Languages and sounds

Writing is a wonderful invention, but it has its limits.

Our tutoring consultant sometimes finds himself next to a cubicle in which a very young student is learning to read.  There’s no need to emphasize how important this skill is; even in the age of smartphones and the internet-of-things, most of the detailed information we need is in written form.  But it’s easy to forget how difficult it is to learn, and how very different the written and spoken forms of language are.  Our tutor is reminded of how English spelling rules are many, varied, and filled with exceptions, a sign of the unruly history of the language.

What struck him recently, though, is that the relation between a spoken sound and a written word varies from language to language.  The same letters can produce quite different noises depending on whether the speaker is English or French, and those speakers will transcribe the same sound in different ways.  This means that any foreign language course that includes writing must have a unit on sound correspondences, even if the new language uses the same alphabet.  Getting the pronuncation right from a written text can be a most difficult part of learning.

An Irish writer of the mid-20th century gave this problem a new twist.  Brian O’Nolan wrote under the name of Flann O’Brien as a columnist in the Irish Times newspaper.  Now and then his column would be in English, but transcribed using the Irish sound-to-letter methods.  The result looked unintelligible to a reader fluent in either language.  But if it is read out loud by an Irish-speaker, it becomes understandable English.  (We consider this an example of a particularly Irish genius, and just a bit mad.)

The root of the matter lies in the fact that we’re trying to make some two dozen letters, more or less, convey a much larger number of sounds.  Even within one language it’s not possible without some conventions, tricks and fudges.  There is no English letter for the final consonant sound in “mouth,” for example, so the convention is that t and h together have that sound.  Unfortunately they also represent the different sound found in “these.”  And the rule doesn’t apply to “hothouse.”  Once you include another language the difficulty increases enormously.

The problem can get worse.  Our navigator recently identified a bird outside his window as a bluejay (not in itself a difficult feat, but outside his normal areas of expertise).  He listened to its call for several minutes, trying to work out some transcription so he could compare it to a reference.  He finally gave up.  No doubt there are people who can recognize a bird call based on the syllables in a birding book (or vice versa), but we’re not among them.

Maybe the most amazing thing about writing down a spoken language is that it can be done at all.