Wednesday, January 19, 2005
(7:08 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Epistemological problem
I have thought about this story many times, but only upon thinking to tell it tonight did it occur to me that it may not be true. I distinctly remember a conversation in my first grade classroom, when we were learning how to read using phonics. The topic was the combination wh, which as we all know is pronounced with a simple w sound in most dialects of English. Being the children that we were, we wanted the rules to apply rigorously in every situation, and being the grade school teacher that she was (unfamiliar with the real foundations of the topic at hand, merely able to teach the rudiments), our instructor finally told us that there was just a hint of an h sound before the w, so that whale was actually pronounced hwale. (This is more effective when the story is told verbally.)On the face of it, this story is ridiculous. Our teacher told us something that clearly wasn't true, acting as a rank apologist for the (non-phonetic) English spelling system. Thus, it occurs to me that maybe this didn't happen. Maybe my agile first-grade mind, unsatisfied with the superfluous h, first mentally constructed a rule whereby it was barely pronounced, then upon realizing that the h would not really sound if it was pronounced after the w, I constructed a further fictional rule whereby it would be pronounced before the w, serving my mental purpose of making all the letters sound, while subverting my attempt to render the spelling system of English coherent phonetically. And I now remember this as clearly as if it had actually happened -- perhaps more clearly.
So what do you think? Did my teacher really say this, or did I hallucinate it on the day we were learning about the letter w?
