The English language, as we know it today is barely recognizable from its Germanic roots, and the modern reader may experience some difficulty interpreting the meaning from the terminology of most people living from 1100 through the 1500’s.  This era, in terms of language development and evolution, is characterized by what is termed “Middle English.” This epoch utilized certain aspects of French vocabulary, and we can see evidence of this throughout the works of Chaucers’ famed “Canterbury Tales,” and other masterpieces.  

Many of the modifications are trivial, and are easily identifiable by applying spelling and pronunciation differences, for example; “younge sonne,” “melodye,” and “slepen nyght;” however, some terms are not so easy to determine meaning or context for the casual reader, including; “durste,” “clepe,” and the term “I wot.” 

The easily recognizable terms that were prominent in Chaucer’s era are words still in use today, and do still bear some resemblance to the Middle English form.  Oftentimes, the reader can discern the context by analyzing the other words within the same sentence or line of poetry.  The term “younge sonne” even to the casual reader is readily identifiable to refer to a “young son.”  Similarly, “melodye,” can be translated as “melody.”  These are good examples of this phonetic resemblance; it would appear that only the spellings are altered.  Even, the term “slepen nyght,” can still be identified as referring to “sleeping night,” in spite of the visual differences between the Middle and Modern versions by simply uttering the words aloud.  Therefore, readers of Chaucer and other Middle English authors can faithfully rely on their acquired knowledge of phonetics, vocabulary and word recognition to assist them with comprehension and thus, decipher context from the reading.

With that said, many words circulating during this time are no longer used today or “has become obsolete or has changed its meaning over the centuries.”  Many of the terms have ambiguous meanings, or have differing meanings for differing contexts.  One such situation occurs when attempting to decipher the meaning of the word “durst.”  The Concise Dictionary of Middle English offers several synonyms for “durst,” ranging from “I dare,” to “dear.”  Michael Murphy, a scholar who has extensively researched Middle to Modern translations, and who has specifically concerned himself with the work of Chaucer, proclaims the proper interpretation of “dare” is a more accurate clarification of Chaucer’s’ writing.  Murphy’s work can be found online here; http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/webcore/murphy/canterbury/1intro.pdf

There seems to be less disagreement with the term “clepe,” and is taken to mean to “call.”  The Concise Dictionary of Middle English however, defines the term as a similar verb, translating as “recall.”  Alphadictionary.com is in agreement with Murphys’ translation  and clarifies that “clepe” means to call out a name.

The third term to be discussed, “I wot” seems to have derived from Shakespearian old English, and means, “I know,” and once again, is in agreement with Murphys’ analysis. 

Probably the best evidence to explain changes in pronunciations is a trend that has been termed “The Great Vowel Change,” which began in “the twelfth century and continuing until the eighteenth century.”  However, the most prominent changes occurred during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  Harvard University scholars maintain this change occurred because “Old and Middle English were written in the Latin alphabet and the vowels were represented by the letters assigned to the sounds in Latin.” Consequently, there had been an increased awareness that there was a need to create a new alphabet, because “the pronunciation of English had moved so far from its visual representation.”  The sixteenth century saw the beginning of the English language reformation, a movement that scholars at Harvard insist, is “still active today.” (L. D. Benson)  The Great Vowel Change had a huge impact on Chaucers’ writings. 

Michael Murphy points out that the changes that ensued in the English language were not consistent.  Words that once rhymed in Chaucer’s poetry suddenly were no longer phonetically similar.  For example, when Chaucer was writing, the words “hood,” “blood,” and “mood,” all rhymed  with one another, as did “save,” “heart,” and “convert,” and we can see that the “most observable shift [is evident in the vowels] from o to u.”  (Murphy)

If the Harvard scholars are correct, and that the evolution of the English language is a continual process then we may never find a proper or standardized version.  It is interesting to note that there are many variations of the language in use today, accounting for educational and cultural differences and the problem of ensuring a consistent form may be more complicated that scholars thought in the beginning of this project.  There are generational differences in the way language is used in the current era, easily recognizable by the younger population using acrostics or “text talk” to convey a message.

To highlight this point, a quick “Google” search provides several results translating the Middle English term “wot” to “waste of time,” and given the artistic flair of language during the Old and Middle English period, it is difficult to determine whether Shakespeare and Chaucer would be amused or mortified by the contemporary changes in communication forms.

Those with a passive interest in languages will note that almost all Germanic and French influences, at least phonetically, are obsolete in the Modern form, yet we retain certain spelling similarities.  However, even this is not consistent considering regional dialects and geographic location. It is assumed then, that the English language will continue to make changes and evolve until the end of time and will provide a continual source of study for language majors.

