LL-L "Orthography" 2003.09.22 (01) [E]

Mon Sep 22 17:20:34 UTC 2003

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A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian B=Brabantish D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian
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S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic V=(West)Flemish Z=Zeelandic (Zeêuws)
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From: John Duckworth <jcduckworth2003 at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: Orthography

Sandy said:

"As for "atrocious", which is a prude's approved adjective for English
text with spelling errors, I think that this is nothing but snobbery."

I must apologize if my comments came across as snobbish, but would you not
agree that bad spelling, and I do refer to consistent bad spelling and not
just to an occasional lapse, is a reflection on the dire state of English
language teaching in our schools? And  I really would not consider my claims
for the prevalence of such spellings to be exaggerated - I seem to encounter
them wherever I look. The Times newspaper is replete with them (and so are
broadsheets of other political leanings), official letters are full of them,
brochures from holiday firms and government departments are too. In actual
fact the IT revolution has perhaps exacerbated the situation because people
write text and then run the spell-checker which often leaves glaring
mistakes.

I honestly think that our schools need to go back to more prescriptive
methods of teaching the language. I am sure that you, Sandy, must have been
taught in that way if your French instruction was as meticulous as you
describe. We need to establish and maintain some standards after all.

Sandy also said:

"I've heard people on this list saying that they don't see spelling
mistakes in French. This mystifies me because one of the most amusing things
I saw on my first visit to France was the spelling mistakes in notices in
shop windows, especially with respect to badly-parsed liaision. It was
amusing because, you know, because we just weren't _allowed_ to do any of
that in my Scottish school!"

I have also seen an occasional mistake in handwritten French signs, and in
personal letters written by Frenchmen (especially with regard to the
agreement of Past Participles), and I have seen minor mistakes on signs
written by Italians, but I have never seen spelling mistakes in French or
Italian newspapers or official letters.

Sandy quotes someone on the list as having said:

""Second to Finnish, Czech is probably the most phonemic spelling system in
Europe."

I am not very familiar with Finnish, but what little I have studied of it do
indeed show it to be (absolutely?) phonetic. I suspect, however, that the
reason for that is that the spelling is relatively recent and therefore
represents a fairly modern form of the language. The earliest form of
written Finnish was conceived by a bishop Mikael Agricola in the 16th
century; the language at that time contained quite a number of sounds that
subsequently disappeared (such as the voiced and unvoiced dental
fricatives), consequently the spelling was revised time after time.The
language was rarely used as a medium for literature and officialdom after
the brief renaissance of the 16th century until it finally broke from the
Russian yoke in 1809. I contend therefore that the reason for the simple
Finnish Orthography is the fact that it is a more or less modern way of
representing the contemporary form of the language.

In the case of Czech we are dealing with a form of the language standardised
by Josef Dobrowsky  in the 19th century, based on the language of the 16th
century that had hardly changed since the 13th-14th century.The result is
that the modern literary language is grammatically and orthographically
archaic when compared to the colloquial language, and the orthography is not
that marvellous even for the representation of the written norm.The result
of all this is, as you so rightly observe, problems with spelling. In actual
fact, I think it would be true to say that Serbo-Croat orthography is more
efficient and phonemic than Czech, but then it too was only really
standardised by Vuk Karadzic in the 1800s.

I totally agree with you regarding Icelandic; the orthography looks so
efficient at first sight - it is so wonderful to see the letters Thorn and
Etha, and acute accents showing vowel length, but the phonological system
has changed quite a bit since Old Icelandic times (when the orthography does
seem to have been more or less phonemic), and as you begin to delve deeper
into the language you begin to be aware that all is not as wonderful as you
initially thought.

Sandy goes on to say:

"As for the best spelling system in Europe? Well, I don't know all that
many spelling systems but of those I know I would suggest Welsh."

Welsh orthography is very phonemic as far as the spoken literary language
goes, but colloquial Welsh has moved on since the spelling was
standardised.For instance, the 3rd person plural verbal ending -nt was
already pronounced [-n] in the 9th century, and is so in the colloquial
language today, but it is still written -nt and pronounced according to the
spelling in the spoken literary norm.Initial vowels are often dropped in
colloquial Welsh (as in [va:le] for 'afalau' (apples), [fe:dog] for
'arffedog' (apron).) Still though, if we ignore more contemporary
developments in the language, and concentrate on the efficiency of the
orthography in presenting the literary pronunciation, I think I would
wholeheartedly agree that it is very successful.

