Spelling Conventions Research Articles

The influence of spelling conventions on perceived plurality in compounds

Dutch compounds with ‘e’ or ‘en’ as linking element between modifier and head were presented to mother tongue speakers of Afrikaans in an experimental setting that explored the possibility that these different spelling formats would suggest a singular or plural meaning of the modifier. The participants appeared to interpret ‘en’ in the linking element as an indication for singular, and ‘e’ as signifying plural. This outcome supported the findings in comparable studies on Dutch, which also revealed a tendency to understand the spelling of the linking schwa in relation to conventions for the spelling of the plural suffix. In Afrikaans the spelling of the plural forms is ‘e’, whereas in Dutch the spelling of plural forms is ‘en’. This explains why the results of the Dutch and Afrikaans experiments, while using the same materials, are each other’s mirror image.

On the loss of preaspiration in Early Middle English

This article looks into the loss of preaspiration in words like *hnecce, ‘neck’, *hlēapan, ‘leap’, or *hraefn, ‘raven’ in Early Middle English. With the exception of /hw-/, which survives in contemporary varieties, preaspirated variants were lost between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. It is suggested that the phonotactic reduction of initial */hn-/, */hr-/ and */hl-/ clusters (which effectively resulted in a merger with /n/, /r/, and /l/) is both a language-internal and an externally-adduced process, in that an ongoing change in English was catalysed through language contact with Norman French. This claim is based on spelling conventions in Old and Early Modern English texts, which not only attest to the chronological development of this change but also indicate that the loss of preaspiration in English adhered to common and persistent patterns of language change. Additional evidence for this hypothesis comes from levelling-out of preaspirated variants in contact scenarios that involved inputs with preaspirated and non-preaspirated variants (exemplified by New Zealand), and from cases where contact between English, Dutch and French affected the rate and trajectory of ongoing changes in East Anglian English.

When prophecy still had a voice: the letters of Thomas Merton and Robert Lax

J. Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a twenty-year-old sophomore when he was introduced to fellow student Robert Lax (1915-2000) in the Columbia University cafeteria in 1935. They were brought together by an admiration for each other's writing in the college humor magazine. Upon graduation in 1938, Merton converted to Roman Catholicism; Lax began graduate study in English and took a job at the New Yorker. Three years later, Merton entered the Abbey of Gethsemani, and he and Lax saw each other only four more times. Yet their friendship was sustained for the next thirty-three years through an amazing correspondence. Their letters show Merton as an irreverent and often hilarious critic of presidents and popes. He also turned to serious issues, such as the war in Vietnam and the dangers of nuclear holocaust. Merton and Lax's correspondence is filled with reminiscences of friends and faculty from their years at Columbia, including Mark van Doren, Lionel Trilling, Ad Reinhardt, Edward Rice, and Jacques Barzun. These letters of two poets and solitaries betray a giddy delight in wordplay, unconstrained by rules of grammar or conventions of spelling. Puns, portmanteaus, and inside jokes abound. The thirty-year exchange began when Merton dashed off a note on June 17, 1938, after spending a week with Lax's family. The final epistle in this extraordinary correspondence was written by Lax on December 8, 1968. Merton died in Bangkok five days later and never received it. Arthur Biddle spent nearly ten years collecting every letter known to exist between Merton and Lax, a total of 346, two thirds of which have never been published. Biddle provides chronologies of their lives and places events and people in context within the letters. This volume also includes the text of a rare interview with Lax. Arthur W. Biddle is professor emeritus of English at the University of Vermont.

Implicit Cognition and Spelling Development

Intuitively it may seem that spelling involves explicit cognitive processes. However, a great deal of knowledge used during spelling is implicit, that is, we are not necessarily aware of the appropriate spelling convention. The goal of this paper is to address how existing theories of implicit cognition may contribute to the understanding of spelling development. The paper includes a review of the adult literature on implicit memory and implicit learning and how this literature may be applied to spelling development. Karmiloff-Smith's (1986, 1992, 1994) multilevel model of representational redescription presents a framework from which to investigate the interrelation of implicit and explicit knowledge and how knowledge representation changes over time. Karmiloff-Smith's model provides insight into observations of children's spelling and can be used as a framework to better understand the development of children's spellings.

