Learning English: An ‘Illogical’ Language .

In my previous blog, I wrote about English Language and the ‘immigration’ of many words and how some changes in pronunciation, were due mainly to accents. And, I didn’t even mention the difference in accents within the UK, from the North of Scotland, down through Yorkshire, to the west country and Cornwall. Then there’s the Irish in the extreme west, across to the Cockneys in the East! Many ‘accents’ reside even with the UK, let alone across its history of colonialism. What I want to return to, was my having to teach Malaysian students how to pronounce English ‘correctly’ when speaking, and the work I did with Robert Lam, on our popular courses “Effective Spoken English” (See last blog). The real challenge occurred when we looked at the spelling!

There are the words that sound the same, but are spelt differently and have different meanings. Here are just a few examples: whether, weather and wether (a castrated sheep) or boy vs buoy or died vs dyed, and practice vs practise. Then there is: said vs led or bed (so why isn’t said spelt ‘sed’) or sneeze vs teeze, tea vs tee or laid vs played, or staid vs stayed, or peace vs piece. There is heal vs heel, no vs know or wear vs where and meat or meet. Again, the examples can go and on! I could continue with many examples, which would appear that someone had conspired to ensure learning English would be difficult. 

When I worked for QANTAS, many people would want to spell it Quantas, not realizing it was from the initials of; Queensland And Northern Territories Airways

 At that time my daily priorities would be determined by the telexes I received. And the costs of telexes depended on their length, so words needed to be abbreviated, so a telex dictionary was given to me. Some of the telex abbreviated words still remain today (like ‘pax’ for passenger), except now it means people. Would, could or should were spelt – wld, cld, or shd – but now we spell in them as wud, cud or shud, due to SMS. Please was pls or thanks was tks, but today we say tq or adding on ‘very much’, it is tqvm. In this new world of instant messaging, we try to shorten many words even more, like ‘n’ for and, or ‘cu’ for see you, or the confusing one like ‘LOL’. Is it lots of ‘love’ or ‘laughter’?.

And here, we are only talking about spelling and pronunciation, not grammar. The illogic of the English Language can be further amplified when we use singular or plural words. Most English plurals are recognizable when we put an ‘S’ at the end. As with the last word in the previous sentence, ‘words’. OK! But how about, ‘staff ‘, or ‘personnel’ – no – ‘s’, but can still be plural! Then we have ‘one child’ but no childs – only children (and not childrens). The ‘s’ only comes in when we insert an apostrophe. For example, a child’s shoes or children’s shoes, but with ‘child’s’ it only the shoes of one child, whereas ‘children’s’ shoes would be the shoes of more than one child. There are of course many examples, but I just wanted to illustrate how difficult it can be to also learn correct grammar, and perhaps more frustrating to teach it.

As I am a more an ‘auditory’ learner, I feel blessed that I just picked up both the correct BBC English pronunciation and grammar, merely by the sound. Even though I am ‘English’, I just learned to be able to say ‘It sounds correct or not’. If asked why, I can’t tell you the rules, I almost intuitively say, “it sounds right (or not) to me”. And by the way, even though my wife would often say she is married to an Englishman, I am only 25% English! I happen to also have 25% Welsh, 25% Scottish and 25% Spanish blood in me. And yet, I do not speak with any of those last 3 accents, only the ‘English’ one. So I should forgive my wife for calling me English – or more specifically ‘S.W. London or Surrey’ English – tainted slightly with having lived also in New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia! Perhaps I can call my accent “Commonwealth Salad.”

So what type of English will future generations speak or will children still learn to spell and write? Will we learn to speak and pronounce in one way? Or will we still spell and speak in many diverse ways?

  

Learning English: Accents and Migration.

Learning English: Accents and Migration.

I am ‘English’,  (or more correctly – British). I grew up learning to speak English and acquired a hybrid accent of BBC and the Queen’s English. Luckily my parents spoke excellent English – with the same accent and I picked up correct grammar by ear, rather than from classes at school.

It was only when I migrated to New Zealand at the age 19 that I experienced weird looks from people, who thought I was too ‘posh’. But a bigger shock came when I went for an audition for a newsreader‘s job at the NZBC. They said, sorry, but you sound more like Prince Charles than the local Kiwis (not the bird)! I was told that the listeners would focus more on the sound of my Queen’s English accent, than on the news I was reading. Immediately I tried to mellow my accent so I could pass off as a ‘Pakeha’ (white New Zealander).

Later, I moved to Australia, and then found many Australians sounded more like the Cockneys from central London, so I had to fight hard to regain a more ‘BBC’ English way of speaking. But I had by now become fascinated by how accents occur. There are now dictionaries of Cockney rhyming slang and ‘strine’ (Australian slang).

It seems when we are young, we are more  adaptable, and we can adopt the accents of those around us. But once older, and having adopted an accent, it becomes harder to change. Two well known adult Germans, Peter Drucker and Henry Kissinger, who spoke with a strong German accent, did not lose their accent upon moving to live in the USA. But Henry’s younger brother, who moved with him, quickly acquired an American accent.

 For me, I had just passed the ‘age of influence’, so never really lost my ‘BBC’ accent. But it did soften and mellow and was less easy for people to pick exactly where I came from originally. Often I am taken for a South African, but not a Malaysian, where I have spent more than my life. But some word sounds   have changed a bit. (years  became – ‘yerz’ – rather than ‘yiers’).

But, back to learning English and its lack of logic. When I set up a consultancy business in Malaysia – called CREDO, many pronounced it as CRAYDO. rather than CREEDO.  I teamed up with a TV newsreader who’s  whose name was Robert Lam. He spoke more like a BBC newsreaders and we established a training course called ‘Effective Spoken English’. This really was a course on pronunciation, rather than building vocabulary or improving grammar, and I was often asked to speak to trainees on the English Language. I used to tell them there is no pure English – as it is an amalgam of Saxon, French and German words together with many Roman (Latinized) words – a sort of migration of several languages that had converged,  like ‘menu’ or ‘flambe’ (French) words and Latin, like ‘egocentric’ or ‘information’.

A lot of legal terms came from Latin and terms like, i.e. or e.g. or etc. are from the Latin Language. Long Latin words introduced by the Romans contrasted to the Anglo, like “defence vs fortification” or “shock vs mortification”. Most long words – ending in ‘ion’ came from Latin. Winston Churchill was a great promoter of using shorter words for better understanding (“seek to express rather than impress”). For example, make vs manufacture, proof vs verification, expand vs elucidate, car vs automobile, kill vs exterminate, talk or speak vs communicate and the list could go on and on.

Look at how many English words that migrated to North America and were changed, as if to deliberately confuse us even more. Schedule is pronounced skedule, so the American would ask why school is not spelt shule or skool! And programme became program, or colour became color.  Of course there is the famous line from a song; “you say tomayto and I say tomarto and I say potayto and you say potarto”. Americans will pronounce glass like gas or lass, unlike the English, where glass is pronounced glarss, or kick ass vs kick arse (an ass is a donkey!). So no wonder English is difficult to learn. The ass has an arse. So which do I kick? It’s difference in spelling, as well as accent. So, where’s the logic of the English Language? And to coin an American phrase, “there ain’t one”!

So it Is any wonder our trainees were having great difficulty with pronunciation, let alone spelling, just as I also experienced difficulties when people spoke to me in ‘Manglish or Singlish’ when I first came to Asia. Or like the problems I had with “Strine” in Australia.  And now to further complicate things (or simplify, if you are Gen Y) there is the use of SMS lingo. But let’s leave that for another blog.