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

[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.