Читать книгу Applying Phonetics - Murray J. Munro - Страница 20

Phonetics focuses on the sounds of language rather than on written forms. Moreover, phoneticians generally accept the primacy of speech over the written modality. Historically, it must have preceded writing because many world languages have a spoken form but no written one, yet we know of no natural language that can be written but not spoken. Another reason for assuming the primacy of speech is that children become highly proficient in oral language well before they are capable of reading and writing. In fact, many people never learn to read or write at all. No one seriously doubts that literacy is an important aspect of human culture, but it is a mistake to regard written language as more important or more “correct” than speech. That simply isn't true. Writing was invented by humans as a way of representing the spoken word on the printed page, and not the reverse. Nor is it true that printed texts are good models of how we should speak. It is true, however, that written style in many languages differs from spoken style. The formal usage in English academic textbooks is quite different from everyday spoken English, while English speech and writing are much more similar in other situations such as text messaging. For that reason, we cannot regard writing and speaking as different manifestations of the same thing. Sometimes they are very close; other times they are not.