By Jay Jamison
I remember being told as a little kid to “sound it out” when confronted with an unknown word when I was learning how to read. I don’t know if little kids are told that anymore. Looking back over about six and a half decades since I learned to read, it seems to me that “sounding it out” has many limitations when learning English. Moon, roof, blood, foot … OK, sound them out.
It gets worse. How about pneumonia, knife or though? Yeah, go ahead, kid, sound them out. And then there are other confusions in English: two, to and too. Or what about there, their and they’re?
I’m reminded of the word pronunciation trick asking the listener to pronounce “ghoti” … take the “gh” in rough, the “o” in women and the “ti” in motion. Sounding out ghoti in this way, the careful listener would give back to us the pronunciation of fish. English is loaded with confusing constructions such as this.
English is a mongrel language, incorporating influences from Latin, Greek, Gaelic and the ancient Anglo-Saxon language that was spoken in parts of the British Isles before the Norman Conquest of 1066. There are other influences, but you get my point. Whereas the French have attempted for years to codify and purify their language in their never-ending dictionary project (Dictionnaire de l’Academie française), English remains a beautiful muddy mess. We can’t seem to agree on the spellings of some simple words in everyday use. In America we often refer to the local lockup as the jail. In England, it’s the gaol. These words are pronounced the same, but how would anyone be able to sound it out when confronted with “gaol?” Good luck with that.
English, like many other languages, comes well-supplied with idioms or idiomatic phrases. These are expressions that cannot be adequately understood by simply looking up the meanings of the words used. “Quit your bellyaching!” has nothing to do with your belly. If this phrase is spoken rapidly, upon hearing this, a non-English speaker might try to consult his foreign language dictionary for the unusual word, “kwitcher.”
We have regional differences here in America that can cause confusion. When my family came out here to the prairie from the urban landscape of New Jersey in 1970, I was confronted with words that sounded familiar but had totally different meanings. I heard people referring to the Franklin elevator, or the Chapin elevator. I came here from a place where an elevator was a box-like conveyance people rode between floors in tall buildings. Of course, in the birthplace of the English language they refer to the lift, which no one is going to confuse with a grain storage facility. They also talk about the loo, which is their version of the john, um, bathroom. Our realtors (in England, estate agents) may sometimes describe a house as having one full bath, and one half bath. What’s a half bath? It’s a room with no bath, not even a fraction thereof. “Please, Mr. English speaker, explain to me what a restroom is?” Sure. These are places on our highways and public buildings, where you can drain the radiator — if ya know what I mean. “So, no rest in restroom?” What kind of crazy question is that? Wait. I never thought of it that way.
