Posted on 02/10/2015 6:30:03 AM PST by C19fan
Johnny in Topeka can’t read, but Janne in Helsinki is effortlessly finishing his storybooks. Such a disparity may be expected by now, but the reason might come as a surprise: It probably has much less to do with teaching style and quality than with language. Simply put, written English is great for puns but terrible for learning to read or write. It’s like making children from around the world complete an obstacle course to fully participate in society but requiring the English-speaking participants to wear blindfolds.
Adults who have already mastered written English tend to forget about its many quirks. But consider this: English has 205 ways to spell 44 sounds. And not only can the same sounds be represented in different ways, but the same letter or letter combinations can also correspond to different sounds. For example, "cat," "kangaroo," "chrome," and "queue" all start with the same sound, and "eight" and "ate" sound identical. Meanwhile, "it" doesn’t sound like the first syllable of "item," for instance, and "cough" doesn’t rhyme with either "enough," "through," "furlough" or "bough." Even some identically spelled words, such as "tear," can be pronounced differently and mean different things.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Exactly. In this article we see yet again how leftist ideology is a hodgepodge of incoherent and contradictory ideas.
For example, if English were to be simplified as advocated by this author, the language would have less capacity for the “nuance” of thought which is held up by the left as a hallmark of why their ideology is supposedly so brilliant.
Whole language has been a boogie man. Texting shorthand is a side issue.
Nah—I think it’s a teacher union jobs creation project.
This simplification lunacy was all the rage at the beginning of the last century. George Bernard Shaw was one of its proponents, IIRC
To me “anxious” means nervously expectant and “eager” means looking forward to.
If your team was victorious, press “won”.
If you want directions, press “to”.
If you are an environmentalist, press “tree”.
If you are in favor, press “for”.
If you are a bee, press “hive”.
If you have more than one ill person, press “sicks”.
If you are Norwegian, press “Sven”.
If you finished your meal, press “ate”.
If you are German and you want to say no, press “nein”.
If you are World War II Japanese fighter pilot, press “Zero”.
If you are an astronomer, press “star”.
If you are British and are ringing for money, press “£”...
So is this the Atlantic’s way of announcing that they’re hiring writers who don’t use big words and can’t spell?
P.S. you want a headache? try learning to spell in Gaelic. It’s as bad as english or worse.
CC
That is precisely what they mean.
That’s why it’s annoying to hear someone say something like: “We’re anxious to get started on this wonderful project” when they are clearly looking forward to it rather than dreading it.
Our constitution is written in cursive. In another generation Americans will have to rely on someone to tell them what it says.
So then there IS an upside to simplifying the language...
;-)
Based on their online content I thought they did that years ago.
CC
Couple of years ago, I saw a Discovery Channel program about building some huge icebreaker.
The customer was Finland.
Contractors from Finland, Russia, France, China, Japan and South Korea were building the ship in a South Korean shipyard.
Naturally, the official language of the project was English.
Why didn’t this jackwad just write her article phonetically? Other than wanting to keep her job, of course.
is it as hard as Chinese arithmetic?
And the tyrants in "Big Edu" are only too happy to hasten the process.
this is like the cafe that is so busy that nobody comes to it
“If English spelling is such an impediment to reading, why is it that past generations learned to read without experiencing any of the problems today’s generation is going through?”
It is due to many thing—demographic shifts, liberal takeover of education, purposeful dumbing down of students, etc.
what? not esperanto?
Luba Vangelova ?
Not going to touch that.
:o/
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