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The most efficient way to learn to spell a word is to approach it phonogram by phonogram, and not letter by letter.
A phonogram is a written symbol that stands for a sound.
The word pal, for example, contains three letters, each of which is also a phonogram: /p-a-l/. The word church , on the other hand, contains six letters, but only three phonograms: /ch-ur-ch/.
Learn to spell by Phonograms, not Letters
Here is How Do I Become a Better Speller:
A college freshman asked me how to spell “valiant” and when I did, he wondered why it was not “-ent”. He asked how I knew that and I had no idea how to respond! All along, I’ve been a terrific speller, even winning some spelling bees in my younger years. But after some thoughtful consideration and reference to my classes on teaching English, I have come up with a few helpful tips:
1. The number one thing that bolsters your spelling ability is reading. The two are so inherently linked that it is almost impossible to be a good speller without being a good reader.
Without knowing anything about this blogger, I'll go ahead and say that I'm sure this is true.
This probably explains why it's possible to teach your own child to spell with nothing beyond Megawords and a child who is able to read fluently.
This makes sense, too:
4. Writing frequently also helps you to spell with more precision. You will quickly learn which words “look right” and if not, never hesitate to consult a dictionary. Once you’ve written a word correctly a few times, you will start to remember this.
Numbers 1 and 4 probably explain me. I've always been good at spelling. I was the kind of kid who won spelling bees, back when teachers were allowed to have spelling bees.
I was also a bookworm, and, as I grew older, I started to write a lot, too.
I didn't write papers; when I went to Wellesley I hadn't written a single paper for a high school class.
I wrote letters.
5 comments:
Historical linguistics explains quite a bit too.
The "-ent", "-ant as well as the "-ance", "-ence" distinction is actually from the same source, but in different evolved forms. The "-ant" and "-ance" forms are French, while the "-ent" and "-ence" forms are Latin. You can see the regular sound change too.
Happens in English they are both reduced to the same unstressed vowel (the neutral schwa).
Were we still in Middle English, this probably wouldn't be the case.
One of the things is, even though many homonyms are otherwise pronounced the same, they "sound" different mentally. They have a different "mental stress". It's kind of hard to explain, but perhaps someone knows what I mean.
schwa!
That was the VERY FIRST SYLLABLE Megawords taught.
I remember thinking....oh, brother.
schwa
What next?
I have to learn arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and calculus in order to get my kid through school; now I have to learn schwa, too??
Well, most of us learned to speak perfectly without ever knowing about the schwa.
But it was very insightful when I discovered it. I didn't perceive the vowel found in "-ion" (e.g. "solution") to be a schwa, I always thought it was an unstressed O. This was probably due to the influence of the way I read the word -- which affected mental pronunciation (perception) but not external pronunciation (production).
That's probably how it developed too -- but in time in Modern English the unstressed vowels became completely neutral.
If someone wants to understand the real set of rules behind English orthography they have to learn linguistics. If they want to learn how to write an essay or speak in it, they don't have to, but I hypothesise that it will be a major help.
When I have children, I am thinking of whether to expose them to the IPA chart (International Phonetic Alphabet) alongside their ABC's. I think if they're more conscious about the system behind the languages they speak (which is usually grasped but only on an automatic/unconscious level).
The French language seems to have undergone the same process that English did -- in fact I wondered if it was English or French that made the e silent (and did the vowel reduction before hand) because the same time it started becoming silent in French it became silent in English too, even for "native" Anglo-Saxon words (like "ate").
You can see the the transformation from full vowel to no vowel at all in some words (or a heavily modified word).
Latin musica (pronounced /mu.si.ka/ moo-see-cah), Old French "musique" (/my.zi.kə/ mue-zee-cuh; schwa [ə] replaced [a]) becomes modern French /my.zik/ and borrowed into English (from Old French) as "music".
English didn't use to have the silent "e", and was written essentially as it was pronounced. (For example "knight" was pronounced "cniihhht".) English also used to have a real long and short vowel system, like in Latin. Some of the sound changes are very similar to what happened in the Romance family -- the trend of deprecating vowel length in favour of quality (Latin only had five vowel qualities but distinguished vowel length to make ten phonemes; modern English and the Romance languages don't distinguish length but have many different vowel qualities).
You can see the Latin ending -a becoming schwa becoming nothing as a regular sound change. You can also see dipthongisation of stressed vowels -- a pattern reflected in Old English also. (The reason why "eat" is spelt that way is because in Middle English it was stressed to the extent that it became two vowels and was pronounced "eyat". Then it was pronounced "eyt", where the "y" consonant [having the same effect as an i weak vowel] caused it to change in quality altogether as "eet".)
