dandv is reading
The Simplified Spelling Society has been making some decent efforts to simplify the English spelling. However, some people just don’t get it, and keep opposing any reform. One such retrograde is Prof. Vivian Cook, who was recently interviewed by the BBC in a debate with Masha Bell from the Simplified Spelling Society.
Masha Bell’s arguments written in simplified-spelling look illiterate at points. I really tried to support Prof. Cook, but his arguments are very weak:
> English is a great success story, used by hundreds
> of millions of natives and being used and learnt by
> a billion non-natives: it is so efficient that there are
> problems about it wiping out other languages.
I’d say that English is so efficient not thanks to its spelling, but IN SPITE OF IT.
> I cannot agree that it is absolutely easier or more
> difficult than any other language: it depends on what
> first language you start from and many other
> circumstances of learning.
Sadly, Prof. Cook, there has been research on the ease of picking up languages:
What Helmar Frank’s research at Paderborn and for the San Marino International Academy of Sciences shows is that one year of Esperanto in school, which produces a communication ability equivalent to what the average pupil reaches in other European languages after six to seven years of study, accelerates and improves the learning of other languages after Esperanto.
—from Propaedeutic value of Esperanto.
> The danger is that if children are encouraged to
> think of reading as turning letters into sounds and
> we change spelling to make this easier, they will
> forever be reading only as fast as they can speak
> rather than at the reading speed two or three times
> greater than speech that fluent readers reach.
The alleged perils of subvocalization have never been backed up by serious research.
> We want children to be able to read and understand
> what they read, not just to read it aloud.
And how would a simplified spelling hinder that?
> Perhaps you could explain how any changes to
> spelling would affect the issue of English globally
> and how you would change spelling in a way that
> would help children and not hinder the rest of the
> English-using world?
The simplified spelling is so simple that the rest of the English-speaking world can pick it up in a matter of hours. Give it a try reading the following highly enjoyable spoof:
The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the EU rather than German, which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations Her Majesty’s Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5 year phase-in plan of modifications that will lead to ‘Euro-English’ as the language will be known.
In the first year, ’s’ will replace the soft ‘c’. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard ‘c’ will be dropped in favour of the ‘k’. This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have one less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome ‘ph’ will be replased with the ‘f ’. This will make words like ‘fotograf ’ 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expected to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkorage the removal of double leters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent ‘e’ in the languag is disgraseful and it should go away.
By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing ‘th’ with ‘z’ and ‘w’ with ‘v’ to beter align the modified language with the kapabilities of the Euro speaker.
During ze fifz yer ze unesesary ‘o’ kan be dropd from vords kontaining ‘ou’ and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.
After ziz fifz yer ve vil hav a rali sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor truble or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer.
Ze drem vil finali kum tru!
> Well I think this brings us to the crunch of the
> problems with spelling reform: the mistaken idea
> that spelling exists for reading aloud and the belief
> that the human mind works better with a few rules
> rather than with lots of individual items.
Professor Cook, care to debunk this “belief”? Perhaps by explaining why mnemonics exist? (And why they are taught to children, by the way).
> The human mind can deal with a vast number of
> individual signs
Of course the human mind can. The question is “Why?”.
> a Chinese dictionary has about 30,000;
> Japanese children have to learn 1,945 in primary school.
Now that’s smart. Instead of learning how to think, these kids memorize thousands of symbols.
> Cutting down on the number of individual words, we
> need to know as wholes is no particular advantage.
Perhaps, Professor, you’ll realize the fallacy of your argument if you go the other way: how about instead we invent new symbols for phrases as well? Why compose them of existing smaller units, when we can invent a new symbol for “The purposelessness of complexity sometimes borders absurdity” ?
> If Chinese can manage to learn so many symbols so can
> English children.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_study_of_the_Chinese_language#Difficulty
> Yet some researchers claim that Japanese
> children do not have dyslexia.
Thanks for propping up this piece of myth, Professor. Here’s a bit of juicy research for you, Sir:
These tests showed that about 1 percent of surveyed children had difficulties in reading kana characters. However, the figure climbed to about 5 percent to 6 percent for reading kanji, which are not phonetic.
—http://www.dyslexia-teacher.com/dyslexia_japan.html
> Only a few of us need to read aloud seriously, such as
> the handful of trained and highly selected newsreaders;
> otherwise we read aloud rarely, except perhaps
> to children.
You are completely missing the other direction, Professor: writing down a word you heard. But perhaps things like searching in a dictionary for words we hear and don’t understand is something only a few of us do seriously.
> It is precisely the most frequent words that we don’t
> need to reform because they can be remembered as
> wholes. Surely most pre-reading children can recognise
> large numbers of such whole, say McDonald’s and Coke
> signs? Learning the 200 words as wholes would equip
> children to read probably most of the running words in
> any ordinary sentence; treating “say” and “does” as
> weird exception rather than as unique symbols is what
> may do the damage.
I agree: we should reform the entire spelling at once, not create another bunch of exceptions. Although how much damage they’d do is debatable – more or less jocularly, the youth already speaks in SMS language (see this Cingular commercial)
> The cost of any change would be astronomical.
Unsupported assertion.
> Imagine the number of books in English that would
> need to be changed. If they were not changed the
> children taught by the new system would be effectively
> cut off from their written heritage.
- All new content is produced in the simplified spelling
- Classic spelling is taught for “read only” purposes.
> Imagine the conversion of every computer, every programme
> written in English.
Huh? “conversion of every computer, every programme” ?! Written in English? The Prof. must seriously think that programming languages using keywords such as “if … then … else …” would somehow break if we changed the spelling of English and left the programs untouched.
At best, software applications may have to be localized into Simplified Spelling, which is an automated process because the simplified spelling is not a translation per-se, but a transformation of the classic spelling according to a (large) set of precise rules. English input that has to be understood by into computer systems affects a much lower number of users, who generally are geek anyway and would have a fun time writing in something closer to l33tspeak. Search engines can apply the same transformations that localization would do, and return results accordingly. Really, it’s software. We’re paying a much higher premium right now to translate web sites and applications to languages other than English, and seem quite happy about it.