Phat Lines

This paper focuses on the spelling conventions used in a corpus of written rap music lyrics intended for public consumption. The non-standard spellings evident in this corpus are used deliberately for various purposes, one of which is to graphically represent the phonological and syntactic features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). This use of non-standard orthography can be seen as a way for the writer to demonstrate a positive evaluation of the non-standard speech forms that characterize rap music performances. Other non-standard spellings bear no relation to the grammar or phonology of AAVE. However, through the use of processes such as “inversion”, these non-standard spellings invoke alternative meanings while simultaneously calling attention to the arbitrariness of dominant spelling conventions. It is argued that, overall, the non-standard spelling conventions employed in rap music lyrics function to create and sustain hip-hop culture as an “anti-society”.

Wortbegriff und Nomen-Verb-Verbindungen

In connection with the new spelling conventions in German, the status of noun-verb combinations has repea tedly been discussed, with the emphasis on whether such combinations are to be written in one or two graphic words, e.g. mashalten or Mas halten (‘to observe moderation’). Thereby it has not sufficiently been taken into account that in grammatical theory the term “word” is not clearly defined unless a theoretical context is given. In section 2, I will attempt to clarify the different concepts of “word” found in the literature when used in syntactic, phonological, graphemic or lexematic-paradigmatic contexts. In section 3, I will compare the terminology thus obtained with a series of concepts that can be found in the literature on the phenomena of noun-verb co mbinations such as compounding, incorporation, lexicalization, etc. In my last section ‐ as a result of the previous discussion ‐ I will show that the new regulation of the German orthography corroborates the prevailing usage of writing noun-verb combinations as two graphic words.

Diva in the promised land: a blueprint for newspeak?

Hebrew is a fully gendered language: not every noun and adjective, but also every voice and case, is gendered. There is no accepted gender‐neutral term (‘it’), although ‘man’ and the male third‐person singular is generally taken to include women, despite the protests of feminists. Assigning a particular sex/gender to an inanimate object is arbitrary. The issue of sex and gender in language will be addressed in this paper as a dichotomy not of biology but of performance. It will be suggested that sex is akin to hardware, while gender is like software. Specifically, this paper will analyze the efforts of a successful Israeli singer, Danna International, a male‐to‐female transsexual, to provide an international syllable‐sampling strategy for disco songs that subvert conventions of sex, spelling and cliches. To understand Danna International’s appeal and art, it is helpful to employ Michael Agar’s idea of ‘languaculture’: in this case, the languages (Hebrew and Arabic) and cultures (secular, sacrosanct and sectarian) of Israel and the Middle East, as well as Israel’s gay male subculture (the most overt in the region).

Intuitive syllabification: universals and language specific constraints

ABSTRACTIntuitive syllabifications of 50 five- and six- and 50 eight-year-old children are studied in an experimental setting. The children syllabified Dutch disyllabic words with a single intervocalic consonant that were presented orally to them. The aim was to find out if these syllabifications adhered to the universal principles of syllable structure and if the children's syllabifications witnessed an overruling of the universal phonological constraints by language specific ones. Results indicate that universal principles are sufficient to explain syllabifications. Except for obligatory onset formation, other principles act as soft constraints that are influenced by factors such as stress and vowel and consonant quality. A language specific constraint proposed in the phonological literature, namely bimoraic minimality, is hypothesized to be a result of children's familiarization with the spelling conventions.

