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Alphabet,
Mother
of Invention
Marshall Mcluhan and Richard Logan
At
a stroke the Greeks provided a table of elements of linguistic sound…
Eric
Havelock in Encyclopedia Britannica: History of Writing Systems
Ancient
Greek and Latin were almost completely phonetically written…
Teaching
Reading - a History
Just
as in learning to read, I said, we were satisfied when we knew the letters of the alphabet…
Plato,
the Republic
The
Romans borrowed the Greek alphabet to form the Roman, or Latin,
alphabet.
Latin was the language of state
and of scholarship
in Europe until the end of the middle ages.
Encyclopedia Britannica:
History of Writing Systems
Before
1066 English spelling was quite simple, but the next few centuries saw an influx of French, Latin
and Greek words and major pronunciation changes (vowels shifted,
consonants fell silent). As a result the spelling became incoherent.
The
Simplified Spelling Society
…Latin
letters were used for a language which was ill-suited to their
pronunciation… spelling
was so diversified,
reading
it became far more than deciphering
a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds.
This
situation became aggravated over time by changes in
pronunciation and the many dialects that have to be
accommodated, so that spellings have become
less
and
less
indicators
of sounds.
Teaching
Reading - a History
Letters, the most useful invention that ever blessed mankind, lose a part of their value
by no longer being the representatives of the sounds originally
annexed to them. The effect is to destroy the benefits of the
alphabet.
Noah Webster
The
heart of our trouble is with our foolish alphabet.
Mark Twain
..."a hopelessly inadequate
alphabet devised centuries before the English language
existed to record another and very different language. Even this
alphabet is reduced to absurdity by a
foolish orthography based on the notion that the business
of spelling is to represent the origin and history of a word
instead of its sound and meaning.
George Bernard Shaw
'Why
can't Johnny read?' And the answer is, because of the spelling.
Richard Feynman
(with 26
letters)
we spell our 42 sounds in a potpourri of over 400 different ways.
American
Literacy Council – Spelling Matters
There have been major or minor reforms in the writing systems
of every major language in the world except English…
Writing
Systems of the World
©Copyright 2001 - 2003: Training Wheels for Literacy & Implicity
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