I did mean the vowel reduction itself, AND the stress pattern… and that’s interesting how “pronounce” is a rare example where the former, at least, is actually reflected in the spelling. But the latter never is, because we don’t happen to show stress in orthography…yet correct syllabic stress is CRUCIAL to understanding spoken language, more crucial usually than vowel and consonant sounds, 'mkay?
Which just goes to show how little of the acoustic properties of speech are captured by “spelling”, for ANY language (though indigenous languages only recently committed to paper by linguists come closer than most).
Simply that, while subvocalization is normal and always happening to a certain degree, the more proficient a reader is the more s/he utilizes automatic detection of words, which takes place in a different part of the brain (the occipital lobe). Groups of words are taken in by the eyes instantaneously in chunks, and processed in the same way. (That’s why it takes two to three times longer to speak a speech than it does to read it.)
The fact that letters are “silent” becomes less and less relevant the more we move the reading process back to the occipatal lobe as proficient readers.
Chinese writing is the utmost example of this logic. After all, they have a phonetic spelling system called Pinyin. But for actual written Chinese, they prefer to use the characters, which require tons of memorization to learn, but disambiguate all the homophones that obtain using Pinyin.
Yes. This is where non-native English speakers are most susceptible to misunderstandings, contrary to popular characterizations in the media–such as the /l/ vs. /r/ phoneme/s, and so on.
In fact, English–in clearly non-standard usage–occasionally introduces orthographic marking for unitary lexical items, such as spelling hot as hawt. This kind of thing is obviously marginal and limited, but it demonstrates that non-phonetic spelling is still productive, and, in a way, functional (in the technical sense, not in the pedestrian sense, IMHO).
Obviously what we need is not spelling reform but pronunciation reform. Let’s make a concerted effort to pronounce words as they are currently spelled - and raise our children to speak that way.
So, I really only think I am subvocalizing the entire word in my head when I read? I know I recognize words once I know them, I don’t read the letters, but you’re saying I don’t even read the word? Words to a fluent reader are essentially ideograms?
Hmmm … how could you test that? Are there any studies other than the part of the brain used to support this? Do neurophysiologist (or neurologist?) and linguists agree about this? I’m very excited because this is an educational missing link for me between ideogram and alphabetic languages.
I don’t see how you can argue that we need different spellings. If so, then how do we get by in speech where we can’t just vary the spelling? For as many times as people have freaked out over their, there, and they’re, when’s the last time you couldn’t figure out what was meant? They are three different parts of speech, so the other form doesn’t even make sense. If you chose just one spelling, you’d still be understood, even if you’d be mocked for identifying yourself as part of the lower, uneducated class.
There’s a lot of research, (and in particular research on eye-tracking, and how it relates to reading specifically), using many different approaches and from various fields, and there’s also disagreement and uncertainty. (I don’t know what’s been done specifically addressing ideograms vs. alphabets.) But the thing is that’s it’s hard to generalize because most people read in different ways for different purposes. I think various cognitive functions work together (including prior background knowledge, “schema” derived from context, etc.), so when most people read they draw from the text in various ways simultaneously, and probably different people rely on different processes to differing degrees, but that’s just a wild-assed assumption on my part. One fascinating book related to this recently came out, called Im Auge des Lessers (“In the Eye of the Reader: From Letter Recognition to the Joy of Reading”), but I don’t think it’s been translated from German yet. My understanding is that–when reading extended discourse for meaning–the eye of a competent reader doesn’t need to have a very wide field of acuity around its fixation point to successfully take in meaning from (alphabetic) text, causing it to sweep over text quickly–much more quickly than the actual physiological production of the succession of sounds could ever occur. This process, in fact, allows for better global comprehension, because the relationships between larger ideas can then be more immediately perceived, (and then stand out better), and thereby can move into long-term memory more securely. At this level of reading, “silent” letters don’t matter. However, when you’re looking for an unfamiliar name in a phone book, or calling roll from a list of names, you’re engaging in much more focused and phoneme-level cognition, so for purposes such as these, of course “silent” letters become an issue.
But then again Swedish is doubly screwed up in that they call it double-V but treat it pretty much the same as a V, to the point where Ws and Vs are all mixed together in the telephone directory. When a Swede reads a URL out loud they 99 times out of a hundred say “vee vee vee punkt” instead of “dubbel-vee dubbel-vee dubbel-vee punkt” (for “www.”). A good example of why this was a bad idea was the URL för vägverket, the government office for driver’s licences etc. It was www.vv.se and the vast majority of Swedes would say “vee vee vee punkt vee vee …” making no distinction between W and V.
