But can you go the other way: can you spell every French word or name you hear?
Personally, I have a very hard time hearing French. Speak English to me, even if there are words or names I’m not familiar with, and I have no trouble understanding the sounds and picturing the way the words look written out. But speak French to me, especially with a French accent, and it just sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher.
The friend of the OP framed the question in terms of saving trees, but one could also look at it from the perspective of a publisher who wants to cut back on printing costs. In fact one major publisher even wrote a style guide explicitly indicating this line of thought:
Thanks to Indistinguishable for pointing this out. The bolded part is the closest mathematical analog of omitting silent letters; the AMS convention would have us carry out juxtaposition-implied multiplication before division, thereby rendering the otherwise-mandatory parentheses (if we naively followed the usual order of operations) as unnecessary as the h in John.
This is just silly.
If I said “pain” without any additional context you couldn’t know if I meant " pain" or “pane”…of course this happens in French. I don’t know by ear whether you are saying “manger” or “mangé”, but give me context and it immediately becomes clear.
You have a hard time hearing French because it’s not a language you’re very familiar with, not because there’s something inherently difficult in the language.
I readily admit that I’m saying something subjective about my perception of French, and I don’t know how much, if any, of my difficulty in hearing French is inherent in the language itself (which is, admittedly, one of the vowelier languages) and how much is just my peculiar reaction to it—but it’s not just because it’s a language I’m not familiar with, because I don’t have the same reaction to other languages I’m not familiar with.
Let’s say I’m listening to an audiobook or a news report or something like that, and I hear the name of a person or place in, say, Spanish or Italian or Swedish or Russian. I may not understand it or be able to spell it correctly, but I could at least understand the distinct sounds that make up the words, and write them down somehow and recognize them the next time I hear the name. Whereas if the name were in French, it wouldn’t sink in at all; it would just sound like [Charlie Brown’s teacher]mwaw mwaw mwaw[/Charlie Brown’s teacher].
If we really wanted to save paper, the state and federal government and state boards of education could be forced to use both sides of a piece of paper. Over 26 years in the teaching business in Georgia, I never once got workbooks, guides, or anything the state piled onto teachers that were printed front and back. Some of these things had pages running into the hundreds, and we got at least a couple per teacher every year. I may be wrong, but I can see the same thing happening on a federal level.
Yes, and yet, interestingly, the vast majority of translations from English to Spanish will require more print than the English original (taking up more page space), contributing to the problem which the OPs “friend” bemoans. I would guess that one leading cause for this is the comparatively fewer number of homphones in Spanish, which probably necessitates more nominalizations, requiring more words.
So a language whose orthography is more phonetic (such as Spanish), with fewer “silent” letters, doesn’t seem to necessarily accomplish the goal of the OP’s “friend.”
Interesting point. This also has to do with English’s much greater flexibility in forming phrases with attributive nouns (that is, two nouns together, one of them acting adjectivally on the other). Equivalent phrases in Spanish almost always need a bunch of “…of the…”'s.
ETA: Guizot, I LOVE your statement that “all letters are silent”. Well put.
I must correct you in this, yes, spanish is more “transparent” than other languages, but we are not free from spelling errors, and kids are not free from spelling tests lol. H is silent so you have to know it’s supposed to be there, and there are classic problems with certain letters such as c, s and z, or b and v, y and i, g and j. And there are rules and exceptions that are taught in elementary school. It also depends on where you are from, afaik, in spain they pronounce the difference between c, z and s, but in chile que don’t, at all.
You also should consider accent marks, there are very sinple rules, but also exceptions, specially with homophones, for example “solo” means alone, and “sólo” means only, the article “el” means “the” where “él” means he, etc…
Of course you are correct. I don’t know why I didn’t consider h, at the very least. And I’ve seen badly misspelled Spanish.
But I was under the impression that actual spelling tests were not done in Spanish-speaking schools–that Spanish was transparent enough that you didn’t really need a special class for it. I’m certain that at least one of my native Spanish-speaking friends said they never took a spelling test except when in English classes. Maybe she had a different curriculum, or was exaggerating to make a point.
Yes, most silent letters are evil. They are wasteful artifacts that make language unnecessarily complex. Wide-scale spelling reform is much needed.
You are correct. Despite a few exceptions, Spanish has much higher correspondence between letters and sounds than English (even moreso fpr the Spanish in Spain). Ironically, that’s exactly why many Spanish speakers commonly make basic spelling errors – because there isn’t the relentless pressure to carefully learn how to spell, as there is for English speakers.
And, as you are hinting at, that’s why there are no Spelling Bees in Spanish-speaking countries. They must find our National Championship Spelling Bees and the like to seem slightly ridiculous.
I have invested heavily in sustainable forests, which are dedicated to supplying the paper industry and related industries.
With the forecast usage of paper going down, we’ve begun to sell off parcels of forest to developers, in order to hedge our investments a bit. I guess they’ll be condos, McMansions, or lord knows what.
I guess it’s just a larger-scale issue similar to what happened in my neighborhood. The evergreen tree farm behind my house just couldn’t sustain itself anymore with all the fake Christmas tree owners who are trying to save trees. So, instead of rows and rows of evergreens, I might have to look at the back of a strip mall.