Formation of writing skills

Chapter II. Relationship between letter and sound
2.1. Basic information from the history of English orthography
The problem of the origin of alphabetic writing is very difficult to resolve, if we keep in mind the origin of the letter as such (the origin of a pictogram or hieroglyph as a picture of a situation or object is clear in itself). And the difficulty faced and faced by the solution of this problem will be understandable to some extent if we take into account the fact that the distinction between such linguistic phenomena as a letter and sound was very difficult not only for ordinary literate people, but also for professional linguists. It can be said that until the end of the 19th century, the mixing of sound and letter was a mass phenomenon in the scientific works of linguists, i.e., the primary sound semiotic system of the language was mixed with its late secondary semiotic system - writing.⁴
I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay , an adherent of the psychological approach to language, coming from W. von Humboldt (in Russian linguistics - from A.A. Potebnya ) was the first in world linguistics to draw a distinct line between letter and sound, and then added to these purely material linguistic objects and mental correspondences: a phoneme corresponded to a sound, a grapheme corresponded to a letter. Baudouin wrote about the difference between the “pronunciation-auditory and written- visual” form of speech activity in his work “On the Relationship of Russian Writing to the Russian Language”. But in Baudouin 's theory the matter was not reduced to one difference and opposition, he also reasonably explained the relationship between them. Thus, he writes: “The actual connection between writing and language can be the only psychic connection. With such a formulation of the question, both writing and its elements, and language and its elements are transformed into mental quantities, into mental values. And since we must imagine both the transitory sounds of a language in all their diversity and the remaining letters as occurring and existing in the external world, when it comes to mental quantities and mental values, both letters and sounds must be replaced by their mental sources, i.e. e. representations of sounds and letters that exist and act constantly and uninterruptedly in the individual human psyche”
I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay further notes: “Between the mental elements of language, i.e., pronunciation-auditory linguistic thinking, and between the mental elements of writing, i.e., written- visual linguistic thinking, there is no necessary “natural connection”, but there is only an accidental bonding called association. In other words, there is no natural connection between the shape of the letter and the sound itself, this connection is arbitrary, which turns the letter into an arbitrary sound sign (non-symbol). And this is so to some extent at the present time, but it could not have been so at the time of writing.
From the provisions put forward by Baudouin , it follows that the graphic system corresponds as a secondary sign system to the phonetic (sound) system of the language and therefore there are two associated units - the phoneme (sound representation ) and the grapheme (" letter representation ", i.e., the image of the letter), while a grapheme is a pure sign of sound, that is, a non-symbol.
I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay , in his seminal work, shared such concepts as the alphabet and graphics. This division of the alphabet and graphics, at first glance, seems incomprehensible, but it makes sense. L.R. Zinder , characterizing this point of view of Baudouin , writes: “From the further presentation it is clear that in both cases we are talking about the relationship between the letter (grapheme) and sound (phoneme), but only from different points of view. If we take letters as the initial and establish which phonemes they denote, this is the alphabet; if we start from phonemes and other sound units, for example, syllables, and determine with what graphemes or their combinations they are designated, this is graphics". Modern representations of information theory allow us to consider writing as a kind of code that translates an acoustic speech signal into an optical one, and a mandatory property of the code is its conditionality: the code is created consciously and arbitrarily and it can be arbitrarily changed, so cases of changing the alphabet in the same language are possible. For example, the Tatar literary language first used Arabic script, then switched first to the Latin alphabet, and then to the Cyrillic alphabet, which is no less convenient for reflecting the sound features of the Tatar language than Latin or Arabic script. Now Tatarstan is considering the issue of switching from Cyrillic to Latin.
The main elements of the alphabetic graphic system are letters. They can have their own names, have a descriptive form, a sound value, and in a number of writing systems, a numerical value. As allographs of one letter, its handwritten and printed (typewritten and typographical) styles act.⁵
A special range of problems is outlined by a discipline that is inextricably linked with graphics - spelling, or spelling. Spelling is meant to reflect pronunciation. But the pronunciation is constantly changing, even before the eyes of one generation - for example, "Petersburg" (close to spelling) and "Moscow" pronunciations, actual back in the 1960s, now they are practically leveled (the Moscow version won). “If spelling is constantly changed, then writing cannot be an effective tool of communication, not only in historical terms, but also within the life of one generation. Literacy will drop sharply. In addition, a decisive factor in keeping the spelling unchanged is that the change in pronunciation does not reduce the effectiveness of using the old spelling. The fact is that a change in pronunciation inevitably leads to a rethinking of the old spelling, which begins to reflect not the old sound, but the new one ... Suppose that in Russian the explosive voiced consonant is stunned not only in the final position, but also in all other positions . Naturally, in such cases, the spelling of the word "bull" will be perceived as " pyk " ... The stronger the change in pronunciation, the more the old spelling is rethought "
The modern English alphabet developed in the 17th century on the basis of the Latin without any significant modifications of the latter. It contains 26 letters. The latest letter to enter the modern English alphabet is the letter J ( jay ), which existed before that as a variant of the letter I.
