B. Mistakes in the employment of the sounds.
We have mistakes belonging to Class A, for instance, when Englishmen
use the _ng_ combination in place of the French nasals, or when they
diphthongize the French long, pure vowels, when they pronounce _ʃ_ or
_k_ instead of German _ch_, or [z] or [s] for German _z_ [ts], [ə·], as
in _cur_, instead of [œ·r] in French _cœur_, when they pronounce French
_dû_ like the English _due_, etc.
Mistakes belonging to Class B arise if you pronounce French _gent_
like _gant_, _peut_ like _put_, or vice versâ _eut_ like [ø], German
_frass_ or _fuss_ with a short, or _nass_ or _nuss_ with a long vowel,
_bischen_ with [ʃ], etc.
Both kinds of mistakes may occur in the same word, as when _München_ is
pronounced [minkən] or [mjuŋkən] instead of [mynçen].
The mistakes belonging to class A are not due to the orthography; those
mistakes we can also make in languages whose spelling corresponds
to the pronunciation; they are largely due to our native habits
of articulation, and they are to be counteracted by means of the
phonetical training which has been described above. If the foreign
sounds have once been well learned in the introductory course, this
kind of mistakes can only occur through carelessness or through the
lack of continued practice.
Mistakes in the employment of the sounds (class B) however, are as a
rule due to disagreement between the pronunciation and the orthography
of each language; they are not caused by our native habits of
articulation, and even those that have learned all the foreign sounds
perfectly (indeed even the natives themselves) are liable to make them
in every new word which they see written, but have never heard.
_It is this last kind of mistake that phonetical transcription helps
us to avoid_, it protects us against the mistakes which the different
national orthographies actually seduce us to make. Phonetical
transcription is necessary in the teaching of all languages, but of
course, it may deviate from the ordinary orthography in greater or
less degree in the different languages. In Finnish and Spanish, the
orthography is so nearly phonetical that only relatively few changes
are necessary in order to indicate the pronunciation; in Italian,
almost all that is needed is to indicate if _e_ and _o_ are open or
closed, if _s_ and _z_ are voiced [z, dz] or voiceless [s, ts], and
which single consonants are to be pronounced double (long). In German,
the orthography is already much more capricious, but in languages like
French, Danish, and English, the number of conflicting rules with
all their exceptions is so great that the phonetical transcription
necessarily has quite a different appearance from the traditional
spelling.
Max Müller once said that the English orthography is a national
misfortune, and Viëtor has improved upon this observation by declaring
that it is an international misfortune, since it is not only Englishmen
but also all educated persons in other lands who have to be bothered
with it. Now, by means of phonetical transcription the words of the
foreign language are presented to us in a kind of normal or ideal
orthography, where every letter always signifies the same sound, and
every sound is always indicated in the same manner.
Some persons urge the objection against the use of phonetical
transcription that it can never be made so perfect that it can show
all the shades of intonation, etc., in the spoken language, so that
it cannot take the place of a teacher’s oral instruction. But we have
never maintained that it could; aside from private study without a
teacher, which must needs always be more or less imperfect, we have
always emphasized the exceedingly great importance of the teacher
pronouncing the words for the pupils, and we have not recommended
phonetical transcription as something to replace, but as something to
support, the teacher’s oral instruction in pronunciation. Even if it
misses some of the very finest shades, it may still be of benefit, just
as a table of logarithms can be very useful even if the numbers are not
carried out farther than to the fourth decimal place.
Other opponents again have exactly the reverse objection to make, that
our system of sound-symbols is too delicately detailed for school use.
Even if many people only say this because they confuse the phonetical
transcription which is used in scientific works with the far simpler
transcription which we want to introduce for school use, and which is
by no means beyond the powers of comprehension of an ordinary pupil,
still we have an answer right at hand. We are aiming at (and attaining)
greater exactness than our predecessors cared for, but this is very
necessary too, for the old school pronunciation was too unintelligible
to the native. Besides, our system is constructed on such simple
principles, that we attain to a higher degree of exactness with less
trouble than you do with far more difficult means. When mathematicians
began to designate the value of π in decimal form (3·1416) instead of
the fractional form 22/7, they not only attained greater exactness but
also greater ease in using the quantity in long calculations, since
the decimal is easier to handle than the fraction. Our phonetical
transcription may pride itself on exactly corresponding advantages.
