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Welcome back to Language Made Difficult. In the news today is an opinion piece by Bruce Price
that appeared in the Canada Free Press. The editorial is entitled: "Is English a Phonetic Language? Of Course. 100%"
Well, to sum up ... this is, if I understand
Price's argument — which is brief — his argument is that English spelling allows you to recover
the sounds of English words with 100 percent accuracy! Sure, there's lots of inconsistencies in how
individual sounds are spelled out, but, once you've learned the system and the exceptions
you've got a, quote, one hundred percent phonetic writing system.
Well, okay, let's be clear up front. This article is not really about language is it,
it's about education, and unfortunately those don't seem to be related topics. But still,
as linguists, we are obligated to respond to this incursion onto our turf, right?
So what d'you think, folks? Is the Price right? Is English 100% phonetic, or is this just
another utterly inept appropriation of linguistic terminology? Trey?
- Hahaha, he's not right, he's not even wrong! It is in fact a total misappropriation of
linguistic terminology — he's got framework psychosis, he's got a bee in his bonnet about
teaching Phonics, and he's bringing in these quasi-linguistic notions to make himself sound
smart, and he's confusing phonemic orthography with phonetic language, and I don't know...
He's just makin' stuff up. While reading about this though, I did learn
of an interesting new concept called "orthographic depth", which is a subjective measure, but
it's about how phonemic an orthography is. So English is relatively deep, because the
orthography doesn't really reflect pronunciation very well, and for example Italian is relatively shallow.
So that's the concept he should've been working with,
but it doesn't matter. He says English is a hundred percent phonetic, while he just
kept bringing up examples and tossing them aside of a lack of a 1:1 correspondence between
writing and pronunciation, so, I don't know what he means by phonetic, because, he just
says it's true, and then brings up examples that seem to contradict his point, and then
keeps going... - Well those are the exceptions, and he says:
"sure, there's exceptions, but you learn the exceptions and then, they're not exceptions any more.
You've learned how they correspond to the phonetics." Right?
Isn't that what he meant? - I don't even know what that means!
- I thought what he meant was: that he was going to prove that English has no phonology!
- Hahaha! That would've been useful! - That would've been awesome!
- You go directly from the sound to the morphological level, something like that.
- That sounds like stratificational linguistics, doesn't it?
- No no no, there was another stratum in there somewhere. It would've been awesome
if he could've proven that English has no phonology. But I don't think he's trying to do that.
I think he's trying to prove that his way of teaching people to read is better than
anything anybody else could come up with. - Well, you know, in that, I think he's a little bit
remiss in not making the distinction between how hard it is for a reader as opposed to
how hard it is for a writer, because well, it is true that just about anybody who can
sound out a word can eventually figure out what it says on any particular page, simply by knowing the language,
it's very, very *** the other hand for someone who understands
the basic mechanism of sounding out to decide how to spell correctly, if he's writing.
- Right, I think Andrew Jackson is claimed to have said: "It's a damn poor mind that can
only think of one way to spell a word." [laughter]
- Well, I was actually thinking of a contemporary of Andrew Jackson. I was thinking of Jean Lafitte,
who in his 1816 letter to President James Madison, misspelled quite a number of words,
including: "centiment", "happrehension",
and the word "funs", you know, referring to money, "funds", he spelled it as f-u-n-s.
You know, you could argue, that if you actually went and read his letter, which I have, that
it's perfectly comprehensible, even if he did misspell all those words. So what does
it matter? But the thing is he was asking President Madison to give him his money back,
and since he didn't spell the words right, he did not get his money back!
[laughter] - It really all boils down to sociolinguistics, doesn't it?
- Yeah, I'm afraid so. - Aren't we sick of this whole orthography thing yet?
Really, at some point everybody just has to get together, hold hands, and
pitch it out the nearest window, because, aren't we tired of it? I mean, we've been having
this argument for a really long time. And if we just let go of it and spell the way
we want to, just think of the glorious freedom we could all have...
- I have a counterproposal! Because, we don't want to throw out all our books... The problem
isn't really that the words are not spelled the way they're pronounced, it's that they're
not pronounced the way they're spelled. [laughter]
So if we just start pronouncing it that way, and within one generation you'll have yourself
a phonetic writing system. - So some people've already started, with "often".
- Exactly. - We just need to go from there. Hmm.
- We just need to carry that to its logical conclusion, yeah.
- Well, I've noticed in the area I live in in the Midwest, all of the local speakers have
turned forred into fore-head. So they seem to be on this bandwagon already.
- Mm-hmm. Maybe another, what, hundred years? - Don't you mean fo-re-hēd, there, Phil?
- That's true! It should be fo-re-he-ad! - Fo-re-he-ad! Yes. - Yep.
