LL-L: "Standardization" LOWLANDS-L, 02.AUG.2000 (06) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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 L O W L A N D S - L * 02.AUG.2000 (06) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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From: Carl Johan Petersson [Carl_Johan.Petersson at Nordiska.uu.se]
Subject: LL-L: "Standardization" LOWLANDS-L, 02.AUG.2000 (04) [E]

Lieve laaglanders,

Henry wrote:

>I actually like English ortography.
>Like I said in my last message, I really can't spell in Dutch, although I've
>had
>12 years of training in it, and of course 27 years of experience speaking it.
>Yet
>I haven't got much problems spelling English, while I've only had 6 years of
>training in it, and much less than 27 years of experience with it.
Sometimes I
>can even point out spelling errors in what native English speakers write
>(read: "Americans" (sorry...)) What I really like about English is that for
>example
>"o" can be pronounced in a multitude of ways. You have "word", "pork", "done"
>(just naming some), they all use only "o" for the vowel, yet all three are
>pronounced differently. At least for me, that makes spelling somewhat
easier ...

Interesting. I'm not sure this has anything at all to do with the spelling
systems of the languages involved though. Myself, I've had some similar
experiences, pointing out spelling errors in texts written by native
speakers of English and Dutch, yet now and then making very stupid mistakes
when spelling my native Swedish.

The explanation is that there are different forms of spelling awareness
involved when writing a text in a foreign language and when writing in your
own mother tongue. I have spoken Swedish all my life and I could speak it
flawlessly (well, in a child's way at least) many years before I even knew
such a thing as spelling existed. But when learning a foreign language,
spelling and pronunciation is usually acquired more or less parallelly. At
least for me that was the case both in English class at school and later at
university, when I studied Dutch.

I recall a discussion about spelling I had with some fellow students at
Groningen university some time during my year as an exchange student there.
They wanted to know what part of Dutch spelling was most difficult to me.
They were all very surprised when I told them I found Dutch spelling very
consistent, easy and regular, except maybe for some irritating
irregularities in the spelling of foreign words such as
consequent/konsekwent [this was in 1994, a year before the spelling reform
that abolished the "consistent" spelling (konsekwent) in favour of the
inconsistent but historically "correct" one, (consequent)].

Some Dutch students told me they had problems with dt-spellings in Dutch
verbs (ik word, jij wordt etc.) and were quite astonished to know I hardly
made any such mistakes myself. The explanation is of course quite simple:
the Dutch dt-spelling is perfectly regular from the grammatician's point of
view, but in order to apply the rules correctly, you have to be aware of
the morpho-syntactic system of the Dutch verb endings. As a foreign
learner, you learn to master this type of spelling while studying the
verbal inflexions. To a native speaker, it all works quite differently
because he never has to study the grammar of his own language.

Don't get me wrong: foreign learners (of whatever language it may be) also
make spelling mistakes - in fact, they probably make a lot more of them
than most native speakers do - but they make other types of spelling errors
than the native speakers do, because they have another type of linguistic
awareness in the foreign language than in their mother tongue.

I recall reading some study of spelling errors (in fact, I think it was
used as a "weapon" in the debate preceding the Dutch spelling reform some
years ago) that concluded that learning to spell correctly was not so much
about mastering spelling rules as about memorising the spelling of
individual words. People don't necessarily have a hard time learning to
spell just because there is no regular correspondence between the spoken
and written form of a word. This makes some sense to me: after all, there
is - to my knowledge (please correct me if I'm wrong!) - no evidence that
native speakers of English, or other languages with "irregular" spelling,
make more spelling errors than speakers of languages with more "regular"
spelling systems.

Regards,

Carl Johan Petersson

---------

From: john feather [johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk]
Subject: Language standardisation

This may be of interest in relation to some recent lines of discussion.

The city fathers of Göteborg have decided that they don't like the
international designation of "Gothenburg" for their home and have laid down
that the Swedish name is to be used exclusively. The obvious problem is that
"Göteborg" is unpronounceable to people who don't understand Swedish
spelling conventions. The pronunciation, in a pseudo-phonetic English
spelling, is "Yerterbory", the first two r's not being pronounced.
"Goaterborg", which is closer to the way most English speakers are likely to
pronounce the word, doesn't seem to be much of a gain on "Gothenburg". Since
the use of unaccented vowels is more Internet-friendly this seems to be a
peculiarly bad time to make the switch.

BTW, the Swedish rule for e-mail addresses is that the accent is simply
omitted. What is the rule in Lowland languages?

Perhaps the question of how you spell a place name seems particularly
irrelevant to a BE speaker because of the notorious difficulty of
pronouncing English proper names of all kinds. There's an old joke about a
Pole who inherited a large sum of money on condition that he adopt an
English name. So Mr Zwyczyk advertised in the legal announcements column of
various newspapers that he was henceforth to be called Smith - pronounced
"Zwyczyk".

The composer Dame Ethel Smythe is often called "Smithe", though her name was
correctly pronounced "Smith". (I put this in to show that the English can't
always pronounce their curious spellings either.)

John Feather johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk

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