how a language sounds" a nightmare, it's not the appearance of these four issues, individually, that is the problem. It's that you have to strike the right balance between these four factors, and that you have to do a better job of it with your own expertise or the expertise of a limited number of your fellows than the whole of the speech community that actually uses the language has done with it. As I've shown above, the elision/liaison issue alone creates real problems with creating a system where "sound and spelling coincide" and useful morphological information is simultaneously preserved in French. Others will disagree, but to my own mind the speakers of the French language have chosen the best compromise available all on their own. Cainntear, I think, is trying to show that there's a middle ground between preserving absurd archaisms and Zazie dans le métro. I'm inclined to agree. But locating that middle ground is a trickier problem. It's one that is best solved by speech communities hashing it out as their language evolves. Simplifying language, when you move from the stage of pointing out the obvious absurdities to deciding what to change, and where and how and how much, is suddenly not so simple. Individuals solving problems with language and fixed ideas about what needs fixing are likely to create a mess, which is why artificial languages so often get bogged down. Better to let language evolve naturally as the larger speech community evolves it to solve real communication problems improvisationally, even if their approach makes things mystifying and complicated for us non-natives as we try to learn to talk in their tongue. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 16 of 17 09 April 2011 at 10:49am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Except the evolution of English in particular is being retarded by the establishment. We may not have an "academy", but we have enough teachers and editors enforcing the status quo that we can't spontaneously fix the problems in the language. The Oxford English Dictionary was built as a document of written forms encountered in genuine use. The problem was that the words were collected from all over the English speaking world, and no at that point there were massive differences in orthography. By its nature and by intention, there is no consistent orthography presented by the dictionary. It was not intended as a definitive reference for spelling, but that is exactly how it became used in the end. The result is that we're not allowed to produce a consistent orthography. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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