Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English 9781463213923

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

EDWARD ODISHO

GORGIAS PRESS 2007

First Gorgias Press Edition, 2007 Copyright © 2007 by Gorgias Press LLC All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC. Published in the United States of America by Gorgias Press LLC, New Jersey ISBN 978-1-59333-690-5

GORGIAS PRESS 46 Orris Ave., Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA www.gorgiaspress.com

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standards. Printed in the United States of America

Dedication To my son Captain Fred Furat Odisho for his service to the United States and Iraq

Table of Contents List of Symbols ................................................................................................................. ix Foreword......................................................................................................................... xiii Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................... xvii Chapter I. Family Origin of Spanish and its Geographic S Spread …….....................1 1.1. Introductory Remarks .................................................................................................... 1 1.2. Indo-European Family of Languages ............................................................................ 1 1.3. Romance Sub-Family .................................................................................................... 2 1.4. Journey of Spanish into the New World ....................................................................... 3 1.5. Spanish in Confrontation with Native American Languages........................................ 4 1.6. Language Variation: Spanish Accents, Dialects and Standard(s) ................................. 7 1.7. Standard or Standards? .................................................................................................. 9 1.8. What Standard Variant to Teach? ............................................................................... 12 Chapter II. Spanish and English Alphabets and Alphabet Identities ....................... 15 2.1. Alphabet, Graphemics and Orthography..................................................................... 15 2.2. Origin of the Alphabet ................................................................................................. 16 2.3. Journey of the Aramaic Alphabet to the West ............................................................ 18 2.4. English Alphabet ......................................................................................................... 19 2.5. Spanish Alphabet ......................................................................................................... 20 2.6. Four Identities of English and Spanish Alphabet Units .............................................. 21 Chapter III. Comparative Study of Spanish and English Graphemics and Orthography .................................................................................................................... 25 3.1. Graphemes and Graphemics........................................................................................ 25 3.2. Mismatches between Spanish and English Graphemics ............................................. 27 3.3. Discrepancies in Graphemic Orientations ................................................................... 29 3.4. Orthography ................................................................................................................. 33 3.4.1. English Orthography ....................................................................................... 33 3.4.2. Spanish Orthography ...................................................................................... 35 3.5. Shallow (Transparent) Orthography vs. Deep (Opaque) Orthography....................... 36 3.6. Implications and Applications of Orthographic Differences ...................................... 40 3.7. Implications of Orthography Interface with Spelling and Pronunciation ................... 40 3.7.1. Orthography and Spelling ............................................................................... 40 3.7.2. Orthography and Pronunciation ...................................................................... 42 3.8. Applications of Orthography Interface with Spelling and Pronunciation................... 43 3.8.1. General Applications in Spelling .................................................................... 44 3.8.2. Linguistic Awareness and Spelling Awareness .............................................. 46 3.8.3. General applications in Pronunciation ............................................................ 49 3.8.4. Linguistic Awareness and Pronunciation Awareness ..................................... 53 3.9. Phonetic versus Phonological Accent ......................................................................... 55 Chapter IV. A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Phonetics and Phonology .......................................................................................................................................... 57 4.1. Technical Terminology ............................................................................................... 57 4.2. Primary Parameters for Sound Description and Classification................................... 58 4.2.1. Place of Articulation: Classification and Description of Consonants ............. 58 4.2.2. Manner of Articulation: Classification and Description of Consonants ......... 59 4.3. Comparative Phonology of Spanish and English........................................................ 61 4.3.1. General Comparative Spanish and English Consonant Systems .................... 61 4.4. Phonological Comparison of Consonant System ........................................................ 62 4.4.1. Phonological Consonant Cluster Comparison ................................................ 66 4.5. Phonetic Comparison of Consonant Systems ............................................................. 67

vi 4.6. Phonological Comparison of Vowel Systems............................................................. 68 4.6.1. Quality Differences ......................................................................................... 70 4.6.2. Quantity Differences ....................................................................................... 73 4.7. Phonetic Comparison of Vowel Systems .................................................................... 74 4.8. Implications of Consonant and Vowel Systems Comparisons ................................... 75 4.9. Applications of Consonant and Vowel Systems Comparisons................................... 75 4.9.1. Phonological Applications: Consonants ......................................................... 75 4.9.2. Phonetic Applications: Consonants ................................................................ 81 4.9.3. Phonological Applications: Vowels ................................................................ 83 Chapter V. A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Nomenemes and Sequemes.......................................................................................................................... 89 5.1. Introduction.................................................................................................................. 89 5.2. Nomenemics of Spanish and English.......................................................................... 89 5.2.1. The Nomenemes of English ............................................................................ 90 5.2.2. The Nomenemes of Spanish ........................................................................... 92 5.3. Nomenemes and Oral Spelling.................................................................................... 94 5.4. Implications ................................................................................................................. 98 5.5. Applications ................................................................................................................. 99 5.6. Rationale for Introducing Sequeme Identity ............................................................. 101 5.7. Linguistic Function of the Sequeme.......................................................................... 101 5.8. Non-Linguistic Functions of Sequemes .................................................................... 103 5.9. Core Alphabet and Augmented Alphabet ................................................................. 104 Chapter VI. Teaching of Spelling ................................................................................ 111 6.1. Introductory Remarks ................................................................................................ 111 6.2. Primary and Specific Causes of Latinos’ Difficulties in English Spelling ............... 112 6.3. Revisiting Oral and Graphic Spelling ....................................................................... 114 6.4. Techniques of Teaching Spelling .............................................................................. 115 6.5. Common Latino’s Errors in English Spelling ........................................................... 122 6.5.1. Common Latino’s Errors in Spelling English Vowels .................................. 122 6.5.2. Common Latino’s Errors in Spelling English Consonants ........................... 123 Chapter VII. Interconnection of Vowel system with Stress and Rhythm in English and Spanish ................................................................................................................... 125 7.1. Introductory Remarks ................................................................................................ 125 7.2. Stress as Phonetic and Phonological Phenomenon ................................................... 126 7.3. Stress Placement in Spanish and English .................................................................. 128 7.4. Problems Emerging due to Different Stress Placement Patterns .............................. 130 7.5. Rhythm in Spanish and English: the most Salient Difference .................................. 132 7.6. Weak Forms and Strong Forms................................................................................. 136 7.7. Approach to Teaching Stress and Rhythm ................................................................ 137 7.7.1. Ascertain that both Teacher and Learner are Aware of Stress ...................... 138 7.7.2. Prepare the Teachers before Preparing the Learners..................................... 139 7.8. Multicognitive Aspects of Stress and Rhythm Internalization ................................. 139 7.9. Multisensory Aspects of Stress and Rhythm Internalization .................................... 140 7.9.1. Variety in Visual modality ............................................................................ 141 7.9.2. Variety in Auditory Modality ....................................................................... 142 7.9.3. Variety in Kinesthetic-Tactile Modality ....................................................... 143 7.10. Teaching Rhythm .................................................................................................... 143 Chapter VIII. Teaching and Learning How to Write................................................ 145 8.1. Introductory Remarks ................................................................................................ 145 8.1.1. Preparing for the Theme ............................................................................... 145 8.1.2. Preparing for Language ................................................................................. 145

vii 8.1.3. Organization of Contents .............................................................................. 147 8.2. Blueprint for the Process of Writing ......................................................................... 148 8.3. Actual Process of Writing ......................................................................................... 149 8.3.1. Sentence Formation ...................................................................................... 150 8.3.2. Further Sentence Expansion.......................................................................... 152 8.4. Sentences to Paragraphs and Beyond ........................................................................ 152 8.5. Revision beyond the Correction of a Written Work ................................................. 154 Chapter IX. Arabic, spanish and English Linguistic Contacts: A Study of Loanwords ..................................................................................................................... 159 9.1. Introductory Remarks ................................................................................................ 159 9.2. Arabic and Spanish Contact ...................................................................................... 159 9.3. The Unexpected Borrowing of an Article ................................................................. 162 9.3.1. Size of ‘al’-Prefixed Loanwords in Arabic ................................................... 163 9.3.2. Qamari-Initiated Loanwords [QIL] ............................................................... 165 9.3.3. Shamsi-Initiated Loanwords [SIL]................................................................ 166 9.4. What Justified the Borrowing?! ................................................................................ 166 9.5. Spanish and English Contact ..................................................................................... 169 9.6. Spanish Loanwords via British English .................................................................... 169 9.7. Spanish Loanwords via American English ............................................................... 170 Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 173 Index............................................................................................................................... 179

List of Symbols Because the International Phonetic Association (IPA) and its symbols and conventions are the most linguistically acceptable tool of phonetic transcription, they have been adopted in this book to transcribe both English and Spanish as well as other languages when necessary. Slight modifications in both letter symbols and diacritics are occasionally used. Below is a list of the symbols and conventions used: Vowels

Phonetic Description

i  e   a  æ   o  u 

ɚ ɝ

Close front with spread lips Close front (somewhat centralized) to close-mid with spread lips Close-mid front with unrounded lips Open-mid front with unrounded lips Open-mid central with unrounded lips Open front with unrounded lips Near-open central vowel Near-open front with unrounded lips Open back with unrounded lips Open back with rounded lips Close-mid back with rounded lips Open-mid back with rounded lips Close back with rounded lips Near-close near-back with rounded lips Open-mid back with unrounded lips Mid central (neutral) vowel (schwa) R-colored (rhotacized) mid central (schwar) R-colored (rhotacized) open-mid central

Diphthongs au ai oi ou; o ei; e i ; iɚ e ; eɚ u ; uɚ

as in as in as in as in as in as in as in as in







x Consonants

Phonetic Description

b p p d t t

k k q  ʤ ʧ v f   z s    x     h    l j w m

Voiced bilabial plosive Voiceless unaspirated bilabial plosive Voiceless aspirated bilabial plosive Voiced alveolar plosive Voiceless unaspirated alveolar plosive Voiceless aspirated alveolar plosive Voiced palatal plosive Voiced velar plosive Voiceless unaspirated velar plosive Voiceless aspirated velar plosive Voiceless (unaspirated) uvular plosive Glottal stop Voiced postalveolar affricate Voiceless postalveolar affricate Voiced labiodental fricative Voiceless labiodental fricative Voiced interdental fricative Voiceless interdental fricative Voiced alveolar fricative Voiceless alveolar fricative Voiced postalveolar fricative Voiceless postalveolar fricative Voiced velar fricative Voiceless velar fricative Voiced uvular fricative Voiceless uvular fricative Voiced pharyngeal fricative Voiceless pharyngeal fricative Voiceless glottal fricative Voiced labio-dental approximant Voiced alveolar approximant Voiced retroflex approximant Voiced alveolar lateral approximant Voiced palatal approximant Voiced labio-velar approximant Voiced bilabial nasal (approximant)

xi n    r

Voiced alveolar nasal (approximant) Voiced velar nasal (approximant Voiced dental/alveolar tap Voiced retroflex tap Voiced dental/alveolar trill

Conventions

Grapheme {} Nomeneme (Letter-name) / / Phonemic transcription [] Phonetic transcription  Full length vowel  Half-length vowel _ Superscript indicating aspiration _! Superscript indicating strong stress – Subscript dot under /d,t,, s/ indicates /‫ض‬, ‫ ط‬, ‫ ظ‬, ‫ ص‬/ the emphatic sounds of Arabic ˜ Tilde _" Dieresis _΄ Accent C In syllable structure patterns, ‘C’ stands for a ‘Consonant’ and V stands for a ‘Vowel’ Arabic Symbols Consonants

IPA

Phonetic Description

‫أ‬ ‫ب‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ث‬ ‫ج‬ ‫ح‬ ‫خ‬ ‫د‬ ‫ذ‬ ‫ر‬ ‫ز‬ ‫س‬ ‫ش‬ ‫ص‬

[] [b] [t] [] [ʤ] [] [] [d] [] [r] [z] [s] [ ] [s]

glottal stop or the long vowel [a] voiced bilabial plosive voiceless alveolar plosive voiceless interdental fricative voiced postalveolar affricate voiceless pharyngeal fricative voiceless uvular fricative voiced alveolar plosive voiced interdental fricative alveolar trill voiced alveolar fricative voiceless alveolar fricative voiceless postalveolar fricative voiceless alveolar emphatic fricative

xii ‫ض‬ ‫ط‬ ‫ظ‬ ‫ع‬ ‫غ‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ق‬ ‫ك‬ ‫ل‬ ‫م‬ ‫ن‬  ‫و‬ ‫ي‬

‫ــّــ‬

[d] voiced alveolar emphatic plosive [t] voiceless (unaspirated) alveolar emphatic plosive [] voiced interdental emphatic fricative [] voiced pharyngeal fricative [] voiced uvular fricative [f] voiceless labio-dental fricative [q] voiceless (unaspirated) uvular plosive [k] voiceless velar plosive [l] voiced alveolar lateral [m] bilabial nasal [n] alveolar nasal [h] voiceless glottal fricative [w] central labio-velar approximant [j] central palatal approximant Superscript on consonant indicating geminated (double) consonant.

Vowels (Letters) ‫ا‬ ‫ي‬ ‫و‬

[a] [i] [u]

long counterpart of [a] long counterpart of [i] long counterpart of [u]

Vowels (Diacritics)

‫ــَــ‬ ‫ــِــ‬ ‫ــُــ‬

‫ـــْـ‬

Superscript over consonant indicating short (lax) [a] vowel. Subscript under consonant indicating short (lax) [i] vowel. Superscript on consonant indicating short (lax) [u] vowel. Superscript on consonant indicating absence of vowel

Foreword This is my fourth book in a series of books in the domain of applied linguistics with focus on the overall approach and method of teaching languages both as the first language (L1) and the second language (L2) together with the techniques needed for the implementation of the approach and method. This book is specifically geared toward the Latino (Hispanic)1 learners of English (hereafter, LLE), a fact which makes it somewhat different from the first three where I was dealing primarily with languages (English, Arabic, Aramaic) in which I have high proficiency. In this book, I did my best to use my very limited knowledge of Spanish to introduce Latino learners to English. Fortunately, the mastery of English (L2) was the final destination to which I tried my best to lead my students and other prospective learners of English of Latino linguistic background. There were three major guiding principles that ushered me in preparing myself to shoulder the writing of this book. First, I had to serve my student in the best way possible and learn from them while teaching. I am of the strong conviction that one of best ways to learn is to teach– but teach proactively with a passion for learning from what one may call the ‘the rights and wrongs’ of the learners and transform the knowledge gained into effective strategies for teaching. Second, teach what my teachers did not teach me or were unable to do so for either not connecting with the learners or for their limited preparedness in teaching the given subject. I, for one, majored in English as L2 in a non-English speaking country. Although the majority of my instructors were native speakers of English, the Aramaic and Arabic linguistic background generated so much negative transfer that seriously interfered with the mastery of stress and rhythm of English. I do not remember that my teachers of English in my college education ever brought to my attention and to the attention of my classmates the terrible misplacement of stress in English we demonstrated at the time. Personally, it was only at my graduate studies in speech sciences in England that I self-discovered the manner in which I misplaced stress in categories of words such as . In such categories of words, I shifted the stress to the last syllable under the influence of the background languages (Aramaic and Arabic) rendering them as: . At the time, I was simply imposing a Semitic rhythm upon an Anglo-Saxon language. Third, to be more authentic and precise in my statement above, I do vaguely recall that one of my English instructors in high school did mention in passing that words such as and are distinguished as ‘nouns’ and ‘verbs’ by placing the stress on the first syllable for the former and on the second syllable for the latter. Apparently, the class, or at least I, failed to connect with what the teacher was trying to impress upon us. More accurately, either we failed to connect with the instructor or he failed to do so with us. This failure of learner-teacher connection reverberates in my mind as an extremely significant principle in teaching. In teaching any subject or theme foremost of the things that the teacher has to 1

The term ‘Latino’ is used throughout the book for convenience without any political or ethnic overtones.

xiv ascertain is the fact that there is a connection between him/her and the learners. Stated differently, the teacher has to find the means to discover that learners comprehend what is being introduced. There is hardly any effective teaching when such connection fails. Personally, as a classroom teacher, I am very much aware of the significance of maintaining such a connection and finding the means to discover whether the connection has been established or not. Equally important for the teachers, is to help learners discover what they do not know when in reality they think they know. Just recently, I introduced the fact that some words in English change their grammatical category by the shift in stress placement such as in: . When I demonstrated the difference as distinctly as possible, I carefully watched the facial gestures and impressions of some of my students. When I asked one of them whose proficiency in English as a non-native speaker was quite good to demonstrate them, I noticed confusion and failure. At this instance, I suspected that the student had not connected yet with what I was trying to introduce. I used different strategies to impress the stress shift upon the student. In a few minutes, she was able to signal the difference. The next session, the student approached me and said: “I really thought I knew the difference, but apparently I did not.” This is a typical example of learners who do not know what they thought they knew. It is the responsibility of the teachers to develop the techniques to detect and discover this type of learners. This book is developed in line with the ‘Multisensory and Multicognitive Approach’ (MMA) introduced in my first book: Techniques of Teaching Pronunciation in ESL, Bilingual and Foreign Language Situations (2003). As one notices, the approach is a two-prong one: multisensory, on the one hand, and multicognitive, on the other. Multisensory implies using all sensory modalities of which the human physical system is capable of manipulating, such as auditory, visual and kinesthetic-proprioceptive etc., to function separately and jointly as needed to feed the brain with the needed diversified input(s). Multicognitive implies allowing all cognitive processes of which the human brain is capable, such as thinking, comparing, analyzing, synthesizing and memorizing etc..., to function separately and jointly as needed to activate the brain. In light of this approach, the teaching of any aspect of language, especially to adults in second language (L2) or foreign language (FL) situations, requires engaging the brain in the process and manipulating as many senses as relevant to the successful internalization of the targeted language skill. It also requires designing techniques and activities which will facilitate the efficient functioning of the cognitive processes and sensory modalities. MMA attempts to stimulate the brain in a multisensory manner and activates many of its cognitive processes to transform the mechanical habit into a subconscious cognitive one and relieve the brain of as much conscious effort in retention and retrieval as possible. Obviously, no book can cover all what LLEs need to develop a good level of proficiency in English. The aspects covered in this book are determined by three facts. First, the aspects of English which I think I am capable of introducing efficiently to my students. Second, the aspects of English which LLEs often fail to improve upon–such as in matters of pronunciation–in spite of long years in

xv English languages classes or situations. Third, the type of program in which the teaching is taking place–in this case a bilingual program which is part of a teacher preparation program. The book covers nine chapters, the first of which identifies Spanish in historical contexts and language family affiliation. It also covers the geographical and cultural contexts to which Spanish has been taken especially in its American habitat. Chapters two through six deal with the comparison and teaching of English and Spanish alphabets in their four different identities, namely, graphemes, phonemes, nomenemes and sequemes. There is specific emphasis on the most significant differences between English and Spanish such as the overall vowel systems as well as the most salient consonantal differences. Chapter seven handles the comparative study of stress placement and rhythm in the two languages. Chapter eight is an attempt at introducing some practical tips for teaching writing in an expansive format called the ‘pebble and pond’. The last chapter gives an example of languages in contact with emphasis on borrowing and naturalization of loanwords. In this instance, it is a triangular language contact of Arabic, Spanish and English and the manner in which they interact with each other. It is my hope that students and teachers will benefit from the overall approach and the implementation strategies contained in this book. Edward Y. Odisho Northeastern Illinois University Chicago, Illinois

Acknowledgements First and foremost I have to express my appreciation to my Spanishspeaking students whom I devotedly taught and from whom I eagerly learned while teaching. When I first entered the United States of America in 1981, I had no linguistic acquaintance with the structures and systems of the Spanish language and the difficulties Spanish-speakers encounter in their transition to English. However, as a linguist, when one teaches any group of students with a coherent linguistic background, one gradually begins to identify the most salient difficulties of those students with learning their second language (L2), English in this case. It was those students who taught me in classroom situations that between each two vowel qualities there is a third quality and between each two vowel quantities (lengths) there is a half-way quantity. I gradually, albeit steadily, began to learn and then help them to transition more smoothly from Spanish to English. I thank all my students, the good ones and the not-so-good ones each of whom taught me in his/her own way. I also would like to express my deep appreciation to Dr. Victoria RomanLagunas, previously a colleague at Loyola University Chicago and presently a colleague at Northeastern Illinois University as an Associate Provost, for reading my manuscript and making some very beneficial corrections and suggestions. Also, I would like to thank Mr. Devlin Hyna who kindly gave me some of his time to read part of my manuscript and made some helpful suggestions. Thus, if you encounter any inaccuracies, you have no one to blame but me. Also my son Fred Furat was always ready to pitch in when I faced some technical difficulties in preparing my manuscript. He really remedied my technical weaknesses. Finally, I should not forget my wife (Wardia Shamiran) for her limitless patience and encouragement throughout my decades-long involvement in writing. Edward Y. Odisho April 26, 2007

Chapter I Family Origin of Spanish and its Geographic Spread 1.1. Introductory Remarks In order to understand the history and evolution of modern Spanish as a language used throughout twenty-one countries by a population estimated between 350 to 400 million (Mar-Molinero, 1997; Stewart, 1999) it will be quite helpful to present a general and compact view of its history and evolution. Human languages throughout the world are estimated in the thousands with the highest estimate being approximately six thousand languages that are assigned to major families. The concept of language family seems to be an extension of the concept of classification into categories of different forms of live organisms or entities in a hierarchical structure from the most general to the most specific much like what Charles Darwin promoted in his book The Origin of Species. Thus, the several thousands of human languages can be clustered in only scores of major language families each of which has a basic form usually known a protolanguage2; for instance, the overwhelming majority of languages in Europe are genetically related to each other through an archetype form known as protolanguage and named proto-Indo-European which serves as the hypothetical construct that genetically binds all Indo-European (IE) languages. The rationale for relating languages genetically within a given family is premised on historical, geographic and linguistic facts and principles. It is hypothesized that if speakers of a given language distance themselves from each other and move to different geographical areas, they will enter a stage of geographic isolation. The further they move, the more they isolate themselves from each other. This geographic isolation of a given language from its ancestry coupled with its contacts with local languages and cultures leads to the emergence of different hybrid linguistic varieties. The cumulative consequences of geographic isolation, localized cultures, contact with other languages and the internal dynamics of human language due to different social, economic, political new surroundings etc. usually result in creating different dialects which, over several centuries, develop into autonomous languages due to a decline in mutual intelligibility among those dialects. 1.2. Indo-European Family of Languages With only about a hundred languages, Indo-European is not a large family in terms of total number of languages. However, it is the largest language family in the world in terms of total number of speakers (O’Grady, 1993:320). Besides, it is a family whose languages cover a large area. Indo-European languages are spread all over Europe (except for a few languages such as Magyar ‘Hungarian’, Basque, Finnish etc…) extending beyond it to the Middle East to cover the 2

is a Greek word meaning “first” or “earliest form”.

2

Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

Kurdish regions of Turkey, Iran and Iraq (Kurdish) and into most of Iran (Farsi), Afghanistan (Pashto), Pakistan (Urdu), Bangladesh (Bengali) and most parts of the Indian peninsula, especially in its central and northern regions. It is this regional stretch between Europe and India that grants the family its IndoEuropean name. Perhaps, the greatest expansion in the domain of the IE family came with the Western European colonial domination of the two Americas. Spanish, English, Portuguese and French languages, all of which are IE, have virtually replaced the Native American languages. It is this expansion into the new world that has raised the total population of IE speakers over a billion and a half. The table below gives the reader a sketch of the nine sub-families of IE.

Indo-Irani

Baltic

Slavic

Greek

Albanian

Armenian

Romance

Celtic

Germanic

Indo-European Sub-Families

Figure 1. The main sub-families of the great IE family of languages. 1.3. Romance Sub-Family Since Spanish belongs to the Romance or Latin sub-family of IE, it is beneficial to elaborate on this sub-family in order to better understand the linguistic status of Spanish among the rest of the Romance languages. The chart below is a representation of the better known Latin languages. Spanish, French and Italian are the ones with the largest population followed by Romania which is the only Romance language that is geographically isolated from the core region of the Roman Empire due to the incursion of the Magyar and Slavic tribes to the south and the separation of Romania. Thus because Romania has long been brought into contact with Slavic languages, it is influenced by them much unlike Italian, Spanish and French.

Figure 2. The main languages of the Romance sub-family.

Romanian

Romansh

Italian

Provençal

French

Occitan

Catalan

Spanish

Portuguese

Romance Languages

Family Origin of Spanish and its Geographic Spread

3

Obviously, all those languages are the descendants of Latin, but not necessarily the direct offspring of its classical form. They are rather the historical linguistic variants of the different regionally spoken dialects or the so-called Vulgar Latin. It is evident from the historical pattern for the linguistic evolution of almost all modern standard forms of today’s languages that such standards are linguistic extensions premised on former local or regional dialects of a given language rather than the survivals of the classical or former standard varieties. If modern French, Spanish or Italian had been the direct descendants of Classical Latin, they should have been far more mutually intelligible than they are presently. The forms they are in today render them highly unintelligible to the lesser educated speakers and it is this high unintelligibility that justifies their status as autonomous languages rather than mere dialects of Classical Latin. Of all the languages of today, it is only Modern Standard Arabic that has maintained greater similarity to Classical Arabic. The only reason for this is the fact that Arabic language is religiously bound with the Islamic religion. It is also claimed in Islamic religion that the contents of Al-Qur’aan (‫ )ا*)('ن‬represent the actual words of God and consequently, the Arabic language should not deviate from the norm used in Al-Qur’aan. However, despite this intimate religious connection, Modern Standard Arabic has indeed diverged away from the religious norm set by the Holy Book of Moslems. It is a linguistic axiom that as long as a language is in circulation it will undergo changes. The only difference is that in case of Arabic the divergence is more limited. 1.4. Journey of Spanish into the New World The crossing of the Atlantic by the Spaniards led by Christopher Columbus and their accidental encounter with the Americas and eventual occupation of Central and South America led consequently to the institution of Spanish as a new language of the region that, in the long run, seriously damaged most of the Native American languages. Only a small percentage of the population of Latin America still speaks a few of the hundreds of indigenous languages with different degrees of proficiency. In fact, many of the indigenous people are increasingly becoming bilingual with their gradual acquisition of Spanish. This expansion of Spanish into the New World coupled with a very high birth rate of its population put Spanish in the position of the “fourth most widely spoken language in the world after Mandarin Chinese, English and Hindi” (Stewart, 1999:3). Two of the most powerful tools that helped Spanish spread were the religious conversion of the indigenous people to Catholicism and the use of Spanish as a medium of literacy, public education, social mobility and political administration. Obviously, this should not imply that there are no indigenes who still use their native languages and practice their indigenous religions. Thus Spain, the historical origin of Spanish language, with a population size of about 40 million represents a fraction of the overall Spanish speaking world.

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

1.5. Spanish in Confrontation with Native American Languages It is true that there are enclaves of Native American languages still in existence, but they are no more than small islands in the midst of the linguistic oceans of Spanish, English and Portuguese. In South America, there are presently more than eleven million people who speak an Amerindian language including Quechua, in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, Aymara in Peru and Guarani in Paraguay (O’Grady, 1993:334; Stewart, 1999: 3-5; Penny, 2002: 276). It is said that only a small number of languages have more than 100,000 speakers, with Quechua and Guarani having 7.3 and 1.5 million, respectively. These indigenous languages are in a race with Spanish they will never win. As long as the urban areas are steadily growing due to migration from the rural areas and as long as public education is conducted in Spanish, the domains of the native languages, which are primarily confined to rural areas, will continue shrinking progressively. No one can deny that in several of the Spanish-speaking countries such as Bolivia, Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, among others, there is a rising sense of indigenous identity and the need to maintain and revitalize the indigenous languages and cultures, but without strong geographic, administrative, educational and economic borders to protect and promote the indigenous identity, the identity will remain in direct threat of Spanish language and culture dominance. The current globalization trend that is sweeping the whole world is not in favor of small languages which do not have strong economic, political and social foundations. It is those foundations that function as borders to protect the survival and maintenance of small languages. Besides Guarani, which has, by far, the most conducive conditions of actual circulation and survival in Paraguay, Quechua has also, thus far, managed to survive in the face of the powerful Spanish for two reasons. First, it was the dominant language of the Incan Empire and was also used, after its destruction by the Spaniards, as a medium of their missions to convert the indigenous population to Christianity. Second, the adoption of some progressive measures by some of the governments including Peru and Ecuador in the 1970’s and 1980’s helped promote genuine bilingual, intercultural and pluralistic models of native American education (Hamel, 1994: 275). However, in this day and age of the explosion of population, globalization, communication technology and urbanization, no social and geographic isolation is possible. Consequently, Quechua, Aymara or even Guarani are not immune to linguistic invasion by Spanish in the future. With every wave of migration of Quechua speakers from their villages in the mountains to the urban areas in the plains, a major loss of language takes place. I have two anecdotes to narrate pertaining to the survival status of Quechua. The first anecdote relates to one of my graduate students of Peruvian origin and of Quechua linguistic background. He had served as an officer in the Peruvian army prior to coming to the United States. When asked whether he spoke Quechua or not, the response was in the negative. He said that only his parents spoke the language and he only knew isolated words because as a child he went to primary and secondary schools in which Spanish language was the medium of education. Obviously, his military schooling and training were exclusively in Spanish. After his graduation, Spanish functioned as his first and dominant

Family Origin of Spanish and its Geographic Spread

5

language for all forms of interaction including daily conversation as well as formal communication.

The above statement indicates two facts. The first is that the maintenance of Quechua seems to be a generational problem. In other words, the older the generation is, the higher the likelihood of maintaining the native language in daily communication and the younger the generation the less the likelihood of maintaining it as a functional language. The second fact relates to the extent to which the native language is the medium of education, especially at the early stages, as well as the medium of social and economic mobility. Certainly, if the native language is confined to home and has the status of the non-prestigious low language, its circulation and effectiveness in daily communication as well as in formal interaction will be very limited. It is the combination of the above two facts that impedes the intergenerational transmission of the native language. And if this intergenerational disconnection takes place, the younger generation will not be in a situation that is conducive for native language maintenance. The second anecdote relates to a married couple, also of Quechua linguistic background, who were on our university campus to sell some folkloric art and craft works. I met them inadvertently when I took a short break from a graduate class during which I mentioned Quechua as a language struggling for survival in its confrontation with Spanish. When I asked the husband whether he speaks Quechua, he strongly responded in the affirmative. Encouraged by this positive response, I invited the couple to attend my class for a few minutes and meet my students who are interested in knowing about the Quechua language and eager to listen to its native speakers. They accepted my invitation and participated in the discussion with my students. As a warm up question to discover the level of their proficiency in Quechua, I asked the husband to count one though ten thinking that counting in the native language tends to be a very natural skill. He was quite successful in moving from one through five, but to my utter surprise he got stuck at what was supposed to be ‘six’. He hesitated for a few seconds, stuttered for a few more after which he turned to his wife as if asking her for help. She also hesitated for a split second, but finally managed to utter ‘six’. To overcome their difficulty, they both collaborated to finish counting through ‘ten’.

