Tag: English

A is for ai, ay, eigh

I have noticed that there are a lot of ei or eigh words that have homonyms – words spelled alike but sound differently that DO have a more instinctive spelling.


Someone, responding to a previous blogpost in which I suggested that English could be a tricky language to learn, disagreed with me; he thought it was quite easy. Unfortunately, I don’t know what his native language was; perhaps if it were Chinese, with all of those symbols and differing pitches, that might be the case. Maybe my thinking comes from being in the midst of trying to help the Daughter with her spelling homework each week that I find it rather challenging to explain WHY certain words are spelled as they are.

For instance, one rule she’s learned is: “When two vowels go awalking, the first one does the talking.” Well, yeah, that’s quite true, except when it isn’t.

Take the sound of the long A: One of the reasons why children have so many spelling problems is because of their shaky knowledge of how to spell many of our long-vowel words.

The big problem with long vowels is that there is more than one way to spell the same sound. For example, long a can be spelled simply a as in apron, agent or April; or a-consonant-e, as in ate, page, or fame; or ai as in rain, waif, or maid; or ay as in day, gray, or play; or ei as in vein or rein; or eigh, as in eight or weight. Notice that in ei and eigh, there is not an a in sight. I imagine the French influence on the language is responsible.


Of course, local pronunciation may render a long A into a short A such as the potayto/potahto tomayto/tomahto issue, well documented in the Gershwin song Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off (version by Louis ARMSTRONG and Ella Fitzgerald).

Common Spellings of the Long A Sound.

If one considers ai, ay and a-consonant-silent e as standard, then I have noticed that there are a lot of ei or eigh words that have homonyms – words spelled alike but sound differently that DO have a more instinctive spelling, such as

aweigh-away
deign-Dane
eight-ate
feint-faint
heir-air
lei-lay
neigh-nay
reign/rein-rain
sleigh-slay
vein-vain/vane
veil-vale
weigh-way

Now, the EI sound DOES show up in another convention: “I before E except after C or when the sound is AY as in neighbor and weigh.” Also not as true as it might be.

So I have a question for you, especially, but not limited to the non-native speakers. What aspect of the English language did/do you find most difficult in terms of pronunciation and spelling?
***
We remember The Fonz most from giving a single or double thumbs up while saying his signature catchphrase “Aaaaayee!”


ABC Wednesday – Round 8

Y is for You

These words do not reflect ignorance on the part of speakers who use them, but a legitimate linguistic development called leveling by morphological analogy, whereby missing pieces of the grammar are generated by analogy with other parts of grammar.


I don’t think I considered it until I took French in high school, but I realized at that point that standard English was deficient. While French has tu for the second person singular and vous for second-person plural, English uses the word you for both. I subsequently discovered that most languages followed the French rule, such as German du/ihr and Russian ty/vy.

So some groups have developed their own set of second-person plural pronouns, such as y’all and yous.

Some Australians, just like some Americans and some Brits, have for many years now been happily using valid second person plural pronouns. It helps in clear communication, allows succinctness of expression, and, sadly, has invariably been associated with a lack of education and low socioeconomic status.

But it is not the failure of the speakers, it’s the failure of the language. These words do not reflect ignorance on the part of speakers who use them, but a legitimate linguistic development called leveling by morphological analogy, whereby missing pieces of the grammar are generated by analogy with other parts of grammar. In other words, people instinctively create words when the meaning would otherwise be ambiguous.

Thus English is lacking here, but it was not always so. The King James Bible, e.g. has a perfectly useful pairing, thou for singular, ye for plural. Over the years, however, the terms meshed.

My basic point is that perhaps we ought not to deride those people who have creatively addressed a linguistic need.

Four years ago, the TIME person of the year was YOU. Read all about it.

Here are three songs, all very different, called You:
Marvin Gaye
George Harrison
R.E.M.

ABC Wednesday – Round 7

E is for English language

Will English continue to be the lingua franca, or will it be supplanted?


I don’t know about you, but I think that English is a bit of a tricky language to learn. Not so much for me as a native speaker, but for others first learning the language in countries where English is not primary, especially as one gets older. The example above from an early Dr. Seuss book is a perfect reflection of what I mean; the “ough” sounds like uff, off, ow (rhymes with cow), and a long o, respectively.

Yet, English is on its way to becoming the world’s unofficial international language. “Mandarin (Chinese) is spoken by more people, but English is now the most widespread of the world’s languages.”

How the heck did THAT happen?

Here’s a short history of the origins and development of English.

What IS English, anyway? As this article states: it belongs “to the Germanic languages branch of the Indo-European language family, widely spoken on six continents… The primary language of the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and the various Caribbean and Pacific island nations, it is also an official language of India, the Philippines, and many sub-Saharan African countries. It is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world (approximately 1.5 billion speakers), the mother tongue of more than 350 million people, and the most widely taught foreign language… Written in the Latin alphabet, it is most closely related to Frisian, German, and Dutch.”

I have been long fascinated by the differences in the English language from country to country. It’s not just the extra (or missing, depending on your POV) U in color/colour, or the extra/missing syllable in aluminum/aluminium. It is a whole different way of thinking. One of my favorite places to read about this phenomenon is Separated By A Common Language by an American expat in Britain named Lynneguist, who is a linguist (get it?) Recently she asked, Why is it the Mississippi River in the US, but the River Thames in the UK?

And there are even regional variations within the United States. In the North, you ask for tea, you get hot tea unless you ask for iced tea; in the South, you ask for tea, you get iced tea unless you ask for hot tea. Then there is the regional nomenclature for carbonated beverages, which, as the map here describes, might be soda, pop or coke.

So, frankly, I found it hysterically funny to read about whether an Academy of English is necessary. Or put another way: does the English language need protecting? This Academy would be along the same lines as what the Académie Française tries to do for French: protect the language from “impurities, bastardisations and the horrors introduced by the text-speak generation”.

But the great strength of English IS that it’s a mongrel language. Look at the etymology of some English words here, or at least skim this PDF article.

So, I have some trouble with the English-only crowd in the US. Not only may it be detrimental in the learning process of immigrants, as this report suggests, but it also cuts off the wonderful flavor of a vital language.

This video asks: What is the Future of the English language? Will it continue to be the lingua franca, or will it be supplanted? Interesting questions, these.

A conversation between Ellen DeGeneres and Hugh Laurie; she’s an American TV host, he’s a British actor best known for playing the title character in the American TV show House. And while I knew little of what he was talking about, I was even more flummoxed by HER examples.

Pretty much off-topic: Broken English by Marianne Faithfull, “live” performance, and the original video.

ABC Wednesday – Round 7

 

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