Date:         Mon, 6 Mar 2000 04:08:34 -0600
From:         Mike Salovesh <t20mxs1@CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU>
Subject:      Re: English spelling

Ron Kephart wrote:

> And, as Jack has pointed out, English has around 12 vowel phonemes,
> so we really need 12 "letters," but our own alphabet is deficient,
> having come from Latin which had the basic five-vowel system (but
> with a length contrast). This is probably our biggest stumbling block
> to developing a rational orthography for English- it's very
> difficult, if not impossible, given our traditional alphabet.

I have two problems with what Ron says.

1)  It isn't absolutely necessary to have 12 distinctive letters in your
alphabet to create a good phonemic writing system for a language with 12
vowels.

Writing systems get into trouble when two different phonemes are
represented by the same graph (like the c in "case" and the c in
"grace"), and where one phoneme is represented by two or more graphs
(like the s in "case" and the c in "grace"). You can avoid both kinds of
error and still produce a proper phonemic writing system using fewer
characters than you have phonemes to represent. The way out is to use
combinations of letters, rather than single letters standing by
themselves, to represent distinctive phonemes.

Example:  Consider the contrasting vowels in the words "hat" and "hot"
in most varieties of English.  If all I had available were five letters
to represent vowel sounds, I would try writing the first as /a/ and the
second as /ae/. (It might be somewhat more elegant to think of the first
as "a plus zero", the second as "a plus e".)  Five letters plus a zero
marker would be enough to give unique written representation to 16
separate vowels.  All you need is a rule saying that it takes either one
letter plus zero or two letters combined to represent a vowel phoneme.

That's just a way to get unique combinations of a small number of
distinctive letters to represent a larger number of phonemes.

2) Ron's statement of the English vowel problem conceals a very
important feature of English dialect variation.  It's too easy to read
his "English has around 12 vowel phonemes" to imply that there is the
same finite number of vowel phonemes in all dialects of English.
(Presumably, that number is either 12 or something close to 12.) Ron
knows better, but the facts are so familiar to him that he didn't think
of repeating them for the benefit of those who haven't studied dialect
variation.

Back when I was doing research on dialects of U.S. English, I found
people who spoke 11-vowel English.  Other people's speech had to be
analyzed as having 12 or 13 vowel phonemes, and I think I remember
hearing about someone who spoke English with 14 vowel phonemes.  The
11-vowel English I analyzed was internally consistent and perfectly
intelligible English; it simply got along with one less vowel than the
more common 12-vowel variety.

Suppose someone who spoke 11-vowel English tried to read a phonemicly
accurate transcription of 13-vowel English, or vice versa. Reading would
not be as simple and direct as Ron reports for people reading his
transcriptions of Grenadan or Carriacouan creole.

That's one of the stumbling blocks that hold back adoption of full
spelling reform for English.   English dialects which just aren't in
one-to-one correspondence with each other. You can't develop a single
standardized phonemic alphabet and have it fit all the variation that
goes on between separate dialects.

I've seen what happens when using a phonemic representation of one
English dialect to teach reading to kids who speak another dialect.
When our kids hit kindergarden/first grade they went to a school that
used someting called "ITA", the Initial Teaching Alphabet.  ITA was
designed to be a solid, consistent phonemic alphabet, and in fact it is
pretty good that way. Trouble is, it's a good phonemic alphabet for what
looks to me like a variety of English spoken by members of the middle
class living somewhere in England.  ITA is NOT a good phonemic
representation of standard Midwestern U.S. English.

Since the school my kids were in was here in De Kalb, Illinois, ITA was
not that much better as a teaching tool than standard dictionary
spelling would have been. Unfortunately, the teachers who were using and
demonstrating ITA didn't know enough descriptive linguistics to realize
that that their saw had a lot of missing teeth, or their straightedge
had kinks in it, or the head was loose on their hammer. They tended to
blame the smartest kids in their classes for taking an oppositional
stance when those kids had trouble reconciling ITA with the way people
speak around here.  (Our kids were spared such problems, because they
had taught themselves to read -- with a lot of help from Sesame Street
-- before they started school.  They were, therefore, mostly excused
from having to deal with ITA.  When they couldn't avoid it entirely,
they treated ITA as one of those dumb things that make teachers happy
but don't mean anything in the real world.)

Back to the larger context of Ron's point and my quibbling: This thread
seems to show that there may be lots of people with strong interests in
anthropology who have not been exposed to an adequate introduction to
linguistics.

That's  exactly the kind of gap in anthropological education I've been
moaning about in other discussions here.  I know that most anthropology
departments do not require their students to gain basic competence in
linguistics.  I think that is a disservice to our students, and I wish
we were doing better by them.

-- mike salovesh                    <salovesh@niu.edu>
PEACE !!!