Comments on: Today’s “Today”

By: Col

Col — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 23:32:42 +0000

Do they actually really believe that the non literacy rate is to do with the difficulty of english as a language?

Do they really believe that some crazy attempt to to fiddle with the language, would make it easier for learners.

By: Fabio Montermini

Fabio Montermini — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 15:43:26 +0000

Orthography is a constant issue for the French education system. Recently, there’s been some debate about the necessity of a reform of French orthography. Unfortunately, I have no figures to give, but what people favorable to such a reform say is that orthographic skills are now an important social divide in France. Apparently, many university students and also graduates don’t have a perfect knowledge of orthography. In particular of what is called here “grammatical orthography”, i.e. those letters which are never spelled, but indicate grammatical relations, such as the plural -s, -ent for third person plural or the difference between -é or -er in, respectively, past participles and infinitives.

By: Graham

Graham — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:55:42 +0000

I’m grateful to John Cowan for the French figures – I had never seen them. It would also be interesting to know if there are comparable figures for native English spelling ability and native French spelling ability. Certainly what one might call “greengrocers’ French” demonstrates as many oddities as the equivalent English, as does “greengrocers’ Spanish”, and no doubt other languages too. (I’m taking greengrocers as the example here because of the well-known “greengrocers’ apostrophe” in English, whose best examples include “seedle’ss raisins” and smokele’ss fuel”.)

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:36:52 +0000

As of 1992, the figure for functional illiteracy in France was about 10% (full illiteracy about 1%). But the French spelling system is not to be equated with the English one. French spelling-to-sound rules are complex but reliable: there is only a handful of words (oignon being the best known) whose pronunciations are not predictable from the spelling. In English, 10-15% of written words have unpredictable pronunciations, usually because of idiosyncratic representations of the stressed vowel, but also because of idiosyncratic silent consonants.

In short: both French and English are difficult to spell, but English is also hard to read. A sensible spelling reform (as opposed to revolution) of English spelling would eliminate the unpredictable pronunciations and the homographic heterophones, making English spellng as usable as French spelling.

However, one must take care not to overdo it. English, unlike French, is firmly pluricentric: it has many living accents, all of which are equally part of the standard language. The frequent mistake of anglophone spelling reformers is to make their spellings match their own accent only, which renders it inadequate to the use of people with different accents, usually by way of merging away distinctions that others maintain. Distinctions like “or” vs. “ore”, “sawed” vs. “sword”, and even “meet” vs. “meat” cannot be safely discarded.