This anecdote bears some significance regarding ordinary people’s vision and interpretation of language proficiency. The subjects under discussion thought they were proficient in Quechua, whereas their failure to complete a basic linguistic task in the native language indicates otherwise. All in all, their difficulty with basic counting is an indication of low proficiency level in the native language. In reality, the fact that they got stuck in counting beyond ‘five’ was a clear indication of a very low oral proficiency level. To overcome their difficulty they immediately began to communicate in Spanish showing that it was Spanish not Quechua that was their dominant language. Because the subjects in both anecdotes were between 30-40 years of age, this serves as evidence that if this middle generation is on the verge of losing the native language, it seems highly unlikely for the younger generation to maintain it. In other words, Quechua is in an endangered status. There are claims made that the Peruvian government is trying to protect Quechua and maintain its circulation

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

by preparing textbooks and teaching it in schools. To assess the effectiveness of such a language planning program, especially in the case of a minority endangered language, several questions are in order. First, does the language have a region, territory or a community within which the given language is dominantly or actively in daily circulation both in the community and at home? In other words, does it have a territorial base of actual circulation? Second, is this territorial base economically self-sufficient to the extent that it discourages any migration out of the territory? Third, do the people feel that their language is a major constituent of their national and ethnic identity? Fourth, does the language exist in both oracy (listening and speaking) and literacy (writing and reading) forms? Fifth, is the language taught in schools? If so, are the schools monolingual (only in Quechua), or bilingual (with Quechua dominant) or are they bilingual (with Spanish dominant)? When the answers to the first four questions are positive and the cross-cultural education is in the native language or it is bilingual education with Quechua dominant, then Quechua will continue to survive very healthily. The natural habitat for a language to survive dynamically is the one where the language is actively used in the community, at home and at school. Figure 3 below, is a schematic representation of the generative cycle for language revitalization and maintenance. The community and home components of this triangular model usually cater for the promotion of oral skills, whereas the school provides for literacy skills. The active circulation of oracy and literacy helps with the transmission of language from the older to the younger generation resulting in an intergenerational linguistic connection (Odisho, 2004: 192-3).

School

Home

Community Figure 3. Schematic representation of the three sources of active language maintenance and revitalization. Linguistics is the science of language and it observes an objective perspective of dealing with human languages with fairness and equity. Linguistics has specifically rejected the use of the attributes of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ in assessing languages and cultures. It is, therefore, the hope of every native speaker of a given language, every humanitarian scholar and every conscientious linguist to maintain the survival and continuity of human languages before it is too late. Nobody wants the regulations in favor of protecting and maintaining the survival

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of the Native American languages to be passed when it is practically too late. This is why Schiffman likens the passing of Native American Languages Act by the US Congress in 1990 as the act of ‘locking the barn door after the horse is stolen’(1996: 245). 1.6. Language Variation: Spanish Accents, Dialects and Standard(s) From the sociolinguistic perspective, the term ‘language’ represents a general and abstract construct which hypothetically encompasses a wide range of accents and dialects. An accent is, generally speaking, used to indicate pronunciation differences among and between variations in one language. Dialects are variations within the same language whose differences go beyond pronunciation to include further lexical, morphological and even syntactical differences.3 Differences across dialects may be attributed to regional (geographic), ethnic, cultural and socio-economic variations among the speakers of the same language. Despite all the linguistic differences across those dialects, they still should maintain a level of mutual intelligibility that ranges from a fair level to a high one. When mutual intelligibility decreases between two dialects of a given language due to the persistence and growth of differences, the two dialects become autonomous languages usually known as cognate languages. Quite naturally, when oral communication across dialects becomes more problematic, literate and educated speakers opt for a more common means of communication usually called the standard language that serves as a common medium of both oral and written communication. Thus, the so-called standard language is, in reality, yet another dialect that is predominantly used by the educated. It usually evolves in the capitals of nations or other cities or regions that compete with the capitals in educational, scholarly and artistic achievements. The standard is usually promoted through public schools, universities and literary publications. Take, for instance, the evolution of the Standard English. “Historically speaking, the standard variety of the English language developed out of the English dialects used in and around London as these were modified through the centuries by speakers of the court, by scholars from the universities and other writers, and, later on, by the Public Schools.” (Trudgill, 2000: 6). In the case of Standard Spanish, usually called Castilian or Castellano or Español and historically associated with the learned King of Castile and Leon, Alfonso X who ruled during the years of 1252-1284 (Penny, 2002: 20-1), it gradually began to emerge in Toledo and its vicinities. Throughout the years, the speech of Toledo became the basis of the written and the spoken standard; however, Seville and later Madrid were the cultural and educational centers that were in competition with Toledo (Penny, 2002: 21). The 16th century onwards does not only mark the political unification of Spain, but also the dominance and political supremacy of Castilian as the language of the court, administration and literature (Mar Molinero, 1997;7). Prominent writers such as Cervantes, the author of the world renowned novel Don Quixote de la Mancha, lived during this period. 3

For more details on the concepts of accents, dialects and standards see Trudgill (2000).

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

When Spain began its colonization campaign, it took its language wherever its soldiers and its Catholic missionaries went (Martínez, 1999: x). The spread of Castilian was not confined to Spain because one of the foremost missions of the Spanish Empire was to introduce and impose Castilian as the standard means of both written and oral communication throughout its Empire. This process is collectively named by some writers as Castilianization4 (Mar Molinero, 1997: 21; Stewart, 1999: 14). Castilianization was imposed and spread as the formal communication medium in Latin America through its adoption as the official medium of administration, of the massive proselytization of the indigenous people into Christianity and of the public schooling system and university education. In fact, Spain, like France and many other countries, has established a central formal authority to promote the propagation of Castilian and monitor and arbitrate the linguistic changes and modifications brought about in the Spanish language. In Spain this authority is called the Real Academia Española (RAE) which was established in 1713 (Stewart, 1999: 15: Penny, 2002: 2). However, it is of utmost importance to point out that from the linguistic perspective, change in human language, any language, is too natural and dynamic to be governed by an academy. Usually implementation measures adopted by language academies come after a given language has already been undergoing some changes, whether those changes were in line with the academy’s linguistic philosophy or not. Thus, for instance, in the case of Spain, regardless of all the efforts of RAE, the country still has a wide variety of dialects and even several variants of the so-called standard language. Besides, Spain is still a multilingual country with Catalonian, Galician and Basque still spoken side by side with Castilian Spanish. The linguistic diversity of Spanish in Latin America is even greater than it is in Spain. There are many reasons for this richness in diversity. First, not all comers to the New World were speakers of Castilian; there were others who came from different regions and brought other regional dialects of Spanish with them. For instance, a great number of invaders and immigrants came from the southern region of Spain whose dialect was predominantly Andalusian5. It is, therefore, not unreasonable to assume that where more Spanish words of Arabic origin are used in a Latin American country the more likely it would imply that the early Spanish settlers, or at least part of them, were originally from Andalusia which was the center for Spanish and Arabic contacts. For instance, to find out that the word for a grocery store in Uruguay is , whereas in Peru is may serve as an example because is a word of Arabic origin (‫ن‬+,-*‫ )ا‬meaning . Second, the newcomers settled in different regions thus they came into contact with different indigenous languages and cultures. “This had an enormous impact on European Spanish creating, in effect, multiple varieties of the mother tongue” (Martínez, 1999: xi). It is because of this linguistic and cultural diversity Martínez et al justify the rationale for their Multicultural Spanish Dictionary. 4

The British spelling of which is ‘Castilianisation’; more formally, ‘Castilianisation’ is used as a term that describes the expansion or imposition of the use of Castilian language across territories where the Castilian Crown and its legacy dominated (Mar Molinero, 1997: 179). 5 Spanish spelling is Andalucía and Andalucían

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9

Third, the political independence, which almost all Central and South American countries achieved gradually, changed those countries into geographic and regional islands with political borders which, in turn, intensified the dialectal differences due to the specific socio-economic, political and cultural characteristics that each country developed. Fourth, each language or each variety of a language is naturally and continuously prone to internal shift due to the dynamic nature of language in circulation. This shift is usually more readily discernable in pronunciation and vocabulary. Thus, in spite of all the efforts by the RAE and several other academies established in Latin American countries to ‘govern’ the trends of language shift in Spanish, human language is too dynamic to be governed by decrees. A major principle of modern linguistics has been the distinction between a prescriptive trend in language according to which language authorities dictate to its speakers how language should be used and a descriptive trend according to which linguists report how language is actually used by its speakers and formulate the rules of usage in light of their descriptive data. 1.7. Standard or Standards? Linguistically speaking, the variety of a language formally known as ‘standard’ is no more than a dialect like any other dialect except for the fact that it tends the dialect of the educated. Remember, the description here is in linguistic terms. In other words, the description is formulated in terms of the linguistic systems and structures of dialects each of which has to have clearly established phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical and semantic systems to facilitate intelligibility and comprehensibility among its speakers. To demonstrate, any other Spanish dialect, whether regional or ethnic or social, is linguistically a complete system of communication on a par with Castilian Spanish. Therefore, if a given dialect, Castilian in this case, enjoys more prestige and status, it is only on non-linguistic premises such as being the medium of literature, education or the form of communication associated with upper classes of the community. There are no intrinsic linguistic features in Castilian that render it more prestigious than any other dialect. “Linguistically speaking, it (standard) cannot legitimately be considered better than other varieties. The scientific study of language has convinced scholars that all languages, and correspondingly all dialects, are equally good as linguistic systems” (Trudgill, 2000: 8). Regardless of the above equal linguistic assessment of dialects within a given language, the recognized standard varieties of languages are still held with much reverence and respect and consequently preferred to other dialects. In British English, for instance, the so-called Received Pronunciation (RP) of English is still very prestigious compared to other varieties of British English. Similarly, Castilian is held very highly not just on the Iberian Peninsula, but also in Latin America (Green, 1988: 79). This implies that many of the educated speakers of Spanish throughout the world still believe in the prestigious status of Castilian and try to learn it and emulate it; in fact, Castilian tends to be the model variety of Spanish that is taught in second and foreign language situations.

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

Strictly speaking, it is quite natural even for the so-called standard variety to have somewhat different realizations in different regions and with different ethnic groups. Take RP English6, for instance; one can readily identify somewhat different versions in the north of England and southwest of it. More specifically, one can tell the different realizations of Standard British English in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Primarily, the differences tend to be in pronunciation. This is why Trudgill highlights the fact that Standard English can be spoken with any regional accent, and in the vast majority of cases normally is (2000: 8). One of the most distinctive features of pronunciation difference among those varieties of the standard is related to the pronunciation of the sound of . The difference in the pronunciation of this sound as a distinctive feature across the various forms of Standard English is relevant in two respects. First, if the sound is pronounced in non-prevocalic positions or not, such as in and . Those varieties that do not pronounce the ‘r’ in those positions are named ‘non-r dialects’ and those that pronounce it are named ‘r dialects’. For example, RP is a ‘non-r dialect’, whereas General American is an ‘r-dialect’; thus, their pronunciation of will be /ft/ for RP and /frt/ = [ft] for General American. Second, the articulatory manner in which ‘r’ is pronounced. In RP, ‘r’ is pronounced as an approximant or the so-called frictionless continuant [], whereas in General American, it tends to be pronounced as a retroflex approximant [] and in Scottish and Irish varieties, it shifts between a tap/flap or a trill. Similarly, Castilian Spanish is realized somewhat differently within Spain as well as outside it–at least for those who believe in the prestigious status of Castilian and attempt to emulate it. Naturally, the Latin American standard(s) also have some differences from Castilian; however, even though the Latin American one may be collectively labeled by some authors as non-Castilian varieties (Hadlich et al, 1968), the two still do not have striking differences. Most of the differences are confined to pronunciation and to a lesser extent to vocabulary. Some of the most commonly cited pronunciation differences are whether a given variety of Spanish does demonstrate phonetic and phonological distinction between the pair of sounds [#], a voiced palatal lateral approximant ‘l’ vs. [j], a voiced palatal central approximant as in the words = [ka!#o] vs. = [ka!jo] and the pair of sounds [], a voiceless interdental fricative, vs. [s], a voiceless alveolar fricative, as in the words = [kaa] vs. = [kasa]. If the intention of the above discussion of different realizations of the socalled standard languages is meant to arrive at a more accurate description of language variations, then there seems to be ample evidence that the term ‘standard’ is, in reality, yet another generic and abstract linguistic label. For instance, it is linguistically inaccurate to use terms such as ‘Standard English’ to encompass all the national standards in England, Scotland, Ireland, U.S.A., 6

RP stands for Received Pronunciation which, in turn, represents the prestigious Standard English pronunciation.

Family Origin of Spanish and its Geographic Spread

11

Australia, Canada etc…because they are, indeed, different from each other no matter how small the differences are. By the same token, the standards within Spain and elsewhere also maintain their own differences from each other. In order to secure more descriptive accuracy and to give a more linguistically realistic picture of the various realizations of a given ‘Standard Language’ it is utterly justified to recognize different variants for each standard and call them ‘Standard Language Variants’. Of all the variants in any given language, these Standard Variants tend to display the most minimal differences. Most frequently, such differences tend to be confined to pronunciation and lexicon [vocabulary] and the differences diminish gradually in the domains of morphology and syntax. Based on our elaboration on the concept of a standard language, a token demonstration of standard variants in English will include those in figure 4 below. Standard English Variants

Canadian

New Zealander U.S.

British

Australian

Northeast

Welsh Irish

Southern

Scottish

Midwest English Figure 4. Chart of most important variants of Standard English.

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English Standard Spanish Variants Latin American Spanish: only most populous variants

Peninsular Spanish

Castilian Mexican AsturianLeonese

Andalusian Aragonese

Colombian Argentinean

Figure 5. Chart of most important variants of Standard Spanish. Similarly, the Spanish language will include several standard variants the most common of which are Castilian, Andalusian, Aragonese, Asturian-Leonese, among others, (Bull, 1965: 22) as represented in figure 5, above. Notice that under the Latin American variants only the variants of the countries with the largest populations are cited as examples. In reality, each Spanish-speaking country of the twenty-plus Latin-American countries has a standard variant of its own. It is of the utmost significance to alert the reader that the linguistic entities identified here as standard variants should be distinguished from the general constructs which have been named dialects. Earlier on, dialects were identified as language variants the differences between which go beyond pronunciation to include further lexical, morphological and even syntactical differences. These standard variants are linguistic constructs the differences across which are very limited and usually confined to pronunciation with some lexical differences. Such an identification of the standard variants renders them linguistically nearer to the concept of an accent. Strictly speaking, they could be identified as accents of the standard. In sum, standard language variants are accents of the generic construct of a language traditionally labeled as Standard. 1.8. What Standard Variant to Teach? At this juncture of arguing in favor of rationalizing the concept of standard variants, it is legitimate to inquire about the practical implications of this argument. Questions such as “What standard variant to teach?” or “What standard

Family Origin of Spanish and its Geographic Spread

13

variant to use for business purposes?” are all very legitimate. However, questions of this nature are not difficult to answer. The linguistic division in the Spanishspeaking world between Peninsular Spanish and Latin American Spanish is not unlike the division in the English-speaking world primarily represented by General American English and General British English often presented to the world through the scores of world-wide outlets of the British Institute, the United Kingdom’s governmental institution for the promotion of English language throughout the world. Prior to World War II, British English was almost exclusively the medium of instruction of English as a foreign language. After the War, the competition between American English and British English intensified. Presently, the outside world is almost equally exposed to both varieties. A very similar historical scenario is valid for Spanish. Peninsular Spanish especially in the form of Castilian has enjoyed a highly prestigious status for long centuries; however, during the 20th century several standard varieties have emerged in Latin American countries, especially in the most populous ones such as Mexico, Argentina and Colombia which have produced rich literature and gained much prestige and rendered “modern standard (Spanish) supranational and intercontinental” (Penny, 2002: 319). This expansion in the domain of prestige of the Spanish language has been the result of the political, economic and social progress in many of the Latin American countries that legitimately created a conglomeration of well-established non-Castilian standard varieties of Spanish. Several of the Latin American countries have founded their own Spanish Language Academies such as Mexico which in 1951 moved to form a unified academic body which was formed in 1961 under the name of Associación de Academias de la Lengua Española (Mar-Molinero, 1997: 26; Stewart, 1999: 17). In light of the greater stabilization of the standard varieties of the Spanish language, any of the two of its primary varieties, Peninsular and Latin American are qualified and eligible to serve as a medium of foreign or second language teaching as well as a medium of international business and transactions. Obviously, in the new world, a Latin American standard is more practical not only because it is growing more popular in the United States, but also because of a population of 350 million Spanish-speakers in the Americas. Moreover, presently, Latin America, in general, has extended its international connections all over the world. With this international opening of Latin America to the world together with a population almost ten times greater than the speakers of Peninsular Spanish, the future of dominance will be in favor of the Latin American standard variety.

Chapter II Spanish and English Alphabets and Alphabet Identities 2.1. Alphabet, Graphemics and Orthography At the outset, it is helpful to clarify the difference between the terms ‘alphabet’, ‘graphemics’ and ‘orthography’. The former stands for the list of alphabetic symbols of which a certain system of writing consists. For instance, the English alphabet has twenty-six symbols (commonly known as letters) in its alphabetic system. Graphemics is a modern term used to designate the study of graphemes (in the form of letters and diacritics and combinations of letters and/or diacritics) much like phonemics which is the study of phonemes. As for the orthography, it stands for the applied aspects of the alphabet system in conjunction with graphemics. In other words, it stands for the conventional application of the alphabet symbols together with other symbols, such as diacritics, and the manner and rules that govern the application in designating structures of words and the overall pronunciation in a certain language. To demonstrate the concept of orthography in English, one has to take into consideration the following: 1) What diacritical marks does English use? Luckily, English has hardly any diacritics; therefore, they have a negligible role compared, for instance, to the Semitic orthographies, such Aramaic, Arabic and Hebrew, which are laden with diacritics. 2) Does it combine its alphabetic symbols in the form of digraphs (a combination of two letters such or ) or trigraphs (a combination of three letters such as )? 3) Does it combine its alphabetic symbols with diacritics such as the Spanish with a tilde to create or German vowels with an umlaut to create or an Arabic letter with a FatHa (./0َ1 ) above any letter to indicate its combination with an /a/ vowel as in plus FatHa to create ـ‬to designate the syllable /ba/? 4) Do the alphabetic symbols have more than one form such as most of the Latin-based alphabets which have lower case and upper case variants for example vs. ? Not all orthographies have lower case (small) vs. upper case (capital) letters. Arabic, for example, does not maintain a lower vs. upper case distinction; however, it does have different letter forms for different structural positions within a word, namely, initial, medial, final and independent (stand alone) as in , , and ع‬, respectively. 5) Does one alphabetic symbol stand for more than one sound as for the symbol which stands for /s/ as in , /k/ as in , // as in and /ʧ/ as in and is one sound represented by different symbols or combination of symbols such as the sound of /k/ being designated by as in , by as in , by as in , by as in , by and as in etc…? 6) Does the orthography allow silent letters and are those silent letters rule-governed, i.e. are they predictable with a rule or rules? English orthography is one of the most, if not the most, permissive of silent letters. Almost every letter of its alphabet may be silent in a certain context.

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The above questions are extremely significant in determining the nature of any orthography, especially the alphabet-based ones. It will be seen in due course that orthographies across languages can range from the more consistent in grapheme (symbol) and phoneme (sound) matching to the less consistent. The former orthographies will be identified as shallow or transparent orthographies, whereas the latter ones will be identified as deep or opaque orthographies. A detailed discussion of those types of orthographies will be handled later. 2.2. Origin of the Alphabet The principle of one symbol for one sound on which the alphabet was originally based was discovered or invented once in the history of humanity. No nation or language had to reinvent the principle of the alphabet. All what they had to do was to borrow it and modify its design to suit the new language it was meant to serve (See Odisho, 2004 for details). Although the English and Spanish alphabets are somewhat different in the number of symbols used, their names and their sound values, both alphabets are Latin-based. Historically, Latin itself was borrowed and modified from the Greek alphabet which, in turn, was borrowed and modified from the Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets. Thus the origin of the alphabet is one. It was born in the Near East and associated with the Phoenicians the indigenous natives of today’s Lebanon. This is why the name of the first alphabet is traditionally known as Phoenician. It is, therefore, a misconception on the part of certain people to think that the origin of the alphabet is Hebrew or Greek. This Phoenician alphabet was borrowed by the ancient Arameans of the Fertile Crescent approximately some eight centuries B.C. (Jean, 1992: 52-3) The Arameans perfected the alphabetic writing system and disseminated it through trade transactions, social interactions and political relationships with the rest of the Mesopotamian peoples such as the Assyrians and Babylonians. The alphabetic writing was such a powerful tool of literacy, recording and documentation that it ousted the ideographic and syllabic writing systems of the Sumerians, Assyrians and Babylonians and other peoples of the greater Middle East and eventually spread throughout the world. The existence of trade relations between the nations of the Fertile Crescent and Greece made the transfer of the alphabet a natural and practical transaction to happen. Thus, the famous Greek alphabet was created through borrowing rather than through invention. An average educated person who is not versed in linguistic sciences is easily lured into thinking that the alphabet is a Greek creation simply because the letter-names ‘Alpha’, ‘Beta’ and ‘Gamma’ have been popularized via the Greek civilization. In Greek, ‘Alpha’, ‘Beta’ and ‘Gamma’ are only letter-names, but in Aramaic they had been letter-names as well as ordinary words that are still in circulation until this very day such as ‘Betha’ “house”, ‘Yūd’ “hand”, ‘Nun’ “fish”, ‘Resh’ “head”. This Semitic alphabet consisted of 22 letters. The same number of symbols is still retained in the basic alphabets of Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic.

Spanish and English Alphabets and Alphabet Identities

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To understand the Phoenician or Aramaic origin of the Greek alphabet, compare the letters in table 1, below. Phoenician/Aramaic Greek Alep Α Alpha Beth Β Beta

 

    



         

Gamel

Γ

Gamma

Daleth He

Δ Ε

Delta Epsilon

dropped & reinstated as Omega

Ζ Η Θ Ι Κ Λ Μ Ν

Zen %eth /eth Yuth Kap Lamad Meem Noon Phonetically

absent

Matched with ” c

ayn Pe

[] Ο Π

Zeta Eta Theta Iota Kappa Lambda Mu Nu in

Greek.

Omicron Pi

Absent in Greek

Qop Resh Sheen Tau

Q Ρ Σ Τ

Koppa Rho Sigma7 Tau

Table 1. Matching the Aramaic and Greek alphabet letters to indicate sameness of origin. It is obvious from table 1, above, that the names of the alphabet letters in the two languages are too similar to be accidental. The same observation is valid for the sequence of the letters except for some letters which Greek has created to designate its native sounds that did not exist in the Semitic languages and had no letter (grapheme) designations. These additional letters, which are usually placed at the end of the Greek alphabet, are not included in the above table. However, the fact that the Greeks have borrowed the alphabet from the Phoenicians or Arameans does not deny them an original contribution to the transformation of the alphabet to a more complete system. The Semitic alphabet is known to have been exclusively confined to consonants. It was, in fact, a consonantal alphabet in which the vowels were accounted for either by diacritical 7

Due to the phonetic nature of Greek sigma, the Greeks have mistaken it for Aramaic ‘Sheen’.

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

marks or by assigning an additional vowel function to some of its standard consonants. For instance, each of the consonants و‬/,j, w/ was assigned an additional phonetic value of a long vowel to yield the long vowels /a, i ,u /, respectively. The Greeks enacted two major modifications. First, they created specific letter symbols [not diacritics] to designate the vowels and incorporated those symbols into the system of the alphabet. Second, they coined new letters and added them to the alphabet to designate the sounds specific to the Greek language that did not exist in the Semitic languages. 2.3. Journey of the Aramaic Alphabet to the West @ From its origin in the Middle East, the alphabet spread in the region as well as outside the region to both the east and the west. Of relevance here is the west direction to Greece and then to other parts of Europe. Within Europe, the earliest travel of the alphabet was to Rome and the creation of the Latin alphabet. Latin soon began steadily spreading all over Europe and the further creation of the specific orthographies of German, English, Spanish and French, among others. Another offshoot from the Greek alphabet which underwent modifications led to the emergence of the Cyrillic8 alphabet. Notice the Christian Orthodox connection in the creation of a Greek-based alphabet for the Slavic Orthodox churches of Russian, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Byelo-Russia etc...

Russian; Ukrainian

Cyrillic

Phoenician/ Aramaic

Bulgarian

Greek

L a t i n

South Europe

West Europe

North Europe

Figure 6. Spread of the Semitic alphabet in Europe. 8

Named after St. Cyril who, together with St. Methodius, designed the alphabet to lead the Greek Orthodox missionaries to the Slavic peoples

Spanish and English Alphabets and Alphabet Identities

19

Everywhere the alphabet traveled, the language that adopted it modified it by adding letters or diacritical marks to best cover the specific sounds and sound systems each language had. In case of the Cyrillic alphabet, 43 characters were created to accommodate for its larger inventory of sounds; obviously, it ended up having much larger alphabet than the Greek one. The number of languages and countries that use a Latin alphabet is greater than the number of other languages and countries using another alphabet. Virtually, scores of languages throughout the world use it though more specifically in Europe and the Americas after their colonization by the Europeans and the spread of English, Spanish, French and Portuguese scripts. In the next sections, the focus will be on the specifics of English and Spanish alphabets and orthographies. 2.4. English Alphabet The English alphabet has remained unchanged far more than the Spanish one. The latter, as we will see in due course, has undergone several reforms. Although not all the reforms have been approved, they still have helped in maintaining a high degree of pronunciation and orthographic consistency; in fact, much higher than in English. Table 2 shows the standard twenty-six (26) letters of the English alphabet. The term ‘letter’ is used very differently from the term ‘grapheme’. The former stands for one symbol of the 26 symbols with no diacritics and no combinations with other letters. As for the grapheme, it has been given a much broader denotation than the term ‘letter’. In Odisho (2004), the grapheme stands for a single traditional letter, a combination of one or more letters or diacritical marks. In fact, even space and the punctuation marks are granted grapheme status since they play a very significant role especially in the process of pronunciation and reading. Letter 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

a e i o u b c d f

Letter 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

h j k l m n p q

Letter 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

r s t v w x y z

Table 2. Traditional English alphabet with twenty-six letters.

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

Five (5) letters are used for vowels and additionally the letter may also be used to designate the simple vowel [] or the diphthong [a] as in the word and , respectively. It should, however, be pointed out very emphatically that the letter is not a vowel as it is mistakenly promoted in the traditional non-linguistic phonics approach to pronunciation. The letter in English overwhelmingly stands for a consonant traditionally known as a semivowel and more recently as an approximant as in the words = [j ] and = [js]. Remember, the IPA symbol for as a consonant is [j] as in German words “young” “yes”. The remaining twenty-one (21) letters, including , designate consonants. What is excluded from the English alphabet are the several highly standardized and frequently used digraphs of English, namely and occasionally and which play a very important role in facilitating the encoding (writing) and decoding (reading) processes of English language as well as complicating it. Further discussion of this and other relevant aspects of English will come when dealing with its orthography. 2.5. Spanish Alphabet Unlike the English alphabet, the Spanish alphabet has been less stable in the number of the symbols it contains and their sequence within the system. The lack of stability is attributed to several reasons. First, it underwent numerous reforms beginning with its standardization in the 13th century onwards, especially in the years of 1746, 1763, 1815, 1959 and more recently in 1994. Second, because Spanish is used in twenty-one (21) politically independent countries, many of which have their own language academies, consent over the reforms has not been without dissent for both linguistic and nationalistic reasons. For instance, all Spanish-speaking countries have unanimously resisted the removal of the symbol from their alphabet because it serves as a distinctive feature of their linguistic identity. Another example of nation-based resistance is Mexico’s rejection of RAE standardized spelling of as to apply to the name of the nation since it will render the spelling of 9 as (Stewart, 1999: 57). As a result of the above two points, the Spanish alphabet is presented somewhat differently by different authors or even academies. The differences are primarily in three respects: 1) The number of the alphabet symbols. 2) The status of some of the symbols such as and , but more specifically the status of the digraphs and whether to include them or not in the standard alphabet system. 3) The sequence of and within the alphabet. For instance, should the and be given an autonomous alphabetic sequence? In other words, should the first come after the completion of letter entry [i.e., before ] and the second one after the completion of entry (i.e., before 9

Etymologically, the in Mexico represents the = [] sound since the name is of Nahuatl origin an indigenous language of Mexico (Butt and Benjamin, 1994, 2000: 536-7; Stewart, 1999: 57).

Spanish and English Alphabets and Alphabet Identities

21

) or should come after 10 and after ? Table 3, below displays some of the inconsistency in the number of the letters or rather symbols included in the alphabet which usually ranges between 27 and 30 depending on the inclusion or exclusion of the three digraphs . However, because occasionally, the letter is excluded11, the number may range between 26 and 30. Symbol 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

a b c ch* d e f

h i j k l ll* m

Symbol 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

n ñ o p q r rr* s t u v w* x y z

Table 3. Letters of the Spanish alphabet with some instability in their number. Traditionally, the three digraphs have often been included in the alphabet; however, as recent as April 1994, after much debate, the Conference of Academies of the Spanish Language approved several changes including the exclusion of digraphs from the core alphabet. The exclusion was adopted partly to create more consistency in the Latin-based alphabets and partly to enhance the compatibility in the use of computer technology (Butt and Benjamin, 1994; Stewart, 1997; Butt and Benjamin, 2000). 2.6. Four Identities of English and Spanish Alphabet Units In the previous section, the discussion was focused first on the alphabet as a system and then on orthography which is yet another system, albeit much broader. 10

Actually, it means after since there are no initial combinations of and in Spanish. 11 In VOX Compact Spanish and English Dictionary, is not included as a sound.

