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cents sense
Paul Stapleton
March 4, 2017
Faculty of Humanities
?
Two questions
1. What is spelling?
2. Why is English spelling so difficult?
1. What is spelling?
Transition 1
(In our ancient past before we had oral language)
Imagine you are hunting
together with a partner.
Two of you are behind a
bush.
You see a deer but your
partner doesnt.
You need to stay quiet so
the deer doesnt run away.
Your partner looks at you.
What do you do?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/science/14paint.
html?_r=1&ref=science
Symbolism grows in sophistication
From colors to holes
Oldest known
ornamentation shells
with bored holes circa
75,000 yrs. before
present
Transition 3
(from 35,000 years ago)
Cave paintings
Still far from spelling but
giant leap forward in symbolism.
Ideas could be conveyed over time (we can
still speculate on the meaning).
Sophisticated techniques in shading and
perspective to convey 3D and movement.
In the human brain
the shapes and strokes in
ancient paintings often
resemble our present-day
letters.
Several dots followed by a
deer indicates the
number of animals, and
the vocalization of such a
drawing would have been
spontaneous with reading
as the inevitable result.
Dehaene, S. (2009). Reading in the brain.
New York: Viking.
In the human brain
Our present writing systems are much more
advanced;
Present remarkable uniformity among our
many systems of writing in their method of
combining meaning with sound.
This in turn reflects the human brains nature
(discussed later).
Transition 4
(from 10,000 years ago)
Transition 4
Economic reason to write
when agriculture began
(about 10,000 years ago).
a need for accounting to
keep track of who owed
what to whom, especially
ownership of sheep and
in the case of taxes*
*Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1993). Gesture and speech.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Poe, M. (2011). A history of communication.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
From realia to
but not yet spelling
Increasing complexity
http://pipux.
net/index.ph
p?id=20
Transition 5
Cuneiform script ancient Sumerian
(southern Iraq 6000 years ago)
First phonetic script
http://ww
w.calligrap
hylearn.co
m/cuneifor
m-
alphabet.ht
ml
China (4,000 years ago)
The same concept exists today
;)
Ancient scripts
Rune (northern Europe) Ancient Roman alphabet
Transition 6
Gutenberg (1450) and
moveable type;
Before the printing
press, all documents
were written by hand;
Literacy rate in Europe
was very low.
Result of Gutenbergs printing press
Books were no longer
expensive and rare.
Books were available
widely;
Literacy expanded;
Spelling needed to be
regularized;
Led to Renaissance and
scientific revolution.
Early example
Geoffery Chaucers Canterbury Tales (1400 AD)
Here bygynneth the Book of the Tales
of Caunterbury.
1 Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
When April with its sweet-smelling showers
2 The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
3 And bathed every veyne in swich licour
And bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid
4 Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
By which power the flower is created;
5 Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
When the West Wind also with its sweet breath,
Putting things in perspective
Summary of spellings origin
1. Discovery of symbolism, e.g., pointing;
2. Increasingly abstract symbolism, colors;
3. Jewelry, art, e.g., cave paintings;
4. Pictures, strokes and dots representing
numbers and ideas;
5. Symbols representing sounds;
6. Books became widespread;
7. A need for regularized spelling arose.
What is spelling?
Spelling is the visual representation of a word
or words with letters;
Spelling attempts to transcribe the sounds of
the language into alphabetic letters.
2. Why is English spelling so difficult?
Spelling and intelligence
We often associate
good spelling with high
intelligence
and bad spelling with
stupidity
but of course it is
more complex than
that.
Spelling quiz
Go to
https://kahoot.it
Or google kahoot
Enter a game pin and
nickname
DONT shut down your
browser until the end of the
lecture!!!
How many words are misspelled?
1. It was a lovely occasion.
2. We have no accommodation.
3. I received a promotion from my boss.
4. Try to separate the fighting boys.
5. This word is definitely misspelled.
6. Its important to be consistent.
7. Do you have a 2017 calendar?
8. You need a good explanation.
Misspellings in English
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/co
mmon-misspellings
Spelling bees
mandatory
Summary of reason #2
English is spoken using many different
accents.
The spelling of any one word cannot satisfy all
of the different accents.
Can we remove the irregularities of
modern English?
Five-years phased plan for
[Euro-English] :
[5th year]
After zis fifz yer, ye vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be
no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu
understand ech ozer.
Lets look at a Chinese poem written in
pinyin.
<< Sh Shshsh sh >>
Chinese
French
English
German
Finnish
Spanish
Italian
Japanese*
*for hiragana and katagana only
Chinese and Italian
These two languages are at
the two extremities of a
continuous scale of spelling
transparency:
Italian has relatively few
sounds so the alphabet
suits it well.
