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| ..... | SPANGLISH, PAGE 1 | http://members.fortunecity.com/rapidrytr/spanglish1.htm | S.Bett Rev. 4-00 ITA | .DIPHTHONGS | FONIM TABL | REF >> |
Spanglish [this paragraph is an example] restors the original ogmented Latin alfabet. Re-establishing an alfabet for English iz requird for pronunciation spelling. The Saxon alfabet corrects [or unshifts] the pronunciation of the vowels [vaulz] and brings them back in alignment with international letter-sound values. This set of grafim-fonim (letter-sound) correspondences iz yuzd tu pronounce or sound out each [ich] letter in a werd. Only thoz werds that cannot bi understwd wen sounded out [such as through] ar respeld. *of can be pronounced as ov. v and f are the voiced and unvoiced version of the same sound. The spelling change would be optional. *A terminal s is normally pronounced z in English because Saxon rarely used the z, no change is required. s and z are the voiced and unvoiced versions of the same sound. The same preference for s to mark the z sound is found in German. SPanglic In the early 1800's, Noah Webster remarked, "Letters, the most useful invention that ever blessed mankind, lose a part of their value by no longer being representatives of the sounds orignally annexed to them." The effect is, "to destroy the benefits of the alphabet." Webster was aware that there was a time in English history when the language had a functional alphabet. Tenth century clerics devised a Latin based alphabet for English that made it possible to spell words as they were "pronounced and pronounce words as they were spelled. Could the restoration of the benefits of the alphabet be as simple as restoring the Saxon alphabet? Could the usefulness of the alphabet be restored by restoring the sounds originally annexed to the letters? That is the conclusion of two spelling-pronunciation reform proposals: Spanglish and Englisc. All spelling reformers desire a closer connection between spelling and pronunciation. It should be possible to pronounce words as they are spelled. With 60% of the words in tradition English, this is not possible. The link betrween spelling and pronunciation was lost in the Great Vowel Shift ca. 1400. A spelling pronunciation reform differs from a phonemic reform. Instead of referencing a particular dialect, the reference is to traditional spelling. This kind of reform minimizes the number of words needing to be respelled. Only words that cannot be understood when pronounced according to the Saxon alphabet are respelled. This kind of reform brings pronunciation more in line with international pronunciaton and spelling more in line with international spelling. Spanglish looks something like English written in a Spanish orthography, hence the name. One could justifiably call it restored English alphabetic spelling because it is nearly identical to the system used when English speakers first adopted the Roman alphabet. By the mid 9th century, England had a near perfect sound based spelling system known as West Saxon Standard. Old English (850-1060 AD) was written in a church Latin inspired alphabet in a way consistent with how it was pronounced in the 9th and 10th centuries. Anglo Saxon used grapheme-phoneme correspondences almost identical to those shown in the Spanglish vowel table. In the augmented Latin alphabet, each Roman letter was associated with a specific sound. The six vowel letters were associated with two sounds - the long and short version of the vowel. The letter [a] referenced the Roman /a/ sound [ah]. A new letter had to be added to reference the Saxon ash so [æ]* was added to the Latin alphabet.
Instead of retaining the old correspondence table, the English speaking world has retained many archaic spellings. By doing so, the relationship between spelling and pronunciation has been all but lost. English went from being over 90% phonemic to being less than 40% phonemic. [proof] Less than 40% of the English vocabulary is spelled according to the dictionary pronunciation guide. A perfectly phonemic spelling system, all words would be spelled acording to the pronunciation guide. [through = thru]. SS produces a more phonemic spelling system but not a perfectly phonemic system. latter letter later } latter letter later } laetr letr leitr } læt'r let'r leit'r. AS uses the double consonant to mark the short [checked] vowel. When England adopted the
Roman alphabet (8th century),
they also adopted the sounds associated with the letters. To make
a 5 vowel alphabet work with a language that had 12 vowels, the Latin alphabet
was augmented. The West Saxon standard (ca. 900
AD) added several runic letters for the missing sounds.