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

The alphabet system is a closed system meaning that the units involved in it are finite (limited) in number, whereas the orthography tends to be a more open system not only because it involves more symbols, but also because it involves rules that govern the permissible and impermissible combinations of those symbols in the form of words and non-words. Although the alphabet as a system is a very familiar language construct and tool of literacy, not all of its different identities and the linguistic functions they serve are equally familiar. For those who are oriented in modern linguistics, the phoneme and grapheme identities are familiar. For those who are not linguisticallyoriented, they tend to understand the alphabet in terms of letters, sounds and letternames with considerable confusion between them, as phonics usually does. Very often a phonics-oriented person trends to confuse letters with sounds by making generic statements such as saying that English has five vowels and occasionally six with the inclusion of . This is an ambiguous old-fashioned understanding of the identities of the alphabet that still overwhelmingly dominates the English language knowledge base of our teachers in almost all pre-college stages of education. It is true that English has five vowel letters and occasional six with the inclusion of , but English has a range of at least fifteen (15) to twenty (20) vowel sounds or units in the form of simple vowels and diphthongs. Oral communication in English is accomplished with those 15-20 vowel sounds; it is only written English that is accomplished with five vowel letters. The failure to understand the alphabet as a linguistic system coupled with the failure to successfully recognize all the different identities of each member of the alphabet system results in serious misguidance and damage to a healthy and constructive approach to the learning and teaching of any language. The misguidance and damage permeate all language skills and subskills. In previous publications (Odisho, 2003, 2004), a new approach to the understanding of the alphabet system and its units and their linguistic functions has been introduced. The approach recognizes four major identities for each alphabet unit, defines them and delimits their specific linguistic functions in language learning and teaching. In the next sections, a brief description of the nature and function of each identity will be presented. Later, each identity will be presented in detail in specific chapters (for more details on the identities, see Odisho, 2004). Each unit in any alphabet system has a shape, a sound, a name and a sequence within the system as indicated in figure 7, below. The shape of the letter simply stands for its graphic form more technically known as grapheme. The sound designates the phonetic value of the letter also technically known as phoneme. The name of the letter stands for the way in which a given letter is named as a unit in the system quite distinct from the way the letter is pronounced as a sound. The popular term for this identity is the letter-name, which for more linguistic accuracy and convenience will technically be designated, hereafter, by the term nomeneme, coined from the Latin root “name” to which the suffix is added to be consistent with grapheme and phoneme. The sequence of the letter represents the position or location of a letter within the given system of an alphabet. In other words, it stands for the sequential and numerical value of a letter within the system of the alphabet. There was some reluctance to coin the term for this

Spanish and English Alphabets and Alphabet Identities

23

identity, but the heightened emphasis on this identity and the lack of a better term justified its need. Since the transcriptional representation of those four identities is quite crucial for their appropriate contextual demonstration, the convention of placing graphemes, phonemes, nomenemes and sequemes between < >, / /, { } and – –, respectively will be observed as often as possible. Similarly, phonetic representations will be placed between two square brackets [ ]. To demonstrate, the grapheme represents the phoneme /w/, whose nomeneme is {double u} and its sequeme is –23–. Four Identities of the Alphabet

Letter = Grapheme

Letter-Name = Nomeneme {}

Sound = Phoneme //

Sequent = Sequeme ––

Figure 7. The four identities of the alphabet units. These different identities of the minimal units of an alphabet are not just identified and designated for linguistic accuracy and importance; their identification and distinction from each other is even more important in applied terms as instructional tools of language education both orally and graphically. It is the latter pedagogical aspects of those identities that constitute a major instructional focus in teaching English to both native and non-native speakers of English.

Chapter III A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Graphemics and Orthography 3.1. Graphemes and Graphemics Graphemics is a modern term used to designate the study of graphemes much like phonemics which is the study of phonemes. Traditionally, the most common word in the terminology of describing or identifying the units of the alphabet has been the ‘letter’ which, unfortunately, does not capture every unit in graphemics. In its broadest sense, graphemics should encompass all symbols that designate sounds that contribute to the construction of meaning. It is historically true that the first alphabet was designed as exclusively consonantal and each consonant was allocated one specific letter; in other words, the first alphabet did not have letters specifically assigned to represent vowels nor did it have diacritical marks. As other languages began to adopt the original alphabetic system, urgent need arose for additional symbols to designate additional sounds that were not part of the sound (phoneme) inventory of the original languages which served as the base for the first alphabet system. In such instances, there emerged different devices to account for those language-specific sounds in the form of: 1) using a combination of basic letters, usually two, in the form of digraphs to signal an additional phonemic identity such as the digraph in both English and Spanish ; 2) doubling a basic letter as in Spanish and ; 3) granting a basic letter or combination of letters more than one phonemic identity as in English ; 4) adding a diacritical mark to an existing basic letter as in Spanish ; and 5) slightly modifying a basic letter or modifying its diacritical mark as in the case of the Arabic grapheme ب‬which with one subscript dot it designates the phoneme /b/ whereas with three subscript dots پ‬, as in Farsi (Persian), it represents a new grapheme with the phoneme /p/. As a result of the changes in the traditional concept of the alphabet which is exclusively premised on the classical concept of a ‘letter’, the treatment of modern alphabets in the broader sense of graphemes will yield a more accurate description of a given alphabet and its graphemic units. Evidently, an alphabet system will no longer be exclusively based on letters; rather, it may include different forms of graphemes such as the following: 1) Letter grapheme: stands for a one-letter unit which is the closest in sense to the original and traditional concept of the units of the alphabet such as etc… 2) Diacritic grapheme: stands for a single diacritical mark that carries an exclusive sound value to designate an autonomous phoneme such as the Arabic diacritics for its short vowels of Dhamma ـــُـ‬, Fata ــَـ‬ [a] and Kasra ــِـ‬.

26

Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English 3) Cluster grapheme: stands for a combination of two letters or more usually known as digraphs and trigraphs such as of English and of Spanish. Cluster-graphemes may occasionally appear in the form of double letters and may be called geminate-graphemes such as Spanish and . 4) Letter-diacritic grapheme: stands for a letter (or letters) that is marked with a diacritic that has no specific sound value in itself, but it generates one when attached to a basic letter-grapheme such as the Spanish tilde + to yield and the German umlaut + to yield . 5) Prosodic diacritic grapheme: stands for a diacritical mark which affects more than one letter or a complete syllable. For instance, accent < $ > in Spanish is a mark that affects a syllable; therefore, it is a prosodic or suprasegmental feature. By the same token, the Arabic diacritic shadda placed over consonants is a prosodic feature because it not only doubles the consonant on which it is placed, but it also results in syllabic restructuring. For example, آ‬kabara> “grew larger” has the syllabic structure of , whereas آ‬kabbara> “enlarge” has the syllabic structure of . Thus, the diacritic is affecting more than one structural position within the word; hence, it is a prosodic feature.

Based on the above different types of graphemes, table 4, below represents a summary of the graphemes used in English and Spanish. The table clearly indicates that English has virtually neither letter-diacritic graphemes nor prosodicdiacritic graphemes.

A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Graphemics and Orthography 27 English Letter Grapheme

Cluster Grapheme

a f k p u z ch12 b l q v ph c h m r w sh d i n s x th13 e j o t y th Spanish Letter Graphemes Cluster Grapheme a f k p u z ch b l q v ll c h m r w rr d i n s x e j o t y

LetterProsodicDiacritic Diacritic Grapheme Grapheme

ñ

_J_ _"_

Table 4. Summary of English and Spanish graphemes. 3.2. Mismatches between Spanish and English Graphemics A quick glance at table 4 does not show much difference in the number and shapes of standard letters that Spanish and English use. However, in reality, the graphemes that the two languages end up having and the rules that govern their application are drastically different for several reasons: 1) Mismatch between the number of sound units (phonemes) each language has and the number of graphemes used to designate them. 2) Extent of fluidity (laxity) of the relationship between graphemes and phonemes. In other words, which different phonemes are designated by the same grapheme and which different graphemes are allowed to designate the same phonemes 3) Consistency of the rules that associate phonemes to graphemes or vice versa. Expressed differently, the extent to which the one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes is violated. Let us consider the first point. English suffers from a major discrepancy between its alphabetic inventory of 26 letters and a range of approximately thirtyeight (38) to forty-four (44) phonemes depending on the variety of English 12

Only frequently used cluster graphemes, especially those that do not have another graphemic representation are included; thus, , for instance, is not included. As for vowels, their combinations in the form of geminates (doubles) and non-geminates, they are too variable to be included in a chart. 13 is duplicated because it stands for two separate phonemes which are not designated otherwise.

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

considered. Both General American English (GAE) and RP English have the same number of twenty-four (24) consonants with the difference being in vowel elements, especially the diphthongs. RP has twelve (12) simple vowels and eight (8) diphthongs, whereas GAE has altogether some 15 vocalic units. Let us take RP for assessing the discrepancy between graphemes and phonemes. Practically, the graphemes are phonemically redundant because each one of them has one or more standardized letter or grapheme to designate its sound (phoneme) or sounds (phonemes), i.e. and for . The exclusion of those three graphemes leaves the 44 phonemes of RP to be designated by 23 graphemes, an approximate ratio of 2:1 which is a poor ratio for consistency of phonemegrapheme matching. Nevertheless, even with this huge discrepancy if there were some consistent rules to govern the matching, it would yield a much better consistency and predictability than what the reality is in English. Unfortunately, the situation is seriously disturbed by a wide range of inconsistencies in the grapheme-phoneme correspondence or what some authors call ‘the lack of tangible isomorphism between phonemes and graphemes’ (Staczek and Aid, 1981: 148) The above massive mismatch is the result of several factors that jointly work to widen the gap between sounds of English and their graphemic representation. First, the dynamic nature of spoken English has resulted in the loss of sounds and the creation of others to which the orthography has hardly responded. Second, English did not undergo serious orthographic reforms compared to Spanish; for instance, the latter has consistently replaced the , , with , , as in , , for which the English counterparts are , , , respectively. Third, English has borrowed a large number of words from other languages which occasionally brought with them orthographic patterns with which English was not familiar as well as new sounds for which it did not have graphemic representations neither did it coin such representations through diacritics or digraphs. Consider for example, Greek words with a and letters whose pronunciations are approximated to [ps] and [k] as in the word . The English orthographic rendition of this loanword is, therefore, rendered which seems to have forced English to create two digraphs 14 and since it had no English counterparts for them. Furthermore, because English did not have a combination or cluster, it reduced

to a silent letter. There are numerous instances of silent letters in English which are attributed to the phonological and orthographic incompatibility of English with other languages, especially Greek. Greek words with initial consonant clusters of , , had their first letter rendered silent in English pronunciation as in = , = , = because of phonological and graphemic incompatibility. Compare the spelling of English with its Spanish traditional counterpart and its more recent RAE recommended spelling of . There is, undoubtedly, substantial difference in the two 14

If the combination were to be pronounced, a native speaker of English would treat it as a consonant cluster which, however, is not admitted in initial position.

A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Graphemics and Orthography 29 graphemic renditions of the same Greek loanword in two different Latin-based orthographies. The only reason for this difference is that Spanish has implemented reforms, whereas English has not; instead, English has adhered to etymological (historical) spelling. 3.3. Discrepancies in Graphemic Orientations Evidently, the two languages differ in several respects in their graphemic orientations foremost amongst which are the following: 1) Extent of one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes. 2) Extent of one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and phonemes. 3) Degree of systematicness of graphemic rules that govern the above correspondences. 4) Number of silent graphemes and the instances and contexts in which they are silent. 5) Number of standard digraphs created. 6) Number of diacritical marks used. In all these respects, except the last one, English is unquestionably more laissez-faire than Spanish in seriously violating the one-to-one correspondence of phonemes to graphemes and vice versa. It permits vast latitude of diversity in assigning graphemes to represent phonemes and in allowing phonemes to be represented by different graphemic formations. Moreover, the rules that govern those correspondences are not powerful enough to account for the majority of the cases; there are, often, frequent exceptions to the rules. Looking at the differences from another perspective, English has created more digraphs than Spanish; besides, it allows for more non-standard digraph formations (the standard ones being ). As for silent letters, their presence in English is pervasive compared to one or a few instances of silent letters in Spanish. Let us consider some of the above points in more detail. Based on several standard dictionaries, with regard to the number of graphemic formations to represent the 40 or so phonemes of English, there are no less than 390 different formations (Random House College Dictionary, 1975: xxxii) as opposed to approximately 40 formations in Spanish for a range of 23 to 26 phonemes [depending on the variety used] (Bull, 1965: 51; Politzer and Staubach, 1965: 6970). The ratio is roughly 10 graphemic formations for one phoneme in English and 1.5 graphemic formations for one phoneme in Spanish. This is a considerable difference and it indicates the extensively unsystematic and highly unruled English orthography. To demonstrate, table 5, below portrays the 16 graphemic representations for English /k/ phoneme versus a maximum of 3 to 4 representations for the same phoneme in Spanish.

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English Language Phoneme Graphemic representation English c, cc, cch, /k/ ch, ck, cq, cqu, cque, cu, gh, k, ke, kh, lk, q, qu Spanish c, k, qu /k/ x 15

Examples car; account bacchanal; character; back; acquaint, lacquer; sacque; biscuit; lough; kill; rake; Sikh; walk; Iraq; liquor; capa; kilόmetro; que examen; sexo

Table 5. Drastic difference in the graphemic representation of /k/ sound in English compared to Spanish

Cuba Writer Deficit Reckon Circus Abyssinia











ai ei eo Ia Io oi ou

Examples

Combination of Letters

a e i o u y

Schwa

Single Vowel Letter









Examples

Schwa

In English, the lack of isomorphism16 in vowel representation is far more evident than in consonants. This is attributed to two reasons. First, English has three times more vowel sounds than its five vowel letters. Second, there is hardly any isomorphic correspondence between vowel letters and sounds; in fact, a vowel sound may be represented by more than one letter or a varied combination of letters and the reverse is equally true. Consider, for instance, the vowel schwa / / which may be graphemically represented in scores of different combinations in the form of any of the five vowel letters, a letter and several combinations of vowel letters (Random House College Dictionary, 1975: xxxii) as in table 6, below.

Mountain Mullein Dungeon Parliament Legion Porpoise Curious

Table 6. Different graphemic formation for English vowel schwa / /.

15

The letter sometimes stands for two phonemes, /k/ plus /s/ as in or even /g/ plus /z/as in (Bull, 1965: 54; Baer, 1991: 83; Greenbaum, 1996: 568). 16 The similarity between the phonemic and the graphemic representations.

A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Graphemics and Orthography 31

Caesar quay equal Team See e’en deceive receipt

i i i i i i i

eo es ey I ie is oe

Examples

Graphemic Representation

ae ay e ea ee e’e ei eip

Vowel Sound

Graphemic Representation

i i i i i i i i

Examples

Vowel Sound

Just for the sake of further demonstration of the lack of isomorphism in the representation of vowels, let us consider the graphemic representations of another English vowel, namely the long vowel [i] which has no less than 15 of them as in table 7, below.

People demesne Key machine Field Debris amoeba

Table 7. Different graphemic representations for English vowel sound /i/. The above display of immense lack of isomorphic relationship between English vowel graphemes and phonemes is drastically unlike the relationship in Spanish where “ordinarily the five phonemic vowels correspond isomorphically to five graphemic representations” (Staczek and Aid, 1981: 148). Such an orthographic and linguistic neat and economic matching of vowels in Spanish is schematically represented by Staczek and Aid as in figure 8, below.

Phoneme:

/a

e

i

o

u/

Grapheme:

Figure 8. Vowel isomorphism in Spanish (after Staczek & Aid, 1981).

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

Another very characteristic feature of English graphemics is the high number of silent graphemes whether as letter-graphemes or cluster graphemes. At least half of the letter-graphemes in English can appear as silent. Notice the examples in table 8, below.

Silent Letter





Example

Silent Letter debt; doubt

accuse; muscle

handsome; Wednesday sign; gnat

Hour; honor

Know; knife

Example should; walk mnemonic; comptroller autumn; column psalm; receipt island; debris listen; depot

Table 8. Examples of silent letter-graphemes in English. Almost all geminate-clusters have one of their elements silent such as , and in < shall, blossom, cutting, buzz>. Several cluster-graphemes also have one of their elements silent such as in and ; in ; and in . A cluster-grapheme may be completely silent as in the following example: in , in , in and in In reality, there are so many silent graphemes in English that the concept of a silent grapheme becomes easily justifiable side by side with other categories of graphemes mentioned above. In spite of the fact that silent letters are not part of the pronunciation of words, they are, indeed, part of their overall formation (encoding) and are part of the word identification (decoding) process. Besides, there are also some important rules that govern the contextual positions in which they occur as well as the rules for their pronunciation. For instance, words such as ; ; and do not only inform you that the , and are silent; they simultaneously disclose the fact that there is a combined rule of spelling and pronunciation. The rule is that in consonant clusters of , and formations, the , and are silent. This observation is not an isolated and ad hoc rule; rather, it is a rule that is absolute [no exceptions] in application as well as a highly justifiable rule in phonetic terms. The strong phonetic rationale that is readily applicable to other clusters, such as and as in and seems to be triggered by the difficulty in pronouncing all the elements of a consonant cluster especially when they have similar place and/or manner of articulation. Often when a consonant cluster is broken due to syllabic restructuring by suffixation, the silent letters may be retrieved as part of the added morpheme. Notice that the silent of , of , of are no longer silent in , and , respectively, due to syllabic restructuring and the dismantling of the word-final

A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Graphemics and Orthography 33 consonant clusters. Contrary to those abundant and hardly manageable silent graphemes of English, Spanish, more or less, has an orphan silent grapheme in the form of 17. Finally, it is true that Spanish has three diacritical marks as opposed to virtually none in English; however, the three diacritics of Spanish hardly lead to a significant difference. The tilde over creates a highly consistent grapheme throughout the Spanish-speaking world. As for dieresis (two dots on a letter) it occurs very rarely, but its occurrence is very consistent. The accent (on a vowel) is, in fact, a very helpful device for all learners of Spanish including the natives and more so for non-natives. 3.4. Orthography Orthography was described above as the manners and rules that govern the combination of the alphabet symbols among themselves and in conjunction with diacritics to designate sounds and overall pronunciation in a given language. Thus, for instance, although the alphabet systems in English and Spanish are very similar in the number of letters they use and their sequence, they begin to diverge from each other in the digraphs created, diacritics used, sound values of letters (graphemes) and the extent of letter-sound (grapheme-phoneme) matching. 3.4.1. English Orthography Generally speaking, the linguistically hybrid nature of the English language, its long and dynamic orthographic history and the rarity of orthographic reforms have resulted in granting English orthography a high degree of variability or fluidity– fluidity in the phonetic (sound) values of its letters and combinations of letters as well as fluidity in the graphemic portrayal of its phonemes (sounds). This generally implies that one letter or grapheme or a combination of them may designate more than one sound. Conversely, one sound or more may be expressed by one letter or grapheme or a combination of them. In reality, English orthography is fraught with this fluidity. For example, the letter may stand for the sounds of /s/, /z/, // and // as in , , and , respectively. It can even stand for a zero sound when silent as in . Notice also the digraph can stand for the sounds //, // and /t/ as in , and . There are several such letters or digraphs in English orthography that have double or triple phonetic values. Likewise, the reversed fluidity of one sound being represented by different letters or digraphs is abundantly common in English. Take, for example, the sound /k/ which may be graphically designated by the following letters or combinations of them such as , , , as in , , , , , , among others. These two types of fluidity are even worse with the vowel letters and vowel sounds and the manner in which they 17

is always silent, except in some rural dialects (Butt and Benjamin, 2000). It is interesting to note that with only one silent letter Butt and Benjamin describe the presence of in Spanish writing as a burden on the memory. One would wonder how much the burden on the memory of learners of English would be with so many silent graphemic instances.

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

represent each other. The rules that govern the relationships between vowel sounds and vowel letters could hardly be recognized as rules since they are too loose and much less powerful in governing a reasonable and predictable correspondence. The primary reason for this less governable relationship is the fact that the English alphabet system has five vowel letters, whereas the English sound system has a range of at least fifteen (15) to twenty (20) vowel sounds (phonemes). In a simple mathematical formula, this ratio implies a minimum of three (3) to four (4) times recycling of each vowel letter. Unfortunately, the inconsistency is far worse than the above formula due to the extreme fluidity in the order of determining which vowel or vowel letters designate which vowel sounds or vice versa. One of the very many such examples of vowel letter-vowel sound fluidity is the different sounds the letter stands for as in the words = [æ], = [ei] or [e], [], [], [] and [ ]. In addition to the above types of orthographic fluidity, there are other factors that further complicate the English orthography. Foremost among such factors is the absence of symbols that represent certain sounds; besides, even if English has created the needed orthographic devices, there is still the lack of a systematic representation. Consider, for example the sounds [  ʧ ʤ], as in , , and , which do not have a specific letter or digraph to designate them. To demonstrate, the sound [] is represented by no less than 14 orthographic formations as in: nation, shoe, sugar, issue, mansion, mission, suspicion, ocean, nauseous, conscious, chaperon, schist, fuchsia and pshaw (Baugh and Cable, 1978). Besides, the pervasive phenomenon of silent letters in English is one of the most salient features of English orthography. Hardly, any orthography allows so many instances of silent letters. Almost any letter, vowel or consonant, may be silent or functionless in certain contexts. In most contexts, double consonants or geminates are pronounced as a single one as in , and . Occasionally, English has compound words such as + = = [!mmet] or [!mmeit]18 in which the is lengthened as an indication of its doubling due to the two-root nature of the word. There are other instances in which the double is pronounced, but in the form of two different sounds as in = [ k!spt]. Notice that the reason why the is pronounced as [ks] is the rule of softening of when followed by an or vowel. In the absence of those two vowels, the double is pronounced a single [k] sound as in and . Also due to the very conservative nature of spelling in English and the absence of serious and radical spelling reforms, etymological (historical) spelling of some loanwords still prevails such as the transcription of the Greek letters as , respectively. In Spanish orthography and due to recurring reforms, the latter digraphs have been reduced to single letters of (de Bruyne, Jacques, 1995: 14) as in table 9, below.

18

It could also be transcribed as [!met] with [] indicating long [m].

A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Graphemics and Orthography 35 Greek Χορóς φιλοςοφία θέατρο

English chorus philosophy theatre

Spanish coro filosofίa teatro

Table 9. Examples of etymological spelling in English vs. Spanish reformed spelling. Diacritical marks hardly play any role in English orthography. Some may think this is fortunate, but it may not be necessarily so. Stress location in English is highly unpredictable; therefore, if English orthography had an ‘accent marker’ (stress marker) as in Spanish, it would be tremendously helpful for second/foreign language learners of English to master proper accentuation. 3.4.2. Spanish Orthography Although Spanish orthography is often identified as the one that largely abides by the alphabetic principle which implies one symbol for one sound, it is not absolutely consistent. Generally speaking, however, compared to English, it is highly consistent because: 1) It has more stable and systematic matching of sounds and symbols implying far less fluidity in the graphemic representation of sounds and less fluidity in the phonetic values of graphemes. 2) Compared to English, it has negligible silent letters. 3) Equally negligible are the sounds that have no graphemic representations. Let us consider the above three points. Concerning the first one, the best example of minimum fluidity is the orthographic designation of Spanish vowels. Spanish has a simple vowel system of five (5) units which stand in a one-to-one relationship with the five vowel letters. This high matching of vowel sounds and symbols compared to the very high mismatching in English accounts to a large extent for the so-called ‘phonemic’ nature of Spanish orthography. It makes the process of orthographic encoding (spelling and writing) and the orthographic decoding (reading) much easier and smoother for children and illiterate adults. As for silent letters in Spanish, there are hardly any letters, other than , that qualify as silent. Pertaining to the third point, the creation of and the three digraphs were meant to designate the sounds that did not have a specific alphabetic symbols to designate them. Spanish orthography is also not crowded with diacritics; it has only three of them, namely < > (accent on vowel), (tilde on letter) and (dieresis or two dots on letter), the last being of very restricted usage. Unlike the case in other languages, such as the Semitic languages, in general, and Arabic, in particular, where the diacritics are too many, in Spanish they are few in number and highly systematically implemented.

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

3.5. Shallow (Transparent) Orthography vs. Deep (Opaque) Orthography The concept of orthographic transparency, which may not be familiar to some readers, concerns the degree of directness of access to pronunciation and/or meaning. In a transparent (shallow) orthography (Pérez Cañado, 2005), the phonemic and the orthographic codes tend to match; the phonemes of the spoken language are represented by the graphemes in a direct and unequivocal manner. In contrast, in a deep orthography, the relation of spelling to sounds is more opaque. Spanish orthography will undoubtedly qualify as a very shallow one since it often directly provides access to pronunciation, as opposed to English orthography which is well known for its opaqueness because of the noticeable inconsistency in its grapheme-phoneme correspondence. In other words, one cannot access its pronunciation as readily as that of Spanish. Thus far, to express this differently, one can say that in shallow orthographies there tends to be a univalent graphemephoneme correspondence, whereas in deep orthographies the grapheme-phoneme correspondence tends to be multivalent in that one grapheme or more may stand for more than one phoneme and vice versa. The causes of the orthographic depth in English were discussed in the above, but at this stage an attempt will be made to demonstrate a schematic representation of the concepts of opaqueness or transparency in orthography through the use of the terms attractor (to be abbreviated as ‘A’ and marked as a solid line in the diagrams below) and distractor (to be abbreviated as ‘D’ and marked as a dotted line). An attractor is a letter or combination of letters, which exclusively or predominantly designates one sound value, while a distractor is a letter or a combination of letters, which may designate more than one sound value or whose presence is redundant and serves no function; in fact, it may cause confusion or distraction. Typical of the latter type of distractors are the silent letters. To further clarify the concepts of attractor and distractor, here are some examples. In English, the word is a typical representation of transparent orthography because it is made up of three attractors as in figure 9, below. Fan

A

A

A

Figure 9. Typical representation of orthographic transparency indicated by perfect matching of graphemes and phonemes In figure 10, the word slightly loses its transparency (increases in opaqueness) because the letter is less representative of sound /k/ in both phonetic value and letter-name (nomeneme) than the letter , especially, when the orthographic rule of “ followed by is /k/” is not known to the reader. Thus, for a beginner in English, the pronunciation of is more difficult to

A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Graphemics and Orthography 37 access than because the former has two attractors and one distractor, while the latter has three attractors. Can

D

A

A

Figure 10. Slightly deeper orthographic representation due to the presence of a distractor. In figure 11 below, the word is even deeper than because it has two distractors: the is silent and its presence affects the sound value of the preceding and changes it into the diphthong /e/ = [ei]. It is true that the spelling of such word patterns may be alleviated by a traditional rule of spelling which states that a final in such word patterns as may indicate that the preceding vowel tends to have the sound of [ei]; however, there are exceptions to this rule such as in and 19. Mate

A

D

A

D

Figure 11. Orthographic depth of the English word . Compare now the English word “friend”, pronounced [met], with the Spanish word “dull” pronounced [mate] as sketched in figure 12, below in terms of A’s and D’s to determine the consistency of spelling and pronunciation in English.

19

In British English pronunciation.

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

Mate

A

A

A

A

Figure 12. Orthographic shallowness of the Spanish word It is true that the Spanish word is orthographically spelled exactly as the English word, but its pronunciation as [mat] renders its letter-sound matching perfect very much unlike the English word . Such a high level of spellingpronunciation matching in Spanish makes it a very transparent type of orthography compared to that of English. The fact that the words of Spanish and English are different in meaning has nothing to do with determining the shallowness and depth of orthography. Certainly, it is quite difficult to tell which letter or combination of letters is exactly a distractor and which one is an attractor. Perhaps, to try to use upper case and as opposed to lower case and to distinguish well-defined attractors and distractors from less well-defined ones may contribute to a more refined matching of orthographic units with sound units. However, there is a reasonable degree of validity to the concepts of ‘attractor’ and ‘distractor’ to serve as yardsticks to approximately assess the depth and shallowness of orthography in general. For a language such as English with acute inconsistency in its orthography because of too many variables involved in the matching of symbols and sounds, the application of an vs. yardstick will certainly encounter some difficulties. As a further illustration of orthographic opaqueness or transparency, let us take a word that is etymologically of the same linguistic origin and identical in meaning in both Spanish and English. The word for ‘philosophy’ in both languages is a borrowing from the Greek word , but in English it is spelled , while in Spanish it is spelled . If one compares the two spellings as in figure 13 and 14, below in terms of A’s and D’s, the Spanish word will yield perfect matching, while the English one will reveal several mismatches.

A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Graphemics and Orthography 39 ph i l o s o ph y f  l/ s f 

D

A

A

D/A

A

D

D

Figure 13. Notice the drastic mismatch in spelling and pronunciation of the English word .

f i lo so f ί a

A

A

A

A

A

A

A

A

A

Figure 14. Notice the perfect match in spelling and pronunciation of the Spanish word < filosofίa >. Even a passing look at the ‘A-D’ analysis of the words for “philosophy” in the two languages, is enough to tell the drastic difference in the extent of soundsymbol matching between English and Spanish. There is almost a one-to-one matching in Spanish and a drastic mismatching in English. It is examples like this that render the orthography of a given language more or less transparent. There is no doubt, whatsoever, that Spanish has a very transparent orthography– a feature that will render its spelling, pronunciation and reading much more manageable than English. This whole comparison of Spanish and English should not gear the reader

D

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

into thinking that the transparent vs. opaque distinction is better handled as a dichotomy; rather, it is best portrayed in terms of a continuum implying that some orthographies are relatively more transparent than others. Orthographic depth results from several reasons depending on the nature of the alphabet system as used in a given language. In the case of English, the orthographic depth results from an acute lack of one-to-one correspondences between the graphemes and the phonemes they stand for. In order to envision this concept of lack of graphemic and phonemic correspondence, compare the spelling of the word to its pronunciation as [fl sf].20 Notice that there are more distractors than attractors. The two Greek s, whose sound is originally a voiceless bilabial fricative, are historically transcribed with although their pronunciation today is a voiceless labiodental fricative [f]. The second and third vowels are marked as , but they are pronounced [] and [ ], respectively. Additionally, the final vowel is written with the letter , but pronounced as []. In total, there are five distractors and three attractors compared to the Spanish spelling which has no distractors. It is this difference that makes Spanish orthography a transparent one and English orthography an opaque one. 3.6. Implications and Applications of Orthographic Differences The extensive demonstration of differences in the graphemes, graphemics and orthographic practices is not for academic purposes; rather, it is for the pedagogical implications and the practical applications of the similarities and differences between the two languages with the specific intention of learning English by native speakers of Spanish. The implications seriously impact several language skills directly or indirectly. 3.7. Implications of Orthography Interface with Spelling and Pronunciation The above demonstration should pave the way to identify the similarities and differences between the two orthographies, avoid unwanted errors, develop a systematic plan for efficient learning and acquisition of English and build up some common sense in solving anticipated problems emanating from orthographic inconsistencies. Foremost among language skills that are directly affected by orthography are pronunciation, spelling and reading. The focus in this study is on pronunciation and spelling with comments on other skills when necessary. 3.7.1. Orthography and Spelling Prior to exploring the relationship between orthography and spelling, it is necessary to explain to the reader the perspective from which the sub-skill spelling is dealt with. In this text, spelling is based on Odisho (2004), where it is 20

[fl s f] is a transcription for American pronunciation vs. [fl s f] with [] for British pronunciation.

A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Graphemics and Orthography 41 redefined and recognized, at least, in two forms: graphic spelling and oral spelling21. The former stands for the sequential shaping (i.e., writing) of the graphemes as they occur in a word, whereas the latter stands for the sequential naming of letters (nomenemes) as arranged in a word. Based on the massive deficit in grapheme-phoneme consistency and the substantial irregularity in rules governing the relationship explained in the preceding section, both oral spelling and graphic spelling will be far more difficult to master in English than in Spanish. Indeed Spanish orthography is so transparent that young students often correctly spell words they have not yet encountered– a phenomenon hardly observed among children learning to spell English (Estes and Richards, 2002: 214). If the learner is already literate in Spanish and has established familiarity with the transparency, predictability and orderliness of Spanish spelling (Estes and Richards, 2002: 214), he/she is likely to be misled into thinking that those positive spelling features of Spanish are applicable to English. Consequently, a learner might be seriously lured into spelling English in terms of Spanish which would, oftentimes, lead to erroneous practices. This is especially noticeable in spelling English words of Greek origin such as the ones whose etymology includes the Greek letters and . A Latino learner of English may lean in the direction of spelling words such as , , , as , , simply because of transforming the orderly grapheme-to-phoneme rule of Spanish into English. These instances are typical cases of negative transfer. It should be emphasized that for LLEs, oral spelling, in particular, will certainly be considerably more difficult because this type of spelling requires that the student master the nomenemes of English which are very much unlike their counterparts in Spanish as will be elaborated on in due course. However, at this stage, an example will suffice to explain the nature of the difficulty of oral spelling of English for LLEs. Take, for instance, the word in English and its counterpart in Spanish whose oral spellings will, respectively, be as follows: English = {pee} {aitch} {o} {tee} {o} {gee} {ar} {ei} {pee} {aitch} {wy} Spanish = {efe}, {o}, {te}, {o}, {ge}, {ere}, {a}, {efe}, {i}, {a} Notice the acute dissimilarity in nomenemes between the two languages. It is very unwise on the part of any instructor or examiner, especially in bilingual, ESL and foreign language classes or any comparable situation to ask an emergent or a beginner learner of a given L2 to spell words orally without ascertaining that the speller has already mastered the nomenemes of the L2 alphabet. The pedagogical and instructional significance of the mastery of the nomenemes of a given alphabet will be demonstrated when a detailed comparison of English and Spanish nomenemes is made.

