Lukashenka stages New attacks on our language!

[Yoshimasa Tsuji]

Hello,
Alina Israeli has written
  Germany just underwent a spelling change and the High Court just upheld it
  against the protest of the parents of Bavaria (or something like that, I am
  not a lawyer). What would happen in Germany if a publication would start or
  continue using a system which is no longer considered a norm? What does the
  law say about it?

  History has shown that it is best not to break any laws while being
  dissident in a repressive society. I compare it with Soviet dissidents who
  were prosecuted for drug use. Of course they were singled out because of
  being dissidents. But how can one defend the drug use if it is illegal?

It is a very sad political fact that some governments impose "the correct
language" on their people. The need that official government documents be
coded in a well defined language is quite different from its extension that
citizens are forbidden to use other codings. Post-war Japan saw a
major spelling change and a substantial discouragement of ideographic
symbols and I am of the opinion that the command of