Monday, March 4, 2013

Current Change

The English Writing System

     Language changes every day, whether we as speakers realize it or not. New words are made up and old and new words disappear; new phrases emerge and others grow old and fall from use. As a native speaker of whichever language you speak, you have a right to push this change forward or to halt it, though completely stopping or slowing this change is impossible. I believe that as long as other native speakers of your language understand, you have a right to speak however you wish. When it comes to writing, however, there have to be conscious rules that everyone can understand and judge, and that is why English teachers choose to be "grammar Nazis." These rules are similar to the unconscious rules of speech, though some people disagree and others support wholeheartedly these restrictions on natural expression, though the natural rules of speech are undisputed among the populace.





Image from http://sarolta.wordpress.com/category/call/blogs-wikis/page/2/ .


    Language has interested me since high school. In preparation for college, the high school I attended recommended that students take two years of a foreign language, so I took French and found my niche. I took three years of French courses in high school and went to college and earned my bachelor's in French studies. While in college, I also studied German and English in which I have minors, and Spanish and Japanese. It is in college that I determined where I stand on modern issues concerning language, writing, and language change.
      Concerning the changing of language, specifically the English language of which there are many dialects, the writing system we currently have is outdated. There are many wise and intelligent people who spell things wrong on occasion due to slips of memory; I personally find it sad and frustrating to see a college student (an English major)'s notes containing multiple misspellings. I hate to read a text written by a very intelligent person with a poor memory riddled with spelling errors. Reading and writing come as a second nature to those who learn the arts at a young age, but for the reason of unnatural and difficult spellings, we must continue memorizing our written language until we reach high school. It is in high school that we focus more on grammar and writing larger texts, which I believe should begin much earlier in public education; but learning literature on a macro level is impossible earlier than at present standing when we must take years of spelling and grammar classes to ready us for reading Shakespeare and writing greater works. English spelling takes too much time and effort to learn; spelling tests have become competitions in which memorization is key. I was great at spelling tests once I learned the art of abusing my short term memory, but before that I was told to "sound things out" to read and write them, and this caused me to do poorly on spelling tests to a degree.
     Just as new words come into existence and others fail to continue being used, writing systems gradually change. With the invention of the printing press, the gradual change that should naturally take place in the writing system slowed to almost a stop. The writing system current English speakers use is practically the same one that the people of the 17th century used; that's at least four hundred years without much change. This halt in the writing of the English language is unnatural. We should need a translator to read and understand Shakespeare's texts, but we don't because the writing of Shakespeare approximately 400 years ago is very similar to the writing of today, despite the numerous changes that have occurred in the spoken word.
     When I first began learning a new language in high school, I found that French class was mainly a memorization course, like spelling classes but on a grander scale and including phrases and culture lessons. The French language has its own sets of conscious and unconscious rules just like every other language, but it has the same problem that English has: the written language is lagging behind the spoken language. For example: some written consonants in French don't appear when they are spoken and English vowels don't represent a single sound as they may have done at one time.
     The Japanese language has three different writing systems: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Hiragana was native Japanese, Katakana is used for foreign names and objects, and Kanji is a picture-oriented writing system so grand that not even native speakers of Japanese know all the symbols (this is a little like how English speakers don't know every word in the dictionary). What's so great about Hiragana and Katakana is that the symbols stand for fixed sounds: consonant-vowel combinations that hardly ever change, save sometimes at the ends of words (for example: in words ending with the su symbol, sometimes it is difficult to hear the final u sound), and with the single n symbol. In the English language, this is pretty much unheard of: the c of the alphabet can be a k sound or an s sound and an s can be voiced or not (an s sound or a z sound); and written vowels have many pronunciations, for example the pronunciations of the letter a in the words cat, call, ball, can, etc. (if you say these out loud, you can feel the movement of your tongue from one word to the next) and the letter e which is sometimes pronounced and sometimes not.



Image from http://museofdestiny.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/omg-technology-causes-language-change/ .



     In the English writing system, readers judge writers through the writers' errors. Errors are naturally produced in writing English and are only pushed aside through further education and checking and rechecking texts for errors. This is unfair to native speakers of English. Readers should be able to tell which dialect the writer speaks, but not how much education they've been able to afford or complete. The current judging of writings is increasing the use of prejudices, especially against the lesser educated and forgetful.
     My father is a very intelligent and wise person - he's one of the first people I turn to when I have a medical issue, for example. However, due to his lack of higher education and recent stress-induced mini-strokes, anything he writes is not taken seriously in the educated community due to technical errors. This is merely an example of the writings and betterment of knowledge the world is without due to prejudices that show through the reading and writing of the currently accepted English writing system.
     Concerning profanity, I again emphasize that as a native speaker you may speak however you wish in whichever environment you find yourself in. In some places, however, the f word is expected, in others (such as where I grew up) it is greatly frowned upon by some members of the community. This is natural, but a cultural concern and not a language issue.
     Writers try to recreate stream of consciousness (writing that assimilates the thinking process) in their writing, but it is much more difficult than it should naturally be. Through the higher education needed for the proper use of our language, grammar and spelling is embedded in our language-producing process. Our spoken language should be the first reference for writing, not what we've been taught concerning spelling and grammar, since we already have the tools for these things in our natural-learned language.