21

Besides those forms of spelling, Relief Spelling (Kinesthetic) and Signal Spelling (Gesture) have also been recognized (Odisho, 2004).

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English 3.7.2. Orthography and Pronunciation

In comparing Spanish and English, perhaps one of the worst areas of interference tends to be in the interface of orthography and pronunciation. This is attributed to the fact that both languages basically use the same alphabet, but they diverge substantially in grapheme-phoneme correspondence and the rules that govern the maintenance of the correspondence. English, as has been pointed out repeatedly in the previous sections, is one of the languages in which the phonemegrapheme and grapheme-phoneme relationships are highly asymmetrical and they seriously lack the powerful rules that impose systematicness on those relationships. If an LLE is already reasonably literate in Spanish, it logically implies that the person has already been conditioned sensorially– especially, visually and auditorily– and cognitively to the highly neat correspondence of graphemes to phonemes and phonemes to graphemes. If this sensory and mental conditioning were to be transformed from Spanish to English, the results would be very far reaching in distorting the pronunciation of English, especially in the area of vowels. Imagine that in Spanish the five vowel letters are consistently matched by five vowel phonemes and vice versa, whereas in English there are no less than 200 graphemic forms for transcribing the vowels of English. Vowel Phoneme Example

æ

e













i

e

 i

Vowel Phoneme Example

a





u

o







u

/

ju22

Table 10. Vowel letter-sound inconsistency and variability. Interestingly, in English, each of the same five vowel letters that the two languages share can alone (i.e., no combinations or digraphs with other vowels) 22

The letter here stands for a combination of an approximant (consonant) plus a vowel. Such contexts of letter as in the words , , (Baer, 1991: 86; Fox and Hull, 2002: 120) represent some of most typical examples of the failure of Phonics to distinguish between a letter, letter-name and a sound.

A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Graphemics and Orthography 43 signal a minimum of 4 different vowel phonemes and 6 in the case of as in table 10, above. One of the most typical and pervasive bad habits that speakers of different languages, using the same alphabet system, practice is to fall victim to what is called here ‘letter-pronunciation’ which is defined as pronouncing written texts of a second/foreign language (L2/FL) in terms of the phonetic (sound) renditions of the native alphabet (L1). Instructors should do their utmost to prevent this seriously negative transfer as early as possible by identifying the areas of interference and help students avoid any negative transfer. In sum, the orthography of English is far from being straightforward and transparent because of the unsystematic relationships between its two components: graphemes and phonemes. What further confuses the relationships is the lack of economic and powerful rules that could improve consistency. English orthography has been identified earlier on as deep orthography in which pronunciation and/or meaning are not readily accessed as opposed to the shallow orthography of Spanish in which access to pronunciation and/or meaning is readily manageable. This results in an immense difference in the mastery of reading in Spanish and English. 3.8. Applications of Orthography Interface with Spelling and Pronunciation At the very outset, instructors should make sure that the four identities of the alphabet of grapheme, phoneme, nomeneme and sequeme are thoroughly introduced to learners with emphasis on two aspects: first, that each identity is different from the other in description and function; second, they should not be confused with each other, especially in cross-language situations. Consider, for instance, the letter in Spanish and English as compared in table 11, below.

LetterGrapheme

Phoneme

ClusterGrapheme

Phoneme

Nomeneme

in:

Spanish

Zero Phoneme

[ʧ]

{hache}

English

[h] Phoneme; occasionally silent

; < h>; ; ; th>, ;

[ʧ];[k];[] [ ]; [f];[silent] [k];[f] [];[] [];[w]

{eitch}; {aitch}

Table 11. Drastic differences in three identities of in Spanish and English Traditionally, one may hear instructors saying that both Spanish and English have the letter with hardly any mention of the various differences which lead to various different applications. First, the letter identity (i.e., not the

44

Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

grapheme identity) is overwhelming in recognition at the expense of the rest of the identities. Second, the other identities are either confused with each other or partially recognized or even completely unrecognized. Table 11 above demonstrates several key differences. Foremost among such differences is the fact that in Spanish is almost exclusively a silent letter, whereas in English it may be silent in certain contexts, such as in , and pronounced in others such as . In this regard, very much unlike in Spanish, in English is often pronounced rather than being silent. Another difference is in the nomeneme of this letter which is [aʧ], for Spanish, vs. [eʧ], for English. This difference in the nomeneme is relevant in the mastery of oral spelling. To demonstrate, in English, is spelled {aitch + a + vee + e}= [eʧ + e + vi + i] not {hache + a + uve + e}= [aʧ + a + uv + e]. Perhaps, the most important difference, especially for the process of decoding in reading, is the cluster-graphemes that the letter-grapheme helps to generate. Spanish has one ‘h-based’ cluster grapheme as opposed to several in English some of which play a very significant role in the formation, spelling and pronunciation of English words and their decoding in the process of reading. In fact, the sounds of [, , ] in English have no designated single letter to signal them; they are primarily designated by the most frequently circulated h-based cluster graphemes of for [] and for both [] and []. Some general applications will be highlighted in the remaining sections of this chapter, but certain applications will be handled with more details in due course. 3.8.1. General Applications in Spelling In the area of teaching and learning of spelling, the first and foremost fact LLEs should take into consideration is not to transform the highly transparent and systematic spelling rules of Spanish into English. In spelling, English is highly resistant to transparency; there are only few powerful rules, while the rest are with very many exceptions. Spelling should, therefore, be taught in light of the overall English orthography and the most common and efficient orthographic and spelling rules that govern it. The teacher should prepare some of the neatest and most comprehensive spelling rules and familiarize the learners with them. The purpose of identifying such rules is to alleviate the burden on the student so that he/she can save some time to manage the spelling of items that do not yield themselves easily to rules. Let us cite some spelling generalization in English (For more details, see Allred, 1977: 27-8; Phenix and Scott-Dunne, 1991:42-3). 1) Rules governing the addition of suffixes and inflected endings. a) Words ending in silent drop the when adding a suffix beginning with a vowel and keep the when adding a suffix beginning with a consonant. Examples: bake….baking….baker manage….managing….management

A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Graphemics and Orthography 45 b) When a root ends in preceded by a consonant, the is changed to in adding suffixes and endings unless the ending or suffix begins with then the is retained. Examples: fly…flies..., but flying study...studious...studies, but studying c) When a monosyllabic (one-syllable) word ends in a consonant with one vowel before it, the consonant is doubled before adding a suffix beginning with a vowel. Examples: run….running cut….cutting shut….shutting ship….shipping 2) When adding to words to form plurals or to change the tense of verbs, must be added to words ending with sibilant (hissing) sounds [s, z, , ±]. Examples: glass….glasses quiz …. quizzes dish….dishes watch….watches 3) Words in English strongly resist ending with letter ; hence, if the final vowel represents the sound of short [] or the diphthong [a], use the letter to represent the sounds. There are virtually thousands of words to which this rule applies including all adverbs with . Examples: quickly….slowly….very….cry….fly….dry 4) Often, when you hear the sounds [ʧ r] at the end of a word, it is spelled with . Examples: picture….future….literature….creature….nature However, watch for exceptions in the form of agent nouns with an suffix such as: teacher and pitcher 5) Often, when a word ends with a [ʤ] sound, use the ending when the preceding vowel is diphthongal (or long), and use when the vowel is short. Examples: page…wage…rage…huge…deluge bridge…ridge…judge…grudge…

46

Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English 3.8.2. Linguistic Awareness and Spelling Awareness

Certainly, there are several other relatively effective spelling rules, but also of great significance is the infusion of linguistic knowledge in understanding the underlying dynamics that govern the interaction between spelling and pronunciation and the use of that knowledge in teaching and learning of spelling. In simple words, linguistic awareness helps with spelling awareness. Take for example, the rule of pronunciation which states that the letter is pronounced /s/ when it is followed by as in and /k/ when followed by or a consonant as in 23. When this pronunciation rule is carefully scrutinized, it has the implication of becoming an orthographic (spelling) rule in the following manner. Notice that in English, one can hardly come across native English words which are spelled with the only reason for this seems to be that = /k/ when followed by . In other words, the spelling is redundant because of the presence of spelling. This has several implications with practical application for both spelling and pronunciation. Consider the following implications: 1) English orthography makes far more use of and than for designating the sound /k/. 2) Initial /k/ sounds are overwhelmingly designated by letter ; relatively, a much smaller number of words are spelled with an initial as in . 3) In final position, the sound /k/ is predominantly spelled with and rather than with . The above three implications lead to some very beneficial applications for spelling foremost of which are the following: 1) On hearing /k/ sound in initial position, the student should lean toward thinking of a rather than a . To reinforce the distinction between using a or a , student has consider the following cues: a) If the word tends to be a proper name, especially a foreign one or a foreign word, use such in: Kenyon, Kent, Kenya, kiosk, kilo, kerosene, kinesthetic, kindergarten, Khaki, Khan etc… b) There are very few commonly used English words which begin with letter. To identify such words, it helps to take notice of the quality of the vowel following /k/ sound. If the vowel quality tends to be /, i, , a/, the spelling tends to be with such as in . Notice that if the in those words were , the words would be pronounced with the sound [s] according to the rules of . 2) On hearing /k/ sound in final position, write it with a or . Examples:

23

There are few exceptions such etc…

A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Graphemics and Orthography 47

Beware of some common words in which the sound /k/ in final position is indeed spelled with , especially in word patterns ending with as in or etc…Also notice that in words such as and , when a suffix beginning with a vowel is added, a is inserted to block the rule of = /s/ when followed by . Thus, when is added to and , they are spelled and . If, for instance, we were to create a verb from the noun and then derive a present continuous form from, the present continuous should be spelled *. 3) The pronunciation of letter as [ ] or [ʤ] follows a rule that is in essence very similar to that of letter . It sounds [ʤ] when followed by as in with the exception of some old Anglo-Saxon words and, some times, Greek words such as . Rule # 5 dealing with spelling of or for sound [ʤ] in the preceding section is relevant here. Remember, it is the ending vowel of or that maintains the [ʤ] sound. Consequently, in words ending with or when a suffix is added the has to be retained if the suffix is beginning with a consonant; however, is deleted when the suffix is beginning with a vowel– predominantly an vowel in such instances. Notice the following examples: …… …… …… …24… …… The retention with to keep it soft is applicable to . For instance, in the case of adding the suffix to words ending with , the has to be retained to give the the /s/ sound as in: …] vowels. However, from the pedagogical and educational perspective, to use a phonetic yardstick in assessing the acceptable targeted proficiency in pronunciation is too strict, and perhaps too ideal, of a yardstick to be used. Instructionally, the intention in teaching any L2 pronunciation is to minimize semantic confusion as much as possible. Practically, in L2 teaching the intention is to attain as near a native-like pronunciation as possible that will dispel any confusion in meaning and reduces to minimum the demand for semantic clarification on the part of the listener.

32

In its vulgar sense. These are some of the embarrassing pairs that one may hear in classroom situation.

A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Phonetics and Phonology

75

4.8. Implications of Consonant and Vowel Systems Comparisons The preceding comparisons of Spanish and English sound systems from both phonological and phonetic perspectives aimed at identifying the major differences and similarities between them for the purpose of developing the most efficient and effective approach to handle the transition from Spanish to English. No doubt, by definition, an approach remains theoretical if it is not implemented using the convenient method or methods and the needed techniques, strategies and activities that transform a method into a reality which simply means a successful mastery of the linguistic systems in L2 with as much higher proficiency as possible. The comparisons revealed numerous major differences in the systems of the two languages not just in the domain of consonant and vowels, but also, and perhaps more importantly, in the dynamics that govern the contextual behaviors of those consonants and vowels. The primary purpose of the surveys has not been only to identify the problems, but also to solve those problems and achieve a successful transformation from L1 to l2. It should be reiterated that the transformation cannot be successful without a teacher who is qualified in knowledge, education and professional preparation; without those qualifications, he/she will not be up to the challenge. In order to manage the challenge successfully, the teacher should take the following steps: 1) Identify the most problematic areas in both consonant and vowel systems. 2) Handle phonological problems prior to phonetic problems. 3) Attack the problems, whenever applicable, as general phenomena or general categories first and then tackle the individual constituents of the categories. To demonstrate, plosive (stops) sounds in either language arrange themselves in a neat category with some distinctive characteristics. For instance, the plosives /p, t, k/ in English form a natural class of sounds that are: a) aspirated in most contexts; b) unaspirated when they enter in the formation of /sp, st, sk/ consonant clusters. The phonetic and phonological behavior of this category of sounds is quite opposed to that of Spanish in which /p, t, k/ are: a) unaspirated; b) they do not form clusters with /s/. To be aware of this comprehensive and highly systematic contrastive linguistic behaviors of sound categories, serves as the best tool to overcome the targeted problem. 4.9. Applications of Consonant and Vowel Systems Comparisons Since the above discussion has focused on three sections: consonants, vowels and stress/rhythm, the instructional application of the discussion will proceed in the same order. 4.9.1. Phonological Applications: Consonants The first category of consonants which is of phonological significance is the one of fricative consonants including /v, , , z, , /. Obviously, each of those

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

fricatives subjects itself to auditory orientation which simply means the teacher models the targeted sound and proceeds further to ask students to repeat after him/her. Certainly, the auditory orientation, which is the most accessible, is not enough; it has to be reinforced visually and kinesthetically and foremost of all it has to be reinforced through cognitive orientation. Cognitive orientation means that students have to be made aware of the problem, the nature of the problem and how to be ready to overcome the problem. Without cognitive orientation, the teacher has no choice but to resort to the traditional teaching of sounds through ‘repeat-after-me’ procedure. For many L2 and FL learners, especially adults, successful production of new sounds may be very difficult because of their unfamiliarity. They need to be familiarized with the new sounds through perception and recognition exercises prior to production. ‘Repeat-after-me’ is a procedure that jumps to production bypassing perception and recognition phases which are indispensable for the majority of L2 and FL learners (for further details, see Odisho, 2003). To go back to the above difficult sounds, the first three are much easier to teach simply because they yield themselves readily to visual and kinesthetic sensory channels. Notice, that to teach Latinos the /v/, one needs to compare and contrast it with /b/. In figure 24, below, a [b] sound is produced by the two lips coming together to form a tight contact for a short time and terminate the contact with a sudden release (Figure 24a). All these physical gestures are not only visible, but also kinesthetically and proprioceptively palpable. The bilabial tight contact is a physical gesture that is kinesthetically transmitted to the brain. Similar multisensory input is readily available with the articulation of [v] except for the fact that the contact is not between the two lips, but between the lower lip and the upper incisors (Figure 24b). Unlike [b] and [v], in the articulation of [] and [] Figure 24c), the lips are not involved; rather, they involve the tip of the tongue reaching the biting edge of the incisors and slightly passing the biting edge. All the above facial gestures engaged in the production of those sounds are extremely significant in attracting the attention of the learners to focus on the accurate impersonation33 of those gestures. Teachers should keep demonstrating those gestures vividly and ask learners to practice the gestures among themselves. These activities have proven to be extremely effective in teaching those sounds; they render the learning of those sounds very manageable. In reality, they are the most effective in teaching pronunciation.

33

Notice the term ‘imitation’ is being avoided; instead, it is replaced by the term ‘impersonation’ because the former process tends to be more mechanical and less conscious.

A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Phonetics and Phonology

….a

….b

77

….c Upper incisor

Upper Lip

Tongue tip Lower lip Articulatory gesture for: [b]

Lower Incisor [v]

[] and []

Figure 24. Different readily visible articulatory positions. One of the best activities of preparing students to internalize unfamiliar sounds is through the use of minimal pairs which are pairs of words that differ in only one sound; it is this sound which triggers the semantic difference (meaning) between the two words such as the following: [b] [v]







[t]

[]









[d]

[]









After using the above minimal pairs, learners should go through a step-bystep preparation for the perception and recognition of the difference between those pairs of sounds prior to their production. It should be reiterated again that learners

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

should be instructed to carefully watch all the facial and bodily gestures that accompany the production of any pair of sounds. It should also be remembered that once comparisons are made with isolated words of minimal pairs, the distinction between the sounds should be made more realistic by using the minimal pairs in complete sentences. The distinction in the meaning of minimal pair could be further highlighted by transforming the words involved into pictures such as in the pictures below for and :

vs.

Figure 25. Pictorial display of difference when /v/ is replaced with /b/. Similar procedures should be used for the distinction of [s] and [z] sounds. The distinction of this pair is extremely important not only because of meaning, but also because of the high frequency of occurrence of this pair. In case of these two sounds some preparation of learners to the process of phonation (voicing and nonvoicing of vocal folds) is needed before the activities of perception, recognition and production using minimal pairs are conducted. The best way for the teacher to train learners on voicing is to demonstrate a prolonged production of an [ssssssssss] first, followed by a prolonged [zzzzzzzzzz] then ask learners to impersonate him, while pressing their hand palms on their ears. They have to repeat these two sounds until they begin to sense that with [s] the perception in the ears and the vocal tract is flat (hardly of any feeling of a humming sensation), while with [z] there is a sensation similar to buzzing and humming. Learners may also be instructed to place their hand on their throat and repeat prolonged [s] and [z] sounds. With the latter, there should be a ticklish sensation. In both cases, it is the humming or ticklish sensation that represents the physical process of vocal fold vibration. Once learners succeed in developing a feel for vibration, they may proceed further in their training on the perception, recognition and production of the two sounds using minimal pairs such as the following: [s]

[z]









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A more challenging exercise involves minimal pairs of words which are spelled the same or similar, but distinguished only through the pronunciation of one of their sounds with or without vibration such as the [z] and [s] in the following pairs: Verb

Noun







As for the post alveolar fricative pair [, ], it also constitutes a serious problem because of the absence of both members of the pair in most varieties of Spanish. Latinos usually confuse the [] with the voiceless post-alveolar affricate [ʧ], while [] is confused with the voiced post-alveolar affricate [ʤ]. For example, one can hear Latinos pronouncing = [v n] as [vʤn] or even [%i→in] which is heavily accented phonetic pronunciation. Although the affricate [→] is not an autonomous phoneme, in most Spanish dialects, it does occur phonetically as a substitute ([variant) for = [j] and = [#] in initial positions and sometimes after and as in and (Dalbor, 1980: 93; Dale and Poms, 1986: 63). Because of the phonetic existence of [ʤ] in Spanish, many Latinos are able to manage to pronounce English [ʤ]; unfortunately, however, they also use it to substitute English [] such as pronouncing = [m ] and [pl ] as [mʤ r] and [plʤ r], respectively. To reinforce this native potential of Latinos to pronounce [ʤ], more exposure to English monosyllabic names or words with [ʤ] is needed to minimize interference from other additional difficult sounds for Latinos. Words such as the following are suitable:



As for the post-alveolar fricative pair [, ], theoretically it is supposed to be difficult to teach because of the absence of both members of the pair in Spanish; however, the instructor can make use of the extremely common interjection – used to silence someone– which from the phonetic point-of-view is simply a prolonged [] phonetically transcribed as []. The following anecdote will give teachers and learners an idea of how the interjection [] was first used in my class in early 1980 when I first made contact with LLEs.

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English In the year of 1981, at Loyola University Chicago, in an ESL class, I asked one of my Colombian students named Victor to pronounce the words and . He tried again and again, but his pronunciation yielded one single version for both words which was [ʧip] implying two major changes: replacing [] with [ʧ] and substituting the English short lax vowel [] with a typical mid-long and tense Spanish vowel [i]. I decided to disregard the vowel mispronunciation momentarily and focus first on the consonant. I asked Victor, “Please, do what I do.” I placed my index finger vertically on my lips and uttered the interjection . I asked Victor to impersonate what I did. He had no difficulty, whatsoever, in doing what I did implying that he was able to do the interjection which is exactly the sound []. Next, I repeated the interjection and lengthened it somewhat and terminated it with the segment [p]. I did this several times and then asked Victor to impersonate me. Once again, he had no difficulty in producing what I uttered except for the fact that instead of saying [p] he gave it a Latino accent of [ip]. I disregarded the vowel difference because it was not my focus. It did not take him much time to produce a phonetic [] as an equivalent to the interjection. All what he and the rest of the students needed was to practice more and more in order to help the brain to build up an accurate impression of the sound and then further impress on the brain to store it and add it to the inventory of sound units it had already stored previously.

The above experimentation with [] has always been very beneficial in classroom situations. It does not take Latinos a long time to get the hang of it. Once the [] becomes manageable, the next steps should be: first, help learners experiment with [] and make sure that it is voiced by either putting their fingers on their throats or pressing their palms on their ears while attempting to produce a []; second, model some very common words in English with [] such as the ones below and allow them to reproduce after the instructor in chorus as well as individually. It may be helpful to transcribe those words phonetically to highlight the sound []



[!v n] [!tl v n] or [!tlv n] [d !v n] [m !s] [ !]

Since the last word in the above list is very common in two variant pronunciations as [ !] with [] and [ !ʤ] with [ʤ], it would be very beneficial in modeling the two variant pronunciations for the students and then ask them to impersonate the two renditions. = [ !] vs. [ ! ʤ]

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Another confusion that is somewhat related to post-alveolar and the palatal consonants is the replacement of [j] with [ʤ], especially in initial positions. It is a serious confusion because it is phonological and affects meaning. Find some minimal pairs such as the ones below, transcribe them phonetically and conduct some modeling and reproduction with your students.





[ju] [js] [jlo] [j ] [jt] [jok]

as as as as as as





[ʤu] [ʤs] [ʤlo] [ʤ ] [ʤt] [ʤok]

4.9.2. Phonetic Applications: Consonants One of the most striking phonetic differences in the pronunciation of English by Latinos is the manner in which they render the English /r/ sound which in formal RP English is an approximant [] and in GAE is a retroflex approximant[]. They both lose their approximant nature and are rendered either a tap [] or a trill [r]. Partly because of the very high frequent occurrence of /r/ in English and partly because of the major difference in the phonetic nature of the ’s in the two languages, the replacement of English [, ] with Spanish [, r] results in an extremely readily perceptible phonetic accent. It is so different and dominating that comedians who intend to impersonate Latinos speaking English, the focus is oftentimes on the retention of the typical Spanish tap and trill ’s. Another most conspicuous of the phonetic accent differences is the one caused by the absence of aspiration with Spanish plosives /p, t, k/ and its presence with their English counterparts. For learners who are not so sensitive to phonetic differences, telling the difference between aspirated and unaspirated plosives auditorily may be quite challenging. Fortunately, the difference may be detected visually and used to train students on the activation and suspension of aspiration by conducting a simple experiment. Take a flimsy piece of paper and place in front of your mouth and pronounce each of the plosives. With the aspirated ones, the flimsy paper will move or flutter, whereas with the unaspirated it will not. Teachers should demonstrate this and then ask students to work on it until they manage to cause the paper to flutter or suspend the fluttering. To be able for the Latinos to aspirate the English plosives amounts to a significant step in the reduction of their accent not only in the articulation of the plosives as single consonants, but also when they occur in clusters, especially with the typical English approximant = [] in RP, or [] in GAE. as in the words in which the is devoiced and sounds like a mild fricative, a pronunciation that is very typical of English. Notice the examples below on the extent of phonetic differences with the presence or absence of aspiration. Consider

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

the word of English and compare with its counterpart in Spanish

= =

[m!pt nt()] (GAE); [m!pt nt()] (RP) [i>mpor!tante]

Spanish English Phonetic Differences Quality of vowel & some length i>  No difference m m Presence of aspiration & stress in English p !p Vowel quality o  Different /r/ realizations r or   Stress in Spanish & absence of aspiration !t t Major vowel quality difference a

No difference n n Optional aspiration in English; its absence t t() in Spanish No basis for comparison e Table 19. Detailed phonetic difference in the pronunciation of English and Spanish Of the 9 sounds (plus stress) that the two words share, there are 7 sounds (plus stress) in which they phonetically differ. The cumulative difference is enormous; however, fortunately, in human language the overall shared meaning renders most of those phonetic differences redundant. Nevertheless, those differences act as noise that interferes, and at times, obstructs normal comprehension. It is this noise that is called phonetic accent. The more one manages to reduce the phonetic differences, the less noise is generated and eventually less acute accent is perceived. The following experience, which I had in one of my classes, sheds more light on the cumulative effect of phonetic accent in the form of interference with overall comprehension. Nearly two decades ago, I designed a course for continuing education students titled ‘Anatomy of Articulation’ which focused on human articulation and cross-language accent reduction. The students who registered for the course came from different professional backgrounds– ESL/FL teaching, theater, medical professions etc… Among the last group was a Vietnamese doctor from the University of Chicago. He approached me before the beginning of the course and informed me that the reason why he was taking the course was because his patients had difficulty in comprehending his speech due to his accent. He specifically pointed out that they often responded to him when addressing them by questions in the form of: “What?....What did you say?...I beg your pardon.”. After hearing this, I asked him whether he would allow me to tape-record him while reading a passage in English.

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He indicated his willingness to be tape-recorded. When I listened to his reading, I immediately identified several serious phonological and phonetic accent-causing pronunciations. I remember, I focused on his pronunciation of the word which was pronounced as follows compared to its usual pronunciation in English: English Pronunciation

[mæ !mætk l]

Vietnamese Pronunciation

[matema!tikal]

Notice that all the vowels are pronounced differently. The voiceless interdental fricative [] has been replaced by a voiceless unaspirated alveolar stop [t], while the aspirated plosives [t, k] have lost their aspiration. Besides, the stress position shifted as well. It is exactly this cumulative effect of the phonetic differences that builds up enough noise in the background to interfere with normal comprehension. In other words, it is this interference with comprehension that made his patients request repetitions in the form of: “What did you say? “What?” “I beg your pardon.” 4.9.3. Phonological Applications: Vowels It was pointed out earlier on that the English and Spanish vowel systems are maximally different both phonologically and phonetically. Consequently, a teacher’s priority in emphasis should be on teaching the mastery of the English vowel system with specific stress, first, on the proper production of a schwa [ ]; second, on proper production of short lax vowels, especially [, , ]; and third, on proper distinction of short [lax] vowels from their long [tense] counterparts such as [] vs. [i] and [] vs. [u] etc…It goes without saying that all those salient vocalic characteristics of English are all vulnerable to change by the dynamics of stress placement within the word and throughout a sentence. There are several steps that are recommended for a successful transition to a proper pronunciation of the English vowel system; these steps in the order of their application are the following: a) Preparation for the mastery of a schwa [ ]; b) Preparation for the mastery of the short vowels [, , ]; c) Preparation for the mastery of the dynamics of stress placement and vowel quality and quantity shift (which will be dealt with in the chapter on stress and rhythm). 4.9.3.1. Mastery of Schwa Schwa production is the most significant step in the direction of mastering the English vowel system. There are three different ways of helping learners to manage schwa production: 1) Physical relaxation; 2) Non-linguistic orientation; and 3) Linguistic auditory orientation.

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English a) Physical Relaxation

Because a schwa is the most lax vowel and is part of a general system with more lax and tense vowels, a native speaker of English is by nature accustomed to swing automatically from one vowel quality to the other accompanied, at times, by significant change in quantity (length). In other words, the system in English forces the speaker to swing between laxness and tenseness very much unlike the Spanish system which is tense by nature in which each vowel is almost frozen in quality and length (quantity). Consequently, the first step for a Latino learner of English vowel system is to learn how to physically let his upper body, especially the vocal tract relax. Any tenseness in the vocal organs, especially the oral cavity, will result in a tense and longer vowel away from a schwa [ ] and []. This physically relaxed condition is very similar to any person’s condition when completely comfortable with no muscular tenseness. The teacher has to conduct some such relaxation exercises while trying to produce a schwa or any lax vowel. b) Non-linguistic Orientation Physically and auditorily the sound of a schwa is very similar to the sound that a human being produces when moaning. In order to better clarify the meaning of moaning as a non-linguistic sound, the word was looked up in a dictionary for which the following explanation was given: “prolonged, low inarticulate sound uttered from or as from physical or mental suffering”. This moaning sound is physically (phonetically) very similar to the interjection used to indicate an affirmative answer. The only difference between the moaning sound and the interjection sound may be in the direction of the pitch (tone) of voice. To demonstrate this moaning condition in class, the teacher can do the following: If he is wearing a jacket, he should take it off and relax the tie if he is wearing one. He should relax his upper body, bend, put his hands on the desk and place his head on his hands and start producing short moaning sounds as if he is really sick and having pain or discomfort. This activity serves two purposes: first, it virtually attracts the attention of the learners and conditions them mentally to a mood and mode of serious and conscious attentiveness; second, it auditorily brings the sound of a schwa or schwa-like much nearer home for the students. c) Linguistic Auditory Orientation This simply means ear-training in the form of modeling of schwa sounds in isolation and in the context of words or even short phrases and sentences. Two very appropriate groups of words are tremendously helpful with the mastery of a schwa. The first group is the so-called function words that have strong and weak forms most of the latter involving a schwa sound. The second group represents some words in which the shift in stress changes their grammatical category from verbs to nouns/adjectives. If some students have serious difficulty with schwa, a replacement with [] tends to be quite acceptable to the ear of a linguistically untrained native

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85

speaker. In fact, there are many words in English in the pronunciation of which [ ] and [] alternate as admissible variants such as the examples below.



[!tlv n] [kmplm nt] [dv n]

or or or

[!tlv n] [kmplm nt] [dv n]

Let us demonstrate some of the above materials for ear-training in the form of exercises. First, model a schwa sound in isolation and ask students to impersonate as a group and then gradually move to individual students first by their own voluntary choice and later by selection. Second, select a few function words such as and pronounce them in their strong form first and then in their weak form as demonstrated below and carefully monitor the two articulations. Word

Strong Form

Weak form





[æn] [ænd] [kæn] [fm], [fm] [s m]

[ n] [ nd] [k n] [f m] [s m]

The mastery of the dynamics of strong and weak forms alternation is not only important for the pronunciation of such words because it is even more important for the mastery of overall rhythm in English. Third, identify some words in which the change in the placement of stress results in a change in the grammatical category from verbs to nouns and/or adjectives. Usually, verbs are stressed on the second syllable, whereas nouns are stressed on the first syllable. Practice with this group of words serves two purposes: first, the mastery of a conscious shift in stress placement besides the mastery of a schwa; second, mastery of the grammatical use of this group of words. Due to the important role of this category of words, examples cited are more than those for other categories. Word

Noun

Verb



[!knd kt] [!kns t] [!kntst]

[k n!d kt] [k n!st] [k n!tst]

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English









[!kntæst] [!knvkt] [!dz t] [!ns t] [!ns lt] [!bʤkt] [!pfkt] [!pmt] [!pʤkt] [!b l] [!bl] [!k d] [!s bʤkt] [!s spkt]

[k n!tæst] [k n!vkt] [d!zt] [n!st] [n!s lt] [ b!ʤkt] [!p !fkt] [p !mt] [p !ʤkt] [!!bl] [!kd] [s b!ʤkt] [s s!pkt]

Fourth, select some phrases and clauses which allow two or more different readings such as an emphatic reading (with a strong stress without a schwa) vs. a non-emphatic reading (with a weak stress and with a schwa) such as the following: Phrase/Clause

Meaning

Stressed:

[e kæn f hi ()]

Stressed:

[e kæn f hi ()]

Unstressed:

[e k n f hi ()]

Stressed:

[tu tu tu]

“222”

Unstressed:

[tu t tu]

“Two minutes to two”

It is a canning factory: “They put fish in cans here.” An emphatic positive response to the question of : “Can they catch fish here?” No doubt, they are allowed to catch fish here.

