Ink Tea Stone Leaf

I saw a post on Facebook recently, as one does. It wasn’t from anybody I followed, because these days most of the posts you see on social media don’t come from people you follow. That’s not the point, but I like to gripe about that fact every once in a while. I don’t want anybody to think I’ve accepted this state of affairs with grace.

In this case, the post was from an organization involved with education for/about dyslexia, which is certainly less egregious a thing to place in my field of view than rancid opinions about human affairs from underdeveloped thinkers. The post was centered around a statement by a researcher, to the effect that our written language (presumably standard English) was created to represent meaning and not sound, and that understanding this would be important and helpful to students with dyslexia. I would quote it exactly, except that I’ve already closed that tab and thus have lost the post for eternity.

I’m not an expert on dyslexia, so I can’t speak much to what is and is not helpful to students along that front. I certainly agree that understanding more about anything is helpful to anybody trying to learn an associated skill, but reading this got me to thinking about the extent to which it might be less than true: the extent to which the written language represents sound rather than meaning, or was meant to represent sound irrespective of its purpose regarding meaning. “I could produce a little chunk of written language about this,” I thought, “and my next blog post won’t be ready by the weekend anyway.”

It is not commonly realized how little people know about language, even as they ably make use of it for a thousand purposes every day. The fact that it might be necessary to remind people that sound and meaning are two different things and that this might have implications for pedagogy speaks to the superficial understanding that pervades anything related to words in the public imagination. If you try to correct a misconception, you’re as likely to create more confusion by tripping over another unexamined assumption as you are to accomplish any actual education. But at the risk of signifying nothing, why not examine the idea—what is written language for, exactly?

Speech

I’ve written a little about the conceptual origins of written language before. Written language has great prestige, but there can be no doubt that words were spoken long before they were written. Children learn to speak long before they learn to read, and our assumptions about writing are tightly wound up with our assumptions about speaking. So we’ll start with the obvious: spoken language is the use of organized sound to represent meaning. If I want to communicate to you that I am sick and tired of my bird Yoshi attempting to chew on the inside of my desk every time I open it up to type one of my silly little essays, I can use the muscles in my mouth and throat to make sophisticated adjustments to the air stream from my lungs, creating a pattern of phonemes (recognizably distinct units of sound) that is detectable by the human ear, which can then be decoded by a human brain that has been trained to recognize the symbolism of those particular patterns. The patterns can be complex, but the idea is simple: sound represents meaning.

However, sound is not the same thing as meaning, any more than the map is the territory. “Bird” is a noise that comes out of my mouth, which my brain recognizes as four sounds arranged in a particular sequence. A bird is the feathered biological organism who bites my fingers when I try to remove him from the inside of my desk. “Bird” only means that creature when the sound is produced by and for people who are familiar with the particular systems of sound-meaning correspondence (language) that assign that meaning to that sound. If a speaker of a language from distant lands happens to make those same four phonemic sounds with her mouth in the same way, it does not mean the same thing to her as it would to me. It may not even mean anything at all.

Symbolism is not an act of divination, or the discovery of hidden truths, or the revelation of the true content of forms. It is as simple as this: one thing stands for another, the relationship between them having been established by convention. A sound stands for a meaning, and we call it spoken language. Sign languages work on the same principle, except that it is silent, and consequently the symbol is not a sound but a gesture. Written language is also silent, and for its symbols it has shapes.

Reading

There is an important reason that written language is not like sign language. Although sign languages like ASL have symbols for letters and it is common to spell out unfamiliar words as they would be written in English, the symbolic gestures for most ASL words have no regular correspondence with the symbolic sounds of any spoken language; that is to say, one could not predict which gesture means “bird” using only the sound of the word “bird” in any language. The sounds and gestures are at the same level of symbolic abstraction; both mean what they mean based on an arbitrary association made by the community of speakers or signers. But writing occurs at another level of abstraction—the shapes inscribed on the medium represent words.

This is the reason why, despite the fact that I have hardly opened my mouth since I began writing this, you can say that you have been reading in the same language that you and I speak. While the sound I make when I say the word “bird” means bird, the letters B, I, R, and D in sequence mean the word “bird.” Because English is written with an alphabetic script, each individual letter also represents one of the four phonemic sounds a speaker uses to craft the word “bird.”

(Of course, if the speaker has a variety of English in which the R sound is not pronounced after vowels, then there are only three phonemes represented by those four letters).

However, not all of the symbols used in writing correspond with phonemes. Chinese characters represent entire words or parts of words without always providing guidance as to what the word sounds like; the reader usually just has to know. As for alphabets, designing a useful one that accurately and unambiguously encodes every sound in a language is much harder than is generally assumed; this is all the more true when accounting for the fact that the pronunciation of spoken language varies by region and changes with every generation. Writing is an imperfect means by which we attempt to freeze words in time, words which would otherwise begin to fade an instant after they were spoken. Words are sounds, so one way or another sound enters into the action, but because writing is silent it can operate in surprising ways.

Meaning

En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor.

This is the first sentence of the first chapter of Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes. It is in an older form of Spanish, and my Spanish is not so good that I could reliably gather the meaning just by listening to somebody recite it. In this written form, however, there is much less chance that I could mistake one word for another, and I can spend as much time as I need analyzing their significance, even taking a break to look up any words I don’t know. Potentially, the meaning of this silent sentence is much clearer to me than it would be in the sounds of spoken Spanish.

In my mind’s ear, of course, I can hear what all of these words are supposed to sound like, because Spanish is written alphabetically and I know how it conventionally encodes sounds (and I even know a little bit about how they were encoded differently in Cervantes’s day than they are now). But that sound is only in my imagination when I read silently. Conceivably, a person could learn to read and understand written Spanish without having any idea what it sounds like. However, it’s doubtful that they could do so without learning how the written symbols correspond to the sounds (or signs) of their own native language.