With English being Pakistan’s de facto official language, its prevalence amongst the masses was only but inevitable. However, despite British Raj lasting for about two hundred years, the areas that lie within the realm of Pakistan now, were amongst the last to be annexed. Consequently, English and its phonetics have gotten less time to blossom in the country. In addition, multilingualism has deeply influenced the way English is spoken in Pakistan, with only a nominal percentage speaking the language devoid of vernacular accents and pronunciation.

The expert chosen as a sample of 504 phonemes are spoken languages, including indigenous Pacific and America, and found that the dialects which contain most of the phonemes are spoken in Africa, while those with the least amount spoken in South America and tropical islands in the Pacific Ocean.

Their estimates say that the language and genes evolve in a similar manner, so that the methods and theory of biology could be applied to language and vice versa. That is, once humans expanded their geographic scope from Africa to the rest of the world, to colonize other regions, diversity was reduced phonetic and evolved with human populations migrants.

According to the expert, the so-called ‘founder effect’ that exists in population genetics occurs when a small population shows a larger original population to colonize new territory and carries a subset of original population diversity. That is, there is a ‘bottleneck’, and while transmitting a high genetic diversity is likely to be lost in small populations. In this sense, the same scenario could apply to the phonemes of languages.

According to research, in general, areas of the world that were colonized less phonemes recently incorporated into the local languages, while areas that have been home to human life for thousands of years, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, still use most of phonemes. ”This decline in the use of phonemes can not be explained by demographic or other local factors and, therefore, are clear evidence of an African origin of modern human languages,” concludes the work.

Literary experts have been quick to send criticism to this latest plan by the British government to change yet again the education system that is seen by many to be failing. It will only serve to confuse those young learners and send the wrong message.

The government stated that the inclusion of these so called non-words was to check the ability of each pupil by decoding words using phonetics. I would have thought there are more than enough words already in use within the English language to test six year olds abilities to use phonetics without some new ones without meaning being created.

A spokesperson for the Department for Education said that the test was to check that children were not just repeating their way through memorized words, well surely reading is all about repeating those words we all hold in our memory banks and not having to decipher what is a real word and what is a made up one, that comes into being in a spelling test.

The new test is proposed to take about ten minutes to complete and would consist of 40 questions, a mixture of words and non-words.

By trying to send out the message that reading is easier at that age through the use of phonetics sends out another false message because so many words within the English language are not easily identifiable through the use of phonetics.

Within the education system in the UK today, too many children are unable to read and write properly. Too many are not grasping the chance to read a book for their leisure time. One of the problems in my opinion is the use of texting and sending messages, using abbreviated codes instead of writing the correct word, if that were to be taught and not non-words maybe the education system would improve without resorting to these strange tests.

However, wordsearches can be used as amuch more purposeful resource than this and actually have lots of benefits tothe learning of students.  Here are some of the benefits that wordsearches have.

-Phonetics recognition

If you are looking for particular groups of words, scanning the letters looking for individual letters or groups of letters can help with phonetic recognition and letter recognition.

-Information Processing

Scanning for letters or groups of letters can also help the brain with processing information and picking out the relevant parts of the information that we need.

-Visual Learning

Wordsearches are a good activity for students with a visual learning style as the information that they are presented with is visual.

-Developing literacy skill

Through learning to scan informaiton and through learning letter patterns, it can help students to develop their reading and spelling skills. 

An interesteing activity to do is to get children to design their own wordsearches.  This can incorporate numeracy skills if they do this manually and ICT skills if you use one of the websites available for wordsearch design.  Onced they have designed their wordsearches, class members can swap wordsearches and complete each others.  They may have also provided you with some interesting resources for future lessons. 

 and for unifying the American and British spelling

Then what about words such as chutzpah? There are thousands plus words in English with the letter z in them. Have they taken care of all of them?

 In my opinion X is a more complicated latter we could do away without.

Let me give my ideas:

xerox can be zeroks

ex can be eks

xeno can be kzeno and so on…

 Well I dint understand either of the purposes.

When they say “to simplify the phonetic aspect of the language” what about words containing x which sound different with different words? What about syllables like “ough” which have eight different sounds?

What about complications in pronunciation of words with similar spellings such as put-cut-hut, moor-door-poor…list will go on

Check out these poems on absurdities in English language you will understand what I am talking about.

Ah! what will people already possessing scrabble do with their z tile?

And whatever new scrabble games get  sold now must not only compensate their buyers with more x tiles and s tiles but also change the scores of their x to probably 7 from the present score 8 because now the frequency of occurrence of x has increased because of absence of z. Well since only one Z tile and X tile is give in a scrabble set one could think of using the z as x itself from now onwards.

S need not change its score because it is already the commonest alphabet and we cant give it less than its existing point of 1.