Stressed:

[w n…tu…i]

“Normal counting”

Unstressed:

[w n…t …i]

“A range of one to three”

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4.9.3.2. Mastering Short Vowels The best way to sense the laxness (shortness) of English vowels is to compare and contrast them with some tense or not so lax vowels. In the case of [] and [] vowels, there are some minimal pairs which serve the purpose such as the following: // /i/



< pull>



/pl/ /sk/ /bt/ /fl/ /kn/





//

/u/

/pl/ /st/ /d/ /kd/ /wd/





/pil/ /sik/ /bit/ /fil/ /kin/

/pul/ /sut/ /ud/ /kud/ /wud/

Even = [ft] vs. = [fud], which is a near minimal pair, can be a very good example simply because of common circulation of the two words. Much attention should also be given to comparing and contrasting other pairs of vowels which Latinos tend to mispronounce and confuse such as / / vs. /æ/ and /o/ vs. //. The first pair, / / vs. /æ/, is reduced to [a>], while the second pair, /o/ vs. //, is reduced to [o>] as in the following categories of pairs: / /

/æ/

[a>]

/k t/

/kæt/

[ka>t]

/b t/

/bæt/

[ba>t]

/p n/

/pæn/

[pa>n]

/ n/

/æn/

[ra>n]

/f n/

/fæn/

[fa>n]

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English /o/

//

[o>]

/bot/

/bt/

[bo>t]

/kot/

/kt/

[ko>t]

/not/

/nt/

[no>t]

/hol/

/hl/

[ho>l]

/bol/

/bl/

[bo>l]

Chapter V A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Nomenemes and Sequemes 5.1. Introduction Obviously, when one reads the title of this chapter, the term ‘nomeneme’ and ‘sequeme’ will spring up as unprecedented descriptive labels in language studies and linguistics. This is true, the terms have been used during the last ten years and have been formally introduced later (Odisho, 2003). The former was coined somewhat earlier than the latter from the Latin root “name”, whereas the latter was a modification from the word or . Both were suffixed with to rhyme with phoneme and grapheme. The nomeneme was coined as a replacement for the traditional term of ‘letter-name’ which has been used for naming of the alphabetic symbols. For instance, letter-naming in the Semitic languages, which is the source of letter-naming in most of the common alphabets, begins with aleph, beth, gimel, daleth etc… whose Greek counterparts were centuries later slightly modified in pronunciation and named as: alpha, beta, gamma, delta etc … as stated in Chapter II. In English, after the pattern of Latin, the names of the alphabet letters are reduced from real words, as in Semitic languages, mostly to syllables in the form of : ei, bee, cee, dee, ee, ef whose Spanish counterparts are: a, be, ce, de, e, efe in which the is to be pronounced approximately [] as in the English word . In this study a further step was taken to derive the term ‘nomenemics’ by analogy with the terms ‘phonemics, graphemics, morphemics’ etc…to designate the comprehensive study of nomenemes in one language or across languages and their role in language learning and teaching. As for the sequeme as another linguistic identity of the alphabet, it was introduced after the grapheme, phoneme and nomeneme were defined or redefined within a comprehensive approach to language teaching (Odisho, 2004). Both the nomeneme and the sequeme will be elaborated on appropriately in the next sections. 5.2. Nomenemics of Spanish and English Before proceeding further, it may be beneficial to refresh the memory of the reader by briefly stating the first two identities, namely: 1) Grapheme, to designate the shape of the unit of the alphabet; and 2) Phoneme, to designate the sound of the unit of the alphabet. In the first half of this chapter, there will be specific focus on a comparative study of the nomenemics of Spanish and English. It has been repeatedly pointed out that although the two languages use the same Latin alphabet, there is a major difference in the nomenemes used for the alphabet symbols. Some of the foremost consequences of the difference are: first, the need to learn two sets of nomenemes; second, the need to skillfully master the nomenemes in each language in order to achieve a high proficiency in what will be known in this study as ‘oral spelling’ (vs. ‘graphic spelling’). “The former stands for the sequential physical shaping (production) of the graphemes as they occur in a word, whereas the latter

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

stands for the sequential naming of letters as arranged in a word. Thus, oral spelling is primarily the function of stating the nomenemes. Without an efficient mastery of the nomenemes of a language, especially in L2 learning situations, oral spelling may be fraught with difficulty and hesitation.” (Odisho, 2004: 98-9). 5.2.1. The Nomenemes of English In English, very much unlike other languages such as Spanish and Arabic, there is no standardized and formalized way of writing the nomenemes. To put it differently, there is no conventional consensus on the form in which the names of the letters are written in traditional English alphabet. For example, should the nomenemes of the following letters: , , , , and be written as {de or dee}, {ech, eich, eitch or aitch etc…}, {qu, que, cu or ku etc…}, {double u or double you etc…}, {wy or why etc…} and {zee or zed etc…}. Due to this lack of unanimity and indecision, two recommendations will be made so that the nomenemes will be used consistently and programmatically as a component of teaching the identities of the alphabet and the functions of those identities: first, to recommend a standardized form of writing the nomenemes; second, to transcribe the nomenemes in traditional alphabet as well as in IPA so that students will be able to pronounce them accurately, especially in crosslanguage situations. For example, in Spanish, the [e] is used as a simple vowel to designate a slightly higher (closer) vowel than American English in which is transcribed as []. Unfortunately, in GAE, the [e] is used to designate a diphthongized vowel or a diphthong which is equivalent in RP English to the diphthong [e]. Nevertheless, in the phonetic transcription of the nomenemes of Spanish the symbol is used, whereas in English [] is used. For instance, the English nomeneme for is transcribed as [n] and for Spanish [ene]. Therefore, it is assumed in this transcription that the difference between the Spanish and English is negligible. It is also very uncommon to teach the nomenemes as one of the four systematic identities of the alphabet. Yes, they are repeated, recited and even sung as “a b c d ...e f g ...h i j k ...l m n o p etc…, but not as an autonomous identity that serves a specific purpose. Therefore, the intention here is to highlight the linguistic role of the nomenemes both as members of a system as well as a tool in the teaching of certain language skills such as oral spelling and certain aspects of pronunciation. The table below portrays the suggested nomenemes of English written as accurately as possible in traditional alphabet and transcribed phonetically in IPA. The rationale for transcribing them phonetically is to demonstrate the differences as accurately as possible.

ei bi si di i f ʤi ei± ai ʤei kei l m

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Phonetic Transcription

a bee cee dee e ef

ee aitch i jay kay el em

Nomeneme

Phonetic Transcription

A B C D E F G H I J K L M

Letter

Nomeneme

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Letter

A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Nomenemes and Sequemes 91

N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

en o pee qu r es tee u vee wee eks wy zee

n ou pi kju r or  s ti ju vi wi 34 ks wai zi

Table 20. Proposed formalized nomenemes of English with their transcription in IPA. The proposed formalized transcription of the nomenemes follows certain conventions. Vowel nomenemes are represented by their own single letters to avoid any complication of transcribing them in the traditional English alphabet. They are transcribed in IPA to render their pronunciation as accurately as possible. Consonant nomenemes with single long [i] vowel are transcribed as to emphasize to the learners, especially children, that the vowel is long. The is preferred to lest the latter should be interpreted as its most frequent sound variant or the so-called short of phonics and equivalent to IPA [] as in . This category of nomenemes includes the following: {bee, cee, dee, gee, 34

It has been suggested (Odisho, 2004) to rename the English grapheme = {double u} as {wee} for the following reasons. First, it is the only alphabet character with the maximum grapheme-phoneme-nomeneme discrepancy. Second, it is the only nomeneme that is not monosyllabic besides being a compound one. Third, the replacement {wee} enhances the consistency of the whole nomenemic system as well as the phonemenomeneme consistency because {wee} includes the sound of the [w]. Fourth, in Aramaic, the nomeneme is historically pronounced {waw}.

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

pee, tee, vee, wee, zee}. In each nomeneme, the retention of the letter for which the nomeneme stands creates higher consistency between graphemes and nomenemes. The second category of nomenemes is the one that is initiated with [] or the so-called short of phonics followed by the letter such as {ef, el, em, en, es, ex}. The rest of the nomenemes do not fall into the above two categories; nevertheless, they do carry the letter which they designate except in the case of and which do not. In the case of vowels, each nomeneme represents one of the several sounds the letter may have as demonstrated earlier on. For instance, the nomeneme for {a} has taken the sound of [e] as in ; {e} has taken the sound of [i] as in ; {i} has taken the sound of [a] as in ; {o} has taken the sound of [o] as in ; and {u} has taken the sound of [ju] as in . 5.2.2. The Nomenemes of Spanish A look at table 21, below indicates that the nomenemes in Spanish are drastically different in their structure from those in English. However, they are

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Letter a b c ch*35 d e

f

h i j k l ll* 13 m 14 n

Nomeneme a be ce che de e efe

e hache i jota ka ele elle eme ene

Letter 15 n' 16 o 17 p

Nomeneme en'e o pe

18 q 19 r rr* 20 s 21 t 22 u 23 v 24 w 25 x 26 y

cu ere erre ese te u uve Uve doble equis i rie a

27 z

zeta

Table 21. Nomenemes of Spanish. 35

Since April 1994, letters with asterisk have been dropped from the alphabet as independent characters.

A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Nomenemes and Sequemes 93 More standardized in their spelling and there is unanimous agreement on their transcription all over the Spanish-speaking world. In the case of vowels there is a nearly absolute one-to-one correspondence between the nomeneme and the phoneme of each vowel; namely, the phoneme is the same as the nomeneme. Only the nomenemes {i} and {y} designate the same vowel phoneme, albeit the former one is overwhelmingly dominant. As for the structural formation consonants, they very much like in English, do not abide by one pattern; nevertheless, two patterns dominate, while the rest have different patterns. The first of the two patterns is the consonant-initiated followed by an which includes {be, ce, che, de, ge, pe, te}, while the second pattern is -vowelinitiated followed by the letter and terminated with another vowel as with {efe, ele, elle, eme, ene, eñe, ere, erre, ese}. The remaining ones have odd nomenemes such as . A very historically, as well as linguistically, interesting point of comparison between the nomenemes of the two languages is the comprehensive shift in the formation of the nomenemes of English. Previously, they were very similar to those of Spanish, but the well known historical linguistic shift in English identified as the Great Vowel Shift, which took place between 1400 and 1600 (Fromkin and Rodman, 1998: 454-5), had, in turn, caused a shift in the nomenemes. A comprehensive discussion and explanation of this historical event, which was named for the first time, as the Great Letter-Name Shift, was conducted in Odisho (2004), a summary of which is reproduced here. This major change is comprehensive and systematic and has impacted the nomenemes of almost every letter in the English alphabet. This change, as had been pointed out for the first time, is intimately associated with the overall phonetic and phonological change the English language underwent, namely, the Great Vowel Shift which, in turn, was responsible for the change in the vowel components of the English nomenemes. According to the directions of the qualitative vowel changes, nomenemes involving the vowel quality [] or [e] changed into [i], those with the vowel quality [i] changed into the diphthongal [ai] (Brook, 1958; cf. Stevick, 1968; Barber, 1976; Bambas, 1980; Lass, 1999). Thus, the old nomeneme {b}, which was like in Spanish today, became {bi}. The change in the nomenemes of < a, h, k, j > follows the pattern of [] or [a] into [ei]. Accordingly, {a} nomeneme of English changed from being [] or [a], as it still is in Spanish, to [e] and {k} changed from being [ka], as it still is in Spanish, to {kay} = [kei]. It is beyond any doubt that the change in the nomenemes (letter-names) of vowels is highly consistent with the vowel movement in the Great Vowel Shift. For a sample of the historical comparison of the nomenemes of Spanish and English vowels and plosives in phonetic transcription look at table 22, below.

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English Modern Spanish Middle English Modern English Letter Nomeneme Letter Nomeneme Letter Nomeneme a

a 36

a

a

a

ei

e i o u b d

k p t

 i o u b d

 ka p t

e i o u b d

k p t

 i o u b d

; ka p t

e i o u b d

k p t

i ai ou ju bi di ʤi kei pi ti

Table 22. Historical change of nomenemes in English compared to Spanish. The phonetic transcription in table 22, above, is based on the assumption that Spanish vowels have maintained their mid-length which is indicated by the half-length marker [], whereas English vowels had a full-length, at the time of the change, which they maintained either in the form of a diphthong or in the form of a long vowel with a change in the quality. For example the long vowel [a] changed into the diphthong [ei], while the long vowel [e] only changed in quality into [i]. 5.3. Nomenemes and Oral Spelling The most pedagogically successful kind of teaching is when the teacher learns while teaching. What you are going to read below is based on real classroom experience which typifies learning while teaching. In 1986, the ESL program of which I was a part was involved in large-scale preparatory courses for illegal immigrants who were granted asylum and the right to present themselves for naturalization as citizens of the United States. One such person went for an interview during which one of the questions was: “Who is the President of the United States?” The student answered: “Ronald Reagan.” The follow-up question was: “How do you spell ‘Reagan’?” After some hesitation, the student answered: “I do not know.” Now, this last question and answer entailed much ambiguity and lack of sophistication on the part of the INS official and naiveté and inexperience on the part of the student. The official did not make 36

The phonetic transcription is approximate. The sound [e] in Spanish nomenemes was replaced with [] in order to avoid confusing [e] with the combination in American English pronunciation of .

A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Nomenemes and Sequemes 95 it clear whether he meant spelling the name graphically (reproducing the graphemes) or spelling it orally (enunciating the nomenemes). The student failed to ask for clarification as to whether he was asked to spell it graphically or orally. In order to solve his problem, the student should have asked for clarification. The clarification may have resulted in a turning point in the overall assessment of the language proficiency of this candidate because he was a reasonably literate person in Spanish, whose orthography is also Latin-based and he, certainly, knew how to write the name and even spell it orally in Spanish by saying {ere + e + a + ge + a + ene}. Unfortunately, he failed to do so. As a result of the aggregate assessment, the student was denied citizenship at first attempt. However, regardless of the unhappy outcome of this incident, it sheds much light on the linguistic phenomenon of spelling and the different forms in which it presents itself to teachers and students and adds to the knowledge base of both of them.

After this incident, there were two major learning experiences while teaching. First, the nomeneme was not just a necessary linguistic construct to be identified and recognized, but also a necessary applied unit. Second, instructionally, the nomeneme helped reconsider the nature of the skill of spelling and the approach to teach it. After much consideration and research, it was concluded that teachers of language have no choice but to redefine spelling more realistically as it applies to various language skills and recognize at least two types of spelling which are different in nature because they are based on different linguistic units. As mentioned earlier on, these two types of spelling are: graphic spelling and oral spelling. In order to master graphic spelling, learner has to be fluent and skillful in reproducing the shapes of the graphemes and synchronize them with the sequence of phonemes in a word. Oral spelling is simply based on stating the nomenemes of the letters involved in a word. For instance, to spell orally, one has simply to state: {dee + o + gee}, while to spell , one has to state: {cee + a + tee}. However, developing the proficiency in oral spelling requires looking at the alphabet from at least two different instructional perspectives: a) within a given L1; b) in transition from L1 to L2. a) Within a given L1. Here the focus should be on differentiating nomenemes from phonemes in the sense that the two are different linguistic entities and they behave differently. Consider the word in terms of nomenemes and phonemes and notice the substantial difference at least in the manner in which the word is spelled and pronounced in English. The oral spelling of is {pee + es + wy + cee + aitch + o + el + o + gee + wy} as in figure 26, below.

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

p s y ch o l o g y

{pee

es

wy

cee

aitch

o

el

o

gee

wy}

Figure 26. The word in nomenemes, the units of oral spelling.

p s y ch o l o g y

/silent / [ s

a

k

 or 

l



ʤ

]

Figure 27. The word in phonemes, the units of pronunciation. Notice that in oral spelling there are 10 units, whereas in pronunciation there are only 8 units; the deficit results from the digraph and the silent

. Additionally, the units in each case represent two autonomous linguistic categories which should never be confused as it has frequently been the case in phonics. For instance, phonics usually cites words such as and as examples containing the socalled long not realizing that the two s represent two different sounds, namely, [u] and [ju], respectively. The confusion is attributed to the failure of phonics to distinguish phonemes from nomeneme as the nomenemes of both s is {u} = [ju], but in pronunciation the first is [u], while the second is [ju]. For the differences, compare the oral spelling (i.e., the nomenemes) of and and their pronunciation, as in figure 28, below.

A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Nomenemes and Sequemes 97

rude

Nomenemes:  ju Phonemes:

use

di i

ju s

 + u + d

i

j + u + s (or z)

Figure 28. The difference in the phonemic realization of the nomeneme {u}. b) In transition from L1 to L2. This is of utmost significance in ESL, bilingual and foreign language classes, especially when the same alphabet is used in L1 and L2. The sameness of letters or graphemes, whether as letter-graphemes or cluster-graphemes, does not guarantee identical phonemic and nomenemic identities. It is in this kind of orthographic transitions that a high percentage of pronunciation, oral spelling, graphic spelling and reading problems occur. Spanish

English

Grapheme

Phoneme

Nomeneme

Grapheme

Phoneme

Nomeneme

p –– s s i i c c o o l l o o

í í

p –– s i k  l  x Í

p s y ch o l o

y

––

pee es

a

a

pe ese i ce o ele o ge i a

a

s a k  or  l

ʤ 

wy cee aitch O el O gee wy

Table 23. Cross-language differences in graphemes, phonemes and nomenemes in cognate words.

98

Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English Consider some of the graphemic, phonemic and nomenemic problems that might arise during a transition from Spanish to English as demonstrated in table 23, above by using the cognate word . If one disregards the two alternative spellings of the word for in Spanish, one can readily see very substantial differences in the phonemes and nomenemes in spite of so much similarity in the graphemes. Notice specifically the almost total disparity in the nomenemes. In light of such huge disparity in phonemes and nomenemes, the prospect of negative transfer, especially in spelling and pronunciation, is highly likely. One of the greatest and most pervasively vulnerable areas with learners of English at the lower proficiency levels is this type of negative transfer. In other words, there is a strong tendency of learners to impose the graphemes, phonemes and nomenemes of their L1 on those of L2.

Instructionally and with focus on oral spelling, if a teacher is not aware of the significant differences in the nomenemes of L1 and L2, it is unwise on his/her part to ask a learner to orally spell a word no matter how short the word is. Notice the following incident recently brought to my attention and involves a Latino child (G) placed in an all-English class. “After a month of her placement, the class had a spelling bee contest. Every child was asked to spell a certain word, the Latino child was asked to spell the word . The child was utterly silent, while the rest of the students were screaming and saying that it was a simple word. They did not understand that the child had no previous exposure to the English alphabet and that she had no idea, whatsoever, of the names of the alphabet (nomenemes) in English which are the basic units for oral spelling.”

Yes, it was the three-letter word that the Latino child failed to spell in English as {wy + e + es} because its spelling in Spanish is {i griega + e + ese} which is drastically different from its English version. Obviously, the longer the word, the more difficult its oral spelling will become. Remember the reason why the subject of the previous oral spelling incident failed the naturalization test; he simply did not know that the oral spelling of in English is as follows { i e ʤi e n} which is drastically different from what is in Spanish, namely, {  a  a n}. 5.4. Implications To use the traditional generic term ‘spelling’ for different linguistic activities that aim at constructing a word correctly whether in terms of writing its graphemes in the sequence in which they should appear or say the names of those graphemes in the same sequence is linguistically and pedagogically deficient and

A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Nomenemes and Sequemes 99 inadequate. Linguistically, the activities should be identified as graphic spelling and oral spelling. The two activities represent two different processes and require different linguistic units, namely graphemes and nomenemes, respectively. Pedagogically, the two units appeal to different sensory modalities and are premised on different cognitive processes. Graphemes, as will be discussed in due course, are primarily generated manually and fed to the reader visually, whereas nomenemes are generated by articulatory maneuvers (orally) and fed to the listener auditorily. One of the four identities of the alphabet is the nomenemic one, which in teaching English as L1 (native language) or L2 (second language), has, thus far, been either neglected or confused with other identities. It has been neglected in two ways: first, it has not been recognized as an autonomous identity and its units have not been standardized in transcription; second, it has not been taught formally as a well-defined identity that serves as the primary tool for oral spelling. As for the confusion of the nomenemic identity with other alphabetic identities, it is most evident in phonics where the nomeneme is confused with the phoneme such as in claiming that the word is made up of the ‘sounds’ “ em…a…en’. Actually, this is very confusing because those are the nomenemes not the sounds; the sounds are [m…æ…n]. If one carefully considers the nomenemes of letters across most alphabets, one will find that a nomeneme does usually contain the sound of the letter with some additional attachment. Take, for instance, the name of the letter in the original Semitic alphabet and compare it to other alphabets that are based on the Semitic one. It is = [b] in Aramaic and Hebrew; = [ba] in Arabic; = [bta] in Greek; = [b] in Latin and Spanish and = [bi] in English etc…, the nomeneme does contain the sound [b] but with additional sound attachments. However, it is not necessary that the nomeneme contain the sound of the letter or grapheme. In English, the nomenemes of the letters = {aitch} = [eʧ] and = {double u}= [d bl ju] do not contain the sounds of those letters. In a nutshell, nomenemes are different from phonemes in two ways: 1) all nomenemes contain additional sounds to those of core sound; 2) some nomenemes may not contain the core sound. 5.5. Applications One of the most important applications of the study of nomenemics is a call for teachers and students to go beyond the alphabet as a collection of symbols and look at it as a multifaceted system representing four different identities with autonomous linguistic functions. The identity under consideration here is that of the nomeneme. One of the most common, albeit very casual, ways of dealing with the nomenemic identity is when the alphabet letters are sung by children as part of their initial orientation to language learning. Singing the alphabet should not stay only as a kindergarten assignment and only be orally performed. It should go beyond that to the first and second grades and be supported with standardized written forms of the orally sung nomenemes. In other words, the alphabet song

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

should not only be orally sung as ‘a b c d ...e f g ...h i j k ...l m n o p’ etc…; it is equally important to visually introduce those nomenemes as {a bee cee dee…..…e ef gee…..…aitch i jay kay……. el em en o pee}etc… Young learners should be gradually made aware that the nomenemes are primary units of oral spelling without a good mastery of them, especially in L1 to L2 transition, learners will encounter difficulty. For LLEs, graphic spelling is relatively easier to manage because the graphemes in the two languages are far more similar than the names or the nomenemes of those graphemes. You can ask a literate Latino with a low proficiency in English to graphically spell (or to write) the word , but you cannot ask him to spell it orally if he/she has not fluently mastered the nomenemes of English. Notice the big gap between the graphemes and the nomenemes of phonetically transcribed as in table 24, below. Spanish English Spanish English Graphemes Graphemes Nomenemes Nomenemes p r o p a

a n d a

p r o p a

a n d a

p r o p a

 a n d a

pi r o pi e ʤi e n di e

Table 24. Graphic spelling vs. oral spelling of English and Spanish. In any classroom situation, there is often a tendency on the part of teachers to do impressionistic assessment of the proficiency of their students. If such proficiency assessment is based on graphic spelling, it may give much different impression than when the assessment is based on oral spelling only. In order to arrive at a more valid and reliable assessment, the student should be evaluated in both skills– oral and graphic spelling. Our naturalization test-taker mentioned above (§5.3), might have passed his test if he had been asked to write (spell graphically) the name ; unfortunately, he flunked because he opted, unknowingly, to spell it orally which for him, as a Spanish learners of English, was far more challenging than graphic spelling.

A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Nomenemes and Sequemes 101 5.6. Rationale for Introducing Sequeme Identity The rationale for elevating this aspect of an alphabet to the status of an identity was established on the basis of several observations both linguistic and non-linguistic. First, the alphabet is a system in which the sequence of its units has acquired a linguistic function i.e. alphabetization and lexicography. Second, the alphabet as a sequential system may be used as an enumeration system. Thus, for instance, when Ted Koppel, the former anchorman of Nightline Program on American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) had to count four or five items, he rarely used 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 or first, second, third, fourth, fifth; rather, he used a, b, c, d and e. May be he preferred this manner of enumeration because he was an employee of ABC. Third, based on the numerical orientation of the alphabet symbols, the alphabet set may be used as an encoding and decoding system in activities that encourage divergent thinking. Below is an elaboration on the above observations that characterize the sequeme identity. 5.7. Linguistic Function of the Sequeme The alphabet song that children practice combines two identities of the alphabet– nomeneme and sequeme. Saying the names of letters deals with the nomeneme identity, whereas saying them in the order in which they are said represents the sequeme identity. When dealing with the alphabet as a system, any violation of the sequence amounts to a linguistic violation unless the violation of the sequence is purposeful. For instance, if the purpose is to alphabetize a group of words or names, the sequence has to be observed. Dictionaries are strictly based on alphabetization and many other publications such as telephone directories also adhere to alphabetization. There are several interesting facts about dictionaries that change with the change in the sequencing of the alphabet letters or characters such as geminates and digraphs. For instance, the decision to include or not to include the geminate consonants of Spanish and and the digraph as units in the alphabet has an impact on the way the vocabulary initiated with those graphemes are placed or sequenced37. If they are treated as units in the alphabet then they will receive autonomous entries in the dictionary and separate the words initiated with them from the entries initiated with single and or with only. And if they are not treated as autonomous units, then words initiated with will appear after within the general entry of since there are no words with or . By the same token, will appear just before . Unlike Spanish, in English there has never been an attempt to include digraphs in the sequence of the alphabet in spite of the fact that some of the digraphs in English are far more frequently used and functionally recurrent than those in Spanish. In Spanish, there are relatively few words initiated with , 37

Since April 1994, the Spanish alphabet has consisted of twenty-seven (27) letters because and were abolished as separate items of the alphabet; besides, one is included as a letter in the alphabet, but as sounds [r] and [rr] are kept separate (Butt and Benjamin, 2000).

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

fewer with and none with , whereas in English there are virtually hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of words which are initiated with , , digraphs, let alone hundreds of others that have these digraphs in medial and final positions within words. There are some lexicographical and linguistic implications that stand out as a consequence of the admissibility of such digraphs within the orthography at large and within the alphabet specifically. For example, in Spanish is generally pronounced [ʧ], whereas in English it may be [ʧ], [k], and [] as in , , and . Therefore, any Latino learner of English should take this pronunciation diversity in the sound into consideration for pronunciation as well as spelling both graphic and oral. As for the digraphs and , they have no place in Spanish and therefore they should be seriously taken into consideration by the same learners. Another interesting implication of the inclusion or the exclusion of digraphs in the alphabet is the size of the entries of certain letters. It is never surprising to discover that dictionary entries in English with the letters , and are very rich with vocabulary. There are two reasons for this phenomenon: first, the letters represent very common sounds which are linguistically identified as unmarked (common) vs. marked (uncommon) sounds; second, each one of the above letters constitutes the first element of the three most frequently circulating digraphs of English. If it were not for those digraphs, the entries under , and would drop by at least a seventh in number. Interestingly also, it is relevant to point out that the entry in English has much less lexical; items than . Undoubtedly, there is much room for a linguistic interpretation for this phenomenon. On the one hand, entry is orthographically restricted because it is rarely followed by the three vowels , whereas may be orthographically followed by any of the five vowels; on the other hand, permits digraph formation whereas does not allow a digraph except in a few loanwords of Arabic and/or Iranian origin such as = in which the represents the voiceless uvular fricative = خ‬. In addition to all the above differences between the entries of and , almost all the initial clusters with the sound of [kl] and [kr] are orthographically transcribed with [i.e., and ] as in and . Notice also that digraphs in English are essentially constructed with the attachment of an . As has been pointed out elsewhere, this has never been accidental and had been explained as follows: “The specific attachment of an grapheme, to create a series of digraphs may also be interpreted in terms of phonetic sciences specifically inasmuch as the phonetic nature of the phoneme /h/ matters. The sound of this phoneme predominantly represents an element of mild noise (aspiration) which when it is added to a fricative sound, such as [s], it modifies it to an aspirated [s] which sounds phonetically like [] or Greek sigma . In the case of /p, t, k/, all of which represent plosives/stops, the addition of /h/ changes their phonetic nature

A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Nomenemes and Sequemes 103 into fricatives as in = [f], = [], = [], = [x]38.In the case of the addition of results in the creation of the digraph to stand for the affricate sound /ʧ / as in ” (Odisho, 2004: 87).

