digraphs and sorting

[James Crippen]

On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 9:45 AM, Arnaud <fournet.arnaud at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> then the issue is more that they lack some awareness and training,
> After all we learn to speak well before we ever hear about consonants and
> vowels and syllables...

More to the point, the training that people have in a language like
English where they don’t have to worry about such things overrides the
need to record them in a language where length and tone matter. It has
nothing to do with innate linguistic ability, and everything to do
with years of practice. Few people are genuinely interested in
practicing for decades to become fluent in writing a language that
they don’t use on a daily basis.

Learning to write a language also turns out to be rather different
from learning to read it. This is not as obvious in European
languages, but it’s painfully obvious if you learn Japanese for
example. Consequently, asymmetries are easy to develop, and I find it
fairly common that people can read Tlingit but not write it
successfully.

Another issue is that learning to write in adulthood is quite
different from learning to write as a child. For one, as children
people are allowed to make many mistakes and suffer few or no
consequences for them. But as adults, writing mistakes are often
publicly derided. So it’s more challenging to the ego to learn to
write a language as an adult. This is made far worse when the language
is your first language, which you are supposed to know perfectly.
Second generation speakers of languages in diaspora suffer this
especially when the writing system is hard. Speakers of Chinese
languages and Japanese have a particularly hard time when they learn
to write as adults. Their situation is emotionally rather similar to
that of a Tlingit speaker, I’ve found.

There are also specific issues that arise from English as the majority
language. Every Tlingit speaker I know is literate in English. They
came to English from a second language and had to struggle extensively
to gain fluency. The process of learning the notoriously difficult
writing system of English still holds traumatic memories for them. The
consequence is that learning to write Tlingit is seen as equally
frightening, even though the orthography is easier by far. People are
resistant to writing, and to practicing for better proficiency,
because of their horrid memories of learning English writing. I
suspect that the situation would be similar with French as a majority
language, but not at all for Spanish or Portuguese.

There is an ample literature on the psychology and sociology of
reading and writing. The Second language learning literature is full
of linguistically well informed articles and monographs on reading and
writing. One conclusion that everyone seems to agree with is that
reading and writing skills have very little to do with innate
linguistic ability.