Bunting's Northumbrian Tongue: Against the Monument of the Centre

The Northumbrian tongue travel has not taken from me sometimes sounds strange to men used to the koine or to Americans who may not know how much Northumberland differs from the Saxon south of England. Southrons would maul the music of many lines in Briggflatts. (Bunting's note to Briggflatts)1 MOTTRAM Did you ever think of writing in a transcription of something like Northumberland dialect? BUNTING It's been tried but it's unworkable because there is no spelling convention that will fit it. Swinburne made a serious attempt to write ballads in Northumbrian, failed, and translated them into Scots lowland Scots. (Bunting, interviewed by Eric Mottram)2 And over it all the atmosphere of power, power speaking impeccable Standard English. (John Braine, Room at the Top)3

Up-to-Date and with a Past: The "Duden" and Its History

Let us consider the following: the Planning Board of the Goethe Institute in Munich wants to establish a Nebenstelle mit Sprachabteilung somewhere in the rainforests of Brazil. A language expert is to be dispatched, but can get there only by parachute. Baggage must be restricted to just one book. What book will it be, what is quintessential for the minimalist German teacher? The answer is simple: it must be Duden: Die Rechtschreibung, the little black-red-and-gold book which promises to be maIgebend in allen Zweifelsfallen. The Duden is the vademecum for any teacher of German, it is the trademark of linguistic authority. The very name suggests a definitive set of rules in spelling, usage, grammar, all presented in a clear and accessible form. If it is listed in the Duden, it is legitimate. If it is not, it does not exist.1 Over the years, the Duden has become the bible of the German language. However, its value does not rest only in its usefulness as a reference tool-it is in many ways a work that reflects politics and culture. Last, but not least, it is a monument to immensely successful marketing. The story of the Duden isa fascinating chapter in the cultural history of modem Germany. To trace this history, we have to go back to the middle of the nineteenth century, when Germany was not yet united and political and linguistic identity was largely determined by region.2 This regionalism was strongly reflected in the spelling conventions prevalent throughout the German speaking countries. To be sure, some spelling guides did exist and were used by printers and in some schools. Most were based on Johann Christoph Adelung's Vollstdndige Anweisung zur Deutschen Orthographie, nebst einem kleinen Wirterbuch fir die Aussprache, Orthographie, Biegung und Ableitung, published in Frankfurt and Leipzig in 1788 (Grebe 9). This was a practical volume, based on the principle write the way you speak. However, that was easier said than done, for the multitude of German dialects made any uniformity impossible. Adelung's rules, and those of his disciples, prevailed until, in the wake of the German unification movement of the post-Napoleonic period, romantic and nationalistic notions entered the debate. Voices were heard, primarily from the Germanists at the universities, promoting a return to the conventions of the Middle Ages, to the pure German of the past. One dreamed of restoring an orthography closely linked to Middle High German, the way one restored old castles at the time or wrote novels about

Spelling errors and phonemic segmentation ability: the nature of the relationship

ABSTRACTPoor spellers/readers and younger normal children of similar spelling and reading ability carried out phonemic segmentation and spelling tasks. The poor spellers were impaired relative to controls in their ability to detect the odd word out where the middle or final phoneme of the word differed from that of the other items in the list. For example, in the series ‘dot',‘cot',‘pot', 'bat', the word ‘bat’ differs from the other items in terms of its middle vowel. Spelling errors were classified as being ‘pre‐phonetic',‘phonetic', or ‘transitional’ in character, according to Morris and Perney's (1984) developmental scheme.‘Transitional’ errors indicate a knowledge of English orthography, and are relatively easy for the reader to decode phonetically, for example, green −>‘grene', whereas ‘phonetic’ errors indicate a level of phonetic awareness which is not matched by an ability to represent the word according to the conventions of English spelling, for example green −>‘gren'. Poor spellers were found to make significantly fewer ‘transitional’ errors than controls, there being a non‐significant tendency for them to make more ‘pre‐phonetic’ and ‘phonetic’ errors. It was found that performance on the odd word out task correlated significantly with the occurrence of ‘transitional’ errors, there being no such relationship with ‘phonetic’ errors.