Chinese is made up of
single syllables; therefore,
homophones are relatively
frequent.
The alphabet is not suitable
English is in the middle
Chinese spelling
Each of the symbols could be understood in
hundreds of different ways
Chinese writing also relies on several hundred
phonetic markers () that further specify
how a given root should be pronounced,
Could there be some hidden logic to
our writing systems?
How did our
ancient
ancestors use
our brains visual
system to
transfer
thoughts and
speech into
writing?
Letterbox area
Sight to sound
fMRI
(functional magnetic resonance imaging)
Apple
to the shapes and
strokes used.
Only a very small
number of shapes
and strokes.
The irrelevance of
size.
The flexible brain
yOu CaN pRoBaBlY rEaD ThIs
SeNtEnCe aT ClOsE tO NoRmAl
sPeEd.
Do we actually silently pronounce a
word when we read?
Read the following For the familiar words,
words: you probably processed
Rabbit them based on meaning
Bountary But for the unfamiliar
Culdolt words, you pronounced
them first, then tried to
Money bring meaning.
Dimon
Karpit
Sound into meaning
Try this sentence:
Ay fink u shud stop yr dok frum baaking.
Pal iz a wary gud teechr.
(This is how you read a sentence when you
were a child.)
Spelling in the brain
In general, there are two reading routes of spelling
1. Indirect route:
First decipher the letter string
convert it into pronunciation
access the meaning of the sound
This how we read as children (or how we read a new
foreign language
This route plays a role when learning new words or
reading the sentence in irregular language
Donald Trump has a dystopian view of the world.
Spelling in the brain
2. Direct route: From spelling
immediately to meaning
first recovers the identity and
meaning of the word;
and then uses the lexical
information to recover its
pronunciation;
Happy, sad,
For example Mistake in Chinese sentence
SAD hard to pass through (the drain)
If worse than juice
innocent today is really hot
Even punctuation carries meaning
A woman without her man is nothing
Punctuate this sentence to create meaning
from a mans point of view or a womans point
of view.
Mans point of view
A woman without her man is nothing
Mans point of view
A woman: without her, man is nothing.
Case studies
In English, we can observe many irregularities of
spelling, for example:
English French
ask demand
wish decide
room chamber
answer respond
order command
freedom liberty
Some rules of irregularities of spelling
Fish n chips
Im lovin it.
Kwik
Future spelling
(Irregular verbs)
English has many irregular verbs (about 300)
Be, have, do, go, say, get, make, know, see, think
50% of the verbs you see when reading
English are irregular!
Between 6,000 and 12,000 years ago, the
ancester of English was Proto-Indo-European.
Past tense was formed by an ablaut which
changed the vowel sound of a word.
E.g., sing sang sung
Therefore,
in the ancestral language of English, all verbs
might have been irregular.
Then a process of regularization occurred in
early German for new words.
That process was adding an ed sound to
verbs in the past tense, e.g., Google= googled
Slowly over 100s of years, the original
irregular verbs were regularized
So help-holp became help-helped
Thinking question
Why didnt all the verbs change to the regular
spelling?
E.g., go-went goed
Maked
Knowed
Answer
The regularization of verbs is ongoing and
based on frequency.
Whats the past tense of :
Sneak
Fly
Wed (presently changing to regular form)
Theory: less frequent verbs get regularized.
Answer
Big data tells us that one or two of the
following verbs may become regularized by
2500:
Begin, break, bring, buy choose, draw, drink,
drive, eat
Based on frequency of usage, eventually (if
English remains a language) all verbs will
become regular.
Similarly
(comparatives)
What is the English rule for making
comparatives?
Beijing is _______than Hong Kong in winter.
(temperature)
Apartments are _____________ in Wanchai than
Taipo. (cost of rent)
Humid,
safe,
cheap
Burn, smell, spell, spoil
Burnt, smelt, spelt, spoilt regularized in the
United States first and have mostly regularized
in the UK (but not completely)
MS Word
Auto spell checker helps to
regularize spelling and provides
less opportunity for spelling to
change.
As more and more written
communication is performed
on the keyboard (not
handwriting), the software
controls our spelling.
Therefore there is less
opportunity to introduce a new
variety.
Spellchecker
1. It was a lovely occassion
2. I recieved a promotion
from my boss.
3. Try to seperate the
fighting boys.
Fun spelling
What sentence contains every letter in the
alphabet?
The quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown
dog.
What word contains all the vowels: a,e,i,o,u
automobile
What word contains all the vowels in order:
facecious
Fun spelling
What word has the most double letters?
Committee
Is there a word that has four vowels in a row?
Queue
Q&A
The public lecture series goes on line!
Open in late March 2017
World Englishes