It has already been tried in many old readers (to say nothing of the
dictionaries) to counteract the injurious influence of the orthography
on the pronunciation by means of different systems of designating the
pronunciation, such as numbers over the vowels, strokes denoting length
and curves denoting shortness, italicizing of the _s_’s which ought
to be voiced, or in other places italicizing of the silent letters,
dots and flourishes above and under the letters. All such systems,
just because they try to deviate as little as possible from the
orthography, necessarily adopt a number of its caprices and thus become
too complicated to be of any real benefit to the pupils. But the
phoneticians, by starting out from rational principles, have succeeded
in creating systems of phonetical transcription which really meet all
reasonable demands in the way of exactness and simplicity.[49] That
they really are simple and easy to learn has been proved to me more
than once in striking ways; in several schools where my books are used
but where the teacher has been afraid of the phonetical transcription,
the children have resorted to it of their own accord, when they came to
a word that they did not know how to pronounce; several parents have
also told me that they have familiarized themselves with the phonetical
transcription in the books which their children used and they did not
find it at all difficult.
Perhaps it is worth while here to consider the four ways in which it is
possible to communicate the material of a foreign language to pupils.
Either (1) the teacher may not let them use any writing at all, but
give them everything orally; or (2) he may give them the orthography
alone; or (3) he may give them orthography and phonetical transcription
together; or finally (4) he may give them phonetical transcription
alone.
(1) The first way obviously has the advantage that there is no
sound-symbol whatever to confuse the clear apprehension of the pupils;
it resembles the manner in which a child learns its mother tongue.
It will also be the more in place the more the instruction can be
brought to resemble the way in which a child first acquires language,
that is, where there is only one pupil, or at least very few; where
the pupil (pupils) is (are) not very old, and especially not yet quite
familiar with the secrets of writing; where the teacher is a native;
and above all, where there is ample time. For we must not shut our
eyes to the fact that this exclusively oral instruction in languages
takes exceedingly much time; much repetition is necessary, and the
teacher has to have great patience. In schools it is only possible to
have purely oral instruction as a short preliminary course of a couple
of months at the most, before passing over to the use of writing in
some form or other. Walter, who has tried both, is emphatically of the
opinion that in class instruction phonetical transcription is much to
be preferred to purely oral instruction, because the latter wastes an
enormous amount of time, and the teacher cannot feel nearly so sure
that the whole class is able to follow.
(2) The pupils are immediately allowed to see the traditional
orthography, and the teacher gives them the pronunciation orally. The
eternal repetition and the painful small corrections which this method
craves make the lessons bothersome for both the teacher and the pupils,
who almost always become slovenly out of sheer discouragement over the
prodigious task before them. Of course there are some rules for the
relations between orthography and pronunciation, but unfortunately
there are so few without exceptions that certainty cannot be attained
by their means.
(3) The pupils are taught the traditional spelling from the very
beginning, but at the same time they are given an antidote in the shape
of phonetical transcription, either in the form that every new word
is phonetically transcribed in the glossary, or that (in addition)
the reading selections themselves are transcribed. To be sure the
advantages of phonetical transcription are made use of by this method;
several teachers have expressed their satisfaction at the results thus
obtained, and I have no doubt that they are better than when phonetical
transcription is dispensed with. However, I am convinced that by this
method it is difficult sometimes to prevent the less intelligent pupils
from confusing the two systems of spelling, so that they neither learn
the pronunciation nor the orthography very well.
(4) Therefore I have always (like the majority of the advocates of
phonetical transcription) preferred to let beginners be employed only
with phonetical transcription for some time, so that they may become
quite familiar not only with the system of sound-symbols, but also with
a good deal of the material of the language before they pass on to
seeing the words in their orthographical shape too. The principle to be
followed here is that of not allowing the difficulties to pile up, but
overcoming them one by one. When the pupils know the symbols after the
first few lessons, it causes them no difficulty whatever to read the
texts; these themselves (together with the meaning of the words, the
grammatical forms, etc.) are therefore far more easy to learn than if
the caprices of the orthography had to be mastered _at the same time_.