Spelling errors of normal and disabled students on achievement levels one through four: Instructional implications

The errors of 72 disabled and 90 normal spellers were compared on the first through fourth levels of achievement using a featural system based on developmental spelling research. The mean age of the disabled subjects was two to three years higher on all levels (the differences were significant) but, of 24 error features on the four levels, F-tests showed that the groups differed only on Front Vowels (/a/, /e/, /i/), particularly the combination of in as in chin, with the normal group making more errors. Discriminant function analysis showed that the error features which significantly discriminated between the two groups at Level 1 were Consonant Digraphs, Affricates, and Front Vowels. On Level 2, the dominant variables contributing to the significant discriminant function were Front Vowels, consonant doubling and "e-drop" errors, and suffix errors. The normal group made more errors on all but the last. There were no significant differences on Levels 3 and 4. Discriminant analysis among the four levels for the normal group showed that the incidence of lower-level spelling features declined steadily as spelling achievement level increased. A similar trend but less significant variability was found among the disabled group levels. These results suggest that the strict phonetics-based instruction used with the disabled group contributes to their relative proficiency on the lower level spelling features but that the meaning, orthographic, and derivational conventions of more advanced spelling should be emphasized when designing instruction at achievement Level 2 and above.

THE SPELLING OF GREEK WORDS IN ENGLISH

It is often difficult to decide on the most appropriate way in which Greek words should be rendered in English. Different conventions have come into force at different times, and as a result it is rare to find any scholarly publication which is consistent in its use of any system, unless dealing with a limited range of words. Sometimes inconsistencies appear to be based on nothing more than a misunderstanding of the conventions of spelling and as such can be extremely irritating. This has been the writer's experience on countless occasions, most recently on finding the spellings lAcedaimon, Oidipos and Diodorus Siculus in books published by some respected academic presses. However, inconsistencies are sometimes inevitable, arising from systemic confusion. The following notes, written from the viewpoint of a classicist or ancient historian, offer an explanation of the rules which govern the different ways in which Greek words may be spelt in English. This should be particularly useful to students of ancient history, art or civilisation, whose primary training has not been in the classical languages, and who may therefore feel less sure of themselves, or be less well acquainted with the reference works which would enable them to make correct decisions in matters of doubt. The primary distinction which must be made is between the spelling of Greek words in a Latin form (sometimes with an added French flavour, or slightly Anglicised), and their more direct transliteration. At one time, when Latin was the international language of scholarship, it was the custom to spell all Greek words in this Latin form, or to give Roman equivalents (such as Minerva for Athena or Hercules for Herakles). In the nineteenth century, however, as more and more scholarly work began to be written in the vernacular languages, some writers, particularly in Germany, began to spell such Greek words as they included in their texts in forms which were direct transliterations of the Greek. A few writers in English, particularly in the United States, adopted this style, while others kept to the traditional Latin forms. Nowadays, it is normal to transliterate words into English in a modern Greek context, rather than to try to give them a Latin spelling. In the case of Byzantine studies also, it would probably be true to say that most scholars are now following this convention, although there are still some who clutch at the sweet familiarity of

Effects of preceding context on perception of voice onset time

When discriminating pairs of stimuli from an acoustic voice-onset-time (VOT) continuum, English-speaking listeners typically show a performance peak in the region of the phonetic category boundary. An ongoing series of experiments demonstrates that the location and height of this peak are affected by preceding phonetic context. While any preceding context appears to lower discrimination performance, perhaps by interfering with auditory memory, a preceding [s] also shifts the peak towards the short-VOT end of the continuum and, correspondingly, increases “voiceless” responses in a labeling task. This latter effect (trivial within a syllable because of English spelling conventions) occurs even when a word boundary intervenes and does not seem to be mediated by the duration of the silent closure interval following the [s]. A hypothesis currently being pursued is that phonological voicing decisions for word-initial stop consonants are sensitive to the voicing status of preceding phonetic segments. [Work supported by NICHD.]

