English is a funny language
posted in OmegaDotter, Philosophy, School |One of the intriguing things about having a child in the house is that you (the adult) realize just how many things you take for granted that are hard to learn (for kids).
Walking. That’s a big one. A toddler demonstrates, in no uncertain terms, just how difficult walking upright really is. It requires immense concentration. A sense of balance isn’t intrinsic–it requires practice. It takes months of constant practice before a toddler can turn the Frankenwalk into something graceful and thoughtless. Daily practice. Hours and hours of it.
Somewheres along the line, after all that practice, the brain switches from conscious effort to unconscious act.
It’s fascinating.
Dimes, pennies, nickels, quarters. It’s only with a kid around that you really grasp the idea that it’s utterly senseless, to the naked eye, that the different sizes of these different coins has no correlation to the “worth”.
Then we come to reading.
English is a language with lots of input from a variety of other languages. It’s a mutt, pure and simple. There’s Latin. There’s Saxon. There’s medieval French. There’s a slew of native American words, from a variety of different native American language families. There are Arabic words. Made-up words. Acronyms.
Then there are regular verbs versus regular verbs.
Then there are the archeological remnants of old pronunciations that linger on, like a linguistic appendix.
When you get down to learning to read, how do you distill all these disparate ingredients into a set of rules?
Take, for instance, the word “knight”. Once upon a time, it actually was pronounced somewhat like it is spelled–kunihcht, with that ch being one of those gutterals that modern Amurrikans can’t handle. But a child just learning to read, and sounding out the letters…you have to explain, well, the “k” is silent. Why? Um. (Here you can diverge into two vastly different approaches: “It just is.” Or “Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a Germanic language that pronounced the ‘k’ in a word like that, but as time went on, people who spoke English slurred that ‘k’ more and more until it simply disappeared…but our spelling still shows it.”) Then you have to explain that “igh” is pronounced “eye”. (At least, in this case it is.) And decide whether to do the short version or the long version or the medium version (”English is a funny language, dear”).
Or the letter “e” in all it’s variety. Why, for example, is the “y” at the end of the word “variety” pronounced “eee”? Why did we stick “y’s” there, instead of something else? Why is the “e” at the end of most words silent, but in “the” and “he” it isn’t?
How about “ed”? Why is it pronounced just like it looks in the word “red”, but not in “looked”? Why does it sound like a “t” there?
And on and on. And on. Oy! It’s a miracle you guys can read this bloggage at all!
This is brought to you courtesy of the dotter, who read her first full page from a Jack and Annie book today. Woot! (OmegaMom is doing the Snoopy Dance.) Yes! A full page!
But man. That one page of The Magic Tree House #2,721 was full of such pitfalls that adults (read: OmegaMom) skip right over as they read, while children (read: OmegaDotter) stumble over and question and wonder why.
Yes, in reality there are rules. But there are so many of them! And so many exceptions! And so many rules that depend upon the placement of letters! And lots that depend upon the word itself!
And, yes, it’s easier than ideographic languages, such as Chinese, where a literate person has to learn between three and four thousand individual ideographs.
But, still! Good lord. OmegaDotter was simply exhausted by the end of that one page. It takes a child an immense amount of focus to do something like that. Thank heavens for the vast variety of reading material out there, so that most kids can find something to read that interests them enough to motivate them to focus that hard, that gives them a reason to continue to practice, practice, practice. Because the only way to internalize that intricate, labyrinthine mazework of phonetic rules is to just keep plugging away at it…just like learning to walk.
