Earlier I reported that my failure to find my reading specs was getting in the way of writing my blog. Well, I still haven’t found them so I have had to resort to a magnifying glass. And, given the topic of this entry, very appropriate it is too. It is kept in a box together with one of my most precious possessions, the Compact Oxford English Dictionary.
If, by some chance, you are unfamiliar with the OED, it is a remarkable work. It attempts to explain and detail the origins of every word used in the English language since 1150 AD; in other words, the whole of modern English. The “uncompact” version is 20 huge volumes requiring four feet of shelf space. The “compact” version (“compact”, that’s a laugh) is the entirety of the text photoreduced to fit into one book that is too big to lift comfortably. The smallest text is an eye-watering 1.2pt. That’s 10 times smaller than the text you are reading. A single letter is roughly the size of one pixel on a computer monitor. Now I don’t care how young you are, how sharp your eyesight, you need help to read something that size. And that’s why the Compact OED uses extraordinarily high quality printing and why it comes with its own magnifying glass. And since some oik had stolen the magnifying glass from the copy in my local bookshop, that’s why they sold me the book for £50 instead of the usual price of £275. And it’s the replacement magnifying glass I am using not to read the OED but to read my English-Greek dictionary for the insert to come.
This morning a conversation on The Fence turned to that old chestnut of American vs British spellings. Lines were drawn and battle groups coalesced around “aluminum” vs “aluminium” and “colour” vs “color”. We’ve all been there and seen it before.
One of the arguments put forward in defence of British spelling, one I’ve often used myself in the past, is that it preserves the origins of the word. Educated people can tell at a glance whether a word is Germanic, French or Greek in origin.
I hadn’t realised just how true this is until I spent a while playing FreeRice. Never tried it? Give it a go. If you love words, it’s fun. It’s a multiple choice vocabulary test. You are given a word and four choices for what it “means”. I put “means” in inverted commas because sometimes the link between the question and the answer is more than a little obscure and to imply, as their wording does, that the two words are synonyms is at best misleading. There are 51 levels. My best score is to reach level 48. I tend to hover around level 46. The interesting thing is that by that level I have left behind words whose meaning I actually know. But from looking at the word, I can usually deduce its origins and from that I can pick between the answer and the distractors.
For example, short words are usually Germanic in origin and represent basic concepts, ideas that were needed when the Angles and the Saxons were in Britain. Short words of modern origin (e.g. “car” and “blog”) are invariably abbreviations of longer terms (“horseless carriage”, “web log”); words that got shorter as the need to use them became more frequent.
Oddly, despite being here for 500 years, the Romans left little impact on our language. We do have a few Latin words from them such as “mile” but most Latin words in English got here via French and arrived with William the Conqueror. If a word looks French, chances are it has something to do with military matters or feudalism or other concepts that entered England with the Normans.
We also have two sources of Greek words in our language. Those French-from-Latin words brought over by the Normans are very often themselves of Greek origin. It is as if they are Greek with a French accent. Ironically, the English words that come straight from Greek are not Greek at all; they are all inventions by classically educated scientists of the Victorian era who, as a kind of conceit, fell back on Ancient Greek as a source of words to describe their discoveries or inventions. Many terms from science, medicine and mathematics are transliterated portmanteau Ancient Greek words pressed into new service.
| A little aside…
I’d always thought the principle that short words represent basic concepts was a universal truth. After all it makes sense. There are only so many single syllables and they are all used up by the time a culture starts needing words for “nuclear reactor” or “Seasonal Affective Disorder”. That is, I thought it was universal until I started learning Greek. I can’t, off the top of my head, think of any single-syllable Greek words (apart from “yes”, “and” and suchlike) and flicking through my dictionary, I can’t see any either. As this little table shows, some very common concepts are represented with quite long words in Greek. |
| Car |
Αυτοκινητο (Avtokineto) |
| Gate |
Καγκελοπορτα (Kagkeloporta) |
| Pig |
Γουρουνι (Gourouni) |
| Hat |
Καπελλο (Kapello) |
| Man |
Ανθρωπος (Anthropos) |
| Left |
Αριστερος (Aristeros) |
So what does all this tell us about spelling reform? FreeRice is an American site, using American spellings and that has some difference to my scores, I have very occasionally been misled. Would I still be able to deduce the origins of words if there were a radical overhaul of English spelling. I am really not sure. I suspect I would still be reasonably OK. But even if not, my losing a couple of levels on FreeRice seems a small price to pay for generally increased literacy.
English is unusual among European languages in having such a poor mapping between the way words are spelt and the way they are pronounced. If you see a word, you can’t necessarily say it and if you hear a word, you can’t necessarily write it. It has to be said that this makes thing unnecessarily difficult for learners, whether they are children or foreigners.
There is an almost irrational social prejudice against people who cannot spell. It is vitally important for our children to learn to spell if they want to get on in life. Despite giving this so much thought I am still as beset with the prejudice as any other Radio 4 listener. When I was using a dating site a couple of years back, if a woman used “alot” when she meant “a lot”, I would immediately delete her profile as “not my type” however alluring her photo.