It is to be emphasized that the selection of ‘h’ was not because of its grapheme nature, but rather because of its phonemic or rather phonetic nature as an aspiration or mild frication sound. This affords a satisfactory explanation for the selection of [h] sound to create almost all digraphs in English. 5.8. Non-Linguistic Functions of Sequemes The non-linguistic functions of the sequeme are two. The first is to use it as a unit of enumeration. In some languages, the alphabet units have a double function of letters and numbers. At least in the original Semitic alphabet of twenty-two letters, such as in Aramaic and Hebrew, the letters were used as numbers ranging from one 1 through 400. Later, the same core alphabet of twenty-two (not the augmented one of twenty-eight) was also used for enumeration in Arabic from 1 through 400 to which the six additional letters of the augmented Arabic alphabet were added to raise the enumeration potential to1000 in the following format (Thackston, 1994: 245) as displayed in table 25, below: Letter Numeric Letter Numeric Letter Numeric Value Value Value ‫ا‬ 1 ‫ك‬ 20 ‫ش‬ 300 ‫ب‬ 2 ‫ل‬ 30 ‫ت‬ 400 ‫ج‬ 3 ‫م‬ 40 ‫ث‬ 500 ‫د‬ 4 ‫ن‬ 50 ‫خ‬ 600 ‫هـ‬ 5 ‫س‬ 60 ‫ذ‬ 700 ‫و‬ 6 ‫ع‬ 70 ‫ض‬ 800 ‫ز‬ 7 ‫ف‬ 80 ‫غ‬ 900 ‫ح‬ 8 ‫ص‬ 90 ‫ظ‬ 1000 ‫ط‬ 9 ‫ق‬ 100 ‫ي‬ 10 ‫ر‬ 200 Table 25. Alphabet letters functioning as numbers. The other non-linguistic function of the sequeme which is also related to the numerical values assigned to alphabet letters has emerged in line with the multisensory and multicognitive approach to teaching language, in general, that was first elaborated on elsewhere (Odisho, 2003; 2004). The approach, which is premised on linguistics and the recent cognitive orientation in education, calls for inter-disciplinary and cross-curriculum integration. Subsequently, in order to As it is in the word originally from the Indo-Iranian word  [xak] meaning “dirt or earth”. 38

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

teach the alphabet with all four of its identities, it is quite practical and beneficial to associate it with other systems, in this case the numerical system. As classroom activities, teachers may promote processes of encoding and decoding by converting letters into digits and digits into letters to construct words and numbers; in fact, even to construct longer stretches in the form of sentences and discourse. Such activities have been found to promote the following skills: 1) Encouraging divergent thinking by functioning with units in two different systems. 2) Shifting from one discipline to another to avoid educational boredom. 3) Activating different potentials or intelligences of learners. 4) Monitoring the performances of learners to discover their strengths and weaknesses. Such performances may serve as discovery procedures according to which teachers may be more able to identify weakness and strengths and plan future individualized instruction accordingly. 5.9. Core Alphabet and Augmented Alphabet When the original alphabet was designed, it strictly observed what is today known as ‘alphabetic principle’ which simply means one symbol for one sound and vice versa. Thus, the original alphabet had no inconsistencies, redundancies and multiple associations or functions. As a rule of thumb, spoken language is by nature far more dynamic than writing which tends to be more static and stagnant in nature. Writing does not change if its users do not change it intentionally, whereas spoken language is always vulnerable to change as long as it is dynamically ‘churned’ in the mouths of its speakers, young and old, male and female and native and foreign. Each one of those speakers, who may be in millions, leaves its personal impression on the given spoken language. If spoken language changes faster– at least from generation to generation– and writing is not instantaneously changed to cope up with the change, there will be a gap of inconsistency between the two media. One sound may be represented by more than one symbol and one symbol may represent more than one sound etc… In other words, the alphabetic principle will be violated. Presently, English orthography typically represents the violation of the alphabetic principle because it has all types of grapheme-phoneme inconsistencies as discussed in Chapter II. Briefly restated, the inconsistencies portrayed themselves in the following forms: one sound designated by more than one grapheme whether single or cluster; one grapheme, whether single or cluster, representing more than one sound; sounds with no specific graphemic representation; too many silent graphemes whether single or cluster etc…In an attempt to improve the grapheme-phoneme consistent representation, English, like many other languages, has resorted to the creation of digraphs. English, very much unlike Spanish, has created several of them some of which are of very high frequency of occurrence. As mentioned earlier on, English has adhered to the etymological principle and preserved– or attempted to preserve– the native spelling of some of its

A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Nomenemes and Sequemes 105 loanwords, whereas Spanish has discarded the etymology principle. Obviously, the example cited earlier on dealt with Greek loanwords, among others, involving sounds such as the voiceless interdental fricative [] and the voiceless bilabial fricative [φ]. Spanish linguists and lexicographers have long been arguing the status of Spanish three digraphs within its alphabet system. They had been incorporated in the alphabet, but then a recent movement emerges from the academies to exclude them. Undoubtedly, their inclusion and exclusion has advantages and disadvantages a problem that is beyond the domain of this study since the targeted language [L2] here is English. In English, none of the digraphs has been incorporated into the alphabet mainly for cultural reasons to preserve the traditional and the historical form of the alphabet system. There are also other practical and technical reasons such the revision of thousands of textbooks, revamping the basic premise of dictionary industry etc…Nevertheless, from the pedagogical and instructional perspective, the digraphs should be given utmost attention in the teaching of almost all language skills of English because of the proportionately large number of digraphs in relation to the 26 letters; they are approximately one-fourth of the core letters. Besides, functionally they play a very significant role in the encoding and decoding of English. Thus far, when children are introduced to literacy in English, the focus of their introduction tends to be in terms of teaching the alphabet rather than teaching the English orthography. The two systems were distinguished earlier on in the sense that the alphabet system is a very narrow one, whereas the orthography is much broader. The former was identified as a list of alphabetic symbols of which a certain system of writing consists. As for the orthography, it was identified as the alphabet system in conjunction with other symbols, such as diacritics, and the manner and rules that govern the combination of the alphabets symbols among themselves and in combination with the diacritics to lead to a complete system of encoding and decoding of meaning in a given language. In light of this distinction between the alphabet system of English and its orthographic system, the focus on the digraphs, their structure, their function and their overall contribution to meaning construction should no longer be marginalized as it has been in most of our textbooks, especially those that are phonics-oriented. Such textbooks do mention the digraphs and compile lists of words that contain them. Thus far, the manner in which the digraphs are handled is not pedagogically and instructionally beneficial. The digraphs should be introduced as a complementary part of the alphabet with focus on the following linguistic and instructional points: 1) The digraphs, especially the most common, should be listed and taught within the alphabet. Each one should be associated with the base letter from which it is coined. 2) The list may either be incorporated in the core alphabet or listed separately but matched with the base letter. 3) Any regularity and systematicness pertaining to the digraphs should be brought to the attention of the learners depending on their age and grade. For instance, the fact that the digraphs are exclusively -suffixed should

106

Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English be highlighted and briefly explained taking the age and grade of learners into consideration. 4) The sound or sounds each digraph represents should be clearly demonstrated with ample examples. For instance, may signal the sounds [ʧ], [k] and [] as in , and ; may signal the sounds [], [] and [t] as in , and ; and may signal the sounds [f] and [ ] as in and or even a silent letter as in . 5) It is very beneficial to cite some very familiar English words of Greek origin, for example, and relate the Greek voiceless uvular fricative sound [] to English when pronounced [k] and the voiceless bilabial fricative [φ] to when pronounced [f] as in table 26, below. Greek Origin χάος χάσμα χορός χριστός χρόνιος Greek Origin φάντασμα φαρμακείο φωνητικός φωτογραφία φυσική

Sound of English Sound of /IPA Version /IPA [χ] Chaos [k] [χ] Chasm [k] [χ] Chorus [k] [χ] Christ [k] [χ] Chronic [k] Sound of English Sound of /IPA Version /IPA [φ] phantom [f] [φ] pharmacy [f] [φ] phonetic [f] [φ] photograph [f] [φ] physics [f]

Table 26. Relating and digraphs of English to their original sounds in Greek. The same could be done with some French loanwords in English with digraph representing [] sound as in , , and . As for the first and second points, the core alphabet and the augmented one may be presented in the following two formats a) List the core alphabet and match the base letters with the digraphs they yield: b) Incorporate the digraphs within the core alphabet and create the augmented alphabet; as in tables, 27 and 28, below.

A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Nomenemes and Sequemes 107 Base Digraph Base Digraph Letter Letter A a N n B b O o C c Ch ch P p Ph ph D d Q q E e R r Rh rh F f S s Sh sh G g Gh gh T t Th th; Th th H h U u I i V v J j W w Wh wh K k Kh kh X x L l Y y M m Z z Table 27. English digraphs match with their base letters.

Grapheme A B C Ch D E F G Gh H I J K L M N

a b c ch d e f g gh h i j kh* 39 l m n

Numerical Value 1 2 3 3 4 5 6 7 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Grapheme O P Ph Q R S Sh T Th U V W Wh X Y Z

o p ph q rh* s sh t th u v w wh x y z

Numerical Value 15 16 16 17 18 19 19 20 20 21 22 23 23 24 25 26

Table 28. English digraphs incorporated in core alphabet and assigned numerical values (after Odisho, 2004).

39

Digraphs with asterisk indicate limited circulation.

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The arrangement in table 27 will certainly attract the attention of teachers and learners to the very existence of the digraphs, their association with the base letters of the core alphabet and their function within the orthography at large. If, however, the augmented alphabet is manipulated beyond its linguistic functions as an example of implementing interdisciplinary integration and divergent thinking, then the digraphs are incorporated in the core alphabet and assigned numerical values in such a manner that the augmented alphabet will comprise physically 34 units but will remain numerically twenty-six. This latter feature will be retained by infusing a minor modification. The modification is premised on the fact that all digraphs are formed with an attachment to the base letter. Therefore instead of assigning an additional number to the digraph, the specific base letter carries the same sequential number of the base letter with the superscript . For example, the numerical value of is ‘3’, therefore, the digraph will carry the numerical value of ‘3’ and so on as in table 28, above . In cognitive-oriented instruction that is compatible with the Multiple Intelligence Theory (MIT), the above table may be used for different classroom activities that can be pedagogically sound, instructionally beneficial and socially recreational. Such activities may include simple arithmetic problems using the four operations, designing puzzles, composing simple cryptic messages and even drawing schematic figures or pictures with numbers. Below is some more concrete elaboration of those activities. No doubt, at the early stages, learners are allowed to use a conversion table, which they should gradually dispense with. Examples of simple arithmetic problems that are compatible with 1st and nd 2 graders may include: Subtraction

Addition

Division

Multiplication

1) T – d =

3) C + g =

5) U ÷ c =

7) F x c =

2) O – a =

4) Z + j =

6) R ÷ f =

8) B x d =

3) 10 4) 36

5) 7 6) 3

7) 18 8) 8

Answers: 1) 16 2) 14

Puzzles can come in different forms and levels of challenge depending on the age and grade of learners. Some very elementary ones may seek responses for questions such as the following: 1. What type of fruit the following combination makes? 1 + 16 + 16 + 12 + 5 = 2. What type of animal the following combination makes? 8 + 15 + 18 + 19 + 5 = 3. What part of the body the following combination makes? 20 + 18 + 15 + 1 + 20 =

A Comparative Study of Spanish and English Nomenemes and Sequemes 109

4. What geographic direction the following combination makes? 19 + 15 + 21 + 20 + 5 + 1 + 19 + 20 = 5. What country the following combination makes? 16 + 15 + 12 + 1 + 14 + 4 = Answers: 1) Apple

2) Horse

3) Throat

4) Southeast

5) Poland

Let us present another puzzle. The numbers below represent different parts that together make a major part with which human being are most identifiable: 1) 14+15+19+5 5+25+5+19 5) 3+5+5+11+19

2) 5+1+18+19

3) 13+15+21+20

4)

6) 12+9+16+19

7) 5+25+5+2+18+15+23+19

Notice that several of the above chains of numbers end with #19 which should linguistically be a good clue. It stands for and it grammatically may, most likely, indicate plurality or possessive case. Answers: It is human face and the parts are: 1) nose; 2) ears; 3) mouth; 4) eyes; 5) cheeks; 6) lips; 7) eyebrows.

One can also write secret codes or cryptic messages such as the following: 23+5 21+14+4+5+18+19+20+1+14+4

8+9+19+20+15+25

2+5+20+20+5+18

23+5 3+1+14

18+5+1+4

2+5+3+1+21+19+5

1+14+3+9+5+14+20

23+18+9+20+9+14+8

Answers: We understand history better because we can read ancient writing.

One can even create puzzles in the form of schematic drawings with numbers such as the following. This may be somewhat challenging depending on age and grade. In case of difficulty, some clues may be hinted at by the teacher. The first hint may be: “It is an organ in human body.” A more straightforward hint may be: “It is made up of five parts.”

20+21+13+2

9+14+4+5+24

13+9+4+4+12+5

18+9+14+7 6+9+14+7+5+18

Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

16+9+14+11+9+5

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Figure 29. Schematic design of a puzzle with grapheme-sequeme conversion formula. Answer: Five fingers. Five toes response is also acceptable.

Activities such as the above are excellent for the discovery of talents or what Gardner calls human intelligences. A learner who succeeds in a split second in recognizing the above schematic puzzle, most likely proves that he/she has an artistic or spatial intelligence. He/she is most likely a good jigsaw puzzle solver.

Chapter VI Teaching of Spelling 6.1. Introductory Remarks Before delving deep into the nature of spelling as a process and skill and the instructional problems associated with it, two issues have to be tackled: first, the vague nature of the term ‘spelling’ inasmuch as English is concerned; second, the status of spelling in English as a major difficulty for young learners as opposed to spelling in Spanish. As for its vagueness, English dictionaries give a wide range of definitions and descriptions of the process of spelling (Odisho, 2004). Some definitions focus on the graphemic identity of words, while other focus on the nomenemic and/or phonemic identity without producing a comprehensive definition. After extensive research it was concluded that spelling may portray itself in different forms depending on which one or more of the four alphabet identity– grapheme, phoneme, nomeneme and sequeme– is given the priority. For instance, learners with certain visual and/or auditory disabilities resort to different sensory modalities to master spelling. A hearing-impaired learner has no choice but to reinforce other sensory modalities, especially the visual one, while a visionimpaired learner will tend to reinforce his/her auditory and/or kinesthetic sensory modalities. As for average learners, the choice of sensory modalities will depend on their individual strength in one or more modalities. Under all circumstances, the rule of thumb according to a multisensory approach, which is adopted in this book, is: multiple sensory modalities are always more effective than a single sensory modality. The emphasis on the sensory modalities should not exclude, in any way, the role of cognitive processing of spelling; simply, the sensory and cognitive modalities are complementary in nature and they jointly yield the best results. It has been previously concluded that in actual fact there are four different modes of spelling: oral, using nomenemes; graphic, using graphemes; signal, using gestures (as in sign language); and relief, using touching (as with the blind decoding Braille writing) (Odisho, 2004). Concerning the notorious reputation of spelling in English as a difficult skill from which the young suffer and the native adults and foreigners complain, it is attributed to serious inconsistency between graphemes and phonemes. Among the learners of English as a second language (ESL), Latinos are ahead of all in complaining of the difficulty of spelling in English. Obviously, they are justified in their complaint because in their language they experience a high degree of grapheme-phoneme correspondence. Oftentimes, they spell the way words are pronounced and they pronounce the way words are spelled. It is no exaggeration to say that in Spanish, children are frequently able to spell words they have never heard or seen before. The above discussion will take us back to a distinction that was highlighted earlier on in which the alphabet and orthography were treated as different systems. Two languages may share the same alphabet system, but have substantially different

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orthographic systems. This situation is best portrayed through the comparison of Spanish and English. Due to this situation, Spanish orthography was labeled shallow orthography, whereas that of English was labeled deep orthography. In a shallow orthography, the phonemic and the graphemic codes tend to match; in contrast, in a deep orthography, the phonemic and the graphemic codes reveal great inconsistency. The difference between the two types of orthography implies that in shallow orthography access to pronunciation and/or meaning is far more directly and immediately attained than in deep orthography. Expressed differently, shallow orthography affords transparency and ease in the processes of encoding and decoding of meaning the two operational pillars on which human language is constructed. In contrast to shallow orthography, deep orthography suffers from opaqueness and difficulty in the processes of encoding and decoding. The next sections will be elaborations on the specific causes of the difference in spelling and examples of spelling errors committed and the techniques of teaching spelling to Latinos. 6.2. Primary and Specific Causes of Latinos’ Difficulties in English Spelling Other than the fact that English has a more diversified sound system than Spanish in both vowels and consonants, if one were to select one word which best identifies the spelling disparity in Spanish and English, the word would be variability for English and invariability for Spanish. “Variability or invariability of what”, one might ask. For English the outline of a response would be as follows: 1) Variability in phonemic representation of graphemes. 2) Variability in graphemic representation phonemes. 3) Variability in phonemic and/phonetic values of graphemes according to stress and rhythm dynamics which are collectively called vowel neutralization and/or vowel reduction, two phenomena which are very alien to Spanish. Contrary to the above situation in English, Spanish distinguishes itself with invariability in all those three aspects of English– there is minimum variability in grapheme-phoneme, phoneme-grapheme relationships and minimum influence of stress and rhythm dynamics on grapheme-phoneme and phoneme-grapheme correspondence. Let us elaborate in some detail on the above forms of variability or invariability beginning with variability in sound values of simple vowel graphemes as indicated in figure 30, below.

Teaching of Spelling

(1) /i/ /e/ /æ/ // /u/ / /

& & & & & &

(2) // // // /o/ // / /

?

(3)





113

(4)

(5) /i/ /e/ /a/ /o/ /u/

Figure 30. Variability vs. invariability of vowel graphemes to phonemes in English and Spanish, respectively. As indicated in figure 30, Spanish has 5 graphemes (at times six with the addition of ) that are highly consistently and invariably matched with five vowel phonemes. In English, the same 5 (+1) vowel graphemes signal at least 12 simple vowels. One can readily notice that column # 3 represents the vowel symbols (letters) which are the same for English and Spanish. Columns # 1 and # 5 represent the vowel phonemes of English and Spanish, respectively. In column # 4, the arrows indicate that the one-to-one symbol-sound relationship in Spanish holds very consistently, whereas the large question mark in column # 2 is a collective symbolic reference to the highly variable correspondence between the same five (5) vowel symbols and the twelve (12) simple vowel sounds of English. The question mark also implicitly indicates the very many additional variable ways each of the five vowel symbols contributes in designating one or more of the same vowel sounds. Symbol (grapheme) , for example, has at least six different sounds as pointed out earlier on. Additionally, a schwa / / may be graphemically represented by, at least, 13 different combinations in the form of any of the single vowel graphemes, the grapheme in addition to several combinations of other vowel graphemes. In English this type of variability is the main cause of the pervasive spelling inconsistency and, hence, unpredictability of spelling and often of pronunciation. Similar variability in sound values of graphemes applies to consonants. Once again and very expectedly, there is far more inconsistency in the phonemic and graphemic matching of English consonants compared to Spanish. For example, the phoneme /f/ in Spanish is consistently represented by a single grapheme, whereas in English, /f/ phoneme may appear in at least four different forms: , , and as in , , and , respectively. Consider another phoneme of Spanish, such as /k/, which has relatively some variability in graphemic representation such . If the same phoneme of English is taken into consideration, one will discover that the variability is far more extensive than in Spanish. Notice the comparative schematic graphemic variability of the phonemes /f/ and /k/ in table 29, below.

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English English Graphemic Phoneme Spanish Graphemic Representation Representation f f f ff

h ph c c k cc qu ch k k ck kh q cq qu(e) Table 29. Comparative phoneme-grapheme variability in English and Spanish.

The most characteristic feature of Spanish is the total phonemic invariability in the quality and quantity of its vowels with minimum, if any, phonetic variability. The situation in English is quite contrary to that of Spanish; in English vowel reduction and/or vowel neutralization are utterly pervasive and invasive, with the former term indicating the breadth of the vowel reduction, while the latter indicating the far-reaching influence of vowel reduction on the overall pronunciation and rhythm of English . Virtually any vowel can change in quality and quantity with the presence or absence of stress. It is the absence of this strong tendency of vowel reduction that helps Spanish maintain an almost perfect one-to-one correspondence and consistency between its five vowel graphemes and its five (or six) vowel phonemes. 6.3. Revisiting Oral and Graphic Spelling As teachers and learners, we have to recognize that the oral vs. graphic dichotomy in spelling is not just an inevitable linguistic fact but also an instructionally constructive one in enhancing accuracy in both spoken and written modes of language. In both forms of spelling, the target is to secure the proper sequence of the graphemes or nomenemes that construct a word to keep the word immune from confusion with other words or rendering it a meaningless unit with the hope that the targeted word is in the right structural position within longer structures and in isolation. As for the relative difficulty of oral vs. graphic spelling, there is no doubt that oral spelling is far more challenging than graphic spelling due to the following two reasons: a) speller does not only have to know the right sequence of

Teaching of Spelling

115

the graphemes, but he/she also needs to master the nomenemes of those graphemes; b) speller has also to visualize the sequence in his/her mind and be aware of which graphemes have already been spelled and which are remaining. This latter step becomes gradually more challenging with longer words. For example, if an L2 learner is trying to orally spell the word , he may proceed with the initial graphemes, but then for one reason or another he may lose the sequence or the chain of graphemes. When such a difficulty arises, the speller has no choice but to start the spelling anew. For oral spelling to be successfully completed, the speller has to be more cognitively focused on the overall sequence of graphemes– those that have been uttered and those to come. Unlike the situation in oral spelling, the graphic speller does not have to visually picture in his mind what has already been spelled because it is already written down. In sum, oral spelling is more cognitively challenging than graphic spelling. Let us, demonstrate what has been said in a different format: Graphic spelling of = < a…c…c…o…m…m...> if the speller faces some difficulty but then overcomes the difficulty instantaneously, he does not have to go back to the beginning of the word because the portion that has already been spelled is before his/her eyes. In other words, he/she can continue where the chain was disrupted. This is all possible because the sequence of graphic spelling is static (stationary) in nature. Oral spelling of = Very much unlike the situation in graphic spelling, if the oral speller begins to spell {a…cee…cee…o…em…em…}and suddenly faces some difficulty, his difficulty is doubled because he has also to remember what has already been spelled. If the two difficulties are in no way surmountable, the speller has no other option but to go back to the beginning of the word and begin spelling afresh. Unlike the static nature of graphic spelling, oral spelling is fleeting (transient) in nature.

Some of the most striking symptoms of beginner L2 oral spellers of English are hesitation, indecision, repetition of nomenemes or interjections in the form of or the reason for this being the lack of fluency in remembering the nomenemes and fluency in sequencing them. 6.4. Techniques of Teaching Spelling A major traditional misconception in the teaching of spelling on the part of both teachers and learners is that spelling means ‘graphic spelling’ simply because it is in writing that spelling errors reveal themselves, whereas in speaking people are not stopped and asked how they spell a certain word. Thus, oftentimes, the term ‘bad speller’ refers to the writer not the speaker. Because of this misconception, the emphasis in teaching spelling has traditionally been placed on graphic spelling. It is true that the occasions on which graphic spelling is required are more that the occasions when oral spelling is required. Some such occasions are spelling-bees contests and telephone conversations with poor quality of voice. Besides the above misconception, there is a chronic misdirection in the teaching of spelling. The misdirection manifests itself in the prevalence of visual

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

sensory modality combined with the cognitive modality of memorization– often rote memorization– as the only or the most dominant techniques of teaching spelling. Because of the dominance of this trend, one may often see children performing the following non-verbal gestures when trying to learn the spelling of a word. They may look at the word, close their eyes and visualize the nomenemic sequence of the word and either write them down for graphic spelling or enunciate the nomenemes for oral spelling. They may also look at the word, lift their head up as if looking at the ceiling when in a room and then begin to spell the word. These gestures are all indicators of rote memorization. There is no doubt that memorization as a cognitive technique and visualization as a sensory technique are very beneficial as tools of spelling, but they are certainly insufficient to manage a spelling system with so much inconsistency and unpredictability as is the case in English. Teaching spelling in English requires a comprehensive methodology that is multisensory and multicognitive in scope and content. It is from this broad scope and content that diversified techniques and activities are designed. Words such and are frequently confused and replaced for each other because of spelling. The two words are confused because they are homonyms. And because of their homonymous nature, rote memorization of any one of them will not overcome the confusion. Therefore, there have to be other techniques to eliminate the confusion. If the two words are reduced to their verb forms and , a semantic (meaning) distance as well as a pronunciation distance will emerge both of which will substantially contribute to the separation of the two words. The semantic distance will serve as a cognitive mnemonic and the pronunciation one as an auditory mnemonic. These two mnemonics are indispensable for the error-proof spelling of such words; however, there are sensory techniques one can use to reinforce the correct spelling. For example, visually, teachers may write the words and and highlight the only difference of vs. with a colored marker to pinpoint the source of the difference. Auditorily, teachers may go back to the verb forms of the two words and mark the difference in stress. In = , the stress is on the second syllable in which the sound of the vowel [i] matches its nomeneme (letter-name) , whereas in = the stress is on the first syllable and the sound of the vowel of the second syllable is different from that of in . If one carefully considers the above ways of distinguishing between and , it will be clear that it is an integrative approach to the teaching of spelling that musters all means of highlighting the difference and rendering the spelling more systematic. Table 30 summarizes the aspects that help separate the two words from each other and internalize their correct spelling.

Difference

Aspects of

Teaching of Spelling

Spelling Semantic Stem

117

Samples of words Misspelled Complementary 6th grapheme something that completes complement or complete

Complimentary 6th grapheme an expression of praise compliment

Table 30. Highlights of differences that contribute to better spelling. The best example I cite as a frequently misspelled, albeit easily corrected word, is . It is an item that is misspelled by learners and their instructors regardless of whether they are elementary school teachers or university professors. Whenever, the subject of spelling is introduced and the way to approach it in a cognitive way, the word is given as an example. Last time it was experimented with in my classes was when twenty-three junior university students– predominantly native speakers or near-native speakers of English– were asked to spell the word graphically on a piece of paper. After collecting the paper, twenty-one students (91%) misspelled the word. The spelling error was associated with the two doubles, one of which was reduced to a single letter. In other words, the spelling error portrayed itself either in a single instead of a double or a single instead of a double . Whenever, the error is discovered, the spellers are deeply embarrassed. In order to help them overcome this embarrassment, you have to explain the nature of the error and instruct them to remember that has two doubles– double and double . After the explanation, you tell them that they will be given another word to spell. You do this to help them put themselves in a thinking mode. You give each student another slip of paper and then, very unexpectedly, ask them to spell the same word– . Overwhelmingly, they spell the word with almost one hundred percent correctness after which they take a deep sigh of relief. Some students, especially the non-native ones, may forget the mnemonic of two doubles, but if it is reinforced through other sensory modalities, it will never be misspelled. Some such modalities may be in the form of visual reinforcement of the two doubles by writing them in larger size or capitalizing and/or coloring them to stand out. Teachers may place in their classrooms the correct spelling next to the wrong spelling marking the former with a ‘YES’ sign (b) and the latter with a ‘NO’ sign (x) as in format below. Wrong (x)

Right (b)



And in order to further focus on the locations where the errors occur, the two doubles should be highlighted in bold capitals as indicated below:

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

If the teacher wants to combine the teaching of spelling with some exercises in divergent thinking, then he/she may ask questions such as the following: How many letters in are in two’s? The response: There are four two’s; they are: , , and . or What two movements of letters will transform the following sequence of letters as in figure 31, below, into a very common word? Response: aa

cc

oo

mm

d

t

i

o

n

d

t

i

o

n =

Response

aa

cc

oo

mm

accommodation

Figure 31. An example of divergent techniques in helping with the spelling of

Remember that exercises such the ones above are not simply activities to teach spelling; they are, indeed, activities that stimulate divergent thinking which, in itself, is the best medium for information retention. It is imperative to point out that learners of English misspell the word not always because it is difficult to spell; rather, it is because our approach to teaching spelling has often been and still is, based on rote memorization without the help of any long-term retention techniques both sensory and cognitive. In any form of knowledge acquisition, long-term retention should be the aim not short-term memorization. Another set of words which young and grown-up learners often confuse in spelling are the homonyms or near-homonyms vs. , vs. and vs. . There is much room for minimizing the confusion if some thinking and systematicness are infused in the process of mastering their spelling. There are three steps that should be observed in avoiding the confusion.

Teaching of Spelling

119

1) Consider whether the six words could be placed into categories of some kind. 2) Consider whether there is an orthographic stem or root that will help setting the six words apart preferably in categories. 3) Consider whether there are other mnemonics that will help with improving the accuracy of spelling. In light of the above three considerations, the six words isolate themselves into two categories; the words , and belong to a place category and the other three belong to a non-place category. Besides, the spelling of the three words shares an orthographic base which is ; thus, the orthographic base yields with the addition of a and with the addition of . Subsequently, to know how to spell the three words, one has only to know how to spell , a strategy that will reduce the confusion between the two categories by a minimum of 50% as displayed in figure 32, below.

where

were

there

their

here

here

hear

there

their

where

were

Place

hear

Non-Place

Figure 32. Categorization tips to help with spelling. One may continue to diminish the confusion by associating the spelling of with in that ‘hearing’ is associated with the ‘ear’ the orthographic difference is only an . This association of ‘ear’ with ‘hear’ may be the grounds for some quizzes that further stimulate the brain and other cognitive processes and, in turn, help with the spelling of some words. As an elementary school student, the writer remembers the teacher asking the class: “they did”. Czech has it on the initial syllable and French has it on the last syllable of the word or rather of the phrase. Because of this fixed stress position, those languages do not permit words to contrast on the basis of stress (stress is not phonologically relevant) as is the case in languages with transient stress (non-fixed or non- stationary) in which stress can function phonologically; in other words, it can assume a wide and diversified range of lexical and grammatical functions. Both Spanish and English do have words which are distinguished with the position of stress. Most of those cases tend to signal grammatical differences of which Spanish has more instances than English. In actual fact, at times, Spanish may even have three-way contrasts based on the position of stress such as in: “title”;

“term”;

“continuous”

“I entitle”;

“I terminate”;

“I continue”

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English

“He entitled”; continued”

“He

terminated”;

“He

In English, there are no instances of three-way contrasts; however, there are a few items which distinguish themselves as different grammatical categories only through the use of different stress positions. Examples have been mentioned earlier on in Chapter IV. However, there are only few pairs in English which contrast semantically. Some such examples are: vs. vs. vs. vs. vs. What is different in the above stress-based contrasts in English compared to Spanish is that in the latter language there is hardly any difference in the quality and even the quantity of the vowels involved, whereas in English there are quite conspicuous differences, especially in vowel quality. Consider, for instance, the pair “8th month” vs. “majestic”, the former is pronounced [! st], whereas the latter is pronounced [! st]. Notice, in , the second vowel is reduced to a schwa, a feature that is the most characteristic of English. However, although the two languages permit pairs of words to contrast on the basis of stress placement, their stress systems, and consequently their rhythm types are drastically different as we will see in the next sections. 7.3. Stress Placement in Spanish and English Compared to English, stress placement in Spanish is highly ruled-governed. (De Bruyne, 1995; Kattan-Ibarra and Pountain, 2003). The majority of words are captured by two primary rules which are stated simply as follows. 1) Spanish words are stressed on the next to the last syllable (penultimate) if they end in a vowel, a diphthong and the sounds ‘n’ and ‘s’. 2) In words which end in a consonant (apart from ‘n’ and ‘s’), the stress falls on the last syllable (ultimate). In words, which are not captured by those two primary rules and other minor rules, the stressed syllable is marked with an accent over the vowel element of the syllable as in . The high predictability of the position of stress within words coupled with the marking of stress with an accent when unpredictable renders stress assignment by L2 learners of Spanish a very manageable learning situation. Conversely, English is one of the languages with the least rule-governed stress positioning. Consequently, stress placement in English is highly unpredictable. This unpredictability of stress is one of

Interconnection of Vowel System with Stress and Rhythm

129

the most serious difficulties in the way of L2 learners of English, especially adults and even more so for those of them coming from languages in which stress placement is substantially different from English. For instance, in Turkish stress tends to fall on the last syllable of words and if more suffixes are added they pull the stress with them as in the following examples: o!da oda!lar odala!rim odalarim!da

‘room’ ‘rooms’ ‘my rooms’ ‘in my rooms’

Thus, stress in Turkish contrasts highly with English for which there is ample evidence indicating ‘a pull of stress toward the beginning of words’ (Lado, 1971: 35). Also, in contrast to English, Spanish has the tendency of a pull of stress in the direction of the end of words, but it is not a strong pull as in Turkish. This implies that in the overall positioning of stress, English and Spanish tend to pull distinctly apart, whereas English and Turkish pull considerably apart. For a representation of stress pull in English and Spanish notice the schematic representation of stress in the word in the two languages as in figure 36, below. English

Spanish

color [!k l ]

color [ko!lor]

