The sort of nonsense up with which I will not put

[nineveh_uk]

While there may be disadvantages to the lack of any central body with responsibility for English As She Is Spoke*, there is a decided plus side, which is that no-one can come along and say "We've decided that [word] is spelt differently now" or "we've re-written all the rules about commas."** There is something to be said for the free and easy approach of owning a copy of Fowler in order to argue why you choose to ignore it against the alternative approach, which might be epitomised**** by the following extract from Wikipedia, brought to you by looking up further my German teacher's comments on whether to write du or Du:

In der Schriftsprache werden das Pronomen „Sie“ und die davon abgeleiteten Formen großgeschrieben. Bis zur Rechtschreibreform 1996 gab es auch eine Höflichkeitsform für „Du“ in der Schriftsprache, in der dieses Wort großgeschrieben wurde. Von 1996 bis 2006 wurde „du“ in neuer Rechtschreibung ausschließlich kleingeschrieben. Seit der neuesten, inzwischen vierten Revision der Rechtschreibreform kann „Du“ bei persönlicher Anrede wieder großgeschrieben werden.

Google translate does it for us. Only the culture that produced Nietzsche could produce a sentence like 'Since the latest, now the fourth revision of the spelling reform'. One can just hear the existential despair that rolls off it.

*Would that there had been a committee in 1400 or so to consider whether the Great Vowel Shift should be allowed. Also, I would vote for re-introducing "æ".

**Danish, which I see has since managed to change the comma rules that were new when I learnt*** them.

***Or should that be learned? I think I can choose.

**** The English version is epitomised by the fact that I can choose not to write epitomized. Of course, English is nothing in comparison to Norwegian, in which it would probably be entirely correct to write epyttomised as long as you came from the particular valley in which that was correct and all your other spelling matched it.

Comments

[azdak]

English spelling is well on its way to becoming Chinese in its total detachment from the way words are pronounced. I know nobody who can already read will agree with me, but I spend so much time trying to cheer up little people in the depths of desapir about trying to learn English spelling that I would actually vote for a spelling reform.

[perennialanna]

And yet a primary school teacher I know swears phonics is the answer to everything (fortunately she doesn't teach either of my children. Their own teachers regard phonics as simply one part of a mental toolkit to be acquired as soon as can be managed).

[antisoppist]

Have they come home talking about "split digraphs" yet?

[nineveh_uk]

*look up* In my day we called that magic E.

[azdak]

I still do! It captures the imagination :-)

[perennialanna]

Apropos of absolutely nothing, L just looked up from her breakfast and remarked "Without Magic E, hope would be hop".

[nineveh_uk]

That reminds me of the Red Dwarf joke about Seventh Day Advent Hoppists.

[perennialanna]

Split Vowel Digraphs. One has met them officially, the other was taught them by his sister unofficially last year. And then there are trigraphs. It's all very trying. L was about ready to give up on reading as a source of enjoyment until someone gave her The Wishing Chair.

[nineveh_uk]

I have to admit that I find phonics completely incomprehensible. Though possibly this is because I have never sat down to read about it much.

[antisoppist]

My mum taught me to read by labelling the furniture when I was three. It occurs that this is a very labour-saving and hands-off approach to teaching your child to read :-) but I think in the 1970s it was officially the Look And Say method.

[nineveh_uk]

The furniture is probably more interesting than some of the reading books we had in early primary school.

[azdak]

I don't see how it's possible to teach writing using phonics alone. The Austrian kids get very good at sounding out English words as if they were German and then matching them to English words they've heard (it leads to errors like reading "people" as "purple" but a lot of the time it works), but that doesn't help them spell a word they've only ever heard. I find myself resorting to historical linguistics to help them cope with "gh" in words like "eight" and "laugh" because German preserves the sound in its cognates, but that wouldn't help English children.
Basically, with English spelling there are a huge number of words, or parts of words, that have to be learned off by heart. I don't see how phonics helps you with that (as you say, it's a good thing your own offspring don't have that particular teacher).

[antisoppist]

Because Finnish is phonetic, Finns would demand that I write out English words for them in the phonetic alphabet so that they could match the two up using a decoding tool that they understood. But I did not know the phonetic alphabet and learned spelling by look-and-say/osmosis so this didn't really work.

And then you've got the "is it a hard p or a soft p?" problem, whereby they viewed p and b as the same letter. Also t and d, and v and w. And then were perplexed that I couldn't hear the obvious difference between k and kk or l and ll.

