LL-L "Orthography" 2006.01.30 (01) [E]

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   L O W L A N D S - L * 30 January 2006 * Volume 01
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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Orthography" 2006.01.17 (02) [E]

Sorry about seemingly letting the orthography thread drop when actually
I wanted to say more. I'm out a lot in the evenings which is why I tend
to be posting mainly at weekends.

I see we missed Burns Night this year! Well, my excuse is that I was out
at my computer hardware course that evening. I did mention it being
Burns Night, which resulted in a discussion between me and Hannah (my
Communication Support Worker) on the relative merits of haggis and
faggots  :)

Anyway, I wanted to expand on this thingmibob that Ron wrote:

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Orthography
>
> (2) Is keeping homophones orthographically apart worth
>      lifelong learning of the spelling of individual words (versus
>      initial short-term *system* learning)?

I'd like firstly to remind everybody about this that was said some time
ago on the list:

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0406A&L=lowlands-l&P=R3428

Tom Maguire had explained his experience of Spanish speakers who spelled
English better than Spanish, and the above was myself replying that I
frequently encountered the same problem when asking Welsh speakers to
write things down for me. It demonstrates that it's not really
simplicity or systematics in an orthography that makes people good
spellers, but the amount of experience they have in reading and writing
in the orthography.

That was all said before, but I'd now like to bring up the idea that in
languages, where so much depends on constant usage and experience, a
system isn't necessarily a good thing, especially when it's people
brought up in a different culture who are trying to impose a system on
those who are brought up with a 24/7 (not just school) experience of the
culture.

This is particularly noticeable in the history of the Hearing trying to
impose systematics on sign languages as used by the Deaf. One of the
most famous is Abbe l'Epee's attempted formalisation of LSF (French Sign
Language), which unfortunately is still often reported as if the Deaf in
Paris only had a few rudimentary signs to communicate with, and l'Epee
somehow gave them a language. Although I wouldn't want to detract from
l'Epee's achievements in setting up a school for the Deaf in Paris and
the influence this had on American Deaf Culture, it seems to me that in
such a systemisation a considerable amount of Deaf Culture and tradition
must have been lost.

We also have much less admirable attempts at systemisation in such
things as the Paget-Gorman system, which somehow was supposed to ease
communication problems by getting children to sign different things on
both hands at once all the time rather than something more suited to
their potential as human beings.

There's also Sign Supported English, which as I explained recently, is a
rather poor method of communication, quite apart from the necessity of
wiping out pretty much all Deaf language and culture if it were to
become the normal means of communication amongst the Deaf.

Paget-Gorman is very much accepted as nonsense now (I hope? Or is that
just in the circles I move in?), but for SSE it's the motivation behind
it that prevents it from declining. It's Hearing workers involved with
the Deaf thinking how much easier life becomes with SSE rather than BSL,
which is full of non-English grammar and vast amounts of idiom and
metaphor. What they ignore is that it only makes life easier for
themselves, they don't seem to see that it only shifts the difficulties
onto the Deaf, and only by wiping a whole language and culture clean
away in the process.

While this is perhaps a lot more disastrous than the problems that might
be caused by insensitive approaches to spelling reform, I think it's an
analogy worth considering. We need to look at it from the viewpoint of
"Is there a problem, or does it just seem like a problem to me as an
outsider?"

The evidence seems to me that there isn't a problem with English
orthography because orthography is mastered through experience, not
systematics. It also seems to me that even with the best intentions in
the world, outsiders tend to be destroyers, and can lay waste to
something that was quite perfect for the inheritors of a culture, and
even afterwards claim that things are better now, only because they
never did and never will understand what they've done.

See, I think faggots are too greasy and Hannah thinks haggis is too dry.
Perhaps the important thing isn't who's right but that the choice is
always there!

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/ 

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