Phonics

George Bernard Shaw advocated the use of a phonetic alphabet and even made provision for it in his last will and testament. What a sad little man.

To be fair, his impulse was well-intended. He recognized that the English language is distinguished by its anomalies. Classical Latin, for example, is a wonderfully ordered language and, until the incursion of medieval influences, was reasonably consistent in phonetic pronunciation. A “c” was always hard as in “cake”—never soft as in “cello.” But English, which arose from the collision of different languages and cultures, is a mish-mash of spellings and pronunciations.

Consider the following set of words:

lager, wager, badger, major

Or what about these:

toque, took, talk, tock, noch, tomb, comb, bomb

Now try to articulate a set of pronunciation rules that captures all these vowel and consonant combinations.

I can understand Shaw’s phrostrehshun. But more frustrating to me are the scams—many of them endorsed by educators who ought to know better—to help children learn to read phonetically. For example, Hooked On Phonics presents kids with a rule-based method for learning to read. Learning to read Spanish, maybe. But not English. Yes, children can learn to read with this phun tule. But do they learn because of the exercises, or in spite of them?

I remember sitting in my grade one class with cards on my desk (like some bingo-hall training program) and when the teacher said a word, then I had to point to the word. Then we would relate the sound to a particular word pattern. Sometimes, this is valid, especially for simple, three-letter words. “Bat, cat, mat.” Or “hit, kit, bit, tit, shit.” Of course, they would edit their word lists—and conveniently omit all the words that don’t fit. Suppose we are learning a simple series like “pot, hot, dot , spot and snot.” What about “taught, taut, thought, bought?” What the hell is a “draught”? And how does “draught” differ from “laughed”?

Video didn’t kill the radio DJ; it killed George Bernard Shaw’s phonetic proposal. There was only ever one reason for phonics—to provide a durable record that fixed in time the way a people spoke. We have no way to be certain that ancient Romans pronounced their Latin in a pure and consistently phonetic way. None of the ancient Roman authors bothered to tell us. But Shaw hoped to produce a record of the many dialects that were rampant throughout the British Isles (and still are). What need have we for such a record now? We have video that documents our dreadful speech in all its gritty detail.

Instead of phonetics, the written word serves a semiotic function. In English, words do not point to corresponding sounds; they point to corresponding meanings. This is more apparent in, for example, oriental writing systems such as hanzi of Mandarin Chinese and kanji of Japanese. People learning English get lulled by the alphabetic characters into the supposition that these characters indicate the sound of the word.

How many times have you heard someone telling a six-year-old to “sound it out” when they are trying to decode a word? And so the kid comes up with “eenawgg” for “enough” or “jew—mah—ped” for “jumped.”

Language is not about sound. If we truly cared about the sound of our speech, then we would speak only in poetry. Then again, George Bernard Shaw didn’t write much poetry. Come to think of it, he didn’t write much English either.