Spellings

My 4 year old is now being taught to read at school. Soon enough, the tyranny of spelling will follow. English is so crazy in its spellings: When does one use a “c” instead of a “k”? Indian languages are so much more logical in their spellings (sigh)…

But should spellings even matter? Om Malik pointed out that we skim rather than read anyway. Its title was deliberately mis-spelled: “Olny srmat poelpe can raed this”. And yet, you could read it without effort, couldn’t you?

Ok, even if you couldn’t, it’s probably because you weren’t prepared for it. Let’s try reading a longer sample where practically every single word is misspelled:

If you’re even reasonably comfortable at English, that passage would have been a breeze.

Wait a minute: would it have been possible to read it if the letters in the middle were completely different from the letters in the correct spelling? Obviously not. So does that mean we still need to learn the spelling, if not exact, at least close enough?

But think a bit more: if close enough is good enough (and Auto-correct can do the rest in the increasingly digital word that our kids will inherit anyway), isn’t it time we did away with the Spelling Nazis at school and college?

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarFebruary 21, 2016 at 11:05 AM

    By the way, when you mentioned that "Indian languages are so much more logical in their spellings (sigh)…". I felt like drawing attention to the two components of organizing alphabetical scripts in India. One focused on bringing fair correlation between spoken and written ways. No script actually succeeded in this entirely because some mismatch always existed. But we will certainly agree it was a pretty good approach. No wonder, for Sanskrit alphabet representation(not Hindi, please keep in mind)there are so many equivalents of Devanagari which are all pretty good.

    The second aspect is about alpha organization. In the European languages, it is a jumble of vowels and consonants. In Sanskrit, the organization is really good. They separated vowels from consonants, and established a vowel-consonant linkage, which simply stood out in the alpha organization. Needless to say, that the "matra" or length of vowel also given clear identification. For example, let us assume, repeat assume, 'a' and 'aa' represent short and long forms of the 'a' sound. (In English there is no telling if it ever would work that way!) But in Devanagari equal, there are clear "matra" identification in the vowel structure.

    I also understand that India is the first to come up with a theory of sounds, we should call them 'notes', which is very impressive. Of course, this was done in South India, as applicable for Carnatic Music. Even the Hindustani people do not read this theory much, but this understanding is a must for all Carnatic Music enthusiasts. I understand that this method was looked at by some European Music experts who actually included this idea in their discussion regarding Classical European Music. In that sense they acknowledged the basics proposed.

    I suppose this society has the ability for "fundamentalism" in religion, but not in the way of Semitic religion where the word "fundamentalism" has gained a negative connotation. (By "fundamentalism" in the Indic context, I mean asking and facing all those questions that can uproot faith relentlessly.)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more