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Not in here we don't !!
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I don't know where he's coming from, but language is ever changing.
By rights we should use 'z' in words like organization, but in the UK we now see it as an American 'variant' spelling and replace the z with an s.
One that does get to me is the use 'of' in place of 'have' which has crept in in the last few years. "What should I of done?"
My wife is just recruiting and good spelling on the job application is the first thing she looks for.
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I suspect that texting has had some role in the levels of spelling ability amongst the younger generation.
Mind you, some of the abbreviations do make sense, especially as someone who has used shorthand for more than 50 years....:-)
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I think language and spelling evolve slowly, with time, and we perhaps have to adapt to it. Naming no names, I do get worried about the 'standards' of punctuation. We have had 300 word posts here unbroken by any punctuation or capital letters!
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Professor Ken Smith of Buckinghamshire New University is proposing
First point to note is that B N University's new website is called "Be Coz U Can" (www.becozucan.org.uk) which aims to attract 11-16 year-olds into Higher Education.
If you go to this article,
blogs.guardian.co.uk/mortarboard/2008/08/does_spel...l
it has a link to the original article by the Prof in the newspaper we cannot mention here.
Both the above links also have numerous responses by readers, which generally agree with the view taken on this forum - spelling and grammar do matter.
There is further discussion at the Register, where many commentators are known to be very poor at spelling and grammar, and makes for an entertaining read.
www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/07/for_kids_who_cant.../
www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/07/for_kids_who_cant.../
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If I was a conspiracy theorist I would suspect HMG involvement - with their abysmal record in improving literacy - its almost as if the plot of Fahrenheit 451 is coming true.
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I heard some academic carphound on the wireless yesterday playing down the importance of the rapid spread of slobbish semi-illiteracy among university undergraduates. Inability to spell simple words - in English this can be important as some words are pronounced the same but have very different meanings in different spellings - or compose a grammatical sentence is dismissed as an aspect of language perceived as 'a living thing'.
Despicable twit. Probably can't spell or write a sentence himself. A lot of academics can't.
Edited by Lud on 09/08/2008 at 15:13
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On reflection, given the quite large numbers of non-native English speakers who use English in their work or daily lives, local variants of English as well as non-literary demotic English as spoken in much of the sceptred isle itself do make evolution (or degeneration as some may see it) inevitable, and on a large scale. Indeed I greatly enjoy some aspects of this variation which has endless poetic possibilities.
Nevertheless correctly used, English is an extraordinarily flexible and precise instrument for the expression of scientific and philosophic ideas and concepts. French is considered more concise and exact, but it isn't really in practice, language of diplomacy or no. I was once told earnestly by a French hack that English was 'far better for news reporting'.
Perhaps we are heading for a radical split between 'classical' grammatically-correct English and a wide range of local demotic variants. This has happened to Arabic, whose classical version, the language of the Koran, can seem almost incomprehensible to speakers of (for example) Maghrebi demotic or 'popular' Arabic which contains Berber, Turkish and other Mediterranean imports.
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I heard some academic carphound
The trouble is that this academic Ken Smith is Professor of Criminology; and if he is teaching his students that it does not matter if you spell their as thier or there, then how does he teach them the relevance of the sequence of letters in reading DNA evidence?
If NuLab have anything to do with it, it would not surprise me if the Civil Service instructed to give priority to recruiting graduates from Bucks New Uni in competition with those from the Russel group of Universities. These graduates who will have learnt that attention to detail does not matter, and will be responsible for solving crimes in the UK.
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My brother-in-law's primary school, in the mid 70s, was experimenting with a new literacy programme. Children would learn to read phonetically in order to learn words faster. The idea was that spelling is merely incidental and the kids would learn it as they progressed in their reading. My b-in-law is a clever fellow, but he had to take remedial reading classes when he changed schools (family moved for father-in-law's job). In any reasonable sense, his school made him functionally illiterate by neglecting spelling.
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Mrs P found Welsh one of the simplest languages she learnt for the vary reason that in reading it is totally phonetic. Apparently what you see is what you get.
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Welsh one of the simplest languages it is totally phonetic. Apparently what you see is what you get.
Yes, and when you see a lot of double Ls coming up, it's best to stand back a bit or you may get a faceful of saliva... Depends somewhat on the state of the speaker's teeth...
:o}
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Being an accountant she has very good teeth. :-)
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Quite IT. Very serious attempts were made by the education system in the seventies and eighties to render my own children illiterate. Constant remedial work at home was the answer, but can everyone manage it? Fortunately that reading nonsense has now been largely dropped, despite the large number of today's teachers who were themselves crippled by it.
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I avoided all this reading procedure rubbish by teaching my children to read beefore they went to school.
It took time and effort but I had the advantage of bright offspring.
The local head, on the first day my daughter arrived, was not inclined to believe she could read but had the good grace to admit I was right.
I had no training to teach but my fun method worked.
I think the real problem is not devoting time and effort at home ( assuming you can spell to begin with).
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We were all taught to read at home - I thought that was the norm....!
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Well, yes, and our early spelling efforts kindly corrected at an age when the child knows it has everything to learn. Of course this is what parents should do if they can. Alas though, even some of the ones who could don't bother, and of course many can't.
