ENGLISH PHONETICS, PRONUNCIATION, AND SPELLING

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer. Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
—Gerard Nolst Trinite

After reading this post which asks the somewhat misguided question “why can’t we spell English words phonetically?”, I got to thinking that my students, as they learn the seemingly random and bizarre inconsistencies of English phonetics, as illustrated in the above poem, will ponder the same misguided question. So, I want to address this question in the negative, and further pose the argument that the beauty of English lies in its inconsistencies.

We cannot and should not spell English words phonetically. Here’s why.

Every word in every language has a history. When you think about it, spelling and pronunciation are not haphazardly decided. They have a history. For example, the (somewhat) silent H in ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘where’ and ‘why’ is there because in Old English the H and W were switched and pronounced, making a strong gutteral sound that has been lost to English (though still exists in other Germanic languages). Beowulf begins with Hwæt! (from which we get ‘what’, but used there like ‘listen!’). The frustration over the apparent inconsistencies in English comes, I think, from a lack of explanation as to why it is so. English-as-second-language learners feels cheated, as though native English speakers are playing a sick joke at their expense.

English is an amalgam of Anglo-Saxon (Germanic languages), a spattering of Celtic words (cairn, Thames), Norman and Modern French (mayday from m’aidez), Latin and Greek roots from the Renaissance, and a bunch of loan words (sushi, alchemy). Spelling provides the amateur philologist little clues about the origins and cultural significance of not only the words used, but the things the words stand for. So, for example, the awkward English word castle comes from the Norman French word castel, which in is related to the modern French château (the ch “sh” sound becomes a c “k” sound as a rule between Norman and modern French, and the little hat over the a signifies a silent s that used to be there in Old French), which in turn stems from the Latin castellum. Why is that interesting? Because it tells us that the technology of fortified stone buildings came to England from the mainland. If you don’t think that’s interesting, why don’t you go outside and play hide-and-go-fuck-yourself.

The relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. When it gets down to it, I bet the hatred and anger toward the English language comes from the terrifying realization that, like all languages, it bares no fundamental relation to its objects, that the relationship between the sign ‘tree’ and those things in the woods is, in a sense, make believe. That the relationship between the written sign and its utterance could also be as fundamentally ephemeral only adds to the horror. Furthermore, language is, as Saussere taught us, in constant flux. Not only will you die, but no one will understand your words a few thousand years from now (except academics and nerds who study dead languages). Language allows you to think and defines who you are, and yet you have little control over it. You can’t grasp its fundamental nature, and it has a life of its own.

A word is dead

when it is said,

some say.

I say it just

begins to live

that day.

—Emily Dickinson

Standardized language is totalitarian and destructive. Languages are natural, organic things, which means they constantly breath, in and out. They are flawed, vulnerable, and eventually die. But they bare children, and their children carry their genetic memory. Attempts at standardizing languages are, like all attempts at immortality, doomed to fail. At root, these attempts are fascist. They say “our language is the true and good language. Those who speak incorrectly are degenerates and freaks. You will speak our language or you will be silent.” This is how standardized English is, despite the good intentions of teachers, often taught. The lack of a standard version of any language was for most of human history a fact of life. The standardization of most languages occurred around the rise of empires, and for the explicit goals of imperial domination. Ways of living, traditions, and culture die out alongside their native languages. Christian missionaries to this day use linguistic standardization as a means to quash native religions and spread Christianity and Western culture. I’m not saying we should go back to nearly mutually incomprehensible dialects, if fact we can’t. But the next time you correct someone’s spelling or pronunciation, or complain about how unphonetic and inconsistent a language is, remember that you might be thinking like a fascist.

We have the International Phonetic Alphabet. If you are still not convinced, you should advocate for teaching the IPA instead of for doomed, fascistic attempts at standardization. Imagine a world in which people could read the phonetic pronunciation guides in dictionaries. In that world, first and second language English speakers would know how to pronounce things despite English spelling (you wouldn’t even have to learn the whole IPA, only the sounds that are used in English), and philologists could still trace the etymology and history of English words. Plus, learning different languages would come easier and less stressful.

