Why can't the English learn to speak?

When English is the second language, one of the problems that I and many others face is that we would have seen and read the written word before knowing how it is pronounced.  This always trips us up at conversations.

Take an everyday, simple word like "locate."  Not a big deal of a word.  A word that won't ever be asked at a Spelling Bee.

But, until I came to the US, I had no idea that there is way more to pronouncing it than what I had been doing back in India.  Because ... it turned out that the "loc" of "locate" has a lengthier sound like with the "loc" in "locusts."  The "o" is stretched out in the pronunciation.

That is merely a simple example of the many that I can offer, and there are quite a few examples that completely mess up the communication itself because the other party simply had no idea what I was referring to.  Like "mishap" that I never imagined being mis-hap, and I was merely adding an ending "p" sound to "misha."   The emPHAsis in multi-sylLABle ...

Those who are raised with the language have a different kind of a problem--they know the sound, but have a tough time spelling some words.  For instance, in papers that I have graded, native students have spelled "parity" as "parody."

English is not like Tamil or Sanskrit where the pronunciation is no different from how the word is spelled.  If all these sound "ghoti-y" it is because the bastard language has drawn words from other other languages makes life difficult for all of us.  Imagine one's horror when incorrectly pronouncing "hors d’oeuvre" at a "soiree"!

This post resulted from reading this column.  Read the comments there; says a lot about the bloody language!

Can you hear me now?

As a kid, I did what other kids and many adults did--I made fun of others.  Laughter at the expense of others was considered normal. It extended well into the undergraduate years as well.  After all, nobody ever told me anything otherwise.

But then, slowly wisdom dawned.

I can not ever understand why the damn wisdom should show up only much later in life!

These days, most jokes that I make are about me.  I love it because nobody gets hurt, and I get a wonderful outlet for my bizarre sense of humor, which is also an outlet for all my angst.  It is a win-win all around, except for those who have to suffer my humor--especially the captive audience in the classroom, where I have not been since last March :(

One of the earliest realizations was about the way we speak.  The accents. The choice of words.  The idioms. In the early phase of my life, those were the low hanging fruit for the crude humor.  Visiting grandmothers' places meant exposure to the way of speaking in that part of the old country, and it was so easy to make fun of it.

Now, as I get older, I find the jokes on accents to be awful.  In the old country, people do that a lot even now.

As an older and wiser man, I find the different accents, the unusual phrasings, to be charming. They add color to the otherwise monotonous same-old, same-old.  It is so robot-like if everybody talked the same way.

Further, the ultimate understanding of all: it is about communication and human interactions.  After all, we "hear" those differences only in the real world of human interactions, right?  As an old New Yorker cartoon put it, in the internet nobody knows you are a dog!  I would rather hear somebody's accented voice in a discussion than yet another "like" on Facebook.

An old anthropologist friend of mine used to tell his students that everybody has an accent.  It just depends on the context.  Of course, that didn't stop him from making fun of my accent. But, I laughed when he joked about my pronunciations because I knew he meant no harm.  After all, it is one thing to chuckle, but another to laugh with condescension and I know well where that dividing line is.

Over the years of life here in the US, my speech has slowed down. A few words and phrases I say it differently from how I pronounced them back in the old country.  I quickly learnt about using "the."  But, by and large, I have managed to remain the same person that I was.

A few years ago, when I went to the deep, deep South for the first time, I was all set to listen to the charming southern accent. The drawl. The y'all. I was so disappointed.  In the public space, the number of people who spoke "like a Southerner" was way less than what I had imagined would be the case.

The nasty jokes and condescending attitudes towards some accents and way of speaking, while lauding others, is "back door to discrimination."  We forget that "the so-called standard is simply an invention of a given society."

"We talk a lot about racial discrimination," explains Ms. Lawson, who is now a junior. "We talk about judging people based on their socioeconomic status" and on other, more visibly identifiable factors. But people rarely talk about language, even though it is socially stratified in the United States, as in most countries.
"When I came to college," Ms. Lawson says, "people kept telling me how strong my accent was." She thought, "Wow, y’all need to come home with me and hear how other people sound." She was doing what linguists call code-switching — toning down her accent in favor of a standardized English considered to be more acceptable.

Exactly!  The arrogance of Englishnisation.  We humans are stupid, stupid, stupid!

I wish somebody had told me all these at least when I was twenty years old!  Oh well, wisdom better late than never, eh.