Then J will be the only letter left in scrabble game to have 10 points on it.

When we talk of unification,  what about spelling differences like odour and odor? And what about word differences such as kidding and joking? fibbing and lying? and the very popular one lift and elevator which even has a joke credited to it?

What about algebraic equations and geometry where z in conjunction with x and y is commonly used. Hope the imposition is wavered her.

In Agony aunt/Uncle columns often we see people referring to themselves as XYZ, here also the rule must be relaxed so people do not have to spend unnecessary time on think what to refer themselves as.

  And what about our current editors, which point out spelling mistake with letter ’s’ in the which people are already using instead of ‘z’ as in words ending with “ise”?

And what’s the deal with silent letters at the beginnings and ends of words. Pneumonia? Seriously? I was out in the cold and I got (pa)-num-own-ya. That’s phonetics for you.

Personally, I think the people who invented text-message short-hand are on to something. You get things like 2morrow, and probly, and stuff like that, that makes sense.

Now the highly educated will tell you that the reason that words are spelled funny is because that’s how they used to be pronounced. But this is only the case for some words, and either way, that’s not how we talk now, so why hang on to those spellings. We came up with our own spellings for colour, and theatre, and sabre, so why not update other words too?

1/29/10

After recording an interview with her, this paper should discuss three significant phonological problematic features in Sam’s speech and propose strategies or exercises that may help Sam overcome these problems.

Less Vowel Contrast, Wrong Stress Shifting

During the interview, Sam was noticeably mixing between vowels, mainly short and long vowels. She pronounced /ʌsˈpekt/[i] for /ˈæspekt/, /prʊˈgres/[ii] for /ˈprəʊgres/, and /fəstˈli:/[iii] for /ˈfɜ:stlɪ/. She seems to have a problem in making distinctions between the long vowels and the shorts vowels simply because ‘there are more vowel contrasts in English than in Chinese’. That is, in English articulation system, the vowel sounds are closer to each other than in Chinese (Swan & Smith, 1987, p.225). This use of short vowels results in another problem. When the vowels /æ/, /əʊ/, and /ɜ:/ are stressed in the correct pronunciation of the intended meaning, Sam uses short vowels /ʌ/, /ʊ/, /ə/. Consequently, she shifts the stress to the second syllable. Therefore, the mixing between /əbˈʤekt/ and /ˈɒbʤɪkt/, /ˈkɒntest/ and /kənˈtest/ is possible in Sam’s speech.

Although the listener can impatiently grasp the intended meanings of the wrongly stressed words, it is critical because it can confuse and annoy the listeners, especially if the speaker’s job is marketing! Certain word stresses have strong effects in terms of persuading the listener and hooking their attention if we bear in mind Sam’s level of education. It is worth noting that in some words Sam places the word stress on the right syllable but is still confused with the vowels length and contrast, as in British /ˈbri:tɪʃ/[iv] instead of /ˈbrɪtɪʃ/ and study /ˈstædɪ/[v] instead of /ˈstʌdɪ/.

Problem Treatment

As an English teacher, considering Sam’s case of being busy with long-time classes and workshops, I would prepare a list of two-syllable words with the long and short vowels being highlighted in different colours. This is important because Sam still needs to recognize the vowel contrast and the use of long vowels instead of the short ones on the proper syllables. Thornbury (1997) suggests some good activities on vowels where similar vowels (short and long) are being focused on and practiced (Thornbury, 1997, p.31-32).

Confusion Between /l/, /r/, and /w/

Another obstacle Sam faces in her articulation of English, as any average Chinese speaker would face, is the difficulty in distinguishing the differences between the velarized lateral approximant /l/, the alveolar approximant /r/, and the labio-velar approximant /w/ (Swan & Smith, 2008).  It is only after I listened to the recorded interview again and again that I knew Sam had said Well[vi] not Wow! She has a problem in pronouncing the final /l/ in any word. The same happened when she pronounced will as /wɪw/ or /wəʊ/[vii] instead of /wɪl/ and school as /skəʊw/[viii] instead of /sku:l/ . This is not due to the fact that English has more than one allophones of the /l/ sound. If it is due to Sam’s inability to pronounce the dark [ɬ], she could have replaced it with the light [l] that exists in Chinese. Technically speaking, ending the already shaped and pronounced vowel with a /w/ sound that precedes the consonant /l/ is much easier and relaxing for the mouth. The articulation ends with the lips rounded not spread and the tongue free not touching the hard palate. This allows the air to go through the lips not from the sides of the tongue as neither in the dark [ɬ] nor between the tip of the tongue and the hard palate. To be sure, the same confusion occurred when she could not pronounce a clear /r/ and almost replaced it with /w/ at the beginning of right, remember, and reason. She pronounced them as /waɪt/[ix], /wɪmembə/[x], and /wi:zn/[xi]. Whereas mispronunciation like ‘/wɪw/ go’ and ‘the /wi:zn/ why …’ are understandable to some extent or to some audience, other mispronunciations can radically change the meaning and, as a result, cause confusion and misunderstanding. See the table 1 below:

Table 1. Possible meanings that can be ambiguous to the listener

Sam’s program requires a good skill of communication in terms of clarity and smoothness in the utterance. So, in order to achieve that, she needs to make good efforts to get rid of above discussed confusion.