The ash [c] provided a way to reference the sound that differed from the
Italian A. The West Saxon alphabet had 6 vowel letters, each letter
had a long and short pronunciation as shown below:
By the 10th century, English had a highly consistent spelling system known as the West Saxon standard. The sounds that corresponded to the letters A E I O U were ah, eh, ee, awe, oo. [IPA: a: e i: o: u:] [see table above]. If these letter to sound correspondences were restored, English could once again have a functioning alphabet. Restoration means no more than two sounds per vowel letter. Saxon would often double e and o to mark the long or extended vowel sound. Before 1400 reed and deed rhymed with red or raid, tool rhymed with tole or tall, and time rhymed with team. Spelling-Pronunciation Linguists look at spelling pronunciation as a symptom of the shift from an aural to a visual bias. When the orthography was being developed, speakers determined what was written. Writing was a transcription of speech. Now writing affects what is spoken. In spelling pronunciation, speakers modify the pronunciation of a word based on how it is spelled; e.g., forehead pronounced with an H, /for-hed/ instead of /for'ed/ which was the most common pronunciation. Restoring the alphabet makes more accurate spelling-pronunciation possible. Instead of 20 sounds per vowel letter there would be only two. Spelling pronunciation does not exactly duplicate any particular dialect. In some cases the dialect resembles Middle English because this is the way some words are spelled. It slightly distorts the pronunciation of some words, [for example -- ox becomes aux] but the distortion or historic pronunciation is not so great as to prevent understanding. Many of our English word spellings are from Middle English where they referenced the Saxon alphabet. When these words are not respelled, their spelling pronunciation approximates Middle English. There are some historical spellings that do not make sense or that would make more sense if misleading letter[s] were removed. For example, [gh] is no longer pronounced in any contemporary dialect of English. Thus, the spelling pronunciation of <through> would be nearly unintelligible. The spelling pronunciation of [thru], however, exactly duplicates current pronunciation. There are 12 pure vowel phonemes in present day English. A complete alphabet would need 12 vowel letters. In addition to the 12 uncombined sounds, there are at least 12 vowel combinations. Using the Saxon, the combination of sounds is represented by the combination of letters. ai = ah + ee [the vowel in eye] The Spanglish proposal is to limit the sounds associated with vowel letters to two and to substitute new letters in traditional spellings [TS] only when the spelling pronunciation of TS cannot be understood. This approach has some fuzzy edges or boundaries since the degree to which a spelling pronunciation of a word can be understood in context varies. An alphabet is a consistent set of relations between the way a word is pronounced and the way it is spelled. In other words, in an alphabetic system, words that rhyme are spelled the same. Spanglish does a much better job of attaining this alphabetic ideal than TO. Across all English dialects, there are two ways to vocalize the word DAY. The vocalic sound in DAY can therefore be spelled two ways ay /ai/ or ey /ei/ [ah-ee or eh-ee]. Both Spanish and English orthographies prefer a y in the terminal position to mark a syllable boundary . Since the pronunciation of the traditional spelling, DAY /dah-ee/, is understandable, Spanglish does not require respelling. The only time the respelling of [day] would be required in a broad romic notation would be in a dictionary pronunciation guide where the objective was to represent a particular dialect such as General American [GA]. day /dey/ [GA] Notice that in Spanglish each letter is pronounced and the same notation is used for both quasi traditional spelling and for phonemic spelling. Except for H, there are no silent letters in Spanish or Spanglish.
The development of number words illustrates how pronunciation changes over time. According to the linguists, all of these pronunciations developed from a common pronunciation. Around 500 A.D., Anglo Saxon, Dutch, Danish, and German number pronunciations were almost identical. The word for [one] was ahn or ehn (an, en). If the word [one] is pronounced as spelled, aw-nuh, it is still close to the Anglo Saxon word [an]. The French influenced silent e was added around 1200 when the Spelling was typically [onne] so the pronunciation probably remained about the same: /ahn/. Indo European Number Words - At one time they were all pronounced the same...
