I was helping in my son’s second grade class today, and they were doing spelling exercises. They spend maybe 5 hours a week doing spelling. That’s around 150 hours per school year, so I dunno, maybe in a student’s life they spend around 600 hours working on spelling. That’s just under 4 months of 40-hour work weeks. Perhaps you could even say it’s more like 6 months of kid work weeks.
It occured to me today that this is a complete waste.
It occurs to me that this time is spent purely because English has all these funky spellings. Also, there are tons of grammar things that must be learned, such as then/than, to/too/two, etc., which are also learned purely because of inefficiencies in the language. People (such as myself; I’m not trying to insult anyone) who can use “then” and “than” correctly, and properly spell “ambiguous” aren’t any smarter because of it, in fact they’ve got perfectly good synapses going to waste on something completely without value.
If English were more logically constructed, you could have a full half of a year extra in your life.
What languages are the most “natural” and logical in their spellings and structure? In countries where they are spoken, is there in fact less time devoted to proper grammar and spelling in school?
In fact I think the English grammar is pretty logical, compared to others that seem to include more exceptions than rules and especially compared to languages where the nouns are properly delined and the verbs conjugated. The English spelling actually is chaotic, but personally I prefer easy grammar, not easy spelling. Speaking German as native tongue and having learned Latin, English, French, Esperanto, and Spanish (to very widely varying degrees of command), my impression is that among the natural langauges, Spanish and French have easy and logical orthography, but unlogical grammar (for example the double negations common in both languages).
Questions like “which language is the easiest” have been discussed here repeatedly. See for example http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=279932 or http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=43969.
I’d agree about Spanish orthography, which is almost perfectly phonetic (with a few exceptions such as silent h ). French, however, has many many words which are spelled differently (including many verb forms) but sound the same, as well as many exceptions to standard spelling rules.
Spanish grammar is certainly more complex in some ways than English - most verbs has upwards of 30 different forms, while English ekes by with half a dozen. However, English does have many idiomatic usages which have to be learned individually (e.g. “slow up” and “slow down” mean approximately the same thing.)
Double negations might not be “logical,” but they do come somewhat naturally - although we are taught not to use them in English, it is a frequent error in casual speech, and we instinctively interpret them as being simple negatives rather than working out the logical contradiction.
No, we still got at least 5 hours of Spanish spelling and grammar (sometimes even more per week) while I was in elementary school. At my high school, all basic classes met only 4 hours per week, but the only two classes that remained “basic” all the way to senior year were Spanish and English. So even in my senior year, 4 hours per week of Spanish (this time mainly literature).
I also got about 5 hours of English class per week throughout elementary school, and again 4 hours per week in secondary school. I think the main difference was that in Spanish we started dealing with literature and writing essays a bit earlier than in English.
IMHO, none are much better than English, although some are more structured. Structure means more rules, which means more time to learn them.
Kids entering school without any education can speak so they can be understood. They can differentiate past, present and future tenses, match number of adjective and noun, speak in complete sentences.
Learning the rules takes time because its a set of concepts. Wanna give your kid extra time? Help them develop their particular style of learning.
Something like Esperanto is logically constructive, and covers the objections in the OP. But it is only used as a second language.
English is no more difficult than any other language overall. Spelling is harder, but you don’t have to deal with gender, adjective agreement, or (thank God) declensions.
English is also very logically spelled. Nearly all words are spelled in the way they were pronounced at the time they entered the language. The ridiculed “ough” combination is a perfectly good representation of the original sound; the pronunciation just happened to change over the centuries.
You’ve still got a lot of spelling inconsistencies there. Let’s see… Two different pronounciations of “i”, and one of the “i”-sounds is also spelled “e”, “ee” and “eo”. Two or three pronounciations of “o”, one of them also spelled “oo”. Several superfluous letters, like “h” in “hours” and “e” in “office”.
Tangetially related to the OP: Norwegian is, probably, somewhere between English and Spanish in ease of spelling. We’ve got a language council which, among other things, decides that specific simplifications in spelling are now correct Norwegian. For instance, the word “juice” (borrowed from English with English spelling and Norwinglish prounciation) can now be spelled “jus”, which fits the Norwegian pronounciation a lot better. Some of their recommendations take, some don’t. That’s one mechanism for simplifying the language which AFAIK, no English-speaking country has.