Problem Treatment

English teachers for Chinese students should be aware of the confusion between these three approximants /l/, /r/ and /w/. In Sam’s case, I would suggest that she gets trained on the placement of the English /r/ and /l/. First, I would show her the sounds’ manners of articulating the Chinese /l/ and the light and dark English /l/ before articulating the /l/ in the words. Identifying the place of the tongue is very essential. Then, I would list words that end in /l/ sound in a column and list opposite to them another words that might be results of replacing the /l/ with /w/ or other rounded vowels, such as /u:/, /əʊ/ and /aʊ/. See Table 2 below. Later, I can give Sam sentences that have awareness-raising combination of words as in Table 2, and ask her to read whole sentences focusing on the /l/ sound. After enough practice, articulation of English final /l/ should become automatic. The same procedure and exercises can be designed to solve the /r/ sound problem that is discussed above.

Table 2. Shows how the meaning can change if the final /l/ sound is mispronounced and replaced by /w/ sound.

Rhythm

Stressing on the fact that good marketing needs good and effective presentation skills moving to a super-segmental problem, Sam needs to improve the rhythm of her speech. English is a stress-timed language, so their utterances, speakers of English should be careful about when stressing and unstressing the syllables of the sentence. Throughout the discussion we see Sam has a problem in placing and lengthening the stress with single words. To improve her rhythmic speech (now talking about the whole sentence or phrase), she needs a lot of efforts. It is clear that she distributes almost the same amount of stress to most of the verbs. See her utterances:

“English is a course of our daily studies you know ..” [xii]

 “So I think most of us will have a long time – long period to study English”[xiii]

“most of our primary school came from UK”[xiv]

“Oh. It’s a lit bit like complaining”[xv]

Almost all the syllables in these sentences recur at equal intervals of time. In number 4, Sam tends to speak fast, but she unstressed all the syllables and the word complaining was given the same time given to the previous syllables in the sentence!

Problem treatment

I would give Sam a number of sentences first and draw her attention to the content words in the sentence that needs to carry the stress and the function words that should not be stressed, and practice reading the sentence with a smooth flow. I would also suggest that she listens to authentic English as in the news and pay attention to the speaker’s syllable-timed rhythm. She can also listen to some English radio channels on her phone while walking to and fro the university. I should draw her attention to the relation between sentence flow, stressed and unstressed words and the emotions, feelings and focus of the speakers.

To conclude, Sam, being a marketing student at the University of Glasgow, needs to pay more attention on the vowel contrast in English, to the distinction between the /l/, /r/, /w/ approximants in English, and finally to the stress-timed rhythm of English.

[i] 00:03:09

[ii] 00:04:17

[iii] 00:03:16

[iv] 00:01:99

[v] 00:02:38

[vi] 00:03:03  and 00:05:36

[vii] 00:35

[viii] 00:00:58

[ix] 00:05:02

[x] 00:04:09

[xi] 00:06:48

[xii] 00:01:11

[xiii] 00:01:18

[xiv] 00:01:54

[xv] 00: 05:05

Reference

Swan, M. & Smith, B., 1987. Learner English: A teacher’s guide to interference and other problems. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Thornbury, S., 1997. About language: Tasks for teachers of English. New York: Cambridge University Press.

If there is a difference in the sounds heard try and get the student to repeat the new sound but I would that through examples. Often enough the student cannot pronounce the difficult sounding word on his own and needs to hear words that are similarly sounded out. In the case of pronouncing the past ed for regular verbs it is standard for me to have them hear the harder d sound in “ed” ending words that have a “d” or “t” before the regular ending. The student can compare this sound with other “ed” endings found in words having other consonants. Similarly the student can practice the different “s” sounds that occur with plurals or when pronouncing the present form of a verb in the third person. Some sound more like “z” and this happens for certain words that end with an “ch” in the singular. Problems arise when the student has to differentiate between long and short vowel sounds and the teacher can list similarly structured words that have a short vowel sound like “mit” and then add an e to the ending of the word on the right hand side of the page. The student will make a connection between the changed structure of the word and the change of the vowel sound from short to long.

Doing phonetic exercises is then useful and the ones mentioned are only a few of what the teacher can do for the student.