Jan 03 2008
What gets lost when words are written down?
In Guns, Germs and Steel (a very interesting though eventually quite repetitive book), Jared Diamond tells of a native American who invented an alphabet for his own tongue, after seeing how the Europeans gained such power and expression from their written words. The story (as I remember it) is that he got a sample of the alphabet we used and started assigning sounds from his own language. When he reached the limit of the borrowed glyphs, he started to invent new ones.
It seems odd that people think of the alphabet we use in this country as ‘the English alphabet’ when it so poorly suited to the English language. So many sounds we make in English are not catered for — we must use combinations like ‘sh’ or ‘th’ or ‘ch’ to make up for the shortfall Over the centuries we’ve even lost letters that used to do some of these jobs. Even if we consider the stand-ins as single letters rather than pairs, there are so many odd exceptions and disparities between spoken and written English. Would you guess ‘onion’ is actually pronounced more like ‘union’ looks, which itself is actually pronounced more like ‘yoonyin’? (But then, you’ll probably disagree completely because your accent is so different from mine.)
There is an interesting article about the effect of this arbitrary mapping of sound to symbol. The awkwardness of the English language in this regard is contrasted with reading in Germany and Austria, with terrifying results:
Some children in countries with transparent alphabets do have reading problems, but these have to do with fluency and comprehension. Yet even this is relative. Normal readers from Salzburg were compared to normal readers from London on tests of reading accuracy and speed. Seven year-olds from Salzburg read as fast as the 9 year olds from London, making half the number of errors. The Austrian 7 year-olds had one year of reading instruction, the English 9 year-olds, four or five.
There seems to be a long history of attempted spelling reform for the English language, with limited success. The American dictionary compilers have obviously had the most success, though all they’ve really done is entrench differences in pronunciation. There is a big difference between ‘mum’ and ‘mom’, after all.
I started along this track after reading complaints from BSL users about using the English alphabet. BSL reduced to written words removes all the subtlety and all the power from the language. But then, it does that to most spoken English as well. I wonder if the American fellow mentioned above, who invented his own alphabet to suit his own way of speaking, felt the same?