For this method, connected texts in phonetical transcription are of
course necessary, but such texts are also to be recommended to those
who follow method No. 3, since there are many points of pronunciation
which cannot come up at all in the transcriptions of the single
words in the glossary, such points as appear only in combinations of
words, in connected discourse. There is, for instance, French [ə]
in _le_, _de_, _demande_, _devenir_, _quatre_, etc., etc., which is
sometimes pronounced and sometimes omitted, according to the number
of consonants coming immediately before or after the [ə]: _à devenir_
[advəni·r], _pour devenir_ [purdəvni·r], etc.; there is the varying
treatment of the English _r_; there are double forms due to the
influence of sentence-stress, such as [kæn] and [kən] (= _can_), and
many other phenomena of that kind, which it is really necessary to pay
attention to, since no sentence can be pronounced naturally without
consideration for these points, and since we cannot understand the
natives without being familiar with them[50]--for we cannot require
the French to make their language stiff and do violence to all their
natural habits of speech to suit us. Only by using connected texts in
phonetical transcription can the teacher require the pupils from the
very beginning to read the foreign language connectedly, intelligently,
and with some expression.
In conversations on the subject, I have so often had to answer the
question as to whether I also want the pupils to learn to _write_
phonetical transcription, that I must devote a few lines to that
question here too. Of course they must write phonetical transcription,
but _learn_ it--well, that is scarcely necessary, for it will not
entail the least bit of extra work or trouble for them. They learn the
symbols, and when they know them they can write any word whatever in
phonetical transcription, if they only know how to pronounce it; this
is a thing which follows of its own accord from the very nature of
phonetical transcription. Dictation, in which the pupils are to write
in phonetical transcription what the teacher says to them, presupposes
only a correct apprehension of the sounds, and is a very good test as
to whether they have heard accurately (cf. p. 95).
How long is a teacher to continue to use exclusively phonetical
transcription? That is one of the most difficult questions, and I
cannot venture to give a decided answer. The answer will surely always
depend partly upon the age and maturity of the pupils and upon how
much time can be spent upon the language on the whole. I myself have
even dared to go so far that in teaching a class in English, when I
only had two hours a week for two years before the final examination,
I spent the whole of the first year on phonetical transcription
(Sweet’s _Elementarbuch_), and I did not regret it. In French in the
lower classes, I once at least used phonetical transcription more
than a year, and the only difficulty arose when some boys came in in
the course of the year from other schools. At other times, again,
I have made the course in phonetical transcription shorter, and on
the whole I have experimented in various ways without coming to any
certain result--except this: _continue with phonetical transcription
as long as possible_. For there is relatively so much more of the
language itself learned in this way, that I have not the slightest
doubt that the pupil who, with the same number of lessons a week, and
at the same age, has read phonetical transcription for two years and
orthography for half a year knows more of the language (not only of the
pronunciation!) than the pupil who has used phonetical transcription
for half a year and thereupon orthography for two and a half years
(in all half a year more than the first boy). And then the phonetical
transcription itself is such a fine means of training the pupils
to minute exactness, because they really have to be constantly on
the lookout in order to read neither more nor less than each symbol
indicates; therefore I attach great _educational_ significance to
phonetical transcription.
But of course we have to begin to learn the orthography some time;
and I suppose it is this transition more than anything else that has
frightened people away from using phonetical transcription, because
they imagine that it must be extremely difficult. But now all those
who have dared to try phonetical transcription unanimously declare
that they were surprised at the ease with which the transition took
place; there was no trouble worth mentioning either for the teacher
or the pupils; and they were surprised at the accuracy in orthography
displayed by pupils who had been taught in this way. The psychological
reason for this is probably to be found in the sharper perception
which these pupils necessarily get of the difference between sound
and writing, together with the fact that they are not compelled like
the others to learn many things at a time (spelling, pronunciation,
meaning, inflection), but the orthography is separated out as something
which is to be learned by itself about words with whose pronunciation
and meaning they have already become quite familiar.
