English Hieroglyphics are fun and easy to read

Rantrave.com ^ | September 22, 2013 | Bruce Deitrick Price

[Dr. Sivana]

May I suggest that your phonics education is incomplete as most of the words you list are in fact phonetic.

I would suggest in turn that your definition of phonetic is a little more expansive than mine. You could pretend that every word is phonetic if you list all of the exceptions as regulars. For a seven year old, it is not very helpful.

I understand that "FOUR" rhymes with "POUR"; but it certainly does not rhyme with "FLOUR" or "SOUR". I just came up with a handful of very short words off the top of my head. If you read with children who are taught with phonics, as mine are, you will see these issues pop up with great frequency, and in many cases brute force memorization will have to come into play.

Any language that is not man-made (e.g. Esperanto), ordered into regularity by an academy or government (Finnish), or simply utterly primitive, is going to have these issues, usually with some basic or very old words (which is why the verb to be is irregular in so many languages).

My wife does the teaching, so I will mention the Spaulding site to her. Again, this is NOT a slam at phonics. Phonics is the foundation of being able to read nearly all western languages well. Once that foundation is built, reading itself fills things out. Over time, we do recognize patterns, as we no longer have to sound out each word as adult readers.

[muir_redwoods]

Words like “choir” and “night” the pronounciation of which bear no relationship to their spelling are taught that way until children learn the exception just to improve fluency. The bulk of words like “word”, “have”, “like” etc that follow spelling rules are taught with phonics.

[D Rider]

Don’t you know the eco-nuts back in the 1920s were freaking out over the possibility that the north and south poles were going to melt away?

There is a great graphic from the old farmers alminac Global Warming Timeline Graphic

I can see your point that whole word can be a re-run of a 1930's idea.

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

RE: “Many parochial schools are not much different from public schools...”

This is a very important point. It’s so sad to see the Catholic schools corrupted by the deliberately dumb public schools.

The Catholic Church could make a huge contribution to this country by the simple device of having excellent schools.

First rule? Do not adopt any policy or method used in a public school. If you need a suggestion, call three private schools, ask what they’re doing, and go with the majority.

Okay, Catholics. Put some pressure on your nearest parochial schools.

[Valpal1]

I’ve taught phonics for 30 years and homeschooled my own four. Spalding is the most comprehensive. 70 phonograms and 30 spelling rules, 100 simple facts about the English language that are generally easy to memorize, so brute force shouldn’t be necessary. It’s quite easy to make it fun.

[Cronos]

Not really — Polish, Marathi and Latin are pronounced how they are spelt.

[Dr. Sivana]

Not really — Polish, Marathi and Latin are pronounced how they are spelt.

I cannot speak for Polish or Marathi, but Latin is a bit messier. Many exceptions have been weeded out over the years (as they have in French by the Academié, which had the pretension to go back to "correct" Balzac, cf. "The Story of French"), but Virgil was well known for using an archaic vocabulary, which broke a number of conventions. I'll have to check my Allen and Greenough for specific examples.

Modern Ecclesiastical Latin is quite regularized, in large part because the Catholic Church standardized pronunciations not so very long ago (18th - 19th century?) before that time, English, French, Italian and other priests had different ways of pronouncing many words, until Rome stanmdardized on an Italianate pronunciation. English-speaking countries' "Legal" Latin of course has an entirely different pronunciation, tossing diphthongs in where they do not belong (Legal Latin "Venire" pronounced "Vehn-eye-ree" rather than "Vehn-eer-ay", for instance ... awful to the ear). Granted, each of these systems in modern times may have been consistent within themselves, so that might not be applicable to your argument. We do not know with certainty how the language was pronounced in ancient times, at best we have some good ideas as to how some prominent writers pronounced certain things, and we get some help from poetry. Even in modern Latin textbooks, macrons are often placed over the long e as a hint (to determine between ablative and other cases) which would be unnecessary if it were always pronounced as it is spelled.

I do understand that some of the Scandinavian countries or thereabouts were forcing a strict standardization. That probably works better with smaller, homogenized populations.

[KYGrandma]

While in China in July, I only learned to read one Chinese letter/figure? It was for toilet. I only learned it because the figure looked like a toilet. Except most of them were the squatting kind.