So, given this undoubted prejudice, why do we continue to make our language so hard to learn? Of course, no-one is “making” it hard. There is no authority controlling English. It just is. And it’s changing fast. I am sure the time will come when simplification will take over. I am also sure the old complexities will never be totally eradicated.
How does English compare to other languages in this complexity? All the European languages with which I have any passing familiarity are “purer” than English, with just one principle linguistic root. This is undoubtedly why, when you see a word in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch or Greek you can unerringly pronounce it as long as you know the rules (which can be complex, of course). The converse is less true. If you hear a German word you stand a good chance of being able to spell it, but it’s not guaranteed. French has many letter groups that sound alike, making it trickier to spell French words. Modern Greek is difficult to spell, especially the vowels. Ancient Greek had a clear mapping from sounds to letters and back again. The spellings have, by and large, been preserved but the pronunciations have shifted over the centuries, at the cost of many formerly distinct sounds. The consonants have shifted in a common direction – towards softer pronunciation. D -> Th (as in them), T -> D, B -> V, K -> G, P -> B (but not quite all the way – think of the “p” in “spit”), but the vowels have merged together so that now there are at least five ways of spelling the sound “ee”.
OK, so these other languages have their difficulties, but English is the hardest? Right? Hardly! Consider Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese. There is no way whatever that you can write a Chinese word on hearing it for the first time or that you can say it on reading it for the first time.
The Japanese have techniques for dealing with this. They have a phonetic written language called hiragana (there is also katakana, which is equivalent to our italic script, being used to represent foreign loan words). Children and foreigners learn to write using hiragana and only gradually are kanji (the Chinese characters) introduced. Whenever an unusual word appears in a Japanese newspaper, one the readers might not know how to pronounce, it has a pronunciation guide alongside it in the form of miniature hiragana known as furigana.
| A word about morae…
There are 105 hiragana characters, each representing a syllable. Hence the set is known as a “syllabary” rather than an “alphabet”. The syllables consist of a consonant followed by a vowel. The two exceptions are “A” and “N”, which both have their own symbols and count as syllables. In the world of linguistics, these 105 sounds are technically known as “morae” rather than syllables. There is much debate on how fundamental they are. To Japanese speakers they have a powerful significance. For example, the ancient poetic form of haiku consists of exactly 17 morae. It seems to me that the significance of morae is overstated and I am far from convinced they even exist in any properly definable sense. I think they seem significant to Japanese speakers because of the way they learned to write as children.
As a further aside, it is interesting that the syllables in a Japanese poem can be unambiguously counted, This is not the case in English where syllable boundaries are quite fluid. It is also interesting that the Japanese count will often be quite different from an English count. For example, take the city names “Tokyo” and “London”. In English they have three and two syllables respectively: To-ky-o and Lon-don. In Japanese they both have four syllables. “To-o-kyo-o” has four because the “o” sounds are double length, and only four because “kyo” is considered a single syllable. “Lo-n-do-n” has four because, as mentioned above, “n” stands as a syllable on its own.
| 東京 |
“Tokyo” in kanji (as you would invariably see it written). |
| とぅきょぅ |
“Tokyo” in hiragana. Note that just to confuse the issue “きょ” is considered as a single mora. The small size of the “よ” indicates it should be read together with the preceding character. |
| ロソドソ |
“London” in katakana, as is appropriate for a foreign name. |
|
So we have nowhere near the problems of the Chinese or Japanese, but there undoubtedly are problems with English spelling. Have the American reforms helped? Not one jot. They were so half-hearted they did nothing except add to the general confusion. I also believe that, in the long term, spelling reform is a doomed enterprise. Take the example of Greek described above: the spoken language changes much more quickly than the written language and reformed spellings will always ultimately be left behind by spoken usage.
But if you want to know how to go about spelling reform, consider the 15th century example of the Korean language. Wikipedia has an excellent article on it. Briefly stated, up until 1443 AD, they used Chinese writing and, as a consequence all but a very few elite were illiterate. King Sejong the Great imposed a newly invented written language that, while it looks at first glance like Chinese is, in fact, a syllabary with just 24 symbols to learn. More than that, the construction of the individual symbols tells you how the sound is produced in the mouth. The components of the consonant symbols represent the shape of the tongue, teeth and throat.
The following notes are adapted from the Wikipedia article linked above:
|
Velar consonants
|
ㄱ |
A side view of the back of the tongue raised toward the velum (soft palate)
|
|
Coronal consonants |
ㄴ |
A side view of the tip of the tongue raised toward the alveolar ridge (gum ridge).
|
|
Bilabial consonants |
ㅁ |
The outline of the lips in contact with each other.
|
|
Sibililant consonants |
ㅈ |
represents firm contact with the roof of the mouth.
|
|
ㅊ |
The stroke on top represents an additional burst of aspiration.
|
|
Glottal consonants |
ㅇ |
An outline of the throat
|
Until I learned that this language was created in 1443, I would have confidently guessed that the science of articulatory phonetics was founded in the mid 19th century by Victorian boffins.
Now that’s what I call spelling reform.
