Whereas in the Middle Ages, we had a big vowel shift in English,
so in the 1300s and the 1600s vowels changed their sound.
So that the original [SOUND] sound in this word actually became shorter,
to sound more like how we say it now, book.
Whereas, so the oral language changed, but the written language has stayed the same.
And so the great vowel shift is quite a dramatic example, but
languages are always slightly shifting.
And so this is why languages like English are much less regular than
a newer language.
So, for example, Finish has only had a written form for
relatively a much shorter time.
And so the sound letter relationships in Finnish still remain much more consistent.
And so you might hear a term transparency to represent this relationship,
so Finnish is a very transparent language.
The letter sound correspondences are nice and predictable.
Whereas English, where there's been both these vowel shifts, there's
been the introduction of words from other languages and many other shifts,
this means that it's actually a lot less transparent and less regular.
So, this actually has big implications for children learning to read.
Because, as you might guess, it's actually a harder task when
the letter sound correspondences or the rules are not so consistent.
And so there is actually now evidence, there was a study that
looked at children learning to read across many European countries.
And this study actually found that children learning English,
although having similar intensity of instruction,
were actually learning the basic word recognition skills.
It was taking them longer than in more transparent languages, such as Finnish or
Greek, and this was not a result of inferior teaching or anything like that.
It's really felt that teaching techniques aside,
there's just more to learn with a language like English.
So this can be why we actually see reading difficulties can be more manifest
because actually it's easier to struggle with English, we could say.