The Romance languages tended to drop many of the consonant endings in conjugations from Latin. (Note that the "peut" and "peux" [a medieval way to say "peus"] distinction in spellings was a back-correction.) So "amat" becomes "ame". You have a long "a", so it becomes stressed to the point of diphthonisation "aima", rhyming (at that time) with English "time". But this /a/ is attached to the end and becomes a schwa, and then later (by Modern French) it is not pronounced at all. And of course later Modern French (parallel to the changes in English phonology in some reason) undiphthongises "ai" into /e/ or /ɛ/, given us "aime" as one syllable, with a silent e.
You have "bella" to "belle" (bellah => belluh => bell). "Belle" is an interesting case because it is basically a declension of "bellus". Romance languages dropped the /s/ in "-us" and "-um" (effectively merging them) then usually changed the /u/'s into /o/'s. So "intelligentus" and "intelligenta" would become "intelligento" while "intelligenta" stays as it is. French goes a step further and drops the /o/ (along with its preceding consonant) while applying the ending "-a" to schwa sound change (intelligente), such that you get a pronunciation of "intelligentuh" for the feminine by Old French, before the ending schwa gets dropped (but not its ending consonant!) in Modern French. But traces of the ending /o/ can be seen in some areas -- and it seems that it was a schwa at point. If the "o" was a schwa for a while (before being dropped), it seemed whenever it come after an "l" it did very strange things. "a + le" becomes "au", as well as "bell" + "o" becoming "beau". So it seems that for a while, the ubiquitous Romance ending -o (that vowel you find in Italian and Spanish in words like stupido, fuoco/fuego or loco) was a schwa in French before being dropped altogether (probably as a chain shift due to pressure from the new schwa on the block, the former ending -a). Further evidence is that while Italian uses "lo" (from Latin "illus"), French uses "le", probably because it's hard to drop the schwa from a monosyllabic word!
Even today, in the southern parts of the French, the ending schwa is not fully dropped. You get a "Meridonal" accent, where "musique" seems to be pronounced as two fully articulated syllables and a schwa muttered under the breath, and in songs, the silent -e is often articulated in the form of the schwa -- though it is never pronounced in conversation.
English's ending schwas have mostly been dropped. For example, we would not pronounce "melodies" as "melodiyus". But you can still see it in a few places, like how the verb conjugation "teaches" has two vowels, not one.
So anyway, there is quite a complex and rich history behind why English and the languages it borrows from are spelt the way they are. When I was in first grade I wouldn't have imagined the reason behind the existence of the silent -e was that complex.
The effect silent -e has on vowels (other than the fact that it's no longer generally pronounced) also has something to do with closed and open syllables.
For example, take the words "fate" and "fat". One might have been pronounced "fahtuh" or "fahtay" while the other would have been just plain "fat"/"faht". The first would have had two open syllables (starting with a consonant but ending in a vowel) while the second had one closed syllable (beginning and ending with a consonant, with a vowel in between).
It's easier to lengthen a vowel if it's not between two consonants, so at the time the silent -e was pronounced, it would have allowed or encouraged the vowel pronounced in the preceding syllable to lengthen (so you get fahhhtuh) while the lack of one would have encouraged the syllable preceding where the silent -e would have been to stay short.
Then you get the Great Vowel Shift around Queen Elizabeth's time -- the long vowels are all raised in height, while the short vowels got shoved into the little niches between the cardinal vowels.
So long-e and short-e used to be pronounced what we spell now as "ay" -- the only difference was in length. But after the vowel shift, the long-e increased in height to take the place where "e" was. That is why "see" is spelt with two e's but pronounced like "si" -- those two e's meant it used to be pronounced extra long, as "ay". Long "i" itself diphthongised into /ai/, which is really why "sight" is pronounced like "sahyt.
For "a", the short vowels stayed in their places or migrated towards the back of the throat, while the long "a" moved up towards where "e" was.
So you end up with "fate" and "fat" being pronounced like "faytuh" and "fat".
Come Modern English, you drop a lot of the ending e's (they become silent). What do you get? Two different vowels, "fayt" and "fat", even though they're both pronounced as one syllable now.
You can see the effect of closed/open syllables in French and the Romance languages in general (compare "première" [premmi-ehruh, which becomes premmi-ehr in Modern French] and "premier" premmi-ay. But it doesn't apply to just the silent -e also -- compare "soon" (from OE "sona" -- the extra syllable allowed the o before it to lengthen before it was dropped).
There are a bunch of other weird sound changes too, due to all the factors and interferences. (For example a common sound change was for 'sc' to become 'sh', such as sceald to 'shield', 'Englisc' to 'English' etc.). But the reason why "ask" didn't become "ash" was because of interference of the Norse form of the verb from the Vikings who lived in Old England at the time.
So anyway, English spelling is a really tough code to crack. To me, historical linguistics is more exciting than phonics, although I wonder how many children would be interested in the long-winded version (but far more complete).
I suppose trying to teach my future children Old English at a young age would be out of the question?
It strikes me if they realise how the old language was pronounced (including what a long and short vowel literally means) it might improve their spelling if not the grasp of the language.
Or I might be what Singaporeans call "kiasu". Anyway.
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