Today over 600 million people in the world speak a Latin based language. More than double that number use a Latin based alphabet with Latin letter sound values. In Latin, a vowel letter has one sound which is also the letter's name. Except for the vowels the letter names are not all that much different from English. English speakers have disroted or shifted the original Latin vowel letter soundsThe vowel sounds. To maintain the alphabet, when the pronunciation of words change, the spelling has to change.
In a related example, ice used to be spelled is and pronounced /i:s/ [ees]. After the Battle of Hastings (1066) scribes spent most of their time writing Norman French which unlike Saxon, had a highly illogical spelling system. These scribes tended to write English in a French way [Scragg, 1974]. is started to be spelled ice around 1200 A.D. Later, during the great vowel shift the pronunciation of the word changed to /ais/. Instead of respelling the word again to reflect this change in pronunciation, the spelling remained the same. English became populated with words that were spelled one way an pronounced another. England standardized their word spelling around 1755 with the publication of the first popular dictionary. No attempt was made to standardize below the word level so FIVE became one of many ways to spell the vowel in /faiv/. Before this time some people probably spelled it FYV. This vowel spelling stuck with sky, fly, and my but not with five and ice. The great vowel shift took place around 1400 when the six long vowels began to change their values in a systematic way. Chaucer would have pronounced the middle vowel in time like that in moder team. see would have sounded like say, fame like farm without the R, so like saw, and do like doe, and now like naw-oo. The great vowel shift resulted in a major barrier to intelligibility between middle and modern English. As illustrated in the chart of number words, changes in pronunciation over a 200 year period are not unusual. Other languages have coped with it and retained their alphabet by making corresponding changes in their spelling. This might have been relatively easy in the early 1800s when Benjamin Franklin and Noah Webster recommended that we follow the reforms that were taking place in the orthographies of other European languages. Franklin and Webster thought this was the only chance we had of preserving what was left of our alphabet.
Most phonemic or alphabetic reforms of English respell 60% or more of the words in the dictionary. This can be checked by counting the number of words in the dictionary that are spelled the same as they are in the pronunciation guide. In an alphabetic reform, all the words would be spelled the same as they are in the pronunciation guide. After this kind of reform, there would be no need for a pronunciation guide. Pronunciation guides are found almost exclusively in English dictionaries. They are not needed with alphabetic (or phonemic) orthographies. Spanglish is not a pure phonemic
reform and only respells about 25% of the words in the dictionary.
At this point in time, the decision to respell is intuitive. Perhaps he /heh/ is close enough to hi /hee/ to leave alone. At the current time it is respelled [hi]. In the future, there would be an objective test to determine what words cannot be understood when pronounced according the the correspondence table. Such words require respelling. ______
In the 1960's, New Spelling became the basis of Pitman's augmented Roman, also known as ITA. In the 1980's, the Society advanced a second simplified spelling proposal called Cut Spelling. With this scheme, silent and redundant letters would be cut or removed but no attempt would be made to substitute the correct vowel. Cut Spelling eliminates UGH spellings: rough becomes rof, thorough becomes thoro. Removing surplus letters reduces the number of ways to spell a particular vowel from around 20 to around 8: This significant improvement is achieved while retaining the traditional visual shape of most English words. Spanglish also routinely removes silent or redundant letters. Give is respelled giv because this is how it is pronounced today. The old pronunciation was giv-eh. The word, day, is not respelled because (1) it can still be understood when pronounced as spelled: dah-ee and (2) because this is the way the word is pronounced in some English dialects. Wh is one of those letter combinations that cannot be pronounced. [Who, what, where, when, and why] should be [hu, huot, huer, huen, huai]. The 5 W's are actually the 5 H's: To minimize visual disruption, the 5 W's would be re-spelled hu, wat, wer, wen, and wai. This is the way that the words are pronounced in some dialects of English and these are the most economic spellings. They are also the spellings that would be most easily recognized by English speakers. Cut Spelling uses the same principle of economy to arrive at the same spellings except in the case of [who]. This creates some new homophones such as "Wer w'r yu going tu wer that." Homographs that are different parts of speech [wer = where/wear] are rarely problematic. If you pronounce wer
