Proper language

The two aspects sometimes sit uneasily together.

Our tutor is going through a textbook on Beginning Spanish.  He is not himself beginning the study of the language; that happened long ago.  His initial motivation was to see if there were any lessons or exercises in it that might be useful for his students, since he has few materials at hand for teaching the lower levels of any language.  Along the way he has been reminded of small details that he’d forgotten, so it’s been useful in that way also.

One thing that strikes him is that the book insists on the classical pronunciation of Spain, which differs from that of Latin America.  There is not even a mention of the fact that the majority of Spanish-speakers do not follow the lisping accent of Europe.  Perhaps the author decided that a beginning book should avoid such complications. (By contrast, the Teach Yourself Gaelic owned by one of our consultants discusses, in early lessons, differences among the various Western Island dialects)  Perhaps it reflects a decidedly Eurocentric outlook (it was published in 1941).  It does remind us that any spoken language and its written counterpart are not identical, and may differ profoundly.

Of course language was originally entirely spoken.  A generally literate population seems to appear no earlier than the nineteenth century, though perhaps one can find such in limited times and places previously.  Indeed, a recent very insightful book by a linguist ignores written language entirely; for his purposes it was arguably a good choice.  And it is something of a miracle that the wide variety of sounds found in most languages can be adequately represented by a limited number of letters, at least well enough to allow recognition.

But spoken languages change over time, in unpredictable though identifiable ways.  One can try to stop or limit the change by imposing a written form, but eventually the two will diverge.  It is an unfortunate accident for English that the first printed books were produced in the middle of a general change in pronunciation, so that (for instance) “knight” is now pronounced /nit/ instead of the earlier /knicht/.

And spoken languages are not uniform.  In Spain itself one can identify Galician in the north-west, almost Portuguese; Catalan in the north-east, arguably a different language altogether; and various gradations down the peninsula.  In France, similarly, Parisian French became the standard but the spoken tongues of Provence and Normandy are significantly different.  Yet in each country the written language is uniform.

In our work, we tend to regard this duality as a useful complication to the general task of communication.  The spoken lecture, the written textbook, the graphical figure and the numerical table all have their uses in getting across a scientific point; as do the more recent hybrid forms of the video and the podcast.  In any case, the spoken and the written language will always be different.  But it would be nice for learners if English spelling were more regular.