Haha, this one really repels me, but I never learned to read phonetically, so slowing down to think about sounds instead of words-as-meaning-units always throws me.
The part that makes sense to me is that when you look at unfamiliar language, you get to ask questions you grew right past when learning your native language. Learning French and Latin made me curious about English's grammar in a way that speaking English did not.
Can I just say I love the forwardness of saying "THIS PATTERN REPELS ME"?! ;)
And thanks for that link! It makes me think that we should have a pattern especially for showing which of those historical layers English words come from... I'll play with adding it to Many Subtle Words°.
Related: do you know of the book "History in English Words", by Owen Barfield (aka "the friend of both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien", aka "The Forgotten Inkling", aka "The Third Guy on the Left at the Eagle and Child")? It's a beautiful walk-through of these historical layers.
So (asks the singing geek) why not teach them IPA while you're at it?
Also, have you read Helen DeWitt's novel _The Last Samurai_? If not, I predict you will like it and find it to provoke thoughts useful for this post series.
Ha! I was just about to say "yeah, we SHOULD teach the IPA at some point..." when I chanced to look at the Pattern Index, and found it's already on there!
Well, I'm a singer, and IPA helps me a lot in understanding the proper pronunciation of foreign-language words in music. Singing in foreign languages is a niche interest, but I can't help but think that actual foreign language education could benefit from IPA too (would be interesting to investigate why it isn't more widely used, actually), not to mention exploring the differences between regional accents in our own language.
Yeah! You’re making me remember one of the big three ideas in the (wonderful, amazing, perfectly-written) book “Fluent Forever”, by Gabriel Wynne — before you learn to speak a foreign language, you should learn to pronounce its words correctly. (Otherwise, you just bake in your accent.) And he suggests learning the relevant symbols of the IPA for that!
And I had forgotten that. Thank you — I’ll try to remember update the pattern itself to include this (potentially VERY useful) point.
Haha, this one really repels me, but I never learned to read phonetically, so slowing down to think about sounds instead of words-as-meaning-units always throws me.
The part that makes sense to me is that when you look at unfamiliar language, you get to ask questions you grew right past when learning your native language. Learning French and Latin made me curious about English's grammar in a way that speaking English did not.
Semi-relatedly, you'll like this on English's different registers from germanic, french, and latinate roots: https://hellotailor.tumblr.com/post/741756025919651840
Can I just say I love the forwardness of saying "THIS PATTERN REPELS ME"?! ;)
And thanks for that link! It makes me think that we should have a pattern especially for showing which of those historical layers English words come from... I'll play with adding it to Many Subtle Words°.
Related: do you know of the book "History in English Words", by Owen Barfield (aka "the friend of both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien", aka "The Forgotten Inkling", aka "The Third Guy on the Left at the Eagle and Child")? It's a beautiful walk-through of these historical layers.
https://www.amazon.com//dp/0940262118
I didn't understand the past conditional tense existed until I had to learn it in French class!
And if you had first discovered it in English, you might have not seen how exciting it was... [okay, I worked too hard on this one]
So (asks the singing geek) why not teach them IPA while you're at it?
Also, have you read Helen DeWitt's novel _The Last Samurai_? If not, I predict you will like it and find it to provoke thoughts useful for this post series.
Ha! I was just about to say "yeah, we SHOULD teach the IPA at some point..." when I chanced to look at the Pattern Index, and found it's already on there!
https://losttools.substack.com/p/pattern-index
(It'll just take FOREVER to get to it.) In the meantime, I'm curious as to what use you see in it, specifically.
Well, I'm a singer, and IPA helps me a lot in understanding the proper pronunciation of foreign-language words in music. Singing in foreign languages is a niche interest, but I can't help but think that actual foreign language education could benefit from IPA too (would be interesting to investigate why it isn't more widely used, actually), not to mention exploring the differences between regional accents in our own language.
Yeah! You’re making me remember one of the big three ideas in the (wonderful, amazing, perfectly-written) book “Fluent Forever”, by Gabriel Wynne — before you learn to speak a foreign language, you should learn to pronounce its words correctly. (Otherwise, you just bake in your accent.) And he suggests learning the relevant symbols of the IPA for that!
And I had forgotten that. Thank you — I’ll try to remember update the pattern itself to include this (potentially VERY useful) point.