as /wer/, you will be understood. But there is nothing to prevent
people from pronouncing wer as /hwer/ or /hwe W was a late addition to the alphabet. The Latin V had the same sound. worse used to be spelled uuerse or vverse. v/u and i/j did not become distinct letters until after 1450. Before then they were written interchangeably. Spanglish spelling [wors or w'rs]. Spanglish could be the basis of a practical orthographic reform since it fulfills the following conditions
Those who learned the Spanglish correspondence table would be ready to pronounce many old English words. In this respect Spanglish does a better job of retaining access to our distant heritage than the 18th century spelling system used today. A Spanglish dictionary would usually have two correct spellings for a particular word. [ maintain /meintein/ ] [can /cæn/] The second spelling would be closer to general american pronunciation or the regional educated dialect. Instead of listing the archaic spelling first, the dictionary would list it last [ requair /rikwair/ <require> ] [ thoz /dhowz/ <those> ] Considr a fraz transcribd intu Spanglish: Thoz pepl dont now hau tu pranauns English corectly. The exact pronunciasion iz a litl ambiguous becoz ther ar typic'ly twu pronunciasions ov ev'ry vaul. Thoz wd hav tu bi speld dhoùz or dho'z tu eliminat the ambiguity. In this case, the solution
may be worse than the problem. A slight mispronunciation might be
preferable to the added complexity and loss of familiarity.
While Spanglish could be used to replace the current spelling system, the current proposal is simply to use it as an initial teaching alphabet, a pronunciation guide, a parallel notation, and as a means of understanding the traditional orthography (TO). As parallel notation could be used in publications and in informal communication. TO is a mix of several coding systems. Latin spelling is but one of the codes. It is accurate to say that the foundation of TO is "mixed up" since it combines several incompatible codes. This makes spelling a linguistic guessing game. The proposal is to start with one consistent system and then add the alternate codes and irregularities on to this solid foundation. (example) Learning to read and write is much less frustrating and much quicker when the orthography is transparent1. Once a person learns how to read in a consistent system, the skill readily transfers. It takes only about 40 hours for most children to memorize and apply 40 consistent grapheme-phoneme correspondences. Once learned, they can spell and write any word they can pronounce and pronounce any word they see written. No one disputes that it is easier to learn 40 relationships than 400. (Mastery of TO requires learning more than 400 relationships) If there has been a dispute, it has been over the transferability of reading and writing skills gained in mastering a simple consistent orthography to a complex inconsistent one and exactly how to translate research findings into educational policy. Does it make sense to learn a logical system when the goal is to learn the illogical English writing system? Twenty years of research indicates that it does but there is no consensus on the best ITA (initial teaching alphabet) or on the best way to make the transition.
In the 11th Century, English was just as consistent as the writing system of any other language. Now it is only 40% consistent or alphabetic. Most languages have been able to maintain alphabetic consistency in the 90% range. To do this the country has to change word spelling if and when the majority of speakers change the pronunciation of a word group. Such changes are a precondition of retaining an alphabet. When changes are made every 50 years or so, very little has to change. English has gone 1000 years without an overhaul. Changes have been made to the writing system such as replacing uv with ov to improve handwriting legibility [luve became love] but few of the changes improved alphabetic consistency. The system is now so out of whack that it is difficult to reestablish any consistent alphabetic relationships without a major overhaul. Spanglish is proposed as
a parallel notation and as a new initial teaching alphabet.
