Sometimes I feel sorry for foreigners Trying to learn English no really
I do it's because our
spelling Is just so mad isn't? and loads of people
complain about it. I mean why Is this word choir? Why, isn't it choya or shwah or something?
But no, it's 'kwiyer' and you've just got to know that, and
so when you learn a new word in English you have to learn its spelling almost as a separate thing from the the sound and
the meaning. It's another thing you have to cope with as
you're Learning a
new language. That's your burden and I'm terribly sorry. However, I am here to say that despite what you might think, actually,
English spelling Is a really good system. Possibly even The best system around.
Possibly even the best possible system.
Now, the chief rival to the English spelling system is the Chinese system, which is completely different. In that,
symbols represent not sounds but meanings, so for instance this one
represents the concept of 'big'. It's like a like a man standing like that - "This! Woah! You should seen the one that got, away!"
It doesn't make the noise 'big'. There's no 'buh-i-guh', it's the concept of big. Now, this has an enormous
advantage.
So, for instance
If you're in one part of the Chinese
Empire - yes, China is the world biggest empire - fifty-four nations - which... every time the Chinese talk about
other nations' being
'imperialist', I think "That's a bit rich coming from you either the World's biggest empire!" but anyway, so a bit of an aside
so...
A boss dictates to his secretary, "I'm placing an order for five of these, two of those, and one of those, and could you please
deliver by the beginning of October?", and the secretary dutifully writes down all that using
concepts, using meanings in characters, not sounds, and seals the envelope or
hits return and sends the e-mail, whatever it Is, and it goes to some other part of China and someone else who's able to read
opens this up and reads to his boss
"Ah! I see that they've ordered..." and he's able to read the letter.
But the noises that that person reading the letter makes are
completely different from the noises that the man who dictated the letter in the first place made. They speak two different
languages, and yet they're able to write to each other. That is a huge advantage of Chinese.
So, you don't need to learn someone's language to write to them. Isn't that amazing? You have universal written language. Fantastic.
Yeah, unfortunately,
there are certain drawbacks to the system, and they're quite significant.
If you want to learn how to read, you have to learn an awful lot of characters -
thousands of them - and they're really quite complicated, and it can be
pretty tricky learning how to write them and recognize them properly, and
if you want to write really small, that's really difficult, and small printing is really difficult to read, and
yeah - it's not it's not the most easy to get off the page, because it's so intricate.
So the actual writing is really quite difficult, and try using a typewriter
Hmm... good luck with that! And modern computers - how
many keystrokes do you need per character? And You want to design a fount? How long have you got? Yeah, it's really pretty tricky.
Whereas, we just have to learn 26 letters,
capital and lower case, and a few punctuation marks, and we're away. And if you're a European using Roman script, you've got pretty
much all of those in your head already.
But with Chinese, it's a bit more tricky, and dictionaries! Try
using a Chinese dictionary! You see, if I want to look up the word 'big'... 'BUH' - it's bound to begin with
B isn't it? So I can look under the Bs and
then "BUH- I" - it's bound to be an I isn't it? But, so is it one G or two, 'big'? And
Oh, yeah, it's two Gs, it turns out. Bigg, it's a type of oat.
and...
that's how a western dictionary works, but in Chinese
It begins with...oh, it doesn't begin with anything, so what they have - they do have sort of dictionaries - but they have
things collected together in terms of categories, so for instance all the animals, so there you go, so you
have to look along... so...
Animals animals animals animals animals... Where are animals? Animals... no no no... go down a long list and aha!
Animals - page 152. Right, so you go to page 152 and...
Nope that's not the animal I want... Nope that's not the one animal I want, no not that one, not that one, not that one...
And eventually, eventually you'll find, Aardvark which is the one you were after, and the symbol for it.
So, yeah: lots big drawbacks of Chinese. Now,
in a lot of European languages, particularly the ones which haven't been written down for very long like Finnish and
Lithuanian, if you know how to spell a word,
you know how to say a word, so if you come across a word in the book, you've no idea what it means, but you
can make the noise. It's sort of the opposite of Chinese in that sense.
So that's sort of good if you're trying to learn a language, because at least you know how to say it and
If you know how to say it you're
probably going to be able to spell it, but with English, oh dear no - remember choir and shwah?
How do you write that, and how do you say it, if you see it written down? Well,
what we do when we read
Isn't to look at every single letter in a word and then decode it by noise, what
We do actually is recognize words a bit like we recognize faces.
So, you see the word 'choir', and you recognize it as the word 'choir', you don't go "C-H-O-I-R,
which is that?" You recognize it like a face. You see the whole word in one go, with a gap at either end, and
'Choir' - that goes straight into your head, so it's actually a very useful
Way of reading - you recognize these faces and what beautiful faces they are, and they're more differentiated than they would otherwise be. For Instance,
we have the words: two, too, tutu, and they're all spelled differently and that ambiguity on the page...
isn't there.
Now...
Another advantage is that you can see the derivation of the word on the page.
So, for instance, take the word
'sign'. It's got a G in it (it's got a G in it!). Why has it got a G in it?
Well, because it's actually derived from the same root as the word
'signal'. Now, we say the G in 'signal', but we don't say that G in 'sign', and yet on the page
We can see that those two words are
related, and so in 'sign'
We see something of the meaning of the word in the spelling. Isn't that wonderful?
It's A bit like Chinese only without having to learn all those different characters.
Now, [an] example I like to use is 'cupboard'. It's really obvious how this word is
derived. The word 'cup' and the word 'board' still exist in modern English
and you put the two together and you say "kubbud", only no one says 'cup-board', it's actually very difficult to say
a P followed by a B, so we don't, we just
skip the P Entirely and the 'oar'
becomes "uh", so it's 'kubbud' not 'cup-board', and yet you can see the meaning of the word on the page and
that is part of the beauty of the language. You're seeing meaning in a way that you
don't see in other languages and you're seeing the history of the language in a way that you
don't see in other languages. You can see certain words are from Latin, certain from Greek,
"Oh, it's got a PH in it - probably from Greek". Others have got
little Us in them - maybe they're from French - and that
gives the language so much more colour.
So just think what the world would be like if
English had only started to be written down now, and so a Geordie wrote down what he
was saying phonetically like this:
and then someone from Oxford wrote down what he
was saying like this...
(I am going to Paper Place on my Kawasaki motorcycle for some crepe paper)
On the page, they would look so different that you might think they are two different languages, but in fact English Is
united by derivative spelling.
We can have people saying it all sorts of different ways all the way around the world and yet...
We all understand each other written on the page. Isn't that great?
But I'll give an example when it's not great. You see, the Americans tried to simplify
spelling and it didn't quite catch on, and most of their suggested simplified spellings
were dropped, but a few of them did catch on, an example being the word
'defense', for Instance. They thought it would be simpler if they changed the CE at the end to an SE.
Well, I'm not sure it is, but anyway...
When we, in Britain, see the word 'defense' written that way, particularly on the on very official-looking seal the Department of Defense
or something, in front of a lectern when someone's giving a very grave speech, and we're thinking
"They've spelled 'defence' wrong! That looks so silly!" But anyway,
we understand - you've changed the spelling, but you've changed the spelling of
"Defense" but not other words that it's related to, so 'defence' - the putting up of a barrier in front of you to do to defend
yourself - is related to the art of self-defence or 'fencing'.
But that didn't go to an S. Or the barrier itself: a 'fence', that's still spelt with a C, so now
you've got the worst of both worlds. You still have to learn when to use an S
and when to use a C, so that's no better. You've lost the beauty of the derivation, and you've lost the connection in meaning.
Oh, don't do that!
Lindybeige!