It is difficult to comment too much on Finnish, not having mastered the
language or knowing too much about its dialects, but I believe I have heard
that Finnish dialects are relatively homogenous, and are becoming
increasingly more so.If this is the case, then I would suggest that Finnish
beats Welsh, its orthography is, after all, described as being 99.9%
phonemic.

Regards,

John
Preston, UK.

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

Sandy states:

"In discussing English spelling in education, I think an important point
is often missed: that although English has two overlapping orthographies
(one for perceived Anglo-Saxon and one for perceived Romance), they only
need to be taught one at a time, since the perceived Romance words are in
the advanced vocabulary and don't need to be taught to infants. This means
that the problems in teaching English spelling aren't as difficult as many
accounts make out - a descriptive account of English spelling is much more
complex than a prescriptive course need ever be. With a solid foundation in
preceived Anglo-Saxon, learning the "other" spelling system involves little
beyond learning to spell a limited number of prefixes and suffixes,
eg -tion, dys-, dis-, un-. There are a few problematic areas, however, such
as -ability/-ibility and words with the ex- prefix. These might be areas
worth focusing on for simplification."

The existence of two overlapping orthographies would perhaps not be too much
to deal with if we were talking of two regular ones, and then we also have
to take into mind Latin and Greek spellings, which have quite often been
adopted by English directly rather than arriving via the vehicle of Norman
French (or Anglo-Saxon for that matter).

I was looking through Ogden's list of Basic English words, he gives 100
words that are described as 'Operations', functional words, and of those
hundred I can only spot one (please) that comes from Romance.Of his 400
General Words, at a rough count, some 242 are definitely non-Anglo-Saxon,
and a few of the remaining ones (such as 'sky') are Old Norse.A quick scan
through his 200 'Picturable Words' reveals about 50 non-Anglo-Saxon words;
of his 100 'General Qualities' about 46 are not Anglo-Saxon, and at least
one (anger) Old Norse; about 19 of his 50'Opposite Qualities' are not
Anglo-Saxon, and at least one again (ill) is Old Norse.So, out of 850 basic
words, some 390 are not from Anglo-Saxon.

The point of my going through all this is to show that there will be a large
proportion of Romance and non-Anglo-Saxon words in even the most rudimentary
English texts that are taught to Children.

Even if we confine ourselves to an examination of words derived from
Anglo-Saxon we find spelling inconsistencies. We have the words 'four',
'for' and 'fore', all homonyms but written differently; then their is 'fowl'
and 'foul', homonyms in Standard English, but written differently; 'mule'
and 'cool', both from Anglo-Saxon, rhyme, and yet they end differently in
their spelling; 'read' (past participle of 'read', another anomaly) rhymes
with 'red', while the infinitive 'to read' rhymes with 'mead' and (the verb)
'lead', the past participle of which, 'led' rhymes with 'dead'.'School'
might be from Greek via Latin, but English has received it from its
Anglo-Saxon ancestor, and it starts with the curious combination sch-
(virtually limited to Latin loanwords) and rhymes with (Romance) 'rule'

'Through' and 'rough' are Anglo-Saxon homonyms pronounced differently, while
'heaven' and 'seven' are pronounced with the same vowel.'Once' and 'one' are
pronounced with a w- onset, while 'on' is not. 'Two', 'to' and 'too' are
homophonous, as are 'there' and 'their'. In 'Woman' and its plural 'women',
the first element, identical in both is /wo-/ in the first and /wi-/ in the
second, and the pronunciation of -en as /-in/ is equally unpredictable and
anomalous. Why should 'right' be spelled as it is when we have the word
'write'

I could go on with so many more examples, and that is without proceeding to
Romance, Latin and Greek elements of our vocabulary (the 'b' in 'debt' has
perhaps never been pronounced in English since Latin ceased to be spoken as
a native tongue, and the 'b' of 'plumber' was absent from the Old French
'plommier' it was borrowed from and later replaced in both languages out of
deference to its Latin source). The point I am trying to make, in my usual
long-winded fashion, is that English spelling is very difficult however many
orthographies it might be considered to consist of, and I am sure that
children learning it often have to resort to associating the visual form of
words with the sounds of those words. Getting back to the original argument
about Chinese, this is tantamount to us learning the equivalent of so many
characters.