LEARNING PROGRAM REVIEWS (Livemocha, Pimsleur, and Babbel)

Here is a quick review of three language acquisition programs I have been using to learn German:

Livemocha

Right now Google Offers has a good deal on a yearlong subscription to Livemocha for 39$, but you can participate without spending the money. Livemocha uses a little game-like coin system, where you earn coins for helping others and spend them on lessons.

I’ve played around with it a little and so far I like it. The videos and audio are not annoying or pedantic, as I find Rosetta Stone to often be. The lessons are divided into grammar, vocabulary, audio-visual, reading, and a role-play in which you insert yourself into a dialogue. The greatest advantage Livemocha has over other programs is a live, active international community. You can have conversations, either through text, with a microphone, or a webcam, with native speakers in any of the 38 or so languages on the site.

The Pimsleur Technique

Pimsleur is a series of audio lessons, each about half an hour long, that operate under the idea, proposed by the eponymous Mr. Pimsleur, that second language acquisition can benefit from modeling itself off first language acquistion, meaning adults ought to learn language in the way children do: without fussing about all that learning-how-to-write-and-spell stuff. Children mimic language as they learn it, listening and repeating, playing around, and making all kinds of mistakes without a care. That is how these audio files are organized. So, the narrator will say “listen and repeat: Wie geht es Ehnen?” and then you say “Vee gate ess e-nan”, and wha-la, you are speaking German. Like a child, all you know is when you want to ask someone how they are, you mutter those sounds, not knowing until later what the individual words mean.

I’m at about lesson 20 in the German I program, and I can say I definitely know how to say hello and goodbye in various ways, order drinks, ask people out, ask where this-or-that street is, and maybe a couple other things. Not only do I know how to say these things, I know how to say them well, without hesitation and not too bad an accent. It goes slower than college classrooms or other programs (you learn only about 4 to 7 new words per half-hour audio file), but you learn them well, and the commitment is very low-stress. I listen to a half-hour episode every other night before bedtime.

The downside to Pimsleur is, most obviously, that you can’t write worth a damn in your new language. They do have ten minute reading exercises, but they are focused only on pronunciation. You’ll have to go somewhere else for that writing business. Secondly, Pimsleur is expensive, though I hear there are “free” Pimsleur torrents out there somewhere. Keep in mind however that a college course will cost you a lot more for roughly the same level of proficiency in the same amount of time.

Babbel Android App

I downloaded this nice little app on my Asus Transformer Prime tablet. It is free, and not the worst language learning app in the world. It is very similar to Rosetta Stone, which is why I have a few negative things to say about it. It uses an odd method of showing pictures and then matching the words to the pictures. There are two major problems with this, 1) it has the English word embedded in the picture, which makes you immediately translate instead of thinking in your new language (not to mention when words are similar to the English, like blue, bleu and blau), and 2) there are very few times in your life that you will have to match up pictures to words, or in other words, the learning technique in no way resembles actual language use. As limited as Livemocha and Pimsleur can be at times, they at least try to simulate real dialogue. At the same time, I have learned some vocab using Babbel, though I’ve probably forgotten more than I learned.

THE GOLDLIST

The Gold List Method is a mnemonic aid for language learning developed by “Uncle Davey” (you can watch him explain it on Youtube here). It sounds like a pretty compelling idea, so I thought I would try it out myself as I begin learning German and Old English. Let’s see if I can briefly explain it:

Step 1: On the left page of a notebook you will make a 25 item vocabulary list with the translations to the right. On the right page reserve a space for a list of 17, below that a list of 12, and below the list of 25, again on the left page, a list of 8. Leave those lists blank, as you will come back to them later. Be sure to date the first list.

Step 2: Study. Write down twenty five words you would like to learn and try to memorize them all. Don’t spend more than half an hour on this, as you will tire yourself out and fail to memorize them. Make sure you are alert, and not tired or hungry.