Beginning End A pull to the beginning

Beginning End A pull to the end

Figure 36. General tendency of stress position in English and Spanish words. In order to further indicate this disparity in the tendency of stress placement, compare the English cognates of the following list of Spanish words (Dalbor, 19880) with agudas (ultimate) stress in which stress position is indicated by the vowel in bold. It is clear that stress recedes in English at least by one to two syllables as in table 32, below. Spanish Words Atención comunicar construcción Solicitor

English Cognates attention communicate construction solicit

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English oportunidad Juvenile León Mama Glotón

opportunity juvenile lion mama glutton

Table 32. Examples of left-pull stress in English vs. right-pull stress in Spanish 7.4. Problems Emerging due to Different Stress Placement Patterns Some of the most difficult stress placement problems for LLEs will be with those multisyllabic English words which receive their stress on their beginning syllables. Foremost of such words are verbs and nouns ending with suffixes as in , , and of which receive stress on their first syllable (antepenultimate for the first three suffixes and pre-antepenultimate for the last suffix), whereas the Spanish counterparts for the first three, which are , < educar> and , receive it on the ultimate (last) syllable. As for stress falls on the penultimate (before the last) syllable. Word patterns with endings such as , or that have more than two syllables never receive stress on the final syllables. An overall general rule for the placement of stress in these word patterns is that stress falls on the initial syllable (antepenultimate) if the verbs are trisyllabic (three syllables). Stress is advanced one step (in terms of syllables) with the addition of an extra syllable. In other words, if the verb is of, say, four syllables, stress advances by one syllable which, nevertheless, still stays antepenultimate as is the case with  

Table 33. Typical examples of left pull of stress placement in some English word patterns. Following the above general rule of an antagonistic pull in the direction of stress placement between English and Spanish, there are several other patterns which will be difficult to handle by LLEs. For example, Spanish words ending with as in table 34, below, receive stress on the ultimate (final) syllable, whereas in English stress position recedes backwards (to the left). Spanish Words Animal Capital decimal operación pronuciación asociación dignidad Utilidad facilidad

Stress Position         

English Cognates animal capital decimal operation pronunciation association dignity utility facility

Stress Position         

Table 34. Typical right pull of stress placement for Spanish and left pull for English. The above examples were cited to demonstrate the primary tendencies in stress position in the two languages. Of course, there are other equally serious inconsistencies that result from other causes. For instance, there are cognate words in the two languages of which the Spanish ones have a final extra syllable due to an additional final. The final does not only change the syllable structure of the word by adding one more syllable, but it also changes the position of the stress. Thus, when LLEs come across such words, they try not to pronounce the as is the case in Spanish; unfortunately, however, they often retain the Spanish stress pattern as in the examples in table 35, below. Such examples are typical of negative transfer of stress placement from L1 to L2. English Word Sufficient important relevant emigrant eminent

Stress Position     

Spanish Cognate suficiente importante relevante emigrante eminente

Stress Position     

MisPronunciation sufficient important relevant emigrant eminent

Stress Position     

Table 35. Typical examples of negative transfer in stress placement from Spanish to English. Another common example of interference with accurate realization of stress by LLEs is their failure to reduce vowels so as to produce an unstressed, or rather weak, syllable and render the syllable with primary stress sufficiently prominent to stand out. When an unstressed syllable in an English word receives prominence unduly, it may perceptibly minimize the prominence of the designated primary stress. From the perspective of the native English listener, the word under

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consideration may either be recognized as a word with two primary stresses or as a word in which the primary stress seems to be misplaced. Such examples sometimes occur with some very common and frequently used words such as and . The regular stress pattern for those words is as follows: [bf!] and [b!kz]; however, the tendency to replace the lax and reduced vowels in the unstressed syllables with typical half-long tense Spanish vowels i.e., [bif!or] and [bi!koz] makes those syllables sound more prominent as if there is misplacement of primary stress. 7.5. Rhythm in Spanish and English: the most Salient Difference If stress is a long feature (suprasegmental) because its influence permeates through a syllable, then rhythm is an even longer feature because it runs through a stretch of speech or discourse. Rhythm in language is traditionally defined as the distribution of stressed and unstressed syllables throughout an utterance. It has already been pointed out that no syllable in any language is absolutely unstressed. Each syllable in human speech must receive a certain degree of physical effort which is known as stress. A more accurate assessment of stress in language should come in terms of a variety of degrees of stress or a continuum ranging from strong to weak allowing for a variety of descriptive labels such very strong, strong, secondary, tertiary and weak. Based on these clarifications, a more accurate definition of rhythm in a given language should be determined by the distribution of different degrees of stress within a stretch of speech in conjunction with the extent of quality and quantity variability within the vowel system of a given language. Let us consider three radically different vowel systems, namely Spanish, Arabic and English. The vowel system of Spanish with only five basic units is highly restricted in vowel quality. As for quantity difference, it is almost negligible. In a nutshell, Spanish has a vowel system in which each vowel strongly retains its quality and quantity, the latter of which tends to be of mid length. Unlike Spanish, Arabic with a three-vowel system is even more restricted in quality than Spanish; however, the system doubles its units phonologically by invoking quantity and creating short (lax) vs. long (tense) vowel contrasts. To make the differences in the vowel system of Arabic and Spanish more relevant to rhythm, consider the vowel system of English which is very rich in quality; moreover, vowel quality and quantity are both significantly affected by their positions within a word and in relation to stress assignment. English has at least 1112 simple vowels with four different phonetic length differences. For a more visual representation of vowel quantity [length] differences, notice the schematic diagram in figure 37, below, in which the difference in length represents difference in quantity, whereas the differences in boldness represents quality.

Interconnection of Vowel System with Stress and Rhythm

Spanish

Slightly variable in quality and quantity

Arabic

Quite variable in quantity. Slightly variable in quality.

English

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Quite variable in quality and quantity Figure 37. Quantitative and qualitative features of syllables in Spanish, Arabic and English.

The schematic diagram simply indicates that vowels in Spanish are of mid-length and do not establish contrasts based on length; even with or without stress they do not much differ in length.42 Vowels in Arabic are considerably different in length to the extent of establishing quantitative contrasts. In English, vowels are distinctly contrastive in both quality and quantity. A major natural corollary to the above differences is that Spanish does not and cannot have long vs. short syllables; rather it should uniformly have one type of mid-length syllables. Stated differently, if vowels in Spanish cannot be long or short, how could the syllables be long or short? This precisely explains the quantitatively uniform syllable length in Spanish as opposed to the quantitatively highly diversified syllable length types in English. It is this difference that is the primary cause of difference in rhythm types across languages. The traditional view is that rhythm in languages follows the dichotomy of stress-timed and syllable-timed, but the above discussion of the connection of syllable diversity to vowel diversity and, in turn, to rhythm diversity does not support a dichotomous division of rhythm types. However, we need to understand what is meant by stress-timed and syllable-timed rhythms. It is true that both English and Arabic rhythm types fall within the stress-timed rhythm types, but there are obviously differences between the two; there is far more substantial vowel reduction in the former than the latter. Consequently, for a more refined description of rhythm types, the concept of a continuum will better accommodate the cross-language diversity in rhythm types. No doubt, when one specifically compares the rhythm types of Spanish and English, they typically represent a syllable-timed type vs. a stress-timed one each of which requires some explanation. 42

Nevertheless, the situation in Spanish should not be misconstrued as the absolute absence of qualitative and quantitative vowel susceptibility to change. Navarro, whose observations about the vowel system of Spanish are very accurate, does not let this fact pass unnoticed; in fact, he emphasizes this in different contexts. For vowel quality, he states that each vowel, under certain circumstances, undergoes perceptible changes, but without altering the phonological unity or the semantic value of the words (P. 28). With regards to quantity, he points out that in the stressed vowels one is ordinarily aware of a certain greater length as compared to those in weak syllables (P 50), but no vowel is shortened so as to become muffled or silenced (P. 51).

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A stress-timed rhythm is the one in which stressed syllables tend to recur at regular intervals of time relative to each other. The syllables vary considerably in prominence relative to each other depending on whether they are stressed or unstressed or whether their vowels are reduced or enhanced. In the stress-timed rhythm, only syllables receiving the primary stress stand out prominently, while the unstressed syllables are reduced and compressed in time to become far less prominent. Therefore, the length of an utterance in terms of time, in stress-timed rhythm depends on the number of stressed syllables not the overall number of syllables within the utterance. The manner in which time is distributed over the syllables is uneven in that the speaker dwells longer on the stressed syllables, whereas he glosses over the unstressed syllables with minimum time. The unstressed syllables serve as time savers for the reader through the facility of vowel reduction and even, at times, consonant reduction or dropping. Vowel reduction and/or consonant dropping are most vividly displayed in the so-called function words in English typically represented by articles, prepositions, conjunctions etc…For instance, the strong form of is [ænd], which may be reduced to the following weak forms: [ nd, nd, n, n], the last of which as in which is usually pronounced as . On the other hand, a syllable-timed rhythm is one in which each syllable tends to retain more or less the same duration regardless of stress (Ladefoged, 1982; Roach, 1983). Unlike the uneven distribution of prominence in stress-timed rhythm, in the syllable-timed rhythm, all syllables, stressed or unstressed, receive a relatively even prominence; syllables take approximately the same time, and the overall length of an utterance depends on the number of syllables involved. In other words, in Spanish rhythm type, there is hardly any noticeable reduction in the prominence of the unstressed syllables nor is there any noticeable enhancement of the stressed syllable. It is in light of the above-mentioned characteristics that English is said to have a typically stress-timed rhythm, whereas Spanish is said to have a typically syllable-timed rhythm. It is, indeed, the restriction on vowel reduction in unstressed syllables coupled with a restriction on vowel enhancement in stressed syllables mentioned earlier on for Spanish that was identified as the main culprit for determining the nature of rhythm in Spanish. All those basic differences at the level of words as well as sentences between the two rhythm types may be demonstrated schematically in figure 38, below. Spanish/Syllable-timed f

no

m

English/Stress-timed no

f

n

m

nn

Figure 38. Comparative differences in syllable prominence in syllable-timed (Spanish) vs. stress-timed (English) rhythm types.

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135

In comparing the pronunciation of the word in English and in Spanish, each oval shape in the above diagram indicates a syllable and the size of the oval shape indicates the prominence that each syllable receives in pronunciation. Based on these clues, three syllables of the Spanish pronunciation are of the same prominence with only slight increase in prominence in the stressed syllable. With the English pronunciation, two of the syllables are of minimum prominence because they contain the reduced vowel schwa [ ]. The last syllable has slightly greater prominence because its vowel is not reduced and the syllable has a CVC structure. Obviously, the greatest prominence is associated with the syllable that receives the primary stress. This type of pictorial representation of rhythm types helps many vision-oriented learners to better grasp the differences in rhythm types. The pictorial representation may also assist learners in noticing that in pronouncing the Spanish , the person takes four equidistant steps, whereas in the pronunciation of its English cognate, he takes one small step followed by a large step followed by another small one and end with a modest([medium) step. For a demonstration of rhythm differences in sentences, notice the schematic representation in figure 39, below, of the syllabic structures added to the following two sentences from Hadlich et al (1968). Lle

ga

mos

a

la

at

the

puer

ta

Spanish We ar

rived

door

English

Figure 39. Patterns of syllable arrangement in syllable-timed rhythm (Spanish) vs. stress-timed rhythm (English). It is quite evident from the schematic representations in figure 39, above that there is only minimal difference in the prominence of all the seven syllables in the Spanish sentence except for the second and the sixth syllables which are slightly more prominent because of the placement of stress. Conversely, in the English sentence, there are four reduced syllables with minimum prominence conjoined with two syllables with distinctly enhanced prominence. It is the even arrangement of syllables in Spanish that determines its syllable-timed rhythm type which is popularly known as the ‘machine gun’ rhythm or the so-called ‘staccato’ rhythm. This impressionistic feeling of a ‘machine gun’ rhythm of Spanish is also, at times, interpreted as a rhythm with faster tempo or speed. In more popular terms, people think that Spanish is spoken faster than English or other languages. Once again this is not exactly true; it is yet another impressionistic feeling resulting from the nature

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of the evenly-structured syllables with each taking the same or similar time thus making the transition time across syllables equally even. It is this unvaried mode of cross-syllable and cross-word transitions that give the impression of faster tempo as opposed to the varied mode of cross-syllable and cross-word transitions in English. In sum, if English speakers speak in words Latinos speak in syllable and when Latinos speak in words, English speak in phrases and clauses. There is yet another additional false impression which is common among all beginner learners of L2s. Simply, any L2 speech for a beginner learner seems much faster than his/her L1 speech. The above discussion leads to a major conclusion in that the rhythm types, especially inasmuch as the dichotomy of syllable-timed vs. stressed timed is concerned, depends largely on the nature of the vowel system in each language. A language, whose vowel system imposes restriction on the qualitative and quantitative diversity of its vowels, is not expected to breed qualitative and quantitative diversity in its syllable structures. These conditions are valid for Spanish, while the exact opposite is valid for English. One then asks: how could a vowel system that does not allow quality and quantity reduction or enhancement in its vowels to have syllables that are reduced or enhanced in quality and quantity? The natural and axiomatic conclusion is that a vowel system whose units are uniform in quality and quantity should only yield syllable structures that are even and uniform. This explains the syllable-timed rhythm type of Spanish. 7.6. Weak Forms and Strong Forms One major highlight of the above discussions has been the dynamics of stress placement in English and its interaction with vowel reduction or enhancement and the impact of both on syllable patterns and the final shaping of the rhythm. It has been repeatedly pointed out that vowel reduction, especially in the form of schwa [ ], is one of the most salient features of the pronunciation of English as opposed to Spanish. It is, therefore, inevitable not to mention the pervasive role a small group of monosyllabic function words plays in mastering the rhythm of English and its overall correct pronunciation. In English, there is no better material to serve the purpose of teaching and learning the rhythm of English than the so-called English words with strong and weak forms. These words which are some of the most frequently used items in English have an enormous influence on the nature of rhythm in English. It is the view in this book that no course in English pronunciation is expected to be effective and efficient without a major emphasis on practicing the pronunciation of those words in proper contexts. Table 36, below, represents a short list of such words.

Interconnection of Vowel System with Stress and Rhythm Word

Stressed (Strong) Form a ei an æn as æz and ænd been bin ; bn but b t can kæn for f; f from fr(o)m had hæd have hæv must m st of v shall æl some s m the i to tu us s who hu would wd

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Unstressed (Weak) Form

n ; n

z; z; s

nd; n; nd; n bn b t k n ; kn f ; fδ fr m h d ; d ; d h v; v; v m st

v; v;

 l; l s m ; sm  (V);  (C.) t (V); t (C)

s; s h w d ; d ; d

Table, 36. Strong and weak forms of certain function words in English. It should be reiterated once again that no course in teaching the pronunciation of English as L2 will be successful without thorough exposure and practice in the proper pronunciation of function words. Despite the substantial significance of this class of words, its teaching is often neglected, especially by teachers who have not been exposed to some of the latest developments in the approach to teaching English as L2. The proper pronunciation of the strong and weak forms of these words has to be introduced as a major component of a course in English as L2 or FL and as early as possible. Naturally, they have to be introduced in their citation (isolation) forms as well as in proper contexts. 7.7. Approach to Teaching Stress and Rhythm No one would argue that in teaching English as L2, the domain of suprasegmentals (long features) such as stress, rhythm and intonation is the most neglected one. This negligence is attributed to different reasons foremost of which are the following: a) The segmental features (vowels and consonants) are more

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dominant, easy to teach and directly represented in orthography, especially the alphabetic one; b) They are difficult to teach and they rarely have orthographic representations; and c) They are difficult to teach if teachers have not had serious exposure to them and training in their teaching. In light of the above three teaching observations, any attempt at introducing the teaching of stress and rhythm requires a comprehensive approach that stipulates certain conditions and considerations. First, the teacher has to be aware of the significance of these suprasegmental features in shaping the overall pronunciation of English as opposed to the native languages of the learners. Second, he/she should be familiar with the nature and teaching of those features. Third, there should be a plan to teach those features beginning with the basic elements and gradually moving to the most general and comprehensive ones. Finally, the approach should incorporate a wide variety of sensory modalities and cognitive processes by which the approach is implemented. In language teaching, especially as L2, the audiolingual method has been the tool for the implementation of the behavioristic approach. The primary implementation techniques of this method have been mimicry and memorization through the action verbs of ‘model’, ‘repeat’ and ‘imitate’ (Stockwell and Bowen, 1965; Bowen and Stockwell, 1965; Dalbor, 1980; Dale and Poms, 1985). The implementation catch-phrase of those action words has been: ‘repeat-after-me’ which may be effective with young learners who are auditorily gifted as opposed to adult learners who with age gradually lose some of their adeptness in matters of pronunciation of L2. When adult learners are asked to repeat after the model, they oftentimes repeat after themselves a situation which has been identified as psycholinguistic deafness (Odisho, 2003). The most characteristic symptom of psycholinguistic deafness is some degree of ineptness in perceiving and recognizing, let alone, producing sounds or sound features to which they have not been exposed previously. Thus, if the intention is teaching stress and subsequently rhythm and rhythmic patterns, there should be a comprehensive approach to teach them. First, learners should be introduced to stress recognition, stress assignment, stress movement within words and across words until they familiarize themselves with those phenomena. Next, they should proceed in the direction of rhythm recognition and performance. Such knowledge and awareness of complicated phonetic phenomena can hardly ever be internalized by the generic procedure of ‘repeat-afterme’. The approach adopted here is a cognitive one supported by as many sensory modalities as applicable. This means that the teacher has to enable the learner to consciously perceive, recognize and produce stress in words and sentences in L1 and L2 contexts. In order to enable him/her to execute all those activities, the teacher has to design a variety of activities using different sensory and cognitive modalities for the implementation. 7.7.1. Ascertain that both Teacher and Learner are Aware of Stress There are scores of teachers who know the terms ‘accent’ or ‘stress’, but they have not had experience in their recognition and application in teaching both L1 and L2. There are also thousands of learners in L1 classes who can correctly and

Interconnection of Vowel System with Stress and Rhythm

139

subconsciously assign stress and execute the rhythm without consciously knowing what they are actually doing. In actual fact, there are thousands upon thousands of L2 learners who are not aware of those long features, let alone their correct implementation in L2 learning. Based on experience, the above-mentioned observations are solid facts. They were valid for this writer as a learner of English as L2 and as a teacher of English as L2 in the early stages of his teaching career. It was only after his thorough orientation in suprasegmentals as a graduate student of linguistics that he became familiar with them and developed experience in teaching them. Consequently, in the college-bound classes which he instructed, he was never surprised to come across learners who had no idea, whatsoever, of the existence of a language component called ‘stress’. A successful teacher has to assume that some learners do not know what stress is, let alone recognizing and identifying its location within words or sentences, especially in L2 learning. Simply, teachers have to make sure whether their students are or are not aware of the existence of stress in language. Truly, this is a major instructional strategy. 7.7.2. Prepare the Teachers before Preparing the Learners In the traditional approaches to teaching language arts including the socalled phonics ‘approach’, there is rarely any emphasis on teaching stress or accentuation, let alone pitch and intonation. Teachers tend to be obsessed with the alphabet letters, digraphs, vowels and consonants. For teachers to be aware of the suprasegmental features and the know-how of teaching them, they should have some exposure to the basics of linguistics, especially in areas pertinent to suprasegmentals. It is never a luxury to have a course in applied linguistics as a requisite in any teacher education program. At least, teachers should be able to compare and contrast the linguistic systems in L1 and L2 and able to design some exercises to teach them. 7.8. Multicognitive Aspects of Stress and Rhythm Internalization In sum, the multicognitive aspect of teaching pronunciation simply means the manipulation of all the processes that brain can use to process, assimilate, accommodate and store knowledge which is the ultimate goal of all the multicognitive processes. Some such processes are thinking, memorizing, associating, analyzing, synthesizing etc…The ultimate target of all those processes is to convince the brain to use its power to add new sounds and sound features to its inventory. In order to activate all the above cognitive processes, the teacher should do the best to feed the brain with the necessary input. The only access channels are through the relevant sensory modalities, namely, auditory, visual and kinesthetictactile. Some of the necessary steps to cognitively internalize the stress prior to the manipulation of the sensory channels are the following: a) Prepare learners mentally by telling them that they will be embarking on learning some new sound features. b) Instruct them to be as attentive as possible and to see, hear and feel every sound and verbal as well as non-verbal gestures.

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English c) Encourage them to think about the sounds and the activities that accompany their production. d) Make sure that learners are aware and know what the phonetic focus is and that they are connected with the practical proceedings of the training session. e) Explain to learners how to learn from each sensory modality demonstration and the purpose the demonstration serves as elaborated in the next section.

7.9. Multisensory Aspects of Stress and Rhythm Internalization The foremost pervasive misconception in teaching pronunciation is that teachers tend to consider the auditory modality as the exclusive window through which input is fed to the brain as schematically represented in figure 40, below.

 Model



  

Hear

Pronounce

Figure 40. Traditional monosensory teaching of sound and sound features with exclusive reliance on the auditory sensory channel This is truly a misconception because it often falls short of reinforcing the acceptance of a new sound feature and its internalization in the long-term memory ready for instantaneous retrieval in the right context when needed. In order to reinforce the auditory modality, it has to be coupled with the visual and kinesthetictactile modalities as in figure 41, below.

Hear

See

Feel

  

Brain

Figure 41. Proposed multisensory teaching of sound and sound features.

Interconnection of Vowel System with Stress and Rhythm

141

After the above distinction between a monosensory approach and a multisensory one, let us demonstrate the latter approach through the teaching of stress placement. 7.9.1. Variety in Visual modality This stands for the different ways stress can be signaled by the teachers and picked up visually by the learners. a) Watch every sign or gesture on the face, head, hands, feet and body of the speaker when placing the primary stress; there are different signs and non-verbal gestures that accompany the primary stress. A sudden down movement of the head tends to be a good indicator of stress. b) Jump the syllables of the word and let learners watch. If the stress is on the first syllable of the two-syllable word, demonstrate the stress placement by a large step followed by a small step. A more realistic example to demonstrate this visual physical exercise is to compare the manner in which the primary stress is placed in the pronunciation of the name in both English and Spanish. The difference may be demonstrated by taking one large step followed by two small steps for English pronunciation of as opposed to one middle-size step followed by two slightly lesser steps as demonstrated schematically in figure 42, below. English

b

b

Spanish



ba

ba

a

Figure 42. Rhythm pattern of the name in English and Spanish. c) Use a weak downward hand gesture for an unstressed syllable followed by a strong downward gesture for stressed syllable. d) If the word is written, then the strongly-stressed and the weakly-stressed syllables may be shown graphically in different ways: placing a sign over the stressed syllable or marking the syllable with capitals, bold letters or any other device as in the following examples: de!light deLIGHT delight  

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English 7.9.2. Variety in Auditory Modality This stands for the different ways stress can be signaled by the instructors and picked up auditorily by the learners. a) Obviously, the most common way to signal stress is through the oral modeling by the teacher and repetition by the learner; however, this is not the only way. b) Because for the native speaker stress is a subconscious integral part of the overall pronunciation of a word, the word is usually internalized holistically as one piece without consciously realizing the position of stress. One of the practical ways of making the L2 learner able to separate the segmental [consonants and vowels] pronunciation of the word from its accentuation [stress] and making him/her conscious of the position of stress is to practice shifting stress on nonsense syllables from the first to the next beginning with a two-syllable structures and gradually increasing the number of syllables as demonstrated below. Two-Syllable da

da

da

da

Three-syllable da

da

da

da

da

da

da

da

da

Four-Syllable da

da

da

da

da

da

da

da

da

da

da

da

da

da

da

da

c) One may also tape-record the impersonation of strong and weak syllables and then play them back repeatedly. For instance, a two-

Interconnection of Vowel System with Stress and Rhythm

143

syllable word stressed on the final syllable may be represented as . If stressed on the first syllable, it will be , whereas a three-syllable word stressed on the final syllable will be

d) Strong and weak sequences of stress may be signaled auditorily by tapping or beating them on a surface that produces resounding beats. This may be done by tapping with the hand or a pencil etc… on a desk or table. One can tap with the foot on the floor. 7.9.3. Variety in Kinesthetic-Tactile Modality Because this is a modality that the performer has to execute the stress himself in order to sense or feel the kinesthetic and tactile sensations that accompany the stressing gesture, there are not many ways of achieving this. However, if some touching is allowed between the instructor and learner this kinesthetic-tactile modality may be effectively used. a) For a joint multisensory sensing of stress, ask learner to hold a short piece of wood such as a ruler at which the teacher will beat with another piece of wood or ruler. The learner can see the beating, hear the sound of the beating and kinesthetically sense the vibration at the end of the ruler where he holds it. b) It is even more practical to ask the learners to do the above experiment completely on their own. 7.10. Teaching Rhythm Teaching English rhythm to native speakers of Spanish is not possible without the ability of the learners to produce very short and reduced vowels, especially the [ ], [] and []. Without such short vowels, the Latino learner cannot produce short and reduced syllables which are the basic prerequisites of stress-timed rhythm typical of English. If the learner cannot replace the pronunciation of [fnomno] with [f nm nn] or of [babaa] with [bb  ], especially with relevance to vowels, mastering the English rhythm is a difficult objective to attain. To be able to produce short and reduced syllables and a stress-timed rhythm, the following three graded steps are necessary: 1) Practice on reducing [a] vowels into [ ] in nonsense syllables: a) [a a ]  [ ] b) [a a a]  [a ] c) [a a a] d) [a a a]

 [a a]  [ a a]

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English 2) Practice changing strong forms into weak forms: a) = [æn] [ n] b) = [æt] [ t] c) = [kæn] [k n] Notice the replacement of [æ] with [ ] in all three examples. 3) Practice changing Spanish words with unreduced vowels into their English cognates with reduced vowels: a) = [ka!tastof] [k !tæst f].

=

Notice the transformation of [ka] and [to] syllables into the reduced syllables of [k ] and [t ], respectively. b) = [mono!polio] = [m !np l] Notice the transformation of [mo] and [po] syllables into the reduced syllables of [m ] and [p ], respectively. c) = [vokabu!laio]  = [v !kæbjl ] Notice the transformation of [vo] and [la] syllables into the reduced syllables of [v ] and [l ], respectively. 4) Practice avoiding the Spanish influence in pronouncing English phrases or sentences such as: a) I have had a good trip to Dublin. English pronunciation: [av hæd d tp t d bln ]. Expected Spanish pronunciation: [a hav had a ud tip tu dablin]43.

43

Of course, there are many other expected phonetic mispronunciations which have been disregarded.

Chapter VIII Teaching and Learning How to Write 8.1. Introductory Remarks In designing any project of writing, whether it is a short composition, a research paper or a book, one cannot proceed further without a premeditated plan of action. In other words, writing does not materialize without planning for it. Since speaking and writing are productive skills (encoding skills) as opposed to listening and reading, which are receptive skills (decoding skills), the writer has two productive domains to seriously consider. First, he has to delimit and design the map for the semantic domain (meaning) in the sense of what the theme is, what the basic components of the theme are, which components are more relevant and how informed the writer is about those components. If those considerations are not clear in the mind of the writer, the writing process will not proceed smoothly because of repeated indecisions and disruptions both of which will lead to frustration to the extent of giving up completely. Second, the writer has to familiarize himself with the language required and, occasionally, with the jargon (technical terminology) that is pertinent to the theme. Additionally, a third domain, in the form of organization, becomes indispensable if the contents are to be more impressive. Let us consider those three domains more specifically. 8.1.1. Preparing for the Theme After identifying the theme of the writing assignment, the best way to comprehensively prepare for the theme is to take the following steps: a) Do some bibliographic work to identify resources relevant to the theme. b) Begin a quick scanning of the contents of those resources. c) Identify the contents which are deemed most intimately related to the assignment. d) Skim (read in a cursory manner) through those contents. e) Try to retain the gist of those contents so as to integrate them with your own contributions. 8.1.2. Preparing for Language The language needed for a given writing assignment depends on the nature of the academic discipline with which the assignment is related as well as the form in which it is to appear. Definitely, the language of natural science is different from that of social science and, in turn, they are both different from the language of humanities. As for the forms of writing, they usually fall into four categories: expository, (explaining something for the sake of communicating information) narrative, (relating or narrating an event) argumentative (persuading readers to adopt a certain belief or attitude) and descriptive (giving details about a

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certain event, person or scene to impress the reader).These forms are not mutually exclusive because the same writer may cross over from one form to the other within the same assignment. Each of those forms requires a certain inventory (collection) of vocabulary. The preparation for meaning is not an exclusive effort because the reader can simultaneously focus on meaning while language is being prepared. The aspects of language that are worthy of consideration include: a) Taking notice of the overall style of writing. b) Considering the specific vocabulary that is common and necessary for the construction of meaning. For instance, if one is planning to write an article or paper on ‘bilingual education’, words and terms such as the following are inevitable: “native language or L1, second language or L2, proficiency level, language skills or even sub-skills, oral proficiency, written proficiency, children or young learners, adults, bicultural or multicultural, acquisition, learning, teaching style, learning style etc…”. 8.1.2.1. A Note on Spanish and English Vocabulary In teaching English as a second or foreign language, the similarities and differences between L1 and L2 are always sources of both positive and negative interferences. There is no doubt that the greater the similarities between two languages the less difficult the transition. The similarities can be in different linguistic aspects: syntax, morphology, phonology, lexicon, orthography, among others. In case of Spanish and English, because they both belong to the IE family of languages, the similarities in lexicon and orthography can be a great help for the learners compared to, for instance, Arab learners of English where the differences in orthography and lexicon are enormous because Arabic belongs to a Semitic family of languages. The focus here is on the similarities in lexicon. One has to be somewhat cautious when highlighting the lexical similarity between Spanish and English because the similarity may, at times, be misleading to the extent of being the source of serious negative interference. The interference may be attributed to differences in meaning, pronunciation and orthography. The shared vocabulary between Spanish and English is very large in number mainly because they share an Indo-European affiliation and partly because of later borrowing of words from Latin and French which also survived in Spanish (Lado, 1971: 83). As much as these words are concerned, they are a huge asset for the learner in the overall process of encoding and decoding of meaning in English; nevertheless, learners have to be cautious in accepting those words as identical. Certainly, there are some words which are almost identical in orthography and very similar in pronunciation, but distinctly different in meaning such as those in table 37, below.

Teaching and Learning How to Write English

Spanish

Meaning/ Spanish present; current attend

Actual

actual

Assist

asistir

Advise Conference

avisar conferencia

inform; public lecture Dormitory dormotorio bedroom embarrassed embarazada pregnant

English edit editor exit fabric idiom lecture revise revisor

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Spanish Meaning/ Spanish editar publish editor publisher éxito outcome; success fabrica factory; idioma language; tongue lectura Reading reviser edit revisor editor

Table 37. Examples of false cognates– same etymology different meaning.

Spanish facial judicial social peculiar secular gradual legal legion color feudal

English Abuse abbreviation Delicious Occasion Professor confidential Lethal Pardon Virgin Alphabet

Spanish abuso abreviación delicioso ocasión profesor confidencial letal perdón virgen alfabeto

Same meaning, different orthography & pronunciation

English Facial judicial Social peculiar Secular gradual Legal Legion Color Feudal

Same meaning & orthography but different pronunciation

Words such as those are called deceptive cognates or ‘false amigos’ (amigos falsos) (Lado, 1957 and 1971: 84; Politzer, Staubach, 1965: 162-3). Fortunately, words of this category are not as many as words which are more or less of the same meaning, but different in orthography and/or pronunciation. Words of the latter category are in thousands. A few examples are cited in table 38 below.

