Rachel Heckert wrote:
>
> Hi Ken and list,
>
> >Unlike other language aspects spelling is not rule governed. By
> >standardizing spelling across dialects we limit the extent to which
> >any spelling rules can be applied across dialects.
>
> This is not necessarily true of other languages. English is
> (fortunately) nearly unique in the utter insanity of its spelling.
Actually almost all languages standardize spelling across dialects and
therefor share this characteristic with English. Danish and French are
two other languages where the relationship of phonology and orthography
is almost as complex as English. The Scandinavian languages have settled
on quite different standard spellings for words that sound very similar
in all their languages.
Another universal issue is that oral and written language use semiotic
systems with quite different parameters so there is no possibility of
one-to-one correspondences between phonology and spelling.
After
> tutoring Russian-speakers in English as a second language I came to the
> conclusion that it must be close to what I felt when I first encountered
> Chinese characters! I used to tell them that, "We stole this word from
> French so it's written this way, and this word was stolen from German so
> it's written another way...etc." In languages like Russian or Italian, a
> "spelling bee" would be pointless, since the conventions for writing
> sounds in these languages are orderly - a direct (although not
> necessarily a one-to-one) mapping.
Actually in most cultures spelling "errors" are much more tolerated. B
and V in Spanish are often interchanged in widespread public use for
example. In Chinese and Japanese listeners are tolerant of readers who
substitute the wrong oral word for a character- since the character has
meaning independent of the oral word.
>
> For that matter, has anyone ever compared the process of learning Chinese
> characters with the process of learning how English words are spelled?
> Both are somewhat, but not completely, arbitrary.
Funny you should ask. I've been learning a lot about this from my Asian
graduate students and will publish a book soon on reading and writing of
non-alphabetic writing systems (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) Chinese
characters are not unique unto themselves. They are composed of radicals
which are common to other characters with similar meaning and sometimes
include rhebus like cues that suggest another word a character might
sound like.
In fact, I recall that
> back in the 'sixties someone actually did this with non-readers in an
> inner-city school - teaching them the Chinese characters for English
> words, and then when they had gotten the idea of reading and lost their
> terror of the printed page, switching to English letters.
That's the study of Paul Rozin and Leila Glietman- The materials they
produced used rhebuses rather than Chinese characters to represent
sounds. They didn't work very well.
>
> Any comments?
>
> Rochel Sara Heckert
>
> PS Your comment on the teacher's need for perfect "surveillance" is
> another reminder that as much as our schools exist to teach, they
> function to separate the (supposedly genetically determined) sheep from
> the goats. For most people I know the idea that how hard the child
> *works* can be significant is still heresy, or at least violently
> counter-intuitive.
>
> ___________________________________________________________________
> You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail.
> Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com/getjuno.html
> or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]
--
Kenneth S. Goodman, Professor, Language, Reading & Culture
504 College of Education, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ
fax 520 7456895 phone 520 6217868
These are mean times- and in the mean time
We need to Learn to Live Under Water