Marty

For reasons unknown, I tend to be verbose in posts, but terse in e-mail. As for letters, it has probably been a few years since I last wrote a 'real' one.

I believe that the fact of there being a significant difference between the written and spoken languages (in any language) can be referred to by a single word. I don't think it's 'diglossia', but maybe something similar. Anybody here have any ideas about it?

For what it's worth, my nominal mother tongue, Malayalam, suffers from this to an even greater extent than English. Being able to speak the language, and knowing the alphabet, is not enough to allow you to read or write in it, because there are formal distinctions between the way words sound when spoken, and the way in which they are represented when written. This is despite the fact that Malayalam is basically a phonetic language. In passing, most Indian languages are phonetic (or at least, much more so than English), but most, like Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali and others, do not suffer from this problem. Malayalam, and maybe her parent tongue Tamil, might be unique amongst the major Indian languages in this regard.

cheer

the sunshine warrior