Directions

x

A Short History Of Phonics and Languages

Man has not always had

languages the way he does

today. A language is usually

started by someone making

up names for the things

around him. The way it works

is that the person might point

at their food and say “kufa”.

The others around him copy

that sound and now they have a

new word. The left and right arrows can be used to move through this presentation.

Directions

x

If they did this with enough sounds and told enough people, they would have the start of a language. There are many different

languages on earth.

The first written languages were just pictures of the things. We call these hieroglyphs. The problem with this type of written language is that you have to be an artist to write it. It is also very slow.

One day, someone got a good idea. Why not write the words down so he can communicate with others that are not right there or so that he can

remember his ideas later.

The left and right arrows can be used to move through this presentation.

Directions

x

Later languages such as Chinese and Japanese began to use simplified pictures that did not always look like the thing. But they were faster and easier to draw. You could also communicate more complex ideas.

This was better but there is still a problem with this type of language. If you realize that a children’s dictionary has over 30,000 words, you will see that you would have to memorize 1000’s of pictures to be able to read and write this type of language. These pictures do not tell you how to say the word and they do not even look like the thing they represent like the earlier languages. This type of language requires a great memory and lots of practice to learn to read and write.

The left and right arrows can be used to move through this presentation.

Directions

x

Later, about 3500 years ago, someone had another idea. They noticed that there were only 25 (or so) sounds in their language. Why not make a picture for the sounds instead of the whole

word.

They would say a word and listen to each sound. For each sound, they would make up a picture. Say the word “cat”. Listen to each sound. The first sound, we write with a “c”. The second, we write with an “a”. The third, we write with a “t”.

The left and right arrows can be used to move through this presentation.

Directions

x

They did this for all of their words and made a picture for each sound. The pictures we call letters and all of the letters together we call an alphabet. The way it works is that you memorize the sounds of each of the pictures. Then to spell a new word you just listen to each sound in the word and write the letter that makes this sound. It is like a puzzle.

To read, you just look at each letter and say the sounds. You then blend them together. Once you get good at this, you can read any word. This is the way that phonetic languages are supposed to work. However, there is a problem. English is a little tougher...

The left and right arrows can be used to move through this presentation.

Directions

x

The problem is that there are 44+ sounds in our language and only 26 letters!!!

In order to cover all of these sounds, they had to do a couple of things. The first was to make one letter make more than one sound, such as the “c” in “cat” and the “c” in “cent”.

This would be confusing enough, but to write the other sounds we do something else:

The letter “t” makes one sound. The letter “h” makes another sound. But when we put them together they make a whole new sound.

So in English, we have to learn not only the sounds of the letters but we also have to learn the sounds of these letter combinations.

The left and right arrows can be used to move through this presentation.