Step 3: Using a small sticky note, write the date of the day two weeks from the day you made the first list. This is to remind you to come back to the list without having to open the page again or calculate it later. On that day, you will come back to the gold list. Cover up the translations, and go down the list trying to remember each word. Or, go down the translations and try to translate them into the language you are attempting to learn. Don’t fret, unless you have a particularly keen long-term memory, you will only remember about eight out of twenty five words. If it is a little less that is okay. As you make more lists you will train yourself to remember more. Write a little x next to the words you don’t remember.

Step 4: Take the roughly seventeen words you did not remember and write them in the list on the opposing page. As you do this, try and learn them as best you can, like in step two. Place a new tab with the date two weeks from now, when you will revisit this list of seventeen.

Step 5: You will now repeat the process, and as you do, you should be able to remember more and more of the words. After two months, you will have visited this list of twenty-five words four times. Almost all of them should have entered your long term memory at this point. If there are any you still can’t remember, simply incorporate them into a new list.

This process takes a long time, but that is supposedly just how long term memory works. You can, however, make many lists, so that after two months your vocabulary should be expanding considerably. There has been some debate as exactly how effective a method this really is, as well as some interesting variations on it (like this polyglot, who lists full sentences instead of vocabulary). But I think the premises at the heart of the method are sound.

Based in neuro-linguistic research and accounting methods – The goal is long term memory acquisition. According to psychological studies off of which Uncle Davey based his method, we know that short term memory dissipates after about two weeks, and long term memory retains about 30% of a given experience. Thus, we revisit a given list every two weeks. Upon each visit, we know ahead of time that we will remember only about eight of the twenty-five words (roughly 30%). Therefore, we’ll have about seventeen words for the next list, of which we’ll remember about five, leaving twelve for the third list, and eight for the final list. After revisiting those eight words a final time we are likely to remember them, but if we don’t, we can incorporate them into a new list of twenty-five.

Stress Factor -“The long term memory, like your heartbeat, is not under your conscious control”. When I was learning French I had a bad habit of berating and blaming myself for not remembering vocabulary. Living in France was often terribly stressful simply due to my own self-deprecating and punishing approach to language learning. It was unhealthy, to say the least, and not very effective. What I like about the Gold List is that it is designed to be forgiving and low in the stress factor. I’m not suggesting that learning German is not going to be stressful, but approaching long term memory acquisition with the scientifically backed foresight that I will likely remember eight out of twenty-five words is, well, relieving for someone so inclined to self-deprecation.

My variations on the method:

When I took the GRE a few years ago, I had to memorize advanced English vocab devoid of context. So, during the exam you are given four words outside of of any sentence or other context, and the task is to find the two words that conceptually relate (either as opposites, or similarity in meaning). I think it would be more fruitful, though more difficult, to write Gold Lists in this way, because you force yourself to learn the words out of context and should thus be able to identify them in various different contexts. I figure there are two kinds of contexts that can occur in a gold list besides listing sentences: grouping words with related meaning or theme (such as placing the verb glauben, to believe, next to the noun Gott, God), or grouping words with the same stem (ohne, ohnmacht, ohnmachtig, etc.). These act as mnemonic aids which ease the learning process, but the danger here lies in encountering, say, the word glauben without Gott, and not recognizing it. So for my first few lists I’ve simply gone down 2001 Most Useful German Words alphabetically. This is way more difficult, but I’m hoping the pay off will be worth it.

On the other hand, listing commonly used phrases, i.e. contexts which you will certainly find yourself in (Bitte, wo ist die simeonstrasse?), is obviously a good exercise, but with a very different learning outcome. I will alternate my lists between context and contextless and see what bears more long-term knowledge fruit.

You need a notebook for listing and listing only. I recommend the soft cover, 8.25 x 11.7” Leuchtturm 1917 brand ‘Jottbook’. It runs for about 12$ USD, has a nice leather cover, 60 pages, a place to write the date, and lines perfect for listing things. After completing a list, I write the date of the day two weeks from then on a little sticky tab, and place it so the date is sticking out of the page on the side. That way I will know when to revisit the list without risking the chance of glancing at the words (thus placing them in my memory again).

Do you want to try this method out, or have you already? I will post more in the coming months as my lists evolve, but I would like to hear your feedback, thoughts and suggestions.

