Diglossia

[Cyndi Dunn]

In thinking about the issues surrounding reading and diglossia, I think the issue in part has to do with how we process when we read.  When people first learn to read an alphabetic type language, an awful lot of effort goes into just the decoding process.  And with a language like English, where the orthography lacks a nice one-to-one correlation with the phonology, it's a real headache to learn to decode.  But as we become better readers, we are NOT "decoding" most words.  Instead we're sort of gestalting them--recognizing the whole shape at once as it were.  And for a really fast reader, maybe even reading a clause at a time, rather than a word at a time.  (Hence some of the arguments about whether phonics is or is not the best way to teach kids to read.)  So when you're faced with a somewhat unfamiliar system even for a language you know, it becomes much harder to process because you have to go back to the "beginner stage" of actually reading word-by-word and sounding each one out.

Part of the reason I've become aware of this is the rather different system in Japanese.  There kids learn to read using a nicely phonological syllabary which is extremely easy to learn.  Having mastered that, they then begin the Herculean task of memorizing Chinese characters where each symbol corresponds to one (or often several related) meanings.  Now foreigners like me often bemoan the hassles of the charcter system and wonder why everything can't just be written in hiragana (this nice easy syllabary).  But if you give an adult Japanese something written completely in hiragana, they complain that it's hard to read.  There are a number of different things going on here (some ideological, some having to do with lack of a convention for spaces between words), but I think a lot of it is just having become accustomed to a particular set of sound/idea/symbol correspondences.  If it's written phonologically then they have to sound it out and that actually slows down comprehension.

Actually, I've seen the same thing with psuedo-phonetic style spellings in English.  Try writing a paragraph where you replace all the "c"'s with either s's or k's, all ph's with f's etc. and it is actually quite difficult to read silently at normal speed.  For that matter, think how hard it is to learn to actually read IPA (which should in theory be easy).  I can sound things out, but I can't read IPA it silently at normal speed.  If someone were to hand me a novel or newspaper written in IPA, I too would be reluctant to "bother" reading it.

In , I think the issue is one of the conventionality of writing systems and how deeply engrained they become in our minds  become after years of practice.  Getting back to Mark's original situation, arguably one reason for trying to write down what is actually said is precisely to focus one's attention on the details of linguistic form by short-circuiting one's normal reading habits.  I like the comment that Agar makes somewhere in Language Shock to the effect that transcription conventions allow one to "score" a conversation.  Maybe transcription shouldn't really be thought of as "writing" but as either a formal representation of spoken data or a "performance script" (I think Tedlock wrote a book along these lines presenting what he suggesting thinking of as a script for the performance of some Hopi poetry--don't remember the exact reference).  And actually, getting back to the Arabic situation--how do people handle scripts for plays, movies, soap operas?  Surely they're not all in Classical or even Modern Standard Arabic.  It's true of course that "dialogue" in English plays, novels, movie scripts etc. is not actually the same as the patterns found in natural conversations (another interesting comparison-contrast for students to do), but there are various conventions for representing non-standard pronunciations as well as some of the ubiquitious slurring-together that all speakers do (didja?  whatcha do?  etc.).  What happens in Arabic when literary characters speak in dialect?

Cyndi Dunn
cdunn at gte.net
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