- And of course twō / ト / トー...
- I think you just accidentally spoke some Japanese.
[laughter] - No, she moved towards recreating Old English.
- Mmm. - Well, that's what got us into this mess.
It's Middle English, at least. - We'll have to get our vowel-length back, and
we'll have to get some new diphthongs, it won't be so bad...
- How do you guys want to pronounce o-u-g-h? - Okht!
- We're gonna need a new phoneme there! - Owga-h?
- Owga-ht! That's a pre-aspirated "t", I think, isn't it?
- I didn't actually mean with a t on the end, but that's perfectly fine example.
If you don't know, Doctor Seuss, before he was "Doctor Seuss", did a cartoon with a big muscular guy
ploughing a field that was all wobbly, and it was called "The Tough Coughs as he Ploughs
the Dough", which is just the truly horrible set of examples of -ough being so, so messy in English.
- And there it is.
- So you guys want that to be the, "Ðe tokh kokhs as he plokhs ðe dokh"?
- Yeah, I like that! - I think I just accidentally spoke Klingon.
- It would spread a lot of SARS, though. [laughter]
- But I would point out that if you're actually doing this correctly, it wouldn't have a "kh",
it would have a g-h. - Yeah, but I can't do that.
- So it would be things like, ploug-h. - Oh, you wanna get rid of all the digraphs?
- Well, that's how they're spelled! There's a g and an h, it should be a g-h!
- So you're gonna, what are you gonna do with t-h? - T-h!
- Yeugh. [laughter] - Better get a different microphone before you do that...
- And c-h is k-h. And notice the effect of this
is not just to make spelling transparent, it's to make things sound a little more like
Indo-European, yet not kill us. [laughter]
- I'm just excited about my name becoming S-heri. I think that'll be cool.
- Would it be, or would it be s-herai? Since you spell it with an i.
- No, because that would be a-i at the end, I think we have to do sort of the Latin vowels
I think, so... s-heri. - Yeah, absolutely.
- So we count: ōnē, twō, thrē... - Long "e" there: ta-hrē.
- Foūr. - Fowr!
- Fōūr. - And fīvē.
- Ooh, and sikhhh! - Sikh, yes, alright.
[laughter] [grunt]
- And eigāht. - I think you skipped sēven.
- Oh, sēvēn. That's 'cause it's boring. - Yeah.
Oh goodness. Alright. - Well, I'm not sure we've solved any of the
questions about education... - But we have decided that phonetic English
would be awesome. - But we've certainly decided that the English
spelling system is not really being utilised to its full potential. So I think that's another
place where our research grants are probably just hanging around out there, waiting for
us to apply for them. - The Department of Education.
- Department of Education grants are almost certainly just hanging — they're like low-hanging
fruit — waiting for us to come along with some other invective against both Whole Word
and Phonic education approaches, and we'll need a new name for our way of doing things,
that makes us sound ... modern. Or something. - Well, we just mash 'em together and call it
Whole Grain Phonics. [laughter]
- 50% more fibre. - Regardless of what we do, I would just point
out that we can actually combine research programs, because very little ensures public
compliance with a language policy proposal like dzhiant robots.
[laughter] - You mean gīānt, gīānt, gīānt rōbōt!
[laughter] - Right, exactly.
- Oh, where's the stress gonna go, you guys? This is a problem. We should regularise the
stress while we're at this, because really... - [incomprehensible] ... to tone?
- No! We're not doing tone! Forget it! - No tone, no tone.
- No! No, no, no! I did them in the wrong order... Nō, nó, nŏ, nò!
[laughter]
- That was pretty good. - Thanks, I'm workin' on it.
I mean, t-hānkəs. [laughter]
- There was an epenthetic schwa in there... - Yeah, I noticed that too.
- I don't think your pronunciation's very good. [laughter]
- t-hānks - Yeah, okay. I gotta work on it.
I guess we still need phonology, for like, as a transitional drug until we get this all worked out.
[sigh] - But I think getting rid of phonology should
be one of our goals. - Yes, absolutely!
- You know, after reading this, and, uh, the lovely discussion that we're having, I feel that
we should maybe take back some of the bad things we've said in the past about physicists
who do linguistics. Because at least it wasn't this bad!
[laughter] - But like I said this person isn't doing linguistics,
he's doing education, and that's an utterly, utterly different enterprise.
Unrelated to linguistics. - Okay, but he did appropriate our terminology.
- He appropriated our terminology and I think he means something by it. But, it's certainly
not what we would've meant. Okay! Well, I guess that's all the deep insights
we're gonna be able to recover from this article, or at least, from the discussion of it, so,
I think it's time now for a commercial break...