~chooldrin

[Beverly Flanigan]

At 01:01 PM 10/18/2006, you wrote:
>>From: Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM>
>>
>>"Southern"?  I've been saying "chooldrin" all my life and will continue to
>>do so long after I am dead.
>>
>>   As far as I can remember, my  grandparents pronounced it the same way.
>>I can even remember commenting on the crazy spelling in grade school, only
>>to be told "that's just the way it's spelled."
>>
>>   Tom's convinced me to honor the alphabetic principle, however.  From now
>>on, I spell it <chooldrin>.
>>
>>   JL
>
>No no no.  Hold on pahdnuh.  :-),   In my dream we do tradspeek, spoken as
>traditionally spelled.
>So we need to hold on to the "chill" in "children".
>
>History shows changing spelling doesn't work.  Teddy Roosevelt and Andrew
>Carnegie together tried and couldn't change even the simplest most obvious
>spelling.  So the only way to go is change pronunciation to fit trad
>spelling with tradspeek.  That way we end up with a phonetic language that's
>easy to learn.  Literacy increases.  Crime decreases.  What a great dream.
>
>Tom Z
>
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>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

Good lord, I hope you don't really believe this, esp. the "crime decreases"
part.  Our spelling system is phonemic, not phonetic, and to insist that
people speak and pronounce phonemically (without schwa substitution in
unstressed syllables (as in 'about') or vowel shifts (as in 'children' to
chUldren) or consonant changes (as in 'butter' to b^Der, or would you
prefer bUter?) would screw us all up (oop/Up).  I had a student once, a
grade school teacher, who insisted that her pupils say 'b^ter', even though
it obviously didn't work.  (I'm trying to use a compromise phonetic symbol
system here, obviously--not easy to do when we don't share the universal
symbol system most of us on this list use professionally--and easy to learn
from Yule's book!)

By the way, this all smacks of the kind of bias I just heard from a grad
student of mine, who said a "psycholinguist" told her that black children
in elementary school typically have a productive vocabulary of 400 words or
less.  I thought we had demolished that myth 40 years ago!  And those who
work in literacy know that there are far more serious impediments to
learning to read than the presumed mismatch between specific phonemes and
spelling, like the failure to perceive final consonants and the
morphological meaning they convey (plural -s, aspect markers, etc.)  See
Wm. Labov's  home page and articles
therein:  http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/home.html.

Beverly Flanigan
Ohio University

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org