OCR Text |
Show English language has many options ant, int? The way we Americans pronounce words it is hard to tgs distinguish between some of these endings and when you are spelling M them you cannot be absolutely C , what is correct. Iocal residents say American Is Fark, Spanish Fark, and St. Jargt l7 Newcomers would certainly wonder about the correct spelling of those words. People who write for a living, and t others, too, I'm sure, often look'ata '""t simple, common ordinary Woij r."11 and think it doesn't look like it is fj, spelled right. K In school they told us that to make a word plural you added "8" 'rf'i but then sometimes you added, "es". Or other times you might use ' "i". It is confusing. I am glad that teachers of the lower grades are so ' vfrtf understanding and overlook ' ir spelling errors in original f( compositions. A child can spell i phonetically in the early grades q and this is good enough until they m are able to unscramble all the rules and whys and wherefores of the "Li, American language. f' Most students in foreign n01) countries are required to learn at ' ...L least a second language to go with Km the native tongue. Most American '"r L students do not. Maybe it is because , L they spend their entire lives trying jt to learn American English and never quite accomplish it. 'f. caning By MARCKLIJV WALKER We received a news release from Senator Jake Gam the other day saying that he had finally convinced the Government Printing Office Style Manual, and the Congressional Record Style . Manual that we are Utahns and not Utahans. Now he needs to fjet Websters Dictionary to change its . listed preference. The latter spelling has been listed as "preferred" by the three above publications for many years. Many residents of the state disagreed with this spelling and preferred to be called Utahns. Well, I'll be the first to thank Sen. Garn for insisting on this change. Simplicity is always the best policy, anyway. I wonder who it was that came up with the spelling "Utahans" in the first place. That is kind of a funny looking word but then in the pioneer days a lot of words were spelled funny. (They still are.) I am always perplexed about what we here in our community are called. Are we Pleasant Groveans, Pleasant Grovians, Pleasant Grovites, Pleasant Grovers, or just exactly what? I'd like an answer to that if anyone has one. I guess Iindonites doesn't sound bad for those from Lindon. Is that the correct name for residents of lindon? Maybe no one actually speaks it anymore but it is the basis for all of the romance languages, hnglisn, French, Spanish, Portugese Italian, etc. When I was fresh out of high school I could pick up papers or books written in the romance languages and get the gist of what was being said because of my knowledge of Latin which provides the roots for many words. Because of lack of use I cannot always do that now. I wish I could. It still helps a lot. I always do the test in the Readers Digest on "How To Improve Your Word Power" and rarely get more than two wrong. The reason is because I usually recognize the root word and" recall its meaning. Besides, I read a lot and this helps to understand words, too. n The confusion from "gh", "f , "ph", etc., is enough to blow the mind of anyone learning English. Then you throw in endings like "tion", "sion", "cion", etc. and it is very bamboozling. Or what about endings of ent, No one ever said that English was easy. Actually, we don't speak English here anyway. We speak American. When my daughter went to England this past summer it took her quite a while to begin to understand the natives. The other day the kids and I were discussing the usage of "i" before "e" except after "c". When I was in school, many moons ago, they taught us that rule and in the next breath told us there were more exceptions to that rule than there were examples of it. It is true. Some say that Chinese and Japanese are difficult languages to learn. Many people who learn English as a second language say that it is much more difficult to learn because it is so inconsistent. I took Latin for two years in high school and enjoyed it very much. We had a very strict teacher but we all learned a great deal from her and she made Latin, a dead language we were told, to live. Latin is certainly not dead. |