Dear Lee, "Grrrr!" as you used to say. And "GRRRR!" again.
If my grand-children's teachers were to say, as they taught spelling, "You think we are teaching you spelling, but actually we are teaching you the history of the English language.", I might be less embarrassed. But the chaotic orthography of English is taught without humor or irony. Your point about dialects is interesting and characteristically Quixotic, but .... irrelevant. If there were a rational standard English, children could be taught variants, before going on trips or into history classes. No, Lee. I am not shaken. I am a fascist through and through on this. One nation; one spelling. You atavists can do your deadly work on these children beginning when they are six; before that, I get them. So, there! Nyaaah! Nyaaah! As we used to say when we were six. N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, February 24, 2014 5:46 AM To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'; Nick Thompson Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Spelling of Spanish Surnames Nick, Don't apologize--take the tack that Wayne O'Neil took in his lexicographic introduction to (at least the first edition of) the American Heritage dictionary: English spelling includes a *lot* of useful information about the history and otherwise-hidden relationships of our words. (I'd quote some examples but all our copies of that dictionary are on another floor and I'm too lazy at the moment.) Teach the kids that spelling is a fascinating key to hidden history! I'm sure they're smart enough to catch on to that, given the hint. Make it a game! As to "blatant irrationality": English orthography is only "irrational" if (as you, despite my urgings, appear to continue to believe) the single measure of "rationality" is "faithfully reflects pronunciation"--meaning *your* pronunciation and not necessarily that of the guys in the next state, or the previous half-millennium. Think of all those "dropped Rs" that most of our fellow Massachusettsians have in their non-rhotic speech: would you really want your grandchildren to drop the "r"s from their spelling when and if they move to the East Coast? What about the "wh" digraph? In my dialect, the first sound in words like "what" and "when" is aspirated (and the written "h" shows that the dialect of the people who froze English spelling was, in that respect, like mine--though now that aspiration is quite rare): "what"/"watt" and "when"/"wen" are so-called minimal pairs in my speech. Witch side, in your model of rationality, whins that match? ... And so on for all the many other examples in all the many other dialects. I admit that there are cases where more "phonetic" spelling would elucidate facts about English grammar that are largely obscure. For instance, there are *two* verbs "have" in English (historically, of course, they're one verb): the auxiliary "have" is pronounced either "v" (as in "I've been there") or "haff" (as in "I have to go now"), while the true verb meaning "possess" is pronounced "havv" (as in "I havv three copies of the American Heritage Dictionary"). Similar statements apply to "used" and other auxiliaries. Would *that* group of spelling reforms make you happier or sadder? > Lee, > > I just want to be able to teach my grandchildren to write and spell > without having to apologize every third sentence for the blatant > irrationality of the language they are learning. > > N > > Nicholas S. Thompson > Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University > http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ > > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2014 6:57 PM > To: Nick Thompson; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Spelling of Spanish Surnames > > Nick asks: > > > How come other people can standardize their spellings and we can't > > standardize ours. > > > > > > > > Damn! > > Well, in the first place, the case of actual Spanish-as-she-is-spoke, > including all its dialectal differences, isn't quite as clean as the > official Castilian standard that Frank has cited. For instance, > Galician is (I am assured) mutually intelligible with Portuguese > (specifically, the dialect of Portuguese spoken in the nearby parts of > Portugal), and Portuguese is famous for the difficulty of decoding the > written language into (any of the many and various dialects of) the spoken language. > > In the second place, two desiderata are incompatible. It is evidently > desirable to many, including you, Nick, to be able to have a written > language that encodes the spoken language in a faithful manner. But > it is also desirable to many (including, I hope, you) to be able to > read texts written in one's language in earlier periods, when the > pronunciation is > *very* likely to have been (often, *very*) different. In one European > country (I forget which one; it was either the Netherlands or one of > the continental Scandinavian countries) a fairly recent spelling > reform, designed to fulfil the first desideratum, reportedly made > texts from even a hundred years ago totally unreadable (in their > original form) by modern schoolchildren. > We can at least recognize Shakespeare--and certainly Dickens!--as > writing in something like our English, even if many of his rhymes and > jokes don't work for us. ("Busy as a bee" was a better joke when > "busy" was pronounced as we'd pronounce "buzzy".) > > ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
