An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

(b) Welsh
Sporadic attempts have been made from time to time to narrow the gap between the
pronunciation of Literary Welsh and Colloquial Welsh. A late nineteenth-century
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Exercises
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grammarian sought to persuade Welsh people to read, for example, written 
gwelant
as [gwelan], written 
pethau
as [peøa] and written 
carrai
as [kare] (Jones 1893). He
argued that since major languages such as English and French were not pronounced
as they were written there was no valid reason why Literary Welsh should be. More
recent (but equally unsuccessful) ventures in this direction are those by Jones (1964:
53–6), and by the Welsh school examining authority in a booklet distributed to
schools (Welsh Joint Education Committee 1967). These more recent attempts have
been motivated largely by the perception of an increasing gap between the literary
and non-literary registers, a gap which is thought, somewhat naively, to be a major
contributory factor in the failure of second-language teaching programmes in schools,
and in the widespread incompetence among Welsh speakers in reading and writing
their native language.
Through the nineteenth century the orthography was a field of conflict as one
committee or individual after another attempted to standardize practices. Standard -
ization was not finally achieved until a committee of the Board of Celtic Studies
published a spelling manual (University of Wales Press 1928).
(c) Spoken American English
It is obvious to all concerned that there is a conspicuous gap in these materials:
a comparably large computerized corpus of spoken American English as used by
adults. Such a corpus would provide a rich source of data for all those interested in
the nature of spoken American English and, more generally, of spoken language,
whether their interests are descriptive, theoretical or pedagogical. For example, it
has been suggested that the grammar of spoken language is still little understood
(Halliday 1987); the Corpus of Spoken American English (CSAE) will provide
materials for extensive studies of all aspects of spoken English grammar and lexicon.
It will at the same time have an obvious value for studies of differences between
speech and writing, and thus can contribute to an understanding of how the edu -
cational system can facilitate the child’s transition from accomplished speaker to
accomplished writer. It will be of obvious value to sociologists and linguists studying
the structure of conversational interactions. It will constitute a basic source of infor -
mation for those engaged in teaching English as a second language, who will be able
to draw on it in either a research or a classroom setting for examples of linguistic
and interactional patterns that are characteristic of conversation. And, because the
transcription into standard English orthography will be linked with sound, linguists
and speech researchers will gain a useful tool for studying the relation of auditory
phenomena to linguistic elements, which will ultimately contribute to the goal of
enabling computers to recognize speech. In a larger time frame, this corpus will
provide an invaluable source of information on the English language as it was spoken
colloquially in America towards the end of the twentieth century.
Exercises 175
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