Grammar sins that make you look poorly educated

My Standard-Six English teacher (name withheld) was a very practical man, just like the Kisii University student who told me to stop bothering Kenyan English language speakers about matters of pronunciation.

My teacher’s idea was that it didn’t really matter how we (my classmates and I) pronounced English words so long as we knew how to spell them correctly.

“When you write ‘sould’ (should),” he would tell us, “make sure that you place the letter ‘h’ immediately after ‘s’.” Equipped with that piece of wisdom, we always spelled the word ‘should’ correctly in spite of our deviant pronunciation habits.

I really respect such practical people, but my Standard Seven English teacher, Mr  Sospeter Ndhune, a proud alumnus of the then Kabianga Teachers’ Training College, who also happened to be the headmaster of our school, could not stomach the idea that we could leave his school, Kaswanga DEB (District Education Board) Primary and Intermediate School, in those days the pride of  Rusinga Island, and proceed to a secondary school still saying things like ‘sould’ (should), ‘sall’ (shall), ‘fis’ (fish), and many more of such oddities, testimonies of the freedom of expression that we had enjoyed before our encounter with the headmaster in the capacity of a class teacher.

Mr Ndhune’s first line of action was to put us through the ordeal of reciting his most popular tongue-twister: “She sells sea shells at the sea shore.”

GROWING PROBLEM

The stakes were high for us. Apart from the imminent danger of missing lunch if we couldn’t master the tongue-twister, there was the nastier option of having to deal with Mr Ndhune’s other twister, a brownish plant called ‘omen’ in Dholuo, that grew by twisting up the stem and branches of a bigger plant, usually a euphorbia tree in the neighbourhood of our school. 

His philosophy of education was that, if a lesson could not be drilled into pupils’ heads through their ears, it had to be drilled in through their back sides, which is where ‘omen’ came in handy for Mr Ndhune during his pronunciation drills.

I am aware of the controversies surrounding Mr Ndhune’s approach to the teaching not only of the English language, but also of other subjects, especially mathematics, which usually created more opportunity for the use of ‘omen’.

The only thing I am sure of is that it worked in our situation.

That is why I think of Mr Ndhune when I see people starting their letters by writing things such as ‘Am writing to find out from you...,’ without realising that ‘am’ is a verb, a form of the verb ‘to be’, which means that such a sentence does not have a subject preceding the verb. The story of this deviant expression is quite interesting to me.

Somewhere in our national history, Kenyans started pronouncing ‘I’m’, the short form of ‘I am’, comparable to ‘you’re’, ‘he’s’, ‘we’re  et cetera, as ‘am’.

It did not take a long time before expressions like ‘I’m writing’ became ‘Am writing’ because of this mix-up in pronunciation. In a sense, it was an understandable development arising from the fact that similar distinctions in pairs such as ‘let/late’, ‘cot/coat’, ‘pepper/paper’ et cetera were fast disappearing in the spoken English of most Kenyans. 

When the problem of writing ‘Am’ instead of ‘I’m’ started appearing in our writing, I thought it was a passing fad until I received a letter from the Ministry of Education, approximately five years ago, in which a senior officer started his letter to me with the words, ‘Am writing to request you…’

I discussed it with some of my speech students and expressed the hope that the problem would disappear. As we all know today, it did not disappear. More and more people picked it up and today, it looks like the normal practice in our written, let alone spoken, English.

By the look of things, the problem is getting bigger and bigger. By some kind of analogy, writers have begun using expressions such as ‘would like’, ‘had asked’ et cetera as short forms instead of  ‘I would like’, ‘I had asked’  and other similar expressions whose conventional short forms, for example, ‘I’d like’, ‘I’d asked’ et cetera, are fast disappearing in our speech and writing.

WRONG IMPRESSION

Those, like the Kisii University student, who believe that pronunciation is not important, should at least have the compromising attitude of my Standard Six teacher and insist on making a clear distinction between speech and writing.

The point is that speech is supported by many contextual features. Thus, for example, when students come out of an examination room marvelling at the difficult ‘pepper’, we understand that they are talking about a ‘paper’ because it is unlikely that they would have dealt with ‘pepper’ in an examination room.

Unfortunately, writing reduces the number of contextual features that guide receivers of our written messages.

Moreover, the delayed response-time in writing and the usual distance between the writer and the reader do not allow us to quickly seek clarification by asking ‘What do you mean?’ as we often do in oral communication.

The support we get from context in speech or writing deals with only one problem in our communication, that of intelligibility, i.e. how well we are understood by our listeners or readers.

That leaves out the question of acceptability, that is, the impression we make in the mind of our listener or reader in terms of whether or not we are good enough for them to take seriously.

When our speech or writing has glaring deviant forms, it passes a negative unspoken message about us even if our intended message has been received.

The reader or listener may get the impression that we are poorly educated, not properly socialised, and/or culturally unexposed.

All such considerations may not prevent us from being understood, but they reduce our acceptability in the eyes of the listener or reader, with the consequence that the listener or reader may reject what we have said because of their negative attitude towards us.

No doubt such negative attitudes affect our opportunities in life.

This means that the way we speak or write may reduce or increase our chances of success in our pursuits in life whether such pursuits do or do not have a direct relationship with language.

KENYAN ENGLISH

As the American essayist Norman Cousins famously said: “The first purpose of education is to enable a person to speak clearly and confidently.”

Speaking clearly and confidently requires a good command of the various components of a language, including its vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. Those who believe that writing is more important than speech, in whatever interpretation of that claim, must remember that weaknesses in speech get reflected in our writing.

Thus, for example, Kenyans who write such incorrect expressions as “This issues...,”  “Guests took their sits,” and “They resulted to a life of little luxury” do so because in their speech they no longer make the difference between ‘this’ and ‘these’, ‘sit’ and ‘seat’, and ‘result’ and ‘resort’.

Over the last 10 years, I have been able to establish year after year with diagnostic tests for beginners in my speech classes that a significant number of new entrants to our university programmes  neither make nor hear (in other people’s speech) the vowel distinctions in word-pairs such as ‘bit/beat’, ‘pen/pain’, ‘rod/road’, ‘pull/pool’, and ‘law/low’.

If this becomes a major defining characteristic of Kenyan English, then we must prepare ourselves for the shock of being asked to speak slowly when we operate on international platforms as we heard again and again in some of the exchanges that took place when our lawyers participated in the ICC proceedings.

Having too many homophones (words that sound alike) in your speech is like having too many bumps on your road. You cannot drive at a comfortable speed.