Re: English diglossia (was Re: retroflex consonants)

Sarah Marie Parker-Allen wrote:

>It doesn't take a year to learn all those words.
>
Quite right; for most people it takes two or three; some are unable to
ever master it. (Maybe that's because schools aren't willing to give
them any faster, or maybe it's because it's as quick as its possible to
do without losing the majority of the class.)

> Most of them are short,
>are irregular in large groups, and anyway once you start reading with any
>kind of speed at all, you're not sounding them out anymore, you see them as
>symbols for their concepts.
>
Which doesn't help newbies to English reading and writing, which is who
spelling reform is for, because when you reform spelling, the older
spellers who already are in the habits of whatever language is being
reformed are going to have to re-learn.

>Haven't you ever tried that "count the 'f's"
>email, where everyone misses the "of"s the first time around? They all say
>the word correctly, they all know what it means -- the letters are
>irrelevant.
>
I have no idea what you're talking about there.

>I'm okay with that, and "of" was one of the first words my two
>next-youngest sisters learned to read.
>
Did they learn how to pronounce the letters first (i.e. that <v> makes
the /v/ sound, which is how I was taught). When I was learning to read
and write, the question of why there was a silent L in 'walk' was
certainly asked... (the answer: that's how it was pronounced hundreds of
years ago. The reaction: that's stupid; you might as well spell 'such'
'swilk' (okay, that second part wasn't the reaction)).

>I don't think most of this is a
>problem for native speakers who're exposed to their own language enough.
>
You forget that English is essentially the current IAL.

>BTW, "antidisestablishmentarianism" is almost phonetic (there's "ian" which
>could get confused, I suppose), and one of the biggest words I've ever
>sounded-out-and-figured-out-the-meaning of, before hearing it spoken.
>
Yeah, because longer rules follow a different set of rules from shorter
ones. Long ones are mostly spelt as extremely similarly to how a word
would be spelt in Latin or sometimes French, whereas shorter ones have
the more irregular Frenchified English spellings (i.e. ship, then etc,
respelt under the influence of the Normans) or Anglicised French
spellings. I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of words
over six letters, barring things like compounds or words ending in -ing
and -tion, would suffer no changes in Regularised English.

>And... learning little words that are spelled irregularly helps make bigger
>words easier.
>
No it doesn't, because there's a whole different set of rules for most
bigger ones.

>  Though I can't offhand think of any small words where "tune"
>sounds like "tchoon..."
>
I can think of one ('tune' itself), but that is a tangent and I know you
say /tu:n/ or /tju:n/ so I don't care.*

*Pardon the tone, but I can't think of any better way of avoiding the
pointlessly long threads.

Tristan.

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