Alphabet soup – Simple lettering?

 

[pile of childen's plastic letters*'

When I tell people that I know Hebrew or Russian, quite often the first question they ask how difficult is it to learn the alphabet. My immediate answer is that new scripts are a matter of practice and quickly mastered. However, I read a recent post by Keith Geany on the subject of abugids, (I had never heard of the word either). To clarify, if letters represent sounds, then abugids are letters that intrinsically have both a consonant and vowel sound. For example, In Amharic, one of the languages of Ethiopia, there is a different letter for su, sa, etc. This discovery caused me to consider the multitude of types of connections between symbols and sounds and how the nature of this connection affects learning.

[Russian wooden dolls]

Slavic languages, especially Russian, have separate consonants and vowels, with the latter consistently expressing the assigned sound. Specifically, there are 10 vowels in Russian comprised of 5 pairs of hard and soft variations of the sound: a/ya, e/ye, ih/i, o/yo and u/yu. While learning how to write ten vowels may seem more complicated, this complexity is more than compensated by the fact that they always have the same sound, with the minor exception of unaccented “o”s, which are pronounced like an “a”. The word horosho (good) is thus pronounce harasho. In fact, this aspect of Russian is probably the only oasis of regularity in the sea of rules and exceptions that is typical of Russian.

[French books]

Other languages use the basic five vowels but combine them in numerous ways to allow for numerous ways to produce the same sound. For example, in French, the long a can be written a, ai, é, ais, ait, aient and er. While initially these combinations may be confusing, in practice their pronunciation is consistent. Thus, the learner merely has to learn how to pronounce the specific combination.

[basic English lesson  chalkboard]

By contrast, there is nothing predictable about the pronunciation of English vowels. For example, oo can be a short u as in foot or a long u as in look while an “a” can pronounced as a vague schwa as in the word “a” or a short a as in abnormal. There are so many exceptions that it sometimes seems impossible to provide a rule. So, while English may only have 5 true vowels, it takes significant exposure to the language to understand how to pronounce them.

[Hebrew text]

Some languages, notably Hebrew and Arabic, are partial abugids. Hebrew sometimes uses specific vowel letters to mark the sound, such as an aleph (א) for a short a or a vuv (ו) for a long o or u. However, specific additional marks, not letters, may signal the vowel sound that accompanies the given consonant. However, since most texts do not actually include those marks, the reader has to ascertain the sound by recognized the pattern into which the word falls. For example, the third person feminine form in the past tense in a certain verb group follows the pattern of two short a’s such that she thought is written  חשבה [h-sh-v] without any vowel indicators but pronounced hashva. Curiously, once the learner grasps the pattern, it is remarkably simple to pronounce Hebrew words.

[Amharic alphabet]

A few languages are complete abugids, with the largest families being Ethiopic and Indic. Every letter includes a consonant and vowel sound. Not having studies any such language, I imagine that it adds difficulty to mastering the alphabet but compensates by facilitating the pronunciation. Clearly, there are advantages for predictability and rules.

[Japanese script]

Going farther from Western alphabets, Chinese and Japanese have their own structures. Japanese combines Chinese symbols (kanji), which have no indication of pronunciation, with syllabic characters. Chinese has only kanji, which requires the learner to memorize the sound of each character. This sounds quite difficult for an adult learner.

[cat playing with flower]

Considering all these approaches and balancing learning and predictability, the alphabet of Slavic languages is not particularly challenging. In my personal experience, learning how to pronounce Hebrew was not particularly difficult as it follows a system even if I still don’t fully grasp its more intricate elements. On the other end of the spectrum, it is somehow ironic that probably the two most important languages in the world, English and Hebrew, are also the most difficult for a learner to master pronunciation. Regardless of the actual difficulty, I still believe that the alphabet is the least of the challenges in learning a language. In practice, the need to learn another alphabet should not discourage a person from a learning a language.

* Picture captions allow the blind to fully access the Internet.

Pictures via pixabay.