Children of earth, rant Against "W"

I find having to look and read anything in the nonphonetic Roman script on a day in day out basis brings up strong aggressive resistence and repulsion. "Why do I have to stand this nonsense?", a voice inside keeps asking, "This is voodoo script. Who wants to keep deciphering this to figure out that the person is greeting you and not wishing you to go to hell?" Am I dumb that I can't make out which word and meaning is meant when I hear it? Why does English have write, right, rite, wright with all these variations Does it make sense to remember not to write "r-i-t-e" or "w-r-i-g-h-t," right? I omit to mention that I in this screed stands for all the children of the earth, bar none, who have to cope with nonphonetic scripts that exhibit no pattern of any kind from the word go.

What is 'w' -- "dubble yoo" -- doing there? It has a 'd' an 'l', a'y' and an 'oo in it; so can it become a single letter? If it is to be voiced 'hvva' why not call it that ? More important, why can't people find the energy to fight the inertia on this.

There is some hope. I remember listening on Radio Netherlands to a Canadian woman who did some work in this regard... Here is her name and that of the book she wrote from Amazon: "Vexed Texts: How Children's Picture Books Promote Illiteracy by Pamela Protheroe (Paperback - 1992)"

Phonetic English - A horse designed by a committee

Scripts are believed to have evolved from pictographs. Some scripts, like the Chinese script, for instance, are still pictorial. Over time obtaining information via these scripts subtly creates viewing habits in the human mind. These scripts, which are visual cues for sounds, dicscipline and, in some cases, even prejudice our conduct. The habit these scripts impose on us, in turn, subtly inform and influence our perspectives, relationships, and behavior.

As there was no one like Panini to order and organize the alphabet of the Abrahamic languages - which was adopted by the Roman, mainly their monks in the Roman Catholic Church. The Church lots of power over the affairs of people who lived beyond the borders of present day Italy and, as a result, their script came to be used for all the languages in Eurpoe.

The Indic languages - spoken in most of Asia except
the Oriental countries like China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia - are generally believed to be more ancient
the Abrahamic and European languages. They did experiemnted a lot in creating scripts and you can see that a large country like ours, which in many ways, comparable to the whole of Europe, has many scripts - Telugu, Gujarati, Bengali and so on. At a fortunate point in time we had Panini, who organized the alphabet and Grammar of the parent language, Sanskrit, so well that, although our scripts are different, all of us use the same alphabet and grammar.

One of the things he did was create a vowel system that made all these Indic scripts phonetic. In a stroke of genius,
when these vowels were attached to consonents, a set of marks, or maatraas, around them told you how to pronounce it. As an example, in having to write 'ko' in the Roman script you need to write the 'k' and, next to it, the vowel ''o'. But if you were to to do this in the Devnaagari script you simply add the maatraa of the vowel 'O'.

When you read words in the non-phonetic Roman
script, part of your mind is busy acessing your 'pronouncing archive' so that when you have
deciphered the spelling by looking at group of the vowels and consonents in front of you and figure out how to pronounce it. In this situation of having to use up some resources to access the memory of the sound of the word you are forced to minimize your attention on what is in front of you. If you stop to notice you will find that in reading English words in Roman script you pay more attention to the first few letters of the word and surmise the rest from context. If the first few letters are' journ' you will surmise from context that the others are either 'ey' or 'al.' You will not really look at them. This is true of wording ending in 'tion' or 'ing' and you seldom 'see' them but surmise from context. I call this habit, 'the skipping mind' because, our attention is, like a flat stone thrown horizontally over a pond, will skip over its surface - i.e. make only brief contacts with it - a few times before it sinks.

You can now see that by limiting yourself to the habit using the Roman script you invite a perceptible loss of acuity and sensitivity in perception and unsustained attention during a relationship event.

In the case of the Devnaagari script, you do not have
to go to your memory bank to find out how a particular group of letters has to be pronounced because the script is phonetic. So this frees up your mind to 'see' what is in front of you. Furthermore, as the maatraas surround the consonent, you have to first look at it, and then around it, for them. In this situation the mind is developing the habit of focusing on the central core and then on its periphery. Instead of the 'skipping mind' you have a mind that is always in balanced contact with what is in front of you.

One reason, why people from India are perceived to be 'smart' and 'brainy' is the way they relate to their scripts and the habits they acquire in doing so.

While we are certainly One-up in our alphabet, grammar and our script, we have to understand that, as bad money chases the good money out of the market, the perceived dominance of English, the Abrahamic alphabet and the Roman script today, is something need not be slaves to. Indians are lucky to have what they have, thanks to their forbears. But they will be pitiable if they will let it go for a
short-term advantage. If I were a dictator, I would say, "Learn and use English, its A,B,C,D, and its
nonphonetic script which burdens you with having to memorize the spellings of thousands of words, by all means, if you have to get ahead, BUT ONLY if you do not give up what is not only yours, but, in comparison, far superior.

English is a stupid language

English is a very stupid language.

But more pertinent is the fact that those who had such a stupid language to learn as their mother tongue were able to overcame nearly all their major habitat handicaps, crossed the daunting oceans, nearly circumvented the globe and established and empire on which the Sun never set.

Of course, they were clever people who, in many ways, were - and continue to remain - stupid and muddled; people entangled and trapped in their own invention - the English language; people, for ever so busy in search of the right word that they seldom have any time left to have the right thought.

English is less a language, more a Band-Aided potpourri of diverse patois, that, in its formal structure, ends up more recondite, obfuscatory and exclusionary, the more it tries to be accurate and precise. As a communicational tool, it is like a wild horse that challenges taming. To call is a ‘ language’ of current global trade and commerce is to admit that it is less an international language, more an international harlot. It is like that law of global finance. Bad money chasing the good money out of the market.

If human speech could be analogized to the states of matter, then some languages, Sanskrit, for instance, have a solid crystalline structure; elegant and uplifting patters of sounds that reach out to express that which is beyond expression.

Others are amorphous and powdery; they have speech patterns that seldom allow anyone to deviate or digress into new territory other than set in the past; the Arabic languages could probably make good illustrations of these. Then there are languages that are like liquids with various degrees of viscosity - languages with engaging rhythms and cadences, French and Bengali, and perhaps, those spoken amongst the Mongol people - Mandarin, Tagalong, Cambodian come to mind.

The folk languages are simple, like cascading streams and gurgling brooks. They usually have rich oral content. Many are without their own scripts. Most are spoken in relatively small regions. Humankind is, per the experts who keep track of these things, will lose most of them before this century is over.

Then there are languages - and English is a spectacular example - which are volatile like gas; lots of volume but little content; hardly any memory informs them. Like a shifty character, they are always borrowing from Paul to pay Peter. To keep alive they have to constantly reinvent themselves. Their grammar is unacceptably defective and their scripts are usually plagiarized. Of inattentive minds, they make miasmic cesspools that bubble with resentment, discontent, anger, greed and aggression. They can, however, can spread like a forest fire burning whatever touches them - heritage, tradition, culture, history, feelings and emotions that belong to communities that are meek and would rather live in peace and contentment.

But those few, who are blessed - the saints and the poets - can take whatever sounds are available to them and create a form of language that is charged like plasma. Their thoughts arc out in all directions and their words defeat mortality. It is a miracle that they are able to immunize their insights from the deformations that are the lot of all thought that is expressed.