The modern illusion that everything can be broken down into simple units that fit together and are susceptible to yes/no answers, encouraged by the computer which works essentially by saying yes or no thousands of times a second, subverts the very idea of education as it used to be, and as it perhaps still should be. No doubt the human organism with its endless ingenuity will find a way of subverting that too in its turn.
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Yes PU I think it was, but you don't pick up much a of a vocabulary from "The Sun" and "OK".
JH
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to read before they went to school.>>
I was able both to read and tell the time when I had reached the age of four. As far as I know/recall it was self taught.
In fact the local library allowed me to have a ticket a year early because I was reading so much.
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>>I was able both to read <<
>>As far as I know/recall it was self taught.<<
;-) thats impressve for a four year old! you must have already been able to read so that you could teach yourself!! ;-)
Billy
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Actually I don't recall my parents ever teaching me. In fact my father used to question me about new books I had read before he believed I wasn't just relying on memory...:-)
But we are talking about more than 60 years ago now.....
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Not quite as long ago Stuart but over 40 years anyway, the school I went to relied upon pain incentives to ensure student accuracy. Not that I advocate that as a preferred method you understand but I have to say it did seem to focus the mind. This culture of quite severe physical punishment from the age of five had a very bad effect on some pupils and quite rightly would not be tolerated now. Some of our teachers would now be described as unstable and abusive sadists. The flip side is that those of us who managed to survive it, I hope, relatively psychologically unscathed, did seem to progress reasonably quickly in academic terms.
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Despite my husband learning in this way, we also thought our daughter was relying on a good memory. It was only when she read something from the newspaper that the penny dropped.
This was 23 years ago, Stuart.
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Billy, you do not need to know how to read to learn - you just need people around you who will read to you every day, teach you lots of nursery rhymes and both bother and be around to answer your questions ... like "what does that sign say".
Both my husband and daughter learned in this way.
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That was the good fortune we had as a family - surrounded by books all of us. We still are - much to the exasperation of our various spouses.
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I was able both to read and tell the time when I had reached the age of four. As far as I know/recall it was self taught.
My eldest boy was word perfect for hundreds of nursery rhymes by the time he was 3+yrs. By 4 he was reading fluently having identified the words from memory of the rhymes. At the age of 6 he could read fluently (but not understand) anything written in the Glasgow Herald- his reading age was approx that of a 11 yr old
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Do you agree that we should allow teaching standards to fall in this way?
Know, its' apporling.
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Do you agree that we should allow teaching standards to fall in this way?
No. Professor Ken's principal argument for this seems to be that "it's a bit hard" to spell conventionally. Clearly it isn't, for most people, if they want to.
Free spelling will cause more problems for the reading audience than it solves for the writer. It's distracting and needs more attention to decode for a start; and meanings will be lost - when a less common word is used, it is likely to be taken for a different, similar sounding one.
I sympathise with the truly dyslexic - I have an immensely clever friend who can't spell for toffee (in fact he probably can't spell toffee) but he knows it and he'll get important documents checked by someone else, because he recognises that the meaning of his own versions is not always clear.
The answer might be to rationalise spelling before trying to bring back conformity - I gather that there are proposals in train in the EU to do this, and to standardise on English as the official European language at the same time -
ENGLISH TO BE LANGUAGE OF THE EU
The European Union commissioners have announced that agreement has been reached to adopt English as the preferred language for European communications, rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a five-year phased plan for what will be known as EuroEnglish (Euro for short).
In the first year, "s" will be used instead of the soft "c." Sertainly, sivil servants will resieve this news with joy. Also, the hard "c" will be replaced with "k". Not only will this klear up konfusion, but typewriters kan have one less letter.
There will be growing publik emthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced by "f". This will make words like fotograf" 20 persent shorter.
In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of silent "e"s in the languag is disgrasful, and they would go.
By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" by "z" and "w" by " v".
During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou", and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.
After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer.
Ze drem vil finali kum tru.
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I suffer from a real spelling problem and with grammar and have always done so. I can do figures. I remember getting home (many many years ago) from a party knowing a girl's telephone number but not her hame, or what she looked like .......
My wife has real difficulty with understanding the concepts of numbers, especially on a bank statement, but can spell every word.
Different brains work different ways.
My concern with work output is not about spelling, punctuation, or grammar it is about clarity and preciseness. Both are achievable with the simplest of language.
It makes not a jot of difference to me how people spell words, or use grammar, or punctuate, virtually everything can still be understood.
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<> >
Anzo ve vil al end up spekin der german dat vud av apend 60 years ago if Her Hitler ad von de var! at least ve vud al av bin fluent by now, but dont mention der var, (i did but i zinc i may av gut avay vif it)
As the saying goes:
"Ve av vays an means ov makin EU talk" (even if it is via Brussels)
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Anzo ve vil al end up spekin der german dat vud av apend 60 years ago if Her Hitler ad von de var!
I've long since thought that. Thank goodness that people were sufficiently patriotic to be prepared to sacrifice their life for the freedom of their country. I doubt if that would happen nowadays.
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>>I sympathise with the truly dyslexic -I have an immensely clever friend who can't spell for toffee (in fact he probably can't spell toffee) but he knows it and he'll get important documents checked by someone else,
>>because he recognises that the meaning of his own versions is not always clear.
And a motoring link with the President of Dyslexia Scotland
www.dyslexiascotland.org.uk/
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