Table 38. Words with same meaning and orthography but different pronunciation. Words with same meaning, but different in orthography and pronunciation 8.1.3. Organization of Contents The world-renowned saying of ‘the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step’ is very relevant in every undertaking because long distances are made up of small distances and large structures are made up of small ones. Writing a composition, essay or a course paper may not be big projects, but they certainly require small and basic components that make them what they are. Any such assignment cannot be successfully achieved without design and organization which usually go through the following steps:

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Linguistic Tips for Latino Learners and Teachers of English a) Think about the assignment or design it in the brain. b) Brainstorm yourself and then select the most relevant thoughts or ideas. c) Organize them in the order in which you intend to develop your thoughts, either from the more specific to more general or vice versa.

Guidance

Attendanc

Exams

ESL Course

Assignment Input Achievement Teacher

Responsibility

Weaknesses

Strengths

Learner

Suppose the assignment were to write a short essay on the relationship between a teacher and a learner in an ESL course. The writer has to jot down his thoughts in some relevant words or terms as in figure 43, below:

Figure 43. Brain-storming of relevant thoughts prior to writing. No doubt, the above words do not exhaust whatever vocabulary that is needed, but they do certainly serve as a guide. The vocabulary will gradually develop as the writing process begins. 8.2. Blueprint for the Process of Writing Academic and scholarly writing has always been a process of contemplation, designing and execution. However, recently, this trend has been gradually replacing the traditional approach to writing, especially with children and adult ESL learners. The traditional approach, occasionally known as ‘content approach’, is often executed in the following sequence: assign, write and correct. This means the teacher assigns a topic, learner goes home and writes it and teacher reads and corrects the written assignments. None of those steps tends to be interactive in the sense that between the assignment of the work by the teacher and the actual beginning of writing there is minimum to no discussion, warm up

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and guidance by the teacher or peers. Between the beginning of actual writing and its handing in, the teacher has minimum or no knowledge of how the writing was completed and whether the learner actually completed the assignment by him/herself or with the help of others. Finally, between the submission of the paper, its correction by the teacher and its return to the learner, hardly any direct communication goes on between the two sides. All what the teacher discovers are the errors and inaccuracies, whereas all what the learner finds are the additional markings in red ink. Thus, the content approach is a typically passive one inasmuch as interaction between teacher and learner is concerned. For the last three decades or so, the process approach has been entering classrooms of young learners as an active and interactive means of writing. When properly and systematically applied, it tends to be interactive from its first phase and throughout the final one. The brief form of this approach comes in three phases: a) Pre-Writing; b) Writing; and Post-Writing which in a more detailed form goes through the following phases: a) Pre-Writing; b) Drafting; c) Revising; d) Editing; and e) Publishing, each of which is briefly described below: •

• •

•

•

Pre-Writing includes brainstorming for a topic and if the topic is decided, the brainstorming shifts to identifying ideas relevant to the topic. It also includes determining the purpose of writing (inform, persuade entertain etc…), considering the audience (self, teacher, parents etc…), sketching and designing the form etc… Drafting focuses on formulating the opening sentence after which the contents are expressed as comprehensively and linguistically adequately as possible without laboring over the mechanics of the piece. Revising focuses on a critical consideration of the materials already being drafted. It covers consideration of meaning and structure and allows all necessary changes to enhance the quality of contents and the medium of expressing them. Changes usually come in the form of additions, deletions, substitutions and shifting of words, structures, sentences or even paragraphs. Editing (also known as proofreading) shifts focus from contents and structures to the mechanics of writing including grammar, punctuation, mechanics and spelling. Editing in no way excludes revising nor does revising exclude editing. In any way, editing is the last opportunity for giving the writing a last look and consideration Publishing or Sharing aims at publicizing the writing from which the reader and the writer benefit.

In the next sections, the attempt will be to demonstrate the above sub-processes through activities and examples. 8.3. Actual Process of Writing Actual writing begins when one feels ready to transform the thoughts stored and organized in the brain into a visual format by putting pen on paper or

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have the visual discourse depicted electronically. Writing is a process of expansion in structure and content. This means that letters, which are meaningless, generate words which are meaningful. With a grammatical binding of words together, sentences are generated which when knit together a discourse is created stretching in size from a paragraph to a book. In order to demonstrate this creative process, the analogy of ‘pebble and pond’ will be used. When one throws a pebble in a pond, a small circular wave is created that begins expanding outward. Writing is an expansion process like this. The writer selects the appropriate word and transforms it into a sentence which, in turn, is knit together with other sentences to create a paragraph and a discourse. For short, this process is abbreviated as ‘WSPD’ to stand for ‘Word’, ‘Sentence’, ‘Paragraph’ and ‘Discourse’ schematically illustrated in figure 44, below.

Discourse Paragraph Sentence Word

Figure 44. Pebble and pond analogy– writing as an expansion process. 8.3.1. Sentence Formation In English, there are three major types of sentences: simple, compound and complex; there is even room for other types of sentence structures such the compound-complex one. A simple sentence is a complete unit of meaning which consists of one stand-alone or independent clause with or without a complement. The following are some examples of simple sentences with the abbreviations ‘S’, ‘V’, ‘O’, and ‘C’ standing for ‘Subject’, ‘Verb’, ‘Object’, and ‘Complement’, respectively: • • • •

SVO SV SVC SVOC

The dog bit the man. The dog barked. The dog barked all night. The dog bit the man early in the morning.

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A compound Sentence consists of two or more clauses (or simple sentences) that are equal in grammatical significance or level because they are simply linked or coordinated together with conjunctions without allowing one to dominate the other in significance. The process here is known as coordination and the most common coordinating conjunctions are and as in the following example: • •

I like apples and I like oranges, too. He likes apples, but does not like oranges.

As for the complex sentence, it consists of one independent clause and one or more dependent or so-called subordinate clauses which are connected together with relative pronouns. The process of subordinating simple sentences or clauses to a main sentence is actually known as subordination which, in reality, is a practice in syntactical (grammatical) embedding. In more common words, building complex sentences is like preparing a sandwich with the bread functioning as the main or primary clause and the other ingredients stuffed in within the bread as subordinate clauses. Notice the following example of subordinating one simple sentence and then two simple sentences into one to create a complex sentence. • 2 simple sentences: The dog bit the man. The man was crossing the street.  1 complex sentence: The dog bit the man who was crossing the street. Or The dog bit the man when he was crossing the street. •

3 simple sentences: The dog bit the man. The man was looking at the sky. The man was crossing the street.  1 complex sentence: The dog bit the man who was looking at the sky while crossing the street.

who The man was crossing the street. The dog bit the man. who while The dog bit the man. The man was looking at the sky. The man was crossing the street.

Notice the manner in which a sentence or two are structurally or grammatically reduced to subordinate clauses. If one looks at the first two simple sentences, one will see that is repeated as an object in the first sentence and as subject in the second sentence. Because of the repetition, the in the second sentence, which is the subject, is deleted and replaced with

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the subjective pronoun . The mere deletion of and its replacement with the subjective relative pronoun , the structure ceases to be an independent sentence. Notice also the two relative pronouns that replace the deleted portions of sentences #2 and #3 in the other example. 8.3.2. Further Sentence Expansion Being aware of the different basic sentence structures in English, the writer will be able to diversify his/her grammatical structures to fit the intended purpose. Some thoughts and ideas may be simple and straightforward; therefore, simple sentences will suffice to express them, while other ideas and thoughts may require complex structures, such as the complex sentences, to express them. This structural diversity is, in itself, one of the major tools of style enhancement. After gaining some knowledge about sentence structure in English, one can move one step further into the realm of sentence expansion. Two sources of sentence expansion, namely, coordination and subordination, have already been elaborated on and further demonstration will be considered in due time. A third source of expansion is achieved through modifying. A modifier may be a word, a phrase, or a dependent clause and they all serve to qualify or better identify the grammatical element to which they are related (Vivian and Jackson, 1961) Consider the simple sentence: ‘The dog bit the man’ to which modifiers are added: The (big) dog bit the (old) man. The (big black) dog bit the (blind old) man (early in the morning). Although eight words are added to the original five words of the simple sentence, the sentence still remains simple in structure, but with much enhanced structure and content. 8.4. Sentences to Paragraphs and Beyond After jotting down some of the most relevant words to the intended theme as in figure 43, above, the process of transforming those words into clauses or sentences begins. Let us assume that the transformations result in the following sentences: 1) The successful completion of an ESL course requires learners to provide the major effort. 2) Learners have to attend classes regularly. Learners have to complete their daily or weekly assignments. 3) Learners have to be prepared for the exams. They have to be ready for any additional efforts. 4) Learners have their own learning styles. 5) Learners should not be left alone without proper guidance.

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6) Good teachers are indispensable in facilitating the learning process. Teachers have their own teaching styles. 7) Good teachers should care for their learners and supervise their work. 8) Teachers should also evaluate the achievements of their learners. They should show their weaknesses and praise their strengths. 9) If learners and teachers observe their duties and responsibilities, the learning process will often end up successfully. If one simply adds these sentences together in the order of their appearance, as in the paragraph below, the written piece will lack several features that are central for a coherent paragraph and impressive structure and style. “The successful completion of an ESL course requires learners to provide the major effort. Learners have to attend classes regularly. They have to complete their daily or weekly assignments. Learners have to be prepared for the exams. They have to be ready for any additional efforts. Learners have their own styles of learning. Learners should not be left alone without proper guidance. Good teachers are indispensable in facilitating the learning process. Teachers have their own teaching styles. Good teachers should care for their learners and supervise their work. Teachers should also evaluate the achievements of their learners. They should show their weaknesses and praise their strengths. If learners and teachers observe their duties and responsibilities, the learning process will often end up successfully.” The above paragraph, as it stands, has several structural and stylistic deficiencies foremost of which are the following: a) The paragraph is choppy in the sense that its sentences tend to stand alone rather than flow and bind together smoothly. It, therefore, lacks structural coherence and cohesiveness. b) There is lack of structural diversity because of the dominance of simple sentences when several of them may be collapsible into each other. c) There is verbal repetition that is essentially attributed to the dominance of simple sentences. The repetition portrays itself in the recurrence of the same nouns, pronouns as well as verbs. In order to alleviate some of those deficiencies, three measures are needed: a) Infuse transitional devices where necessary, especially in cross-sentence transitions; b) Collapse some simple sentences into compound or complex sentences; c) As a simultaneous step to (b), avoid some repetitions. Before, these measures are applied, some information on the significant structural and stylistic role of transitional devices is necessary. Transitional devices, which are also known by others as ‘bridge words’, are words, phrases or sometimes whole clauses or sentences, placed at or near the beginnings or ends of sentences and paragraphs (Vivian and Jackson, 1961:33).

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They serve to smooth abrupt transitions, make the vague ones clear and supply missing connections (Krammer and Mulligan, 1953: 392). There is a wide variety of transitional devices that serve different purposes. For time and sequencing, etc…are convenient. For condition, etc…are commonly used. As for opposition, are appropriate. Let us now try to apply some of these transitional devices to the above paragraph and notice the consequences. Notice that the bold and italicized additions are the inserted transitional devices, whereas the words in parenthesis are deletions. The successful completion of an ESL course requires learners to provide the major effort. No doubt, learners have to attend classes regularly and (They have to) complete their daily or weekly assignments. Furthermore, they (Learners) have to be prepared for the exams and (They have to) be ready for any additional efforts. It is true that learners have their own styles of learning, but they (Learners) should not be left alone without proper guidance. In fact, good teachers are indispensable in facilitating the learning process because they (Teachers) have their own teaching styles. For example, good teachers should care for their learners and supervise their work; moreover, they (Teachers) should also evaluate the achievements of their learners. In other words, they should show their weaknesses and praise their strengths. Thus, if learners and teachers observe their duties and responsibilities, the learning process will often end up successfully. Certainly, the structural, lexical and stylistic quality of the paragraph has been enhanced as a result of inserting the appropriate transitional devices and making the required changes in sentence connections, getting rid of redundant words and rearranging the punctuation marks. This way of enhancing the coherence of a paragraph and the smooth flow of sentences are measures to which young learner should be exposed as early in the elementary school as possible so that they will be ready in high school. I will always remember a paragraph of fourteen sentences written by a 2nd grader which had thirteen “and”s to connect the sentences. Fortunately, only the first sentence escaped the tyranny of too many “and”s. Therefore, the successful use of transitional devices tends usually to be a noticeable sign of good quality composition. 8.5. Revision beyond the Correction of a Written Work When a written work is corrected by the teacher, very often students stare at the corrections often with surprise and dissatisfaction, but they do not carefully consider them and understand their nature so as not to repeat them again. Teachers, in turn, do not require their students to work on the revision and avoid their errors. Very often students keep repeating the same writing errors, again and again, because they fail to treat them as a learning lesson in the sense that once an

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error, never an error again. Below is a specimen of writing by a Latino student in response to a test on the difference between the concepts of ‘Validity’ and ‘Reliability’. Obviously, writing during a test is not the best environment for ideal writing because of time constraint and because of test anxiety; nevertheless, the errors and deficiencies in the written text do tell much about the weaknesses of a junior non-native speaker of English in a bilingual program. There is no doubt that the writer of this specimen is fairly in control of the contents, especially with regard to the differences between the concepts of ‘validity’ and ‘reliability’ partly due to good preparedness for the exam coupled with occasional rote memorization; however, the student has different types of errors in grammar, spelling and mechanics as well as deficiencies in contents and their organization. Because it is quite difficult to identify all the errors and deficiencies without creating a graphic maze, the reader is advised to detect some of the major errors and deficiencies noticing the underlining as well as comparing the original piece with the modified and improved version. “I will explain these differences by using ‘a test’ as an appropriate example: Validity; does the test measure what it is suppose to measure is different from reliability; the consistent accuracy of scores from a test, but equally important. Validity is based more on how the test is constructed, where as reliability is based on, more how the test is administered. The validity of a test is determined by whether the questions on the test relate well to the objectives of the test; if the tests content represents the language skills well. Reliability is explained as: Is the test administered consisting of appropriate conditions: is the test given not too early in the morning, but not too late; are the directions clear?; is there a lot of noise in the test area?; is the test legible” Below is the improved version. “I will explain these differences (i.e., between validity and reliability) by using a test as an appropriate example. Validity, which deals with the measurement of what a test is supposed to measure, is different from reliability. Reliability, deals with the consistent accuracy of scores taken from different attempts at the test. Reliability is equally important to validity. Validity is based more on how the test is constructed, whereas reliability is based more on how the test is administered. The validity of a test is checked by asking several questions. Do the items on the test relate well to the objectives of the test? Do the test contents represent the language skills well? Reliability, however, is explained as the consistency of the results obtained under appropriate conditions. Some such conditions may include: giving the test at an appropriate time, not too early in the morning or too late in the evening; having directions that are clear; conducting the test in a quiet place without much background noise in the test area; and, finally, having a test that is legible”

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A quick glance at the above work indicates that one of the most striking deficiencies is in the area of punctuation. The punctuation marks are so misused that they seriously interfere with the structural organization of the sentences, in particular, and the overall paragraph, in general. The other serious deficiency is the failure in the transformation of simple sentences into compound and complex sentences. Yet another grammatical error that is often encountered in Latino students’ compositions is typified by the word which in reality should be in its past participle form . The following ten examples are just a few of very many such combined spelling and grammatical errors that were collected in two sessions of essay-type examinations conducted in both undergraduate and graduate classes for Latino students. Erroneous Formation • • • • • • • • • •

be measure by a standardize test the strategies use should be assess they are not distract is suppose to assess when the Nth word is chose should be qualify I was very surprise the issue will be address the names of the letters are sound

Targeted Correct Formation be measured by a standardized test the strategies used should be assessed they are not distracted is supposed to assess when the Nth word is chosen should be qualified I was very surprised the issue will be addressed the names of the letters are sounded

Any teacher of English composition comes across Latino students who fail to produce a past tense or past participle, especially in passive voice sentences as in the examples above. There are several observations that are embedded in the above examples. First, not all past participles are of the type which ends in consonant clusters. Patterns such as do not end with consonant clusters. Linguistically, the failure to produce the past tense or past participle suffixes that are non-cluster implies a very strong negative transfer that allows the cluster-evasion drive to dominate and become a uniform pattern of suffix deletion. In other words, a partially applicable negative transfer evolves into a fully applicable negative transfer; it virtually becomes an all-encompassing uniform ‘rule’ that is regrettably erroneous. This erroneous trend with LLE is so prevalent and pervasive that it is worthy of being labeled as the ‘past participle syndrome’. Second, there are indications that this so-called syndrome is not simply the result of the absence of word-final clusters in Spanish. It seems to be affected by the overall structural trend in Spanish for ending words with vowels rather than with consonants and the dominant tendency in favor of short and open syllable structure of CV pattern which represents approximately 60% of all syllable structure patterns in Spanish (Navarro, 1968: 40-1). In fact, words in Spanish end with only a few single consonants such as . In light of these structural facts, syllable-final cluster avoidance is only one specific indicator of the overall syllable structure in Spanish which is

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overwhelmingly dominated by CV syllable pattern. Third, there is also the observation that the trend is sometimes explained in sociolinguistic terms. There are many Latino neighborhoods which are adjacent to those of African-Americans who usually show a strong tendency in the direction of final consonant-cluster reduction. Thus, for example, words with final clusters such as and may both be pronounced as [pæs] (Fromkin and Rodman, 1998: 413)

Chapter IX Arabic, Spanish and English Linguistic Contacts: A Study of Loanwords44 9.1. Introductory Remarks Change is a major characteristic of human language; thus, all languages undergo change and they do so for a variety of reasons foremost of which is the exchange of influence when languages come in contact with each other. As a consequence of the contact, borrowing occurs, particularly when the contact is extensive and large numbers of speakers are involved leading to the emergence of bilingual or multilingual situations. Although borrowing can affect all components of language, the lexicon (vocabulary) is typically most affected and of all parts of speech, nouns are the most frequently borrowed. Essentially, there are two reasons why nouns are more susceptible to borrowing: a) they tend to represent things, objects and concepts that the borrower language does not have; b) of all parts of speech, nouns are the most syntactically and semantically autonomous. This chapter is a triangular study of the contact between Spanish and Arabic, on the one hand, and Spanish and English, on the other hand. The rationale for this triangular study is partly due to the movement of many Arabic words to English via Spanish and partly due to the difference in the manner and time British English and American English interacted with Spanish. Also relevant to this lexical interaction is the manner in which Spanish served as a vehicle to transport Native American words to English. The nature and scope of the above contacts will be tackled consecutively. 9.2. Arabic and Spanish Contact There had been a lengthy contact between Arabic and Spanish after the invasion of Spain by the Arabs in 711 A.D. (Penny, 1991:13) which lasted some eight centuries (Burckhardt, 1972:7). It is quite natural during this amply extensive period to observe considerable cultural and linguistic influence of Arabic on Spanish. What is interesting, however, though beyond the scope of this study, is the fact that the influence seems to be a two-way traffic of cultural and linguistic exchange though more in the direction of Spanish than in the direction of Arabic. Concerning the latter direction, it suffices here to cite Glick’s (1979:282) major conclusion in this regard which highlights “the emergence of a standard, colloquial Spanish Arabic as a distinct dialect within the Arabicspeaking world”. It is obvious that Glick’s conclusion is based on Corriente’s major thesis in this regard documented in his book, A Grammatical Sketch of the Spanish Arabic Dialect Bundle, 1977. A return to the subject of the extent of the 44

An initial and narrower version of this chapter was published in Zeitschrift für Arabische Linguistik (Journal for Arabic Linguistics) 33, 1997.

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influence of Arabic on Spanish, especially the linguistic one, Penny (1991:13) points out that the Islamic invasion (of Spain) had enormous linguistic consequences. He summarizes the major two consequences as follows: firstly, it brought the Hispanic-Latin into contact with the language of a culture which was more developed and prestigious than that of Christian Europe. Secondly, the introduction of Arabic profoundly changed the dialectal map of Spanish by giving importance to varieties of Romance which would have remained insignificant and peripheral without the Arabic invasion. Such an extensive two-way linguistic exchange created a world of bilingualism in Andalusia (Al-Andalus *q‚k‫ )ا‬the center of the Arabic concentration (Penny, 1991:217; Trend, 1953:56; Entwistle, 1938:127). In fact, Entwistle recognizes two types of bilinguals, namely the bilingual Mozarabes (the Spanish-speaking Christians among the Arabs) and the bilingual Moslems whose entity was even Hispanicized as “moros latinados or moros ladinos” (Entwistle, 1938:127; Spaulding, 1962:56). Far more precisely, Corriente portrays the linguistic diversity in Al-Andalus not only as a situation of bilingualism in the form of Spanish and Arabic, but also of complex diglossia (1977:7). Stated differently, the linguistic situation represented a complicated fusion of not only languages, but also of formal and informal varieties of those languages. More specifically, Trend (1931: 7) states that there were four languages in use in Muslim Spain represented as follows: 1) Classical Arabic, the language of men of letters; 2) Colloquial Arabic, the language of administration and government; 3) Ecclesiastical Latin, a merely ritual language associated with a particular form of worship; and 4) A Romance dialect, mainly derived from Low Latin but destined to become (under the name of Spanish) one of the great international languages in the world side by side with English and Arabic. According to Trend, the above situation has emerged as early as the first three or four generations after the conquest when most Spanish Moslems were bilingual, both those of Arab descent and those of Spanish Christian origin. This duration for the emergence and spread of bilingualism is very factual and it bears high resemblance with today’s situation of immigrants and refuges that settle in countries such as the United States of America. If there is a reasonable degree of intermingling between the new comers and the natives, usually the second generation of the newcomers develops bilingualism; however, if the new comers are in large numbers such as the movement of Spaniards into South American countries a two-way bilingual situation arises. Although the Arabic influence encompassed different language systems: lexical, phonological, morphological and syntactical, the lexical influence is, by far, the most conspicuous of all. The eight centuries of Arabic domination “made it easy the passage of a considerable Arabic vocabulary” (Entwistle, 1938:126). The diversity of the vocabulary covered primarily the major areas of administration, weaponry, war tactics, commerce, industry and geographic places (Entwistle, 1938:127; Trend, 1931: 19-31; 1953:61; Penny, 2002: 266-270). The

Arabic, Spanish and English Linguistic Contacts: A Study in Loanwords 161 examples below of Arabic loanwords in Spanish45 are cited from the above references to which the Arabic transcriptions are added as in the tables below. •

Military and warfare Spanish Version Alcazar Alfanje Alarde Alcaide

Meaning fortress scimitar parade governor (of) fortress

Arabic Origin (l)*‫ا‬ (ho,*‫ا‬ ‫ا*ƒ(ض‬ q„g‫ا*)ـ‬

Meaning palace dagger same leader (military)

Table 39. Spanish military names of Arabic origin. •

Professions

Spanish Version Albañil Alfarero Alcalde Albéitar

Meaning Arabic Origin builder ‫ء‬gّoH*‫ا‬ potter ‫ر‬gّ,…*‫ا‬ mayor y†g)*‫ا‬ vet ‫ر‬gndH*‫ا‬

Meaning same same judge same

Table 40. Spanish names of professions of Arabic origin. •

Food items

Spanish Version Alubia Aceituna Aceite Azafrán Algodón

Meaning

Arabic Origin bean gdj‡ˆ*‫ا‬ olive ‫‡ن‬0p+*‫ا‬ (olive) oil ‰p+*‫ا‬ saffron ‫Š…(ان‬+*‫ا‬ cotton mn)*‫ا‬

Meaning same same same same same

Table 41. Spanish names of food items of Arabic origin.

45

Obviously, the meaning and pronunciation of many loanwords have undergone changes from what they were in Arabic to what they became in Spanish

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Geographic Names Summarizing this aspect of linguistic interaction between Spanish and Arabic, Trend states: “Though some of the names (Spanish) are Arabized forms of older Iberian and Phoenician names, and many are characteristically of mixed origin– Arabic and Romance–, they form when taken together a striking demonstration of the mark of which the Arab people left on the Peninsula.” Notice the following examples 

sH‹ “Jabal” = [!ʤabal] = “mountain” has produced hybrid geographic names such as: “Jabalcuz; Jabalcón; Jabaloyas; Jabalquinto; Javaleón” etc…



‫رة‬go-*‫“ = ا‬Al-manara” = [alma!nara] = “beacon” has produced similar geographic names such as: Corre de Almenara; Sierra de Almenara; Puerto de la Almenara etc…



For “‫“ = ”وادي‬Wadi” = [!wadi] = “valley or river”. For examples, see §4.4, table 17.

9.3. The Unexpected Borrowing of an Article The most interesting linguistic aspect of this massive borrowing of Arabic words and their assimilation into Spanish is the borrowing of many of those words with their definite Article أ*ـ‬pronounced [al]46, but transcribed for convenience as ‘al’. It has just been mentioned earlier on that the bulk of the Arabic loanwords were nouns; however, in the case of ‘al’ it is the borrowing of this grammatical article which is linguistically a separate morpheme (cf. Steiger, 1963:13) that is worthy of serious consideration. However, notice the following example which demonstrates the grammatical nature of ‘al’ and how it functions as an article. The triliteral root ‘KTB’ = ‘‫ ’ك ت ب‬denotes the abstract concept of ‘writing’ from which the noun /kitaab/ = “‫ب‬g0‫“ ”آ‬book” is derived. Thus /kitaab/ = “‫ب‬g0‫”آ‬ represents the indefinite form of the noun. To transform the noun into its definite form, one has to prefix the definite article ‘al’ to /kitaab/ to arrive at /alkitaab/ “‫ب‬g0e*‫”ا‬. This entails that ‘al’ is an autonomous separable morpheme which should have not been borrowed with those words.

The reasons for the emphasis in this chapter on only loanwords with ‘al’ are many. Firstly, there is sufficient material to constitute a reliable linguistic corpus to probe the subject. Secondly, the assimilatory behavior of the [1] segment of the article ‘al’ in relation to the initial consonant of the word to which 46

The symbol [] represents a glottal stop which is the first sound of the Arabic definite article.

Arabic, Spanish and English Linguistic Contacts: A Study in Loanwords 163 the ‘al’ is prefixed is a well-known phonetic phenomenon in Arabic which seems to have been historically transferred into Spanish. Thirdly, the mere fact that the ‘al’ is borrowed as an integral part of the word seems, in itself, to have a specific sociolinguistic implication as to the socio-educational class of the community which was behind most of the borrowings. Finally, the manner in which the Arabic loanwords are naturalized (indigenized) in Spanish mirrors several interesting phonetic/phonological observations that could be part of a more comprehensive, synchronically-orientated diachronic study of the Arabic-Spanish phonetic/phonological interaction during the eight-century long period. The focus of this study is an attempt to respond to all of the above linguistic and sociolinguistic implications of the retention of the definite article ‘al’, a linguistic element which is semantically redundant in relation to the lexical items borrowed. 9.3.1. Size of ‘al’-Prefixed Loanwords in Arabic When data collection began, there was the initial impression that the number of the ‘al’-prefixed Arabic words in Spanish was in tens; however, once the gathering of data began, the number turned out to be in hundreds. What was interesting, however, in the process of surveying those words in the dictionaries was that not all of them were listed under ‘al’ entries because in many words the 1’ has been assimilated into another sound due to a major phonetic phenomenon characteristic of Arabic as it will be explained in due course. Consequently, to identify all the al-prefixed Arabic loanwords one has to survey and screen the whole section of the dictionary under letter . The major lexical works consulted for this survey are: Academia Española’s Diccionario de la Lengua Española (1956) and Diccionario Historico de la Lengua Española (1960), Corominass Diccionario Critico Etimológico de la Lengua Castellana (1972) and Corominas and Pascuals Diccionario Critico Etimológico Castellano e Hispánico (1980). Undoubtedly, other works were consulted, but for an approximate estimation of the size of the relevant words, the above four references were the primary sources. In order to understand why those words were borrowed jointly with the definite article, one has to have a better understanding of the nature of social and linguistic contact between the Arabic speakers and Spanish speakers. It was already pointed out that the linguistic situation in Andalusia amounted to a complex diglossia with two major languages together with their formal and informal varieties as well as different dialects. The following statement from Corriente sheds further light on the intricate linguistic interactions: “Many phenomena of Spanish Arabic cannot be understood without reckoning with the fact that, in addition to high register requiring Classical Arabic for formal purposes, there were within the colloquial dialect two main distinguishable registers: the standard or educated register of well-bred people who cared a good deal for what they considered to be correct, and the low, substandard register of people who could or would not use but the only brand of Arabic to which the underprivileged classes of Spain had access.” (1977:8)

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The fact that all those words were admitted into Spanish with the definite article (to which the Spanish article was added as in la alcova, la almohada) may signal a strong indication that the borrowing was accomplished predominantly by the masses of the people in the market-place, the street and the workplace in their day-to-day conversations rather than by scholars and academia intentionally designing to enrich the Spanish vocabulary in areas where certain words were most needed. There are several indications which point in the direction of pervasive informal and popular contacts as the most powerful source of borrowing. First, there were no formal academic institutions to conduct systematic borrowing and naturalization of loanwords. The standardization of Spanish did not begin until the 13th century and the Real Academia Española was not created until 1713. Second, the Mozárabes, the Christians who lived among the Arabs, were the intermediaries between the two languages, and served to introduce Arabic words into Spanish. Third, the change in the pronunciation of Arabic loanwords is not only attributed to the phonetic and phonological differences between the two languages, but also to the informal manner in which the pronunciation of Arabic was picked up by ear and on the streets and working places. Consequently, if such borrowings had been the work of the educated, the retention of the definite article ‘al’ would have been unlikely because the borrowers would have realized that the article is a separable morpheme and is not part of the stem (root) of the borrowed words and has nothing to do with the semantic denotation of the stem. The evidence that strongly substantiates the lay people’s role in this lexical transmission is that the phonetic assimilation to which ‘al’ is vulnerable in daily spoken Arabic is strictly observed in the Spanish habitat of those words; however, the transmission of the phonetic assimilation seems to be sheer impersonation rather than observance of the formal rules of assimilation. The formal rules are technically covered under the term sun-letters = .d|-Œ*‫(وف ا‬/*‫ ا‬derived from the Arabic word “shams -{” = “sun” whose first sound is a typical sun-letter; for convenience, the term will, hereafter, be indicated as “shamsi” for singular and “shamsiyya” for plural. Likewise, the term moonletters = .p(-)*‫(وف ا‬/*‫ ا‬derived from the Arabic word “qamar@ (-@“ “moon” whose first sound is a typical moon-letter; for convenience, the term will, hereafter, be indicated as “qamari” for singular and “qamariyya” for plural. In order to understand the above dichotomy, it is necessary to clarify that shamsiyya represent those consonants to which if the ‘al’ is prefixed, the sound [1] of the article is fully assimilated thus leading to its disappearance and to the gemination (doubling) of the initial consonant of the given word. For instance, if ‘al’ is added to the word “shams”, the word is pronounced [aams] with the deletion of [1] and the doubling of . The same is true with “ruz” = “rice’ to which when ‘al’ is prefixed it becomes “arruz”47 rather than