Hey here is a trick!
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Don't have much to write on blog recently, well, having a lot other things to write… but follow the link, there is a very funny quote~~
When the letters don't really make much sense, why do we still care about spelling so much? Is it sort of social obligation/pressure to test whether you are a decent person rather than testing your expressing abilty? We haven't even came across the function of spelling in our Systemic Functional Linguistic approaches…
21 Feb 2005 00:33
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Tags: Zp V Academic
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Hamid Sirhan
Well there are a variety of reasons why.
1) Standardisation and ease of understanding: In "A Trick of Language", the sentences would only make full sense to people who are very fluent in English. If you tried to approach this being a native Arabic speaker you might not be able to comprehend the entire paragraph.
So knowing that s,w,o,r,d is forever sword and not sorde, sord, sworde, saurd, saurde etc is helpful. Standardisation of written language immediately eliminates hundreds of different combinations, especially in such a phonetically-mongrel language as English. Unlike a language such as Arabic, letters are not necessarily complete phonetics. So there are different was to construct written phonetics in English and come up with a suitable representation. So the standardisation of spelling is generally important for written communication in alphabetised languages.
2) History of the language – What's the point of silent letters? They only serve to confuse people! Why is it Knight and not Night (or even Nite)? Why is it Answer and not Anser or Awnsar? Why philosophy and not Filosophy?
The history of the cosntruction of the language is imbued in the writing systems. So the k in knight is brought forward despite the change in pronunciation. At the end of the day, although it seems arbitrary, it is now part of the linguistic construction.
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As a Chinese you can probably appreciate the importance of distinct "spelling", or order in language. If you know around 4,000–5,000 characters in Chinese, you'll be more or less completely fluent. But learning 4,000–5,000 individual characters (albeit many being made up of radicals) is a very difficult task. But each character is imbued with the history of the construction of the word, phonetic representations, pictorial representations etc and even though there might be "easier" ways of written communication, the written language lives on.
Just like English, Mandarin has now been standardised (in terms of order/spelling) and change is now resisted.
In short, it's important to have a standardised language.
21 Feb 2005, 04:21
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