LL-L "Orthography" 2003.09.19 (08) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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From: John Duckworth <jcduckworth2003 at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: "Orthography"


Ron said:

"When this subject of scrambled letters first came up I thought of the
process of reading largely iconographic writing systems like the
Chinese one."

I have recently come to the conclusion that the English spelling system does
work something like Chinese characters. Foreigners are often bewildered by
our orthography and wax lyrical about its lack of rules - they are wrong, of
course, there are rules but they are of such complexity that only an expert
linguist would really be able to grasp them all. Virtually no rules are
taught in schools (I am speaking about the UK, but presume the situation is
also true of other Anglophone countries), with the possible exception of '"I
after E except after C", which I am fairly certain is not universally true
anyway.

Perhaps it would be useful for studies to be made into the acquisition of
written language in the English-speaking world. There must have been studies
like this, but I don't recall having heard of studies that consider the
possibility that children learn words as pictorial blocks, similar to
Chinese characters. True, we are given some phonetic pointers, often at the
beginning and ends of words (like 'TH' and '-NG'), but that too is similar
to Chinese where a Character very often contains a radical that indicates
its pronunciation.

There are other languages, of course, that have mixed orthographies similar
to English. (By 'mixed' I mean an orthography produced where more than one
written language has affected the writing-system of another language), but
even in cases such as Persian (containing Arabic and native Persian
elements), and Urdu (which has, in adition to native 'Hindi' elements,
Persian and Arabic) the rules seem to be much more regular. Having said
this, however, students in primary education who learn how to write Persian
or Urdu do not learn rules that say, for instance, "If there is a letter
'Ayn after a vowel in Urdu it is not pronounced but merely lengthens the
vowel", they just learn to associate the pronunciation with the written form
of the word.

Here in the UK people's spelling is often atrocious, and I have noticed that
this often holds true for teachers as well as present and former pupils. I
once got so irate at the number of spelling and grammatical mistakes in a
letter from my son's headmaster that I sent it back corrected in red ink!
Our great writer George Bernard Shaw was a passionate advocate of spelling
reform for English, and even left provision in his will for an award for
anyone who came up with a more appropriate orthography for the language, I
don't believe anyone has won this yet, but the older I get, the more I
wonder whether it might not be a very good idea to revise the spelling
system. There are drawbacks of course: despite eccentric spellings in
Chaucer and Shakespeare we can still read written English that is hundreds
of years old without any appreciable difficulty; if the orthography were
drastically revised this would be suddenly barred to us, and those works
would have to be rewritten i! n the new spelling in order for us to access
them. Then there is the problem of dialect, but in reality I don't think the
varieties of English in the world are so variant that they would demand more
than one spelling system. True, man a might pronounce "wh-" differently from
man b in words such as "what", "where", but if we decide to write all those
words with "w-", then we are only reversing a situation: previously man a's
pronunciation was represented in the spelling and now man b's is. Perhaps we
need an 'English Academy' incorporating members from all English-speaking
nations to look seriously into the possiblilities of orthographical reform.

John Duckworth

Preston, UK.

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From: GaidhealdeAlba at aol.com <GaidhealdeAlba at aol.com>
Subject: LL-L "Orthography" 2003.09.18 (11) [E]

Latha math, a Lowlanders;

Ron said:
Nah!  I luv yer an aw, me mate, but sum things wiw ferreva be shrouded in
mystery.  :)

I've seen the list on Sassisch.net (I think that's the site), and it's quite
comprehensive, especially when you combine literacy and speaking ability. I
don't know if the way you classify languages is different than the
Ethnologue's, Ron, but "All Germanic languages" for reading is quite a large
number of tongues!

Beannachdan,
Uilleam Òg mhic Sheumais

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From: Global Moose Translations <globalmoose at t-online.de>
Subject: LL-L "Orthography" 2003.09.18 (11) [E]

> > So is there a language you don't know?? How many do
> > you know anyway? Any chance of a list...
>
> Nah!  I luv yer an aw, me mate, but sum things wiw ferreva be shrouded in
> mystery.  :)

No mystery there. One day when Our Ron was young, he happened to stroll
through the famous Fish Market in Hamburg... and an old Chinese fisherman
from Altona sold him a Babelfish for a mere DM 1.50 because he saw at first
glance that Our Ron was the Chosen One.

Gabriele Kahn

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Orthography

Tattletales!  Nothing but tattletales!  (Except John, who actually had
something worth saying above.)

> No mystery there. One day when Our Ron was young, he happened to stroll
> through the famous Fish Market in Hamburg... and an old Chinese fisherman
> from Altona sold him a Babelfish for a mere DM 1.50 because he saw at
first
> glance that Our Ron was the Chosen One.

What do you mean, "*was* young"?  And it wasn't in Altona (which is where
the Fishmarket is) but in Hamburg proper, in the olden days, when there was
still a market downtown, on Steinstraße (or "Steenstraat," as we still used
to say then).   The historic moment was witnessed by none other than the
notorious fishmonger crone ("An de Eck von de Steenstroot stünd 'n Ollsch
mit Stint").  I *thought* I had known you previously, Gabriele!

Tschüß!
Reinhard/Ron

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