Alexandre de rhodes’ dictionary (1651)

Abstract Among multilingual dictionaries of Vietnamese, the earliest one available is the Vietnamese‐Portuguese‐Latin dictionary by Alexandre de Rhodes (1593–1660), a Jesuit missionary‐scholar from Avignon. Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum, published in Rome in 1651, gave the entries in a romanization which reflected the spelling conventions of Portuguese and Italian, each headword followed by a Portuguese gloss and a Latin gloss. This paper introduces the dictionary corpus, and the 31‐page Brevis Declaratio on Vietnamese grammar, then discussed Middle Vietnamese phonology and lexicology. It shows how this example of language codification treated a sampling of some 50 lexemes most frequently occurring in modern Vietnamese.

Wien und Wein: Connecting Sound and Symbol in First-Year German

Although German spelling is relatively phonetic, particularly in comparison to English, students in first-year German classes nevertheless experience some difficulties in assimilating new rules of orthography. We have all heard students read Wien as if written Wein, leider for Lieder, lauft as lauft, schon as schon, or teuer as *tiuer. This is, of course, the result of interference from English orthography, which shows inconsistency in the pronunciation of various vowel combinations, and which does not have umlauts or other German spelling conventions. Constant correction on the part of the instructor gradually lessens or even eliminates this persistent series of errors. Recently I have begun using a technique which trains students to associate correct pronunciation with the graphemes as soon as they see them, and which seems to clear up such errors rapidly. The approach is based upon associating problem combinations with very common German words which are almost never mispronounced or misspelled, such as ein, die, and deutsch. When a student misreads a word, I ask him or her to compare that word with one already known which has the same combination of letters. The student is then usually able to come up with the correct pronunciation. The benefits of this approach are clear. Students discover the correct pronunciation without merely repeating the instructor. The association between spelling convention and pronunciation is made clear and students are more likely to remember the correct sound-symbol association the next time they encounter the word or similar words.

The first Italian grammars of the English language

Summary Five grammars of the English language for the use of Italian learners (Pleunus 1701, Altieri 1728, Baretti 1762, Barker 1766, and Dalmazzoni 1788) were published during the 18th century. These grammars show that there was a growing interest in the English language and in English culture in general in 18th-century Italy. Part of this interest can be attributed to the presence of a large colony of English merchants in Leghorn (Livorno) and to the consequent development of trade between the two countries. These textbooks are largely based on the descriptions of English available at the time; in spite of being heavily conditioned by English spelling conventions, the Italian authors attempt, with varying success, to describe the phonology of English in a form suitable for their readers, namely, in terms of the Italian sound system. Their descriptions seek to define sounds considered ‘difficult’ for the foreign learner, e.g., /æ/ and /˄/ (described prevalently in terms of [a] and [ɔ] respectively), or such consonant sounds as /θ/ and /???/. They also provide at times corroborative evidence, which is compared with the testimony of certain contemporary English authors, e.g., Johnston (1764) and Walker (1791), of the state of the English language at the time. Their description of the English vowel system, in particular, throws some light on the pronunciation of English during the 18th century, but none of them, for example, records the gradual loss of post-vocalic r, which we know from other sources had already begun at this period. The treatment of the grammatical structure of English found in these grammars is largely traditional, and although some attempts are made to describe the peculiarities of English grammar, the rules given are frequently vague and uncertain.

Apprehending Spelling Patterns for Vowels: a Developmental Study

This study investigates the extent to which children and adults are responsive to orthographic regularities in their readings of nonsense sysllables that conform to the phonology and spelling conventions of English words. College students and children of the second, third and fourth years of elementary school read a list of nonsense monosyllables in which most common vowel spellings were presented. Their vowel responses were analyzed according to three categories: incorrect assignment of sound to spelling and correct assignments by context-free and context-dependent criteria. At all levels of reading experience, the proportions of responses falling into the two latter categories far exceeded expectations based on chance responding. These results showed that the children were able to take advantage of orthographic regularities when asked to read unfamiliar words, and, moreover, with increasing age and reading experience they were able progressively to delimit the contexts in which the different regularities apply. The implication is that in learning to read, children do not merely add items to a sight vocabulary by rote recognition of unanalyzed word wholes. Instead, they acquire a practical knowledge of spelling patterns which can readily be applied to new instances.