Spelling matters to people. In America and Britain every day, members of the public write to the media on spelling issues, and take part in spelling contests. In Germany, a reform of the spelling ...system has provoked a constitutional crisis; in Galicia, a 'war of orthographies' parallels an intense public debate on national identity; on walls, bridges and trains globally, PUNX and ANARKISTS proclaim their identities orthographically. The way we spell often represents an attempt to associate with, or dissociate from, other languages. In Spelling and Society, Mark Sebba explores why matters of orthography are of real concern to so many groups, as a reflection of culture, history and social practices, and as a powerful symbol of national or local identity. This 2007 book will be welcomed by students and researchers in English language, orthography and sociolinguistics, and by anyone interested in the importance of spelling in contemporary society.
Ce travail vise à étudier la difficulté des apprenants thaïlandais dans la prononciation de la consonne /v/ du français en position initiale de syllabe et cherche à expliquer les raisons pour ...lesquelles cette consonne est souvent confondue avec /w/ par ces apprenants. Suite à l’étude des processus de romanisation du thaï et de translittération des emprunts en caractères thaïs, nous relevons qu’il existe une association entre la graphie < v > et le son w dans la langue depuis plusieurs siècles. Une étude expérimentale est alors menée dans le but de vérifier l’hypothèse d’un effet de l’orthographe sur la prononciation de /v/ à travers les deux tâches (lecture oralisée et imitation). Les résultats confirment une réelle difficulté des apprenants thaïlandais dans la prononciation de /v/ et montrent que la présence de l’orthographe augmente considérablement le taux de confusion entre /v/ et /w/, quels que soient le type de stimuli, le contexte vocalique et la position de /v/ dans le mot observé (initiale ou médiane). L'apprenant réussit à imiter approximativement /v/ dans quelques cas mais le taux de non-réussite reste très élevé.
Why do Thai learners often confuse /v/ and /w/ in French? A pilot experimental study on the effect of orthography.
This work investigates Thai learners’ difficulty in pronouncing French consonant /v/ in syllable-initial position and seeks to explain the reasons why this consonant is very often confused with w by Thai learners. Our study on the processes of Thai romanization and the transliteration of loanwords into Thai characters shows that there has been an association between the < v > grapheme and the w sound in the Thai language for several centuries. We therefore conducted an experimental study to verify hypotheses based on a possible effect of orthography on the /v/ pronunciation through the two tasks (oral reading and imitation). The results confirm a real challenge for Thai learners in the pronunciation of /v/ and show that the presence of the orthography considerably increases the confusion rate between /v/ and /w/, whatever the type of stimuli, the vowel context and the position of /v/ in the word (initial or medial). The participant manages to approximatively imitate /v/ in few cases, but the rate of non-success remains very high.
"This book will tell all you need to know about British English spelling. It’s a reference work intended for anyone interested in the English language, especially those who teach it, whatever the age ...or mother tongue of their students. It will be particularly useful to those wishing to produce well-designed materials for teaching initial literacy via phonics, for teaching English as a foreign or second language, and for teacher training. English spelling is notoriously complicated and difficult to learn; it is correctly described as much less regular and predictable than any other alphabetic orthography. However, there is more regularity in the English spelling system than is generally appreciated. This book provides, for the first time, a thorough account of the whole complex system. It does so by describing how phonemes relate to graphemes and vice versa. It enables searches for particular words, so that one can easily find, not the meanings or pronunciations of words, but the other words with which those with unusual phoneme-grapheme/grapheme-phoneme correspondences keep company. Other unique features of this book include teacher-friendly lists of correspondences and various regularities not described by previous authorities, for example the strong tendency for the letter-name vowel phonemes (the names of the letters <a, e, i, o, u>) to be spelt with those single letters in non-final syllables."
Languages show variations according to the social class of speakers and Latin was no exception, as readers of Petronius are aware. The Romance languages have traditionally been regarded as developing ...out of a 'language of the common people' (Vulgar Latin), but studies of modern languages demonstrate that linguistic change does not merely come, in the social sense, 'from below'. There is change from above, as prestige usages work their way down the social scale, and change may also occur across the social classes. This book is a history of many of the developments undergone by the Latin language as it changed into Romance, demonstrating the varying social levels at which change was initiated. About thirty topics are dealt with, many of them more systematically than ever before. Discussions often start in the early Republic with Plautus, and the book is as much about the literary language as about informal varieties.
Becoming Turkishdeepens our understanding of the modernist nation-building processes in post-Ottoman Turkey through a rare perspective that stresses social and cultural dimensions and everyday ...negotiations of the Kemalist reforms. Y?lmaz asks how the reforms were mediated on the ground and how ordinary citizens received, reacted to, and experienced them. She traces the experiences of the subaltern as well as the experiences of the elites and the mediators in the overall narrative-highlighting the relevance of class, gender, location, and urban and rural differences while also revealing the importance of nonideological, social, and psychological factors such as childhood and generations.
Spelling Scots Bann, Jennifer; Corbett, John
10/2015
eBook
Analyses the development of Modern Scots orthography and compares the spelling used in key works of literature
People have been writing in Scots for over 700 years, but the spelling of Scots has ...never been fixed, with many words, likebuik, buke, book, appearing in a variety of forms. Drawing on the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing, this volume provides a comprehensive survey of the spelling system of Older and Modern Scots, illustrating how this orthographic system has developed partly in response to historical shifts in pronunciation, and partly as a result of social and political change.
Spelling Scotsacts not only as a wide-ranging reference book to the changing orthography of Scots, but also as an outline of the active interventions in the practices that have guided Scots spelling. The book shows how canonical writers of poetry and fiction in Scots from 1700 to the present day have blended convention and innovation in presenting Scots in literary texts, and it explores the influence of key writers such as Ramsay, Fergusson, Burns, Scott, Hogg and Stevenson. Introducing an innovative method of tracing the use of key spelling variants in a corpus of Scots writing, the book discusses the implication of this method for promoting wider literacy in Scots.
Spelling Scotsshould be a standard reference volume for all institutions where literature in Scots is studied. It draws on the authors' current research project, the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing.
Key featuresEvidence-based treatment of the material using two main corporaPresents the first full description of Modern Scots spellingExplores the influence of key writers such as Ramsay, Fergusson, Burns, Scott, Hogg and Stevenson on other writers
The English language has undergone many sound changes in its long history. Some of these changes had a profound effect on the pronunciation of the language. A number of these significant instances of ...language evolution are generally grouped together and termed the 'Great Vowel Shift'. These changes are generally considered to be unrelated to other, similar long-vowel changes taking place a little earlier. This book assesses an extensive range of irregular Middle English spellings for all these changes, with a view to identifying the real course of events: the dates, the chronology, and the dialects that stand out as being innovative. Using empirical evidence to offer a fresh perspective and drawing new, convincing conclusions, Stenbrenden offers an interpretation of the history of the English language which may change our view of sound change completely.
Previous studies have shown that phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and verbal memory span are reliable correlates of learning to read in English. However, the ...extent to which these different predictors have the same relative importance in different languages remains uncertain. In this article, we present the results from a 10-month longitudinal study that began just before or soon after the start of formal literacy instruction in four languages (English, Spanish, Slovak, and Czech). Longitudinal path analyses showed that phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge, and RAN (but not verbal memory span) measured at the onset of literacy instruction were reliable predictors, with similar relative importance, of later reading and spelling skills across the four languages. These data support the suggestion that in all alphabetic orthographies, phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge, and RAN may tap cognitive processes that are important for learning to read.
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