Languages aren’t logical, they’re consistent. Important difference.
Double negatives aren’t illogical and never were. If negation in language operated according to mathematical rules, then a triple negative would have to be considered grammatical. So would a quintuple negative, and so on.
The truth of the matter is that in standard English a double negative intensifies negation, it doesn’t cancel it out. Native speakers know this intuitively; prescriptive grammarians cause all the confusion by insisting it’s somehow incorrect. In some languages (French, for example) double negation is the rule. It doesn’t confuse them, either.
I call bullshit on that. I have heard, uttered, and can imagine plenty of instances of double negatives where the effect is to cancel out, as opposed to intensify.
For example, I had to uninstall Starcraft and snap the CD in half, because I can’t not play it.
I actually said that sentence a couple years ago to a friend. He did not understand it to mean that I really, really can’t play Starcraft. Quite the opposite.
Yeah, I agree. I understand the origins of the “double negative equals positive” thing, and that it’s not naturally a part of English, but it’s sunk well into Standard English; most dialects of English permit it, but I agree that Standard English doesn’t. Most of us, however, don’t grow up speakin’ no Standard English.
this is a bit of a hijack but:
If your estimate is correct (although your logic is dicey and your overestimations reinforce your point), why the hell doesn’t any of this sink in? I see misspellings on road signs, advertisements, everywhere, not just in writing assignments or at spelling bees. Practically no one can spell.
Besides, learning the language is an intergal part of comunication. What good is devoting more of your brain to science or medicine if you can’t properly and accruately communicate your results or reserch? Most people use the ‘you’d look like a dam fool’ argument, and that’s fairly true. How is your kid going to grow up to be a succesful lawer if he can’t spell half the words in his brief?
Well yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Grammar rules are only ever mostly true, because they’re determined by usage and not logic. For double negatives there’s the counterexample you gave and there’s also litotes like “that’s a not unreasonable question” that parse as canceling each other out too. But in pretty much all of the instances where somebody is criticizing the use of a double negative it will be the intensifying usage that’s singled out as being “illogical.”
But you said “plenty of instances.” You gave one construction, litotes are another. What are the others you are thinking of?
Pronunciation has changed since the spelling was standardized, as mentioned, and indicates linguistic history and derivation for those that care.
A more practical argument is that phonetic spelling poses problems for the variant pronunciations that occur in different groups all over the world; there are variant groups even within a given city. It keeps the language comprehensible to them all, as Chinese characters are said to be understood by people who could not understand each other’s spoken dialects.
Maybe we’ll go to icons for everything? :eek:
As to the grammar, it seems necessary to show what modifies what by some standard, whether by declension or conjugation or sentence order. Latin, which has radically flexible sentence structure, has both declensions of nouns and conjugations of verbs, so you know who amat whom no matter what order the sentence has. English requires a particular sentence order for that.
Here’s another WAG as to why all these natural languages have complexities, instead of evolving toward Esperanto: It’s good training for the mind to be precise and mindful.
Another WAG: Humans start speaking their languages at a very young age, which shows the processing capacity is already built in, and there isn’t an excessive problem with plugging in the vocabulary and structures. Spelling standards just take advantage of the capacity.
Another WAG: People pick up on language niceties as a group bonding mechanism.
Many have to do with describing compulsive behavior, much like my Starcraft example. Others in that vein would be:
I can’t get into a car and not light up a smoke.
I can’t not try to use the hitstick. (Madden reference, for the uninitiated.)
It occurs to me that the more proper usage would be to rephrase using the word “stop” instead of “not”, but there is a subtle shade of difference in meaning that the double negative expresses, IMO, more effectively. Still, there are more:
It’s not impossible to…
It’s not unreasonable if…
It’s not unlikely that…
I’m not unhappy about…
I won’t disbelieve you if…
While not technically untrue…
You get the idea. I’m not convinced I couldn’t go on with examples indefinitely. And that sentence is exactly why double negatives are frowned upon; they are difficult to parse. The intent of the message is logically consistent – I’m pretty sure I could go on and on listing examples. But just reading that sentence gives me a headache, and I’m the guy who wrote it.
