Dorothy Milne:Irish Lenition & Orthographic Depth

[Elizabeth J. Pyatt]

>Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2003 19:45:54 -0230 (NDT)
>From: Dorothy Milne <dmilne at morgan.ucs.mun.ca>
>X-Sender: dmilne at plato.ucs.mun.ca

>
Hi all -

   Some further comments, this time based on Nancy Stenson's
   response ...
>
>>  On the whole, though, it doesn't seem to be a horrible problem for
>>  learners once they get a grip on the concepts.  On the other hand, I
>>  know native Irish speakers who claim to be unable to read the
>>  language because of the spelling changes.  In those cases, it's a
>>  matter of having trouble giving up the familiar more than anything
>>  inherent in the spelling conventions, I suspect, along, no doubt with
>>  all sorts of sociolinguistic baggage about relative value of the
>>  languages and what's actually worth reading and such.
>
    Yes - I have often wondered at this statement by Irish speakers
    (or by Irish who went to school in Irish ) ... it can't really
    be true, surely, if even learners such as myself can read both
    systems of spelling. Yes, reading the older script/spelling
    takes me more _time_ .. but even at that, if I had to read in
    the old system for a few days, I would speed up soon enough.
    So this "I don't/can't read the new spelling" has to be code
    for something else, I think.
>
>>  But that doesn't make the stumbling blocks created by such attitudes
>>  any less real.
>
    Agreed.
>
>
>>  It might be interesting to see if there are any differences between
>>  different populations.  Not only native speakers vs. learners, but
>>  learners in Ireland, who have years of school exposure, even if it
>>  doesn't take, or at least see the language around and  may know that
>>  initial forms change without fully grasping how or why, and learners
>>  here, to whom the whole initial mutation thing is utterly alien at
>>  first.
>
    This is a bit off topic, but one of the things that has struck
    me forcefully - of Irish people who are at Oideas Gael and
    similar summer programs to improve/regain their proficiency in
    Irish - is how they can't read the language phonetically.

    That is, given a passage to read, they could read out the words
    they already _knew_ - presumably from having had a teacher or
    friend say the word to them sometime in the past -- but they
    could not reliably get the pronunciation of any word that was
    unfamiliar to them!  This struck me as very odd indeed.

    I suspect that the oral/aural method of teaching the language
    to small children - the preferred method of teaching Irish in
    schools, and in itself not a bad choice - is one that concentrates
    solely on the rote method of 'whole word' learning of spelling.

    The phonetic nature of the spelling system does not seem to have
    been transmitted to these people even when they are quite fluent.

    You also see this phenomenon on Gaeilge-B .. when people write
    messages in a sort of pidgin- English sound-value phonetic
    method .. they are making the spelling up as they go along
    because they have forgotten how the words are spelled in Irish.
    Clearly these people - quite fluent though they are - never got
    the hang of the Irish spelling system either!

    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.

    I would love to see some research into the long term success of
    Irish teaching based on these teaching methods -- rote-whole word
    method vs phonetic.
>
>>  A study that actually looks at these matters would be
>>  worth seeing.   Do it, Brian.
>
     Ditto !

             Dorothy

--
o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o.o

CELTLING
Post: celtling at lists.linguistlist.org OR celtling at listserv.linguistlist.org
Archives: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/celtling.html>
Subscribe/Unsubscribe - Go to Archives, then click "Join or leave" link

Website: <http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10/celtling>