Dyslexia

A Labour MP (Graham Stringer) has claimed dyslexia is a myth invented by education chiefs to cover up poor teaching. I don't for one minute believe that he is 100% right. Only 99%. There are, undeniably, children who are dyslexic. Equally undeniably (except that it is always denied) there are children who are poor readers who get the "I'm dyslexic" badge and milk the system for all it's worth. Stringer claims that our "dyslexia industry" has been set up to ameliorate the deficiencies within the education system. It is interesting that the incidence of dyslexia fluctuates so wildly from nation to nation and language to language. One might imagine that those languages that use the common Roman alphabet that you are reading here (e.g. German, French, English, Italian...) might have similar dyslexic populations (by percentage). They don't. One might assume that nations speaking the same language might have a similar dyslexia rates. They don't. Clearly, Stringer has a point. If we are (and we are) producing many more dyslexics than same-language or similar-language nations, we are doing something wrong.

PIE and DNA

I have been reading a lot recently about the derivation of European languages and trying to tie in the whole idea of a "proto-language" with the fairly well-established findings of Prof Bryan Sykes on our genetic links. The PIE (proto-Indo-European) camp has it that our language (and that of just about everybody from Bantry Bay to Bangladesh) stems from a common source. There have been some excellent attempts to reconstruct PIE from the common threads of many words and "a trained linguist" can see the commonality immediately (they say).
The genetic story is very different. PIE - in mitochondrial-DNA terms - must have come from the "Jasmine" clan that moved out of Syria into Europe and India, bringing their farming techniques with them. Europe was, by the time the "Jasmines" arrived, populated (albeit sparsely) with "Ursulas", "Xenias", "Helenas", "Taras", "Katrines" and "Veldas". These were all hunter-gatherer people and, although they might have absorbed some of the "Jasmine" words (especially farming-related), I can see no reason why they would take a language hook, line and sinker when they will have had their own, possibly interrelated, and quite ancient languages.
I personally think the PIE people might, in fact, be talking "bhel-oks" as the "Jasmines" might say.

Ebay worries me...

I love eBay. The whole "will it sell?", "will I win it?" thing. Great. Better than a brisk walk.

But I am worried.

Have you read the descriptions of the goods on eBay? Oh my God! Who writes these things? Semi-literate children? An infinite number of monkeys on typewriters? Apparently not; Joe Public writes them.

Joe has, it seems, never been able to spell, punctuation is a completely lost art and the whole act of creating a sentence seems to have skipped by. We are ultimately faced with a melange of text-speak, incorrect spelling and complete disregard for our beautiful language.

Does it matter?

Of course it matters! We communicate with others, in the absence of aural information, by written words. The spelling of a word is not optional in any sense. Words should be spelled correctly. This is one of those occasions when it is just as easy to get it right.

I know our language is changing. In my own lifetime there have been thousands of additions to English. Great. All for it. But when words are mangled and battered out of all recognition, we are doing something wrong. English is a superb language. We have traces of many other languages within ours. All the Germanic languages, the Romance languages, languages from the former British Empire - they are all there. English is a genuine polyglot. We should take more care of the amazing communication device that is English.

I blame the teachers. Oh damn; I am a teacher.