Comment on John Sturrock and Roy Harris

Comment on John Sturrock: The everyday life of the alphabet (TLS March 9, 2001)

John Sturrock (and Roy Harris) believe that there is no language in which the written and the spoken signs are identical, so that the relationship is always an arbitrary cultural construction. This is, indeed, true for English or French where it is impossible to know from how something is spoken how it is written. Hence the difficulties of many even highly educated people to spell (the three words educated, people, spell, contain five different ways to pronounce the letter e, for instance) words and the favourite french pastime of orthographic competitions.
It just so happens that there is at at least one language which has an almost 100% correspondence between the written individual alphabet sign and the way it is pronounced, both as part of a word and as a sequence of letters. This language is Finnish.Once you learn to pronounce the letters (i.e. learn the alphabet) and learn the right intonation (always on the first vowel of the word) you can pronounce almost every word without additional information. Of course, this is very difficult for French or English speakers because they insist on trying to use their own complicated pronunciation rules, but it makes Finnish a perfect computer language, because the computer can learn this easily. The Finnish children, moreover, have seldom any problems with written language, unless they are completely wordblind or the words are direct loans and the pronunciation rule is not clear (whether to pronounce the word as it is pronounced originally or as it is written). The same goes for acronyms: no problems here except in the cases where the English pronunciation is different from sequence of letters.

In writing about writing it would be useful to know other languages than the world universal language. The automatic cultural imperialism of English speakers is rather irritating; to know at least one different living language would be useful, instead of just designer alphabets.
It is unfortunate that the simplicity of the Finnish is not combined with an equally elementary crudity of the grammar, such as is the case of the English. Perhaps then we would not have to suffer the domination of such a highly nonfunctional language as English..

J.P.Roos
University of Helsinki
Finland

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