Shit, maybe this is why they renamed Vägverket to Transportstyrelsen.
Threads like this always make me think about if there is a good way to incorporate basic linguistic instruction into primary and secondary school curricula. The only reason the basics have to be taught in intro college ling classes are that English teachers up until that point tend to not know fuck all about English or language in general. Such nonsense as long/short vowels and sentence diagramming that doesn’t mesh with reality come to mind.
We might also put a halt to the the never-ending threads we see here from prescriptavists.
More in line with the OP, the consonants I can think of that don’t have their own letters (or only have a letter that is shared with another consonant) in English are ʃ (sh), ʒ (azure), ŋ (ng), θ (thing), ð (this), the africates ch, dʒ (the “soft” g in general), ts (fits, tsunami).
I suspect that many readers never make it to this level, especially given the number of posts we see in spelling threads from people who can’t understand how someone who reads a lot could possibly not know how to spell the words they read.
Following on that…
The OP does have a good point that C is a left-over letter since K and S can already handle its duties—except for /tʃ/, which is a strong argument for keeping it around. Who would want to replace ch with tsh? Nobody!
But C is a left-over letter often enough that when various languages around the world adapt the Latin alphabet for their use, C gets to pick up the slack for various sounds that don’t already have letters of their own.
*In Malay and Indonesian, C is used to write /tʃ/. All by itself. The H is superfluous, after all.
*In Fijian, C is used to write /ð/. Bet you didn’t see that one coming.
*In Somali, C is used to write /ʕ/, the voiced pharyngeal or epiglottal fricative that is known as ʿayn in Arabic. Since the transliteration for ʿayn is a small superscript half-circle open on the right, back in typewriter days some typists wrote it with a lowercase c with the paper bumped down a notch to make it superscript. So in a sense, when Somali adapted the Latin alphabet in 1972, they had the letter for /ʕ/ readymade. But they use it as a regular full-size letter, not superscript. The name ʿAbd Allah in Somali is Cabdille. Somali also used X for the related sound /ħ/, since they didn’t need X for anything else.
*In Pinyin, C makes the sound /tsʰ/. For example, Cai Lun (the inventor of paper) used to be transliterated Ts‘ai Lun. The Pinyin digraph CH is used for /tʂʰ/, which sounds fairly close to English ch.
*In Turkish, C is used to write /dʒ/. They had already assigned J to /ʒ/ for all the French loanwords. Perhaps also, the Arabic letter jīm ج which was replaced by C in Turkish has a similar shape. In the Turkish film At, a kid is demonstrating his literacy by reading street signs out loud. And goes, “Avis Rent-a-Jar.”
I’ve always thought this, too, if for no other reason than that so many English teachers spend so much time and energy focusing on things that don’t really develop true language or critical thinking skills. Sentence diagramming is a good example, in that those who will ever be able to do it don’t really need to do it. It’s like a military parade that shows off all the weapons, but does nothing to improve the country’s defense.
Furthermore, if secondary English teachers bring some linguistic instruction into their curricula, it will help students to understand that much of what we are expected to do in writing is purely conventional, and not derived from the character of natural speech itself. It will remove the notion that things like spelling, punctuation, and the protocols of academic written discourse are not natural laws dictated by the mandates of some divine logic, and rather that we learn them simply for the same reason that we learn how to behave well in public.
/dʒ/ totally has its own letter: <j>. It’s sometimes indicated with <g> as well, of course, but if you say “The <j> sound” to an English speaker, you can be assured they will understand “Oh, /dʒ/”.
On the other hand, I don’t think /ts/ is a basic affricate in English… no one thinks of “fits” as anything other than “fit” + the suffix -s. And “tsunami” is still just some crazy loanword; I personally just pronounce it /sunami/, with no regrets.
Of course, the very similar /tʃ/ is a basic affricate; it’s the one represented by the digraph <ch>, as you already indicated.
Only if we bring back the /k/ sound that used to be at the beginning of knight and knee.
You’re still going down a rabbit hole with that route.
Some of you might be interested in knowing that best practice in reading instruction explicitly teaches phonetics and phonology. When I was in clinicals with kids I spent ages doing "say ‘pat’, say ‘pat’, say the sounds in ‘pat’, /p/ /a/ /t/’ and so forth. Now, of course, not every school uses best practice reading techniques, which is really unfortunate.