SPELLING / NATIONAL CULTURES
Could spelling be the reason English speakers excel in science, Italians in music, and Russians — in math?
As an immigrant in an English-speaking country, I’ve always found the idea of a spelling bee a bit odd.
I gradually realized that part of why spelling bees are such a feature of the English language is because English orthography is such a mess. It takes a genius to spell everything correctly all the time.
Other languages — like Italian, or Serbo-Croatian — have so-called transparent orthographies: words are spelled like they sound, and sound like they are spelled.
English has an opaque orthography: you can’t predict how a spoken word is spelled, and how a written word is pronounced. Many foreigners to the English language — myself included — initially pronounce the word sew as “sue”, because they have only seen it written down, and assume it is pronounced like “new” or “dew”. And what foreigner can spell Worcestershire sauce, a phrase they likely easily spell in their own language?
In one fascinating study, English and Italian speakers were compared in how their brains handled pronouncing familiar and unfamiliar words.
The study used two-syllable words, English and Italian, and “non-words”, which were derived from either English or Italian words, but rendered meaningless — for example, cagin and marnet for English (from cabin and market), and ponda and moco for Italian (from ponte and moto).
Researchers measured how long it took English and Italian speakers to think about pronouncing various words, and what parts of their brain were activated. It’s basically the reverse of a spelling bee.
Predictably, both Italian and English speakers took longer to think before pronouncing the unfamiliar “non-words” than real words. But interestingly, for English speakers, there was no difference from which language the non-words were derived — they were slow either way. For Italians, there was a big advantage if the non-words were derived from Italian — they pronounced them almost as fast as real Italian words.
Most strikingly, Italian and English speakers showed different patterns of brain activation. In Italians, native words primarily engaged sound processing. In English speakers, native words engaged deeper, semantic and contextual processing.
When Italian speakers were shown non-words, their brain activation was strongest in regions known to handle sound-to-letter mapping. This is probably why non-words derived from Italian were easier to pronounce.
When English speakers were shown non-words, their brains appeared to take a different route, attempting to resolve ambiguity using more abstract, word-level routes. They were looking not to match letters to sounds, but find similar words that could give them a clue to pronunciation.
So clearly, different languages engage different brain regions while connecting spoken and written words.
This suggests a tempting speculation: the language which we learn to spell as children might determine, in part, who we are. If an opaque language requires handling abstract patterns, and a shallow language requires handling sound, it makes sense that learning one or another would make you better at different things.
Is this why we know more English scientists than composers, and more Italian composers than scientists?
It is very difficult to prove something like this: there’s no way to know whether a cultural difference, even if it is real, comes from spelling, or from some other aspect of English and Italian culture.
But the thought is titillating. Are there other cases when spelling correlates with a national stereotype?
Enter my native Russian language.
Russian, as it turns out, is pretty unique. Here’s a quote from a University of Turku study of Russian orthography:
Russian has a rather elegant orthographic system: on the one hand, quite complex and hierarchical, and on the other hand, organised around a dominant principle and therefore, sufficiently regular and predictable, even though the number of exceptions is high.
When I first read this, I laughed out loud. Complex, hierarchical, and organized around a dominant principle? Regular and predictable, but with a large number of exceptions? This is Russia, man!
It gets even better. The whole difficulty of spelling Russian words is because of how prominent the central stress is. Each word has one ultra-prominent vowel, and the rest is blurred — both vowels and consonants. Because of that, Russian is very mumblable, aside from these stabs of loud vowels strictly once per word regardless of length — that’s how you can imitate a Russian accent.
The existence of strongly centred stress in Russian, where the stressed syllable gains prominence at the expense of unstressed ones, results in the division of disyllabic and multisyllabic Russian words into two perceptual parts, the prestressed-stressed, and the poststressed, where sounds are sometimes totally blurred.
So, because every Russian word has this czar-stress in the middle, everything else falls in line in relationship to this stress.
However, in most cases, you can test the spelling by reconfiguring the word in such a way so as to put the stress onto the ambiguous part. For example, in the word solioniy, “salty”, the stress is on the second “o” and so the first one is mumbled — could be “o”, could be “a”. But you can test the spelling by thinking of the word sol, “salt”, which is unambiguous.
This is what Russians are trained to do in elementary school. We are taught to deconstruct words into constituent parts, recombine them in different ways, and derive them from one another in order to figure out how they are spelled. As far as I know, nothing like that is taught in American or Italian schools.
This “morphological” instruction teaches you that language has an underlying logic to it, a system of rules that govern how it works, and that connects orthography, grammar, and semantics. I actually remember a flowchart with all those components hanging prominently in our elementary school classroom — I couldn’t wait to find out what “semantics” was, but that was only revealed later, in fifth grade.
I would say that Russians take this this rationalization of language to an extreme. Russians tend to forget that language is a living system that evolves on its own and sometimes doesn’t make sense. To a Russian, there are correct ways to say and spell words, and incorrect ways.
I shock my US friends when I say that St. Petersburg, my hometown, would put up billboards reminding people of the correct ways to pronounce some difficult words. This is as unimaginable in America as a spelling bee is in Russia.
Russian orthography, in other words, is not only rule-based but extremely normative — which, again, is how Russia works, on many levels.
It is part of the reason why living in America feels so liberating to me — the flexibility of rules, the variations in spelling seem an integral part of the general individualist, laissez-faire approach to life so fundamental to American culture and so alien to a Russian mind.
Could our rule-based, math-like spelling system be why Russians tend to excel at math, physics, coding? I can’t say for sure, and it would be almost impossible to definitively prove a connection. But the parallels between how we spell and how we think seem too strong to ignore.
What seems safe to say is that teaching our kids to spell is an important part of a national culture. Outsourcing spelling ability to spellcheck would rob us of an essential element of ourselves.
Great essay!
When learning Georgian, I was amazed with that rare quality (called "transparent orthography" as I now realized). The alphabet is entirely different from English or Russian. But once you know the letters and how they sound, you can properly pronounce any written word and spell almost anything you hear. Another surprise is that Georgian words don't have any "canonical" stress as far as I understand. The stress is fluid and may depend on the context, e.g. shifted to the end of the word in a question sentence. I mean, each word may have some kind of customary stress, but you won't find anything even close to the Russian "Словарь ударений" here. Haven't spent much time in Georgia to notice any links between those observations and how Georgians think. But I guess I will keep an eye on that!