In One Ear

Don't stop....no pares....., spanishgirl_in_oxford, 2006

The Spelling Bee is a curious Anglophone phenomenon. The idea of spelling out words as an academic competition is unheard of in countries that lack byzantine orthographies. I'm a long time proponent of spelling reform in English and also a long time hater of people who cannot or will not spell correctly. If I have to go back to the start and reread your sentence because you're not bothered about spelling, then I'm not going to read whatever you had to say no matter how interesting or profound it was since you obviously don't care enough to effectively communicate it. Perhaps a reform will come if we embrace the yoof's demotic - a silent letter cull at the expense of some 'sk8r boi' monstrosities and grammatical malformations.

Thanks to the printing press, English orthography has for the most part been stuck in the 14th century, whilst spoken English has moved on considerably. This is one of the reasons I have never appreciated Shakespeare - I sided with the French woman in that Renault advert. I don't know what the fuck Shakespeare was saying. And it's not Old English. It's not Middle English. He was writing in Early Modern English. Unfortunately, between the printing press, Shakespeare, and the modern reader; the great vowel shift occurred. With it went the rhymes. Archaisms and semantic shifts are apparent too: "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" Where indeed. Actually, why is he called Romeo? Early editions of the bible were rife with margin annotations and the same was true of the textbook I had in fourth year English. Stopping every sentence to learn a new word isn't reading, it's learning to read - like homework in the early primary school years.

What of Scotland's national poet, Robert Burns? I can't understand him either, and he was writing in an accent/dialect geographically and chronologically closer to my own. The absurd irony is that he is more intelligible in Russian than he is to someone living in the Central Belt. Burns is more a case of standard English having shunted Scots into a low-prestige dialect, merging with the slang basilect. When I was in Primary 7 part of Burns' Night was reciting Tam o' Shanter. Due to my diction I landed the part of the narrator and had to memorise the entire piece over three months. Despite that I could not explain what it was about. The thing about my diction is that my parents were quite strict about not speaking 'wrong' - one not wan, hold not haud, fall not faw, head not heid. Of course, that's exactly how they talk, meanwhile I'm left sounding like a BBC continuity announcer.

Interestingly, my French pronunciation was also praised by my teacher, despite the obvious problem of being unable to engage in the simplest spontaneous conversation in the language. When it came to the exams, shall we say I wasn't the only one abusing the permit to bring your own dictionary into the written test; and the only reason most people could pass the French speaking exam was by memorising the questions the teacher would ask - indeed, all exam preparation in all subjects is having the class read past exam papers, memorise the recurring questions, and regurgitate the same paragraph composed entirely of key words that form the answer on the big day. Maybe she'd change the sequence, but you'd know what Q1 sounds like and what it's counterpart answer sounds like. Much in the same way parrots engage in the illusion of speech. If French were properly taught, students could take part of a sentence they know, combine it with other sentences they know, and generate a new sentence that they haven't learnt by heart: ie, express themselves. Changing "comment tu t'appelle" with "comment t'appelle-tu" was an entirely unconscious option you could perhaps thrown in for an extra cracker from the examination board.

As it is, having studied French for five years, I know where to slot my name/age/town/etc into some phrasebook extracts. Being left monolingual by this probably explains why I took refuge in conlanging.

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