THE THREE LANGUAGES

A folk tale from which this journal takes its namesake – collected by the Brothers Grimm and translated by Margaret Taylor.

An aged count once lived in Switzerland, who had an only son, but he was stupid, and could learn nothing. Then said the father: ‘Hark you, my son, try as I will I can get nothing into your head. You must go from hence, I will give you into the care of a celebrated master, who shall see what he can do with you.’ The youth was sent into a strange town, and remained a whole year with the master. At the end of this time, he came home again, and his father asked: ‘Now, my son, what have you learnt?’ ‘Father, I have learnt what the dogs say when they bark.’ ‘Lord have mercy on us!’ cried the father; ‘is that all you have learnt? I will send you into another town, to another master.’ The youth was taken thither, and stayed a year with this master likewise. When he came back the father again asked: ‘My son, what have you learnt?’ He answered: ‘Father, I have learnt what the birds say.’ Then the father fell into a rage and said: ‘Oh, you lost man, you have spent the precious time and learnt nothing; are you not ashamed to appear before my eyes? I will send you to a third master, but if you learn nothing this time also, I will no longer be your father.’ The youth remained a whole year with the third master also, and when he came home again, and his father inquired: ‘My son, what have you learnt?’ he answered: ‘Dear father, I have this year learnt what the frogs croak.’ Then the father fell into the most furious anger, sprang up, called his people thither, and said: ‘This man is no longer my son, I drive him forth, and command you to take him out into the forest, and kill him.’ They took him forth, but when they should have killed him, they could not do it for pity, and let him go, and they cut the eyes and tongue out of a deer that they might carry them to the old man as a token.

The youth wandered on, and after some time came to a fortress where he begged for a night’s lodging. ‘Yes,’ said the lord of the castle, ‘if you will pass the night down there in the old tower, go thither; but I warn you, it is at the peril of your life, for it is full of wild dogs, which bark and howl without stopping, and at certain hours a man has to be given to them, whom they at once devour.’ The whole district was in sorrow and dismay because of them, and yet no one could do anything to stop this. The youth, however, was without fear, and said: ‘Just let me go down to the barking dogs, and give me something that I can throw to them; they will do nothing to harm me.’ As he himself would have it so, they gave him some food for the wild animals, and led him down to the tower. When he went inside, the dogs did not bark at him, but wagged their tails quite amicably around him, ate what he set before them, and did not hurt one hair of his head. Next morning, to the astonishment of everyone, he came out again safe and unharmed, and said to the lord of the castle: ‘The dogs have revealed to me, in their own language, why they dwell there, and bring evil on the land. They are bewitched, and are obliged to watch over a great treasure which is below in the tower, and they can have no rest until it is taken away, and I have likewise learnt, from their discourse, how that is to be done.’ Then all who heard this rejoiced, and the lord of the castle said he would adopt him as a son if he accomplished it successfully. He went down again, and as he knew what he had to do, he did it thoroughly, and brought a chest full of gold out with him. The howling of the wild dogs was henceforth heard no more; they had disappeared, and the country was freed from the trouble.

After some time he took it in his head that he would travel to Rome. On the way he passed by a marsh, in which a number of frogs were sitting croaking. He listened to them, and when he became aware of what they were saying, he grew very thoughtful and sad. At last he arrived in Rome, where the Pope had just died, and there was great doubt among the cardinals as to whom they should appoint as his successor. They at length agreed that the person should be chosen as pope who should be distinguished by some divine and miraculous token. And just as that was decided on, the young count entered into the church, and suddenly two snow-white doves flew on his shoulders and remained sitting there. The ecclesiastics recognized therein the token from above, and asked him on the spot if he would be pope. He was undecided, and knew not if he were worthy of this, but the doves counselled him to do it, and at length he said yes. Then was he anointed and consecrated, and thus was fulfilled what he had heard from the frogs on his way, which had so affected him, that he was to be his Holiness the Pope. Then he had to sing a mass, and did not know one word of it, but the two doves sat continually on his shoulders, and said it all in his ear.