Re: English diglossia (was Re: retroflex consonants)

For some strange reason, that idea seems as odd to me as the beginner's
insistance in Russian class on writing everything in Roman characters (none
of the programs I've seen, BTW, let you get away with that.)  The Cyrillic
is a pain to learn at first, and I still stumble over spelling rules
sometimes, but I read Russian a lot faster and a lot better when it's *not*
transliterated.  And actually, my Russian typing speed is slightly (very
slightly) faster in Cyrillic than in Roman characters (that took work,
though, and I cheered aloud the first day it was actually easier to switch
over to a different encoding for my Russian lists).  I still think that the
list of major problems in language acquisition has got quite a few entries
with higher importance than "orthography."  For adults, especially, I think
our methods are completely screwed up (gotta love filling out declension
tables -- or memorizing static "everyday life" dialogues -- NOT), in all
languages.  And if we solve some of our methodology issues, we can improve
language acquisition for all languages across the board -- spelling reform
fixes one language at a time, and imperfectly at that, and still leaves
those stupid dialogues for the innocent adult language learner to deal with.

Sarah Marie Parker-Allen
lloannna@surfside.net
http://www.geocities.com/lloannna.geo
http://lloannna.blogspot.com

"I will never buy an apple from peddlers plying their craft in remote places
where the customer base could not possibly support a full-time merchant." --
Rules for the Hero's True Love

> -----Original Message-----
> Behalf Of Joe
> eventually it would be brought into use.  My main reason for changing the
> orthogrpahy, though, would be to make it easier to learn for
> foreigners, not
> children.  Children do well on their own.
---
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