[nineveh_uk]

I can hear the difference between l and ll if the ll is Welsh...

[azdak]

The Austrians have a similar, although less extreme, problem differentiating between word-initial p/b and word-final voiced/devoiced consonants. The kids can learn to hear the latter difference but adults have to learn the spelling off by heart and most of them never master the pronunciation.

What do kk and ll stand for?

[antisoppist]

If there are 2 letters the same, you have to say both of them, and they are phonemes, so:

kuka = who
kukka = flower

tuli = came (3rd person)
tulli = customs

The double ll is a sort of longer, darker l sound. First I had to learn to hear it, then I had to learn how to do it.

[littlered2]

Are l and ll clear l and dark l, or is this yet another distinction?

[perennialanna]

There is a list of a hundred Tricky Words they need to learn by the end of the first year. One of the first ones is 'the'.

[azdak]

Well, quite! "Does" is another bastard. And just doing the numbers from one to ten provides lots of opportunities to demonstrate how weird English spelling is. I would feel very disorientated if "one" had to be spelled "wun" because of a spelling reform, but it would make life so much easier for the next generation of readers, I'd be willing to take wun for the team.

[nineveh_uk]

*groans* Though I would rather take "wan" for the team, not least because it would be better to allow the continuance of one of my father's particularly annoying jokes, "pale and two".

[antisoppist]

Is that Birmingham? One of my mother's idiosyncratic pronunciations compared to the rest of us (Estuary) is the vowel in "1".

[nineveh_uk]

Well they are both Birmingham. Is it a Birmingham thing? I definitely pronounce wan and one to rhyme (more or less), rather than one and won. I now feel the need to go round asking people to count to five to hear how they say it.

[antisoppist]

I now feel the need to go round asking people to count to five to hear how they say it
I feel this could be your mission for the day. It would endear you to your colleagues no end.

Perhaps it's a north of Watford thing. I don't know. I pronounce one and won the same, not one and wan but I'm Essex (and have glottal l's)*. Mum's parents moved to run a guesthouse in Lowestoft when she was in primary school, and then moved to Southend but she's got residual bits of original West Midlands.

*A distant cousin once produced a Swedish boyfriend called Ulf and we spent an entertaining afternoon trying to get an elderly Essex great aunt to be able to pronounce his name as anything other than "Oof"

[nineveh_uk]

I may have to do a poll!

[perennialanna]

I say one and won the same, and I am mostly Surrey Girl (with a few Cornish dialect words in my mother's 1950s Grammar School).

[nineveh_uk]

I would happily bring back ð and/or þ to address the th problem.

On the other hand, English doesn't require me to pick which out of several words I need to choose for the definite article, so there is that.

[azdak]

35 years of learning German and my most commone error is still getting the gender wrong.

[antisoppist]

Well the hardest things are the things your native language doesn't even have a mental category for.

It's like Finns getting he and she muddled up. Even though they've been taught it and know it's a thing, and know what the rule for it is and can do it when they think about it, it's still subconsciously a pointless distinction that English makes that is extra effort to have to think about every bloody time you have to refer to a person.

[nineveh_uk]

That is some consolation for all the red pen on my homework pointing out where I should have used the £$%(&$"%(*&$"% dative.

[nineveh_uk]

I know that it isn't a solution for one's first language, but I do wish that I had been taught just a bit of historic linguistics at school as part of being taught foreign languages. I feel that it would have been immensely more useful in terms of getting to grips with how languages work and learning them than learning the parts of the car in French.

[nineveh_uk]

I do enjoy the element of learning foreign languages and being able to make a reasonable stab at how a word should sound or be spelt. It is so civilised.

My principal objection to English spelling reform is that I suspect it would involve the insertion of an r in bath, to which I respond "I will fight you on the beaches!" Or possibly on the path and on the grass. But I would sign up to the "Bring Back Yogh" campaign.

[azdak]

But at least you wouldn't need an r in wrath :-)

[antisoppist]

What have they done to the comma rules? All I've ever been taught (in "how to read Danish when you know Swedish" classes") was to treat Danish commas as random decorative effects, which does make sense when your instinct is to read them as denoting different types of relative clause when they do nothing of the sort.

