Antony Green: Irish Lenition & Orthographic Depth

Wed Apr 16 14:16:10 UTC 2003

>Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 16:00:43 +0200
>From: Antony Green <green at ling.uni-potsdam.de>

>>     So this "I don't/can't read the new spelling" has to be code
>>     for something else, I think.
>
I'm sure of it.  I've observed this here with German, which has just
gone through a spelling reform -- a very minor one compared to the
Irish spelling reform.  The new German spelling is easier to learn
and has fewer peculiar exceptions than the old spelling, and is still
easily readable to anyone who grew up with the old spelling.
Nevertheless, I heard the most bitter, vitriolic statements from
people when the new spelling was introduced.  One linguistics
professor I knew told me he refused to use the new system and would
write papers in English before allowing anything he wrote to be
printed in the new German orthography.  One of the leading
newspapers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, went back to the old
orthography after a few months of the new, because it got such
hate-filled letters from its readers.  And people throughout Germany
were denouncing the new orthography as destroying the language of
Goethe and Schiller -- conveniently forgetting that Goethe and
Schiller themselves used an even more old-fashioned orthography.
It's very hard for linguists to get other people to understand that
the written language isn't the language, it's just a representation
of the language.  I once tried to explain that to someone using the
analogy of the Magritte painting of the pipe with the words "Ceci
n'est pas une pipe" under it.  I said, by the same token that
Magritte can say of the painting of a pipe, "This is not a pipe"
(it's just the representation of a pipe), I could point to those
words he painted and say, "This is not French, it's just the
representation of French."  But orthography is what people get all
worked up and emotional about.
>
>>     This interests me because I suspect that this failure to teach
>>     the spelling system explicitly is part of their problems in
>>     making the language flourish.  People are left unable to really
>>     read or write the language with confidence because the relationship
>>     of the spelling to its pronunciation remains a mystery to them.
>
>
Part of the problem may be that the relationship of spelling to
pronunciation in Irish really is quite mysterious.  In many cases
it's almost as bad as English.  I think this is largely because Irish
has a standardized spelling but no standardized pronunciation (all
due respect to the Larchanuint).  So if a learner is using, say, Cois
Fhairrge pronunciation because he is using Micheal O'Siadhail's
"Learning Irish" or because his teacher is from C.Fh., then he's
confronted with such problems as the plural endings <-anna> and
<-acha> being pronounced [@Ni:] and [@xi:], or the prepositions <do>
and <de> being pronounced [g@], or (if one is using purely standard
spellings instead of O'Siadhail's Cois-Fhairrgized spellings) <dul>
being pronounced [gel'] and <tuigim> being pronounced [t'ig'im'],
etc.  Or, to switch dialects to Donegal, I remember when I was at
Oideas Gael, being totally baffled by the fact that <bain> was
pronounced [bwin'].  No wonder people think they have to learn the
pronunciation of each word individually!

Finally, to return to the original topic of this thread, Elizabeth
brought up the problem of using buailte letters on the computer...
someday if we're lucky, Unicode will be widely accepted as *the*
format of preference for people interested in languages and
linguistics.  The largest Unicode fonts (e.g. Arial Unicode) include
b, c, d, f, g, m, p, s, and t, with dots over them, both capital and
lower case.  Not in the old uncial letters, to be sure, but in a
modern sans serif font.  So maybe someday people who prefer the
buailte letters will be able to use them even in e-mails!

beirigí bua,
Tonio Green

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility
as a means of transportation.
                                              --Yann Martel, "Life of Pi"
========================================================================
Antony Dubach Green                            green at ling.uni-potsdam.de
Universität Potsdam
Institut für Linguistik                        Tel. +49 331 9772936
Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 24-25, Haus 35
14476 Golm                                     Fax  +49 331 9772087
Germany

                  http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~green/

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