Thank you!
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Nod bbleemigg yuu.
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One of the problems I see with writing English as itâs pronounced is that we all pronounce it differently, even within a country, to say nothing of worldwide.
The "R"s or lack thereof in something written by someone from Massachusetts, say, would definitely trip most people up.
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Noo doot aboot it, eh?
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IIRC, English spelling reflects the pronunciation of whatever region of England was dominant around the late Middle Ages, further screwed up by scholars who felt it should be more like Latin.
The real problem is not so much that different dialects use different sounds for the letters, but that the spelling is hopelessly inconsistent.
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I remember in uni one of my profs showed us the Lordâs Prayer written 14 different ways, by 14 different monks writing sometime in the Middle Ages (not sure when, but well before the Great Vowel Shift). Each example was from a different region in England.
They were all remarkably different â and all equally unreadable. To be fair, that was partly because they were photocopies of photocopies.
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I get that itâs GoT, but what is the context?
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Where Stannis corrects someoneâs grammar - they said less and he said fewer, and Davos looks at him and says âwhat?â Of course later, Davos does the same thing to someone else⊠Jon, maybe.
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So is there any difference between syllable-final h and syllable-final x?
In English, yes.
Syllable final -h is like a breath.
Syllable final -x is very close to the word âkissâ.
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In Canada, we may say âehâ at the end of a sentence, but never âexâ.
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Whenever this line of conversation arises I like to introduce people to The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité.
Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress youâll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word
One of my favorite stories from my time as a substitute elementary teacher was the time I was in a first-grade class and the students all got letters from their pen-pals in another first-grade class in another building. They had to read them and then write a response.
Now kids that young generally donât have great skill at grammar or spelling, but no matter how badly a particular kid messed up a sentence it was always perfectly legible to them. What I found fascinating though was that the kids in my class had about 75% comprehension when trying to read something written by one of their classmates and only about 20% comprehension when trying to read something written by one of their pen-pals in the other building.
We were supposed to work on this for an hour before lunch and I spent most of that time going from student to student just trying to interpret what their pen-pal was tying to say. One kid had clearly made this the theme of their prior response to their pen-pal because they letter they got back this time was all about how the other kidâs feeling were hurt because my student had written that he couldnât read the previous letter.
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My very first paying gig as a teacher, I had a summer school class in Grade 12 English. Iâd been expecting teenagers, but it turned out most of the class were adults trying to squeeze in another credit while the adult education school was closed for the summer, and most of them were new Canadians trying to improve their English and get a Canadian high school diploma for their resumĂ©s. Some of them were very well educated â I had a couple of people with Masters degrees â but the comfort with written English varied a lot.
Early in the course I gave them a short written assignment and had them peer mark it. It did not go well. Two minutes in, this man stomps up to my desk, says the assignment he got to mark was incomprehensible and illiterate, and that he refused to do the assignment. I said fine, but Iâd deduct marks from whatever score his assignment got.
Guy stomps back to his desk, whole class is checking my reaction. So a second guy stomps up, same deal. He returns to his desk, I put the two assignments in a file folder to buy time to figure out how to save the exercise if thereâs a general insurrection⊠and notice theyâd had each otherâs papers.
I point it out quietly, but to the class because fuck it, they already started a scene.
They accused me of giving them each otherâs papers on purpose. I asked them what difference that would have made. No answer from either of them for that one.
Canât remember if they took the papers back and finished the exercise or not.
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FTFY
(Couldnât think of a good geordie clip)
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