The best way of making the transition seems to be in going over some
of the selections which have already been read and learned. First,
the teacher says a few words about orthography in general, basing
his remarks on English spelling; he may call attention to the silent
letters in _night_, _know_, the ambiguity of the vowels in _home_,
_honest_, etc. Then a French piece the pupils know already is shown to
them in orthographical dress; it is gone through word by word in such
a way that the pupils themselves may be guided to find out the most
important relations between the letters and their sound-values. Here
they for the first time have something to do with the accents and the
cedilla, whose name they learn.[51]
In the following lessons the comparison between spelling and sound
is conducted in the same manner as indicated above for grammatical
observations; sometimes starting from a certain sound, the students may
point out all the words in which it occurs on a page or so; sometimes
starting from the orthography, they may note and classify all the
phonetical values of a certain letter. A few lessons will be sufficient
for these preliminaries.
Ought the teacher to require the pupils to learn the orthography from
the very beginning, that is, ought he to examine them in spelling
or let them write dictation? No--that is not generally the practice
according to the non-phonetical method either. First let them become
accustomed to seeing the spelling, and in the exercises just suggested
let them copy out of the book; later on they may be required to learn
how to spell the words in the first line of every lesson, and in the
course of a few months the pupils will be just as much at home in their
French and German orthography as any pedant could require--and much
more at home than they generally are now after a long time.[52]
Phonetical transcription ought by no means to be given up on beginning
with the orthography: it is too good an aid to be dispensed with at
this point. Not only ought whole pieces to be read, occasionally
at least, in phonetical transcription, but it ought to be used in
connection with all new words (thus especially in the glossary) in
order to prevent all guesswork. Thereby is also obtained another
important result at a later stage, namely, the teacher may be
_just as strict in requiring the pronunciation to be learned as the
meaning_, whereas without phonetical transcription he cannot expect
the pronunciation to be prepared at home. By steadily keeping up
their practice in transposing phonetical transcription into practical
pronunciation the pupils have something of value for their whole life,
for, when they no longer have a teacher to ask about the pronunciation
of a new word, they can obtain information about it themselves. That
which was only a few years ago a possibility reserved for the distant
future, namely, that all French and English dictionaries should give
the pronunciation according to rational principles, is now, as we know,
well under way to become a reality at any time.[53]
The use of phonetics and phonetical transcription in the teaching
of modern languages must be considered as one of the most important
advances in modern pedagogy, because it ensures both considerable
facilitation and an exceedingly large gain in exactness. But these
means must be employed immediately from the very beginning; just
as easy as it is to get a good pronunciation in this way, just as
difficult is it to root out the bad habits which may become inveterate
during a very short period of instruction according to a wrong or
antiquated method. Timotheus, an old well-known music-teacher, used
to demand double payment of all those pupils who had taken instruction
with other teachers before they came to him; the reason that he gave
was that he had much more trouble in teaching these pupils than those
who had not already acquired bad habits for him to break them of. Go ye
and do likewise, ye teachers of languages!
I shall add a few words on the use of the phonograph. The apparatus
has been very much perfected of late years and renders beautifully
most vowels and all the general features of stress, intonation, etc.
But the rendering of most consonants is still far from perfect; you
cannot always tell whether you hear a _p_ or an _f_, etc., and it
is impossible to rely on a phonographic record for minute shades of
_s_-sounds and the like. It is clear, too, that even if the apparatus
were nearer the ideal than it is now, it could not replace the teacher.
But in the hands of an able teacher I have no doubt that it will prove
a valuable help: it is patient and will repeat the same sentences
scores of times, if required, without tiring or changing a single sound
or intonation; you may also have different records of the same short
piece as pronounced by one man from Berlin, another man from Hanover, a
third from Munich, and a fourth from Vienna, which may be very useful
for comparisons, even if, as a matter of course, in your ordinary
teaching you stick to one particular standard of pronunciation--and in
various other ways phonographic records may be used to stimulate the
pupils. But everything they hear in this way should at the same time
be presented to them in phonetic writing--either in their readers or
on the blackboard. Perhaps, at some future day, the “telegraphone”
invented by my countryman V. Poulsen will supplant Edison’s phonograph
in this as well as in other respects.