Thought of the Day 06.19.09

Listening to my wife teach Spencer how to read this morning, I was moved with great compassion for him, given the tremendous complexity of English. Our language is hard enough to speak properly, and then just when you’ve almost got that mastered, we show you how much harder it is to write!

Of course, you start by learning certain rules of spelling and pronunciation. But even here, things aren’t simple. Each of the vowels and many consonants have several possible sounds. And of course, when you start combining letters, everything sort of goes haywire. C at the beginning of a word sounds like K, but in the middle sounds like S, unless it’s with a K, in which case it seems to do nothing at all. Each of the vowels has several possible sounds.

Then, you learn that different sounds might have the same spelling and that the same sound might have different spellings. So even if you master all the rules, there are still loads of exceptions: cases where you just have to know the answer and there simply isn’t any explanation in terms of other rules. Cite sounds like sight, and Decalogue should have been spelled Dessalog.

And listening to all of this made me realize how similar English and God’s Will are, and how much compassion we should have on people who are struggling to learn either of them.