Of spoken languages, written word and pronunciations

Several problems in teaching languages are caused by various misconceived notions about the relationship between the spoken and the written language. First of all, it is mistaken to believe that these are the only two modes of communication that all societies have.

In fact, only few societies have a written mode of communication even today; several social groups manage quite well simply with an oral system of communication, transmitting their systems of knowledge and socio-cultural traditions orally. Secondly, in addition to the spoken and the written, there are other equally powerful systems of communication available in the sign languages and the Braille script or in such software as Jaws.

That sign language is as grammatical and powerful a system of communication as say French or Hindi is generally but not appreciated; similarly, all that the people do with the Roman or Devanagari writing systems can equally accurately be done by the six dots of the Braille system of writing.  Just these two major gaps in common knowledge of people in general and the teaching community in particular are enough to keep a large number of visually and hearing impaired children out of the system of education. It is also important to realise that whereas speech is millions of years old, writing systems developed only about 5,000 years ago at best.

However, the most serious misconceptions result from the assumption that the only way of writing is alphabetical where each letter of the alphabet always uniquely represents the sound corresponding to it. In fact, there are several different writing systems that people across different societies use. The earliest writing systems known to us are the Egyptian hieroglyphic and Sumerian cuneiform scripts that developed out of a long history of carvings, scratching, painting etc in the caves (that’s why as Vygotsky (a Soviet psychologist) would suggest, it is important for us to recognise that more often than not the pre-school scribbles and line sketches of children constitute a kind of pre-writing).

The early systems of writing were indeed based on line drawings and pictographs. The idea of representing concepts and words in terms of shapes took a more sophisticated form in the Chinese ideographic characters which could be modified to represent related concepts and words. The alphabetic and syllabic systems of writing are of more recent origin.

Most teachers believe that the Devanagari system of writing is phonetically accurate as opposed to say, the Roman writing system. This indeed is not true. All systems of writing are invented to systematically represent sounds of a language in a uniform way. Teachers would often say, in English, ‘put’ is pronounced as it should be with ‘u’ sound while ‘but’ is weird because it is pronounced with ‘a’ like vowel sound.

They would also cite such words as ‘cycle, psychology, walk, make’ etc, to show how inconsistent the English spellings are. They would say in the same breath such words from Hindi as ‘kamal and kamla’ saying that they are pronounced exactly the way they are written. They do not see the obvious paradox that the ‘m’ in the first word also has an inherent ‘a’ where as the ‘m’ of the second word does not have it.

Thus, even though written in the same way, they are pronounced differently. In the case of English, ‘but’ and ‘put’ were both pronounced exactly as they were written, with ‘u’ once upon a time and many parts of England even today pronounce these words with the same sound ‘u’.

Changing speech habits

What people often don’t realise is that speech changes much faster than the written word which for a variety of reasons acquires a certain social prestige.

Without realising that speech is millions of years older than the written word and that the best of wisdom of a substantial part of the world may still be only orally coded, the spoken word starts getting examined from the norms of the written word.  Our keep changing all the time. Grandparents can often understand grandchildren but perhaps that’s about it.

Say about 10 generations across, spoken language of the members of the same community becomes incomprehensible to each other. We cannot read Chaucer or even Shakespeare today without substantial help from the professional experts of 14th or 16th centuries. Languages do not change as rapidly as say the stock market but they certainly change faster than changes in the human body or the shape of the earth.

The written form fails to keep pace with the changes in the spoken form. For one, the written word particularly as coded in the religious and other sacred texts, acquires a kind of sanctity that people dare not touch. For example, the vocalic sound ‘ॠ’ of Sanskrit is no longer pronounced by most Hindi speakers but we have to write the word for a sage as ‘ॠिष’ even though it is generally always pronounced as ‘rishi’ and no wonder most children write it as ‘िरिश’. That also shows that the much taught distinction between ‘श’ and ‘ष’ actually does not exist and that even the best of teachers would say that one is the ‘sh’ of  ‘शान्ित and the other of ‘वषि .’ That does not explain anything.

One hopes that if this relationship between the spoken and the written is understood, teachers and teacher-trainers would look at the ‘mistakes’ of children as indices of their achievements and necessary stages in the trajectory of learning.

(Having retired from the University of Delhi as Professor of Linguistics, the writer is Professor Emeritus at Vidya Bhawan Society)