[perennialanna]

I will add that to my mental file of "Other Scandinavians Being Rude About Danish". Started when inter-railing, when I noticed the faces my Norwegian travelling companion was making at the Danish announcements as we crossed the border from Germany. "They're speaking Norwegian. But they've taken half the letters out at random".

[fallingtowers]

My Norwegian teacher -- who has lived in Munich for ages -- claims that although she goes back to Norway by car every summer and stops in Denmark along the way, she still can't understand a word the Danes say...

[nineveh_uk]

Kamelåså.

[fallingtowers]

That's actually the first word that now comes to my mind when someone mentions the Danish language. :)

I have also got a blog recommendation for me if you'd like to combine your passion for Scandinavia with your new-found interest in German:

http://www.besser-nord-als-nie.net/

It's an online magazine about the Nordic countries written by several fotmer graduate students of Scandinavian studies. Their "miscellaneous" category is called "Kamelåså" by the way.

[(Anonymous)]

I mean a recommendation for you, of course. Clearly, it's high time for me to go to bed now!

[nineveh_uk]

Thanks for the rec. That blog looks a perfect subject combination for me at the moment! And a Kamelåså category surely indicates that the editors are people of sound judgement.

(I hope you got some sleep. I stayed up too late reading. Whoops.)

[nineveh_uk]

Have you seen the Norwegian TV sketches about incomprehensible Danish?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk is the one that seems most known on the internet, and there are several linked (they're in English).

[perennialanna]

I hadn't, thank you. Bookmarked for post Parents' Evening viewing tomorrow.

[nineveh_uk]

Danish has an official 32 page booklet on the comma rules. I have not read it. Though to be honest, from Wikipedia it sounds like they have shifted them around a bit and Danes have agreed that they honestly prefer them as decorative sprinkles. Ah! This is a surprisingly comprehensible Danish account of the whole business, though I am now worrying that I haven't a clue how I should use commas in German.

I'm almost tempted to nominate Danish comma rules for next year's Yuletide.

[antisoppist]

"The basic exception is that starting commas are optional"
"In cases where starting commas are optional, it is recommended that you don't put one".

Ah.

I think the problem for English native speakers is that our commas are mostly "put one where you would pause", apart from the defining v non-defining relative clauses ones, where they change the meaning. And then when you encounter a language that *always* puts a comma before "which" or "that" BECAUSE GRAMMAR, either we expect to pause, which doesn't make sense, e.g. "he said, that..." or we take it as a meaningful comma not a non-meaningful comma and get confused. Finnish does this as well. And teaching Finns that sometimes they needed to put a comma before "that" or "which" and sometimes they didn't, and that this was important, was rather difficult.

[nineveh_uk]

Danish commas are optional in the way that Kingscote has volunteers.

I'm beginning to feel that I don't know anything like enough about comma rules/conventions in any language at all. Clearly tonight's time-wasting on the internet needs to be about the comma in English. It feels that it ought to be easier to move from a meaningful comma system to a rigid grammar one because the latter just requires you to learn the rules, but of course that might depend on how many rules there were ("On a Monday after the full moon, a comma must be used before all conjunctions").

[fallingtowers]

Of course, English is nothing in comparison to Norwegian, in which it would probably be entirely correct to write epyttomised as long as you came from the particular valley in which that was correct and all your other spelling matched it.

Well, as a non-native speaker, you can also try to get away with your mistakes by claiming that your teacher must have spoken a particular, rare dialect and maybe that rubbed off on you... As in, "I'm sure there's a tiny mountain village with five senior citizens and ten sheep somwhere where this is totally a word. Honestly!"

Also, I've always refused to use du cause I thought it rude so the fourth reform of the reform made me feel vindicated... :)

[nineveh_uk]

I admire your cunning plan! One of the most infuriating things about following skiing is the tendency of Norwegian skiers to come from farms in the middle of nowhere so that I tend to find their interviews incomprehensible, whereas when the British skiers are interviewed in Norwegian of course they speak in the standard-learned-by-foreigners way so they're far easier to follow even though they are very fluent.

Congratulations on your vindication :-)

[sonetka.livejournal.com]

While appreciating the benefits of (mostly) standardized spelling, one thing I have enjoyed while occasionally puzzling out sixteenth-century documents is getting a taste of the accent of the person who wrote them. The upper-class accent sounds, to my ear, distinctly Irish -- an idea which would doubtless have horrified them :).

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I like to think that every generation looks back at every previous generation and thinks "you talked like THAT?"