I have only ever read Don Quixote in translation, and whether translation is applied to speech or text it relies on two assumptions: that meaning exists independently of sound, and that the same or substantially similar meaning can be communicated using any two different sets of sound symbolism, i.e. languages. Unfortunately, there are limiting factors to this assumption, the most important being that every language has a finite vocabulary, assembled from that language’s cultural history. The word hidalgo, for instance, refers to a particular social class that possessed certain qualities and attributes in 17th century Spain. One might translate it as “gentleman,” as it often is in the case of Don Quixote, but a person who knows only that English word in its modern sense (a polite way to refer to just about any adult male) might not comprehend exactly what Cervantes meant by labeling the title character an hidalgo.

Without intensive study of early modern Spanish, I could not read Don Quixote as it was written, and consequently I could only approximately understand its meaning as expressed by English words. But the English words also have meaning, with or without sound, so even without sharing a common set of sounds, there is still a meaningful communication (through intermediaries) from Cervantes to myself.

Phonics

What the conventional systems for writing Spanish and English (known as orthographies) have in common is that they are alphabetic, which means that the symbols correspond with the sounds that compose the word when spoken. This statement may raise objections from the contingent of people dedicated to decrying English orthography as pointlessly arbitrary, but English spelling is actually reasonably consistent. The famous “ghoti,” a fanciful respelling of “fish,” doesn’t read as a valid spelling for “fish” because the letters don’t follow the rules that English readers learn—the combination GH sounds like F in words like “laugh” and “rough,” but it never sounds like F in words that begin with GH, like “ghost.” Many English spellings are ambiguous—there is no obvious reason why “get” and “jet” are not homophones—but this does not actually pose much of a problem for people who are familiar enough with the system (they read and write every day) to recognize and resolve those ambiguities. They are only really a problem while you are learning to do so.

The English orthography is bedeviling in its inconsistencies, but even the famously phonetic Spanish orthography has odd features. If the word is kilogramo and not “quilogramo,” why is it quince and not “kince?” What is the point of writing an H at the beginning of words like hidalgo if it is invariably silent? For any language written with an alphabet, learning to identify a written word with a spoken one means applying phonics contextually, with an eye to things like morphology (the understanding of a word’s meaningful parts) and etymology (the origins of a word and its historical forms). It is never really as simple as one symbol to one sound.

No amount of spelling reform or simplification, however, would resolve all the difficulties associated with dyslexia. The word “strands,” for example, is about as simply spelled as an English word can be. It is phonemically complex, however, as the central vowel is flanked by two different clusters of three consonants each, with no consonant sound appearing in both clusters (the pronunciation of the second S is like a Z, making it as different from the first S as D is from T). One of the key signs of dyslexia is difficulty in conceptualizing the way words are built out of phonemes; a dyslexic person may have no trouble saying the word “strands,” but struggle with recognizing the letters on the page as a visual representation of the order of the seven phonemes that make up that word. This is a formidable challenge when the visual representation of phonemes is the core concept behind an alphabet. That is simply how alphabets work.

On the other hand, it’s worth the while of all learners to recognize that the alphabetic principle behind English does not represent the language as it is actually spoken. This would be impossible, as English is spoken in dozens of different ways, none of which have any real claim to priority. The standard orthography of English (much like the standard orthography of just about every language) represents an educated, etymologically informed, and mostly hypothetical pronunciation, wherein “nuclear” is not pronounced like “nuculer” and “comfortable” is not pronounced like “comfterble.” Navigating the divergence, which only grows wider in every generation, between the way we sound and the way we spell is a challenge when teaching anybody how to read. But unless we invent a method of writing which does not consist of the replication of spoken language by other means, this problem is more or less synonymous with the cognitive task of reading.

Nonsense

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

      Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

      And the mome raths outgrabe.

Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll, is the go-to example of nonsense literature. I’ve quoted the first stanza only, which happens to repeat as the last, because it is the most clearly nonsensical of the whole poem. If you follow the rest of it, there is clearly some sense to be found in the narrative: somebody’s son has apparently slain something called a Jabberwock, and this is cause for joy. But every stanza contains words like “mimsy,” which only sound like they mean something. That is, I suppose it sounds like it means something, but since I only ever encounter it in Jabberwocky, I don’t know that I know exactly how it sounds. I and everybody else have made an assumption about how to pronounce this thing presenting itself as a word, reasoning by analogy from the common rules of English spelling. Do we have any reason to be certain that is the right course?

What makes Jabberwocky a great poem, among other things, is the way that it illustrates the tension between sound and meaning. Poetry itself is the art of saying meaningful things in such a way that they sound best, so that the aesthetics of a poem are bound up in both the message it carries and the phonemes that compose it. Some poems strive to create the illusion that these are one and the same, but Jabberwocky smiles and exposes the truth: the sound of language is only a model of its meaning, just as written letters are a model of sound.

Some of the made-up words in Jabberwocky have attracted meaning to themselves, such that the reader at least knows what “frabjous” ought to mean, and can almost believe they know exactly what “chortle” does mean. But if those meanings can only be derived from guesses and supposition, then a good deal of them are actually being projected from the reader onto the text. In a literal sense, Carroll provided very little meaning. He only laid down some guidelines for us to make sounds by.

Meaning is tremendously important to human beings, but communicating it necessarily relies upon the abstractions we invent. Somehow, miraculously, it all seems to work most of the time, at least as far as our purposes require. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that language of any sort can do more than approach at a distance whatever it is we mean by something as ineffable as “meaning.”