The history of English spelling cannot be considered out of touch with the history of the English language as a whole, the history of changes taking place in it, with the formation of grammatical, pronunciation and other norms.
In the Old English period, the written form of the English language was maximally aimed at the transmission of oral speech and was consistently based on the phonological system of the language. The graphic variability found in the written monuments of this period is explained by: 1) the simultaneous influence of several more ancient foreign language traditions (runic, Latin, Old Irish) on Old English writing; 2) the absence of the “idea of spelling” among the scribes of this period, i.e. the desire to write the same words the same way. Of the three "levels" of sound -letter writing distinguished by Baudouin de Courtenay, these monuments contain only the levels of graphics (reflecting the phonemic composition of the language) and the alphabet (not directly related to sound). The above variation occurs precisely at the level of the alphabet and does not reflect changes in the phonological system. In the Late Old English period, a stable written tradition was formed on the basis of the Wessex dialect, which reached the status of the state literary written norm of the pre -national period. In the Wessex literary norm, a level of spelling is already appearing (third, according to Baudouin ). By the end of the Old English period, due to significant changes in the phonological system of the language (monophthongization of Old English diphthongs, the appearance of sibilant consonants, etc.) and the greater conservatism of its written form, as well as due to the supradialectal nature of the written literary norm, which by that time had ceased to reflect the living pronunciation, in English spelling, noticeable deviations from the unambiguous correspondence of graphemes to phonemes and violations of the phonemic principle of spelling began to be observed.
The collapse of the Old English literary language and the emergence of regional written traditions in the Early Middle English period was facilitated by such extralinguistic factors as, for example, the capture of England by the Normans (native speakers of one of the dialects of the Old French language) and the emergence of a linguistic situation of diglossia as a result (Old English, which belongs to the Germanic group of languages, became the language of oral communication of the peasant population, and Norman, related to the Romanesque, is the language of communication of the aristocracy). Anglo-French diglossia and the influence of Latin as the written language of church and learning led to changes in the Middle English period not only in orthography but also in the script of the English language. In the Middle English period, spelling variability increases dramatically.
At the turn of the Middle English and New English periods (14th - 15th centuries), with the partial destruction of the correspondence between the oral and written forms of the English language at the “phoneme-grapheme” level, the correspondence of two forms of the language at other levels of the language structure - morphological and lexical, began to be established, manifested in new for English spelling principles - morphemic (preservation of the external appearance of the morpheme in writing, regardless of the features of pronunciation associated with reduction, etc.) and quasi- ideographic .
The first manifestation of the quasi-ideographic principle is associated with the final vocalization of dorsal fricatives (denoted in writing as gh ) by the beginning of the Early New English period (homonyms like rite - right , site - sight ) and with the appearance of “mute” graphemes caused by various changes in the phonological system. The sound image of the whole word begins to correlate with a certain written image of this word, i.e. correspondence of writing and language at the word level is established.
The prototype of the first attempts to codify the spelling norm of the English language was the London norm of the written language of the 15th century (the language of official documents of the royal chancellery). For the language of the first printed editions 15 - early. The 16th centuries, oriented to this "exemplary" language, is characterized, however, by the variability of spellings associated with extralinguistic reasons (insufficient literacy of typesetters, etc.).
The first attempts to codify the written norm of the English language were made in the XVI c. Two trends can be distinguished within this codification: 1) a movement for a radical reform of spelling based on the phonemic principle and 2) a movement for fixing in the norm and codification in dictionaries and textbooks of traditional spelling. The greatest contribution to the creation of the modern English spelling and orthoepic norm was made by T. Smith, J. Hart , W. Bullocar (supporters of radical reform), R. Mulcaster (option - Melcaster ). E. Kut (traditionalists).