I suppose one fairly gentle step we could take in the UK (and in Australia
and New Zealand where spelling is almost identical to ours) would be to
follow the lead of the Americans and adopt their simplified spellings:
aging, ardor, harbor, armor, behavior, defense, fiber, maneuver, meter,
pediatric and so on. There might be a few instances where they could adopt
our spellings (English 'gram' where the US has 'gramme', and we would have
to decide whether the name of the metal is our 'aluminium' or their
'aluminum'! Then there are a number of spellings such as 'nite' and 'thru'
that we English would automatically reject at the moment, but which the
Merriam-Webster treats as 'variants' of 'night' and 'through'.If we accepted
the form 'night' we would open the doors to 'rite', 'lite', 'mite' (for
'might'), 'flite', and so on.'Through' is a curious spelling to begin with,
it comes from Anglo-Saxon thurh, an alternative spelling for which was
thuruh from which we have the adj! ective 'thorough', the final vowel sound
of which is now pronounced totally differently despite having the same
spelling! Offhand I can't think of any other word ending in -ough that is
pronounced /-u:/.

Another innovation that would be easily introduced would be to avoid the
apostrophe in contractions such as 'can't', 'won't', 'I'm', and so forth,
which was already regularly practiced by George Bernard Shaw, and appears
thus in his printed works.

The apostrophe 's' can also be a bit of a problem, something needs to be
done about it soon. A lot of people either don't know how to use it, or
aren't bothered about using it correctly.Usage of the apostrophe 's' has in
fact been changing since the beginning of the last century, and much former
pedantry has been abandoned, but this has left a muddle behind it. The main
problem, of course, is where we are dealing with a word, especially a proper
noun, in '-s': at one time it was considered proper to write _Jesus'_
meaning 'of Jesus', while pronouncing the word with two syllables, identical
in pronunciation to its nominative form; I can only think of one person on
television who still does that, and it sounds very odd. Since the rest of us
now say _Jesuses_, would it not make sense to write the word thus, or, if we
are overly sentimental about the retention of the apostrophe, _Jesus's_? In
the case of plural possessives, such as 'the books' cover', pronounced
identically! to 'the book's cover', something plainly needs to be done. The
apostrophe after the 's' in the former is redundant, and either we need to
abandon it altogether (in which case the plural possessive meaning may be
ambiguous at times), or perhaps add an extra '-s', which if we get rid of
surplus orthographical s's would be easily understood to be a plural marker.
Thus, if we write the words 'dress', 'mess', 'less', 'toss', 'moss' as
'dres', 'mes', 'les', 'tos','mos', then it will be obvious that a form such
as 'mosess' is the plural possessive form of 'mos' (i.e. our 'moss'), a form
that we would write _ mosses' - at the present time.

Anyway, that's enough from me at the moment on the subject of English
orthographical reform. Apologies to other Lowlanders if I have got a little
carried away. I agree though that the search for reform in our orthography
is like the quest for the Holy Grail, or proposals for package tours to
Cloud Cuckooland, I really can't see it happening in the forseeable future.

It wad help aw us taupie Sassenachs tae follae the ensaumple o' wir nor'land
cuisins an lear tae scrieve in the bonnie Scots leid.

Lang may yer lum reek,

John

Preston, UK.

----------

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

> It is difficult to comment too much on Finnish, not having mastered the
language or knowing
> too much about its dialects, but I believe I have heard that Finnish
dialects are relatively
> homogenous, and are becoming increasingly more so.If this is the case,
then I would
> suggest that Finnish beats Welsh, its orthography is, after all, described
as being 99.9%
> phonemic.

As far as I can tell, Finnish is as close to exemplary as I have seen
(though I am not sure how this bears up across the entire range of
dialects).  There is only one flaw: the remnant of an underlying glottal
stop (which occurs in nouns with _-e_ and some verbs ending with a short
vowel, but which never actually manifests itself phonetically as a glottal
stop) is not represented orthographically.  These days it causes lengthening
of the first counsonant of the following word; e.g., /kolme' kiloa/ written
<kolme kiloa>, pronounced like _kolmekkiloa_, 'three kilo', /tule' tänne/
written <tule tänne>. pronounced like _tulettänne_, 'come here!'.  What is
interesting about this is that due to orthographic omission this phoneme is
in the process of fading away, which illustrates the power of orthography on
the development of a language in a highly literate society.  This can also
be said about Lowlands Saxon "superlength"/"dragging tone," which is ignored
in most orthographies and is consequently moribund.

I understand that Karelian and Estonian orthographies are similarly highly
phonemic, though I cannot say how this bears up interdialectally.

> Welsh orthography is very phonemic as far as the spoken literary language
goes

What about <u> -- based on older southern (extinct?) dialects -- now being
pronounced [i]?  Does it not overlap with <i>, just as Czech <y> and <ý> now
overlap with <i> and <í> respectively, as do <ú> and <ů> already mentioned
by Sandy?

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

P.S.: John, it's great having you on the List.  Thanks for all your
interesting and thoughful contributions.

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