Image from http://nataliaph.com/health-2/change-your-language-change-your-life .



     The current rules for proper writing are a restraint on expression. Native speakers have to think too much about writing. Writing should be a much more natural process and not need so much education to produce successful texts. Speaking feels natural enough, but writing is too complicated when it should not be so. It's perfectly acceptable to speak in fragments while it is not proper in a text. We already have natural built-in rules for our language and don't need additional ones for writing, save for the few (punctuation, for example) that make up for the things we can't hear in intonation, pausing, et cetera. Sure, these rules were put in place for a reason, but our written language is past due for an update; our need for a few new symbols and more lenient writing style acceptability is greater than the rules that have been put in place by those before us, who simply spoke an older version of our language. We're speaking a language that is very similar, but also very different from what was spoken four centuries ago, and we need a similar but updated writing system. We should be able to write stream of consciousness without thinking about it. We shouldn't lose access to our subconscious language processes because we learn more about our language and how to use it properly. As long as other native speakers of a language understand, writing should be considered correct.
     English speakers have the rules and spellings of their school-learned language so ingrained in their thinking that by the age of twenty, if not fifteen, they force these artificial and unnatural rules on those around them. I am personally guilty of this and so is my husband. Since I've earned my degree in modern language, I've backed down on correcting people's pronunciations and grammar, since it is too tiring and some people will only argue with you anyway, but my husband has been trying to correct mine. The most recent that I can recall at the moment is the pronunciation of dachshund: my parents have always said dash-hound (or something very similar to this) and I repeated it in the presence of my husband, who felt obliged to tell me that the correct pronunciation is dack-sund; I looked it up online (very angry at being corrected of course, especially knowing I was correct), and found that there are three correct pronunciations, including mine, that of my husband's, and the German pronunciation. I told him if I was wrong then he was wrong too, and told him the correct pronunciation, since dachshund is a German word, is the German way (let me remind you I have a minor in German): d-o-ck-h-s-h-oo-n-d (every letter here is pronounced) - and he couldn't say it correctly, which is probably why there are three different accepted ways to say it here in America, because we're not German speakers. Concerning this word specifically, one can see how we need respell some words.
 

Image from http://www.themarysue.com/women-change-language/ .


     Language "authorities" argue against change, as they have for years and will continue to do even as change happens, but that is because they have spent so much time brainwashing themselves, or allowing themselves to be brainwashed, with the proper rules of language. In truth, language is all abstract until you write it down on paper, and that is why it continues to change, because we don't write down everything we say. People, the Speakers, and You control language and it's rate of change; we the speakers of language control how we speak and how we perceive others' speech. We control language, and we have to rights to choose what we say and what we write. It's time to make writing easier.
    "Authorities" on language don't want language to change because our language, they say, preserves history. There is no need for this any longer, since there are so very many works that have been printed in the current language system that the language of the times is effectively preserved.
     This change of language and the writing system that I am proposing here, and I have much more to say on the subject, will not take jobs away from English teachers. This change/ These changes will simply make language learning more natural and easier for students so that they can begin studying on a macro level much sooner. There is so much literature out there and so many languages, and so much history, that we should have learned a whole lot more in the public school system. There is so very much to learn, and not enough time in our short lives to read it all and learn it all, though our brains are capable of memorizing a whole encyclopedia set. This is simply another reason to make "language-learning" (I put this in quotes because we already have learned our language by the time we attend school) so much simpler and easier, so we can move to learning other more interesting things sooner.



Image from http://www.digitalmanufacturingreport.com/blogs2.html?author=Matt+Sakey .



     We need an update in our writing system. Our language changes in small increments every day as long as it's being spoken, but our writing system is stagnant and restricting. For greater expression of creativity, genius, and imagination among many other things, writing needs to become more natural and less of a chore. As speakers of language, we have rights, and it's time to take a hold of our current dialects and language and preserve them for our descendants, or they may have a missing link when they turn to studying the history of language. We have so much at the tip of our fingers with today's technology, but yet our language has become a distasteful stagnant pool of water, which is naturally meant to be flowing. We need change because as native speakers and writers we deserve a break from the stench the dam of the printing press has produced. Writing should be as natural as speaking once we've learned the art, but yet adults must read and reread texts to correct technical errors. We need to remove our restraints to permit freedom of expression through writing. 

No comments:

Post a Comment