However, the shifts were rarely so drastic as to obscure the meaning of the word. for comprehending anglocentric spelling patterns than ITA-Nue Speling.
It probably doesn't make
much difference which ITA is used. Any consistent orthography will
make the mastery of reading and writing easier, quicker, and more enjoyable.
Spanglish is an interesting ITA because it is based on Latin, one of the
three
major spelling patterns found in the traditional orthography. It
is a pattern that learners have to learn to become proficient spellers.
Latin spelling patterns form the basis of most European alphabets. Due primarily to the great vowel shift, Latin is not the dominant spelling pattern found in English and therefore not selected by Pitman for his ITA. While Spanglish has sufficient phonemes to make a narrow transcription of speech, it avoids doing this. Traditional English has shown that a writing system need only to suggest the correct sound, it does not have to be right on target. For communication and ease of teaching and learning, a simple approximate system is a superior to a detailed complex notation.
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| English Phonemes
matched with Spanish Phonemes and blends
Blue indicates phonemes that are not present in Spanish. Green and maroon cells can be ignored.
1Research on ITA, see Downing and others. Spelling reform is usually recommended as a way to reduce learning time and increase literacy rates. The full argument was so well stated in the early 20th century that books such as Follick's The Case for Spelling Reform were criticized for adding nothing to the argument.
Corrado wrote regarding the -tion/ -sion/ -cion matter Latin offers both ending CONDITIO-NIS/CONDICIO-NIS phonetically both the English -tion and the spanish -cion are equally wrong English + French +
German spell it -tion
English pronunciation
is -shen/-shun
(Steve wrote)
It is based on the notion
that the role of a practical orthography is not to precisely capture the
dialect of a speaker but to provide clues as to the pronunciation and meaning
of words. In other words, it is a kind of
So what we have is an orthography that is a more alphabetic and consistent than English and which provides better clues as to the pronunciation of unfamiliar words and the spelling of familiar words. Spanglish can be used in
two ways, as you indicate. There would be dictionary spellings and
phonetic spellings just as there is now. Formal publishing would
follow the dictionary spellings. Informal writing could be based
on the dialect of the speaker.
http//onlinecourse.nsula.edu select LSMSA then SPANISH ID Perez PW Pere http://members.fortunecity.com/rapidrytr/sitemap-l.htm http://members.aol.com/alvareze/spanish/frame.html Spanish pronunciation http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimer.htm background: bg-red-yelo12.gif Sitemap-LLatin-1 æ à ì è é ò ô ó ù ò next page>> |
Spanglish
does not look like 
In
English, most of the pronunciation shifts affected the vowels. Words
such as fif /feefv/ began to be pronounced /faiv/. One of
the middle English spellings for /feefv/ or /fi:v
/
was FIVE.
After the 14th century vowel shift, this old spelling became associated
with the new pronunciation /faiv/.
One
of the guiding principles of the Simplified Spelling Society, founded in
1908, was the principle of least disruption.
The initial proposal, which came to be called New Spelling, attempted to
minimize disruption by making the most common spellings of English speech
sounds the standard. When it became evident that this would still
lead to respelling 60% of the words in the dictionary, other devices were
sometimes used (such as allowing 20-40 irregular words) to make NS
easier to read. Although quite readable, New Spelling was quite visually
disruptive. Words did not always retain a familiar pattern.
The
transition from a consistent system to one that is only 40% consistent
is always problematic. For the most part, the original ITA experiments
in the late 1960's and early 1970's let the students fend for themselves.
Consequently there is not much research on this process. Most young
people figured it out for themselves and eventually more or less mastered
the traditional orthography. However, some of those who learned to
read and write with Pitman's ITA never completed the transition.
They blame the ITA approach for their poor spelling skills. While ITA is
an easy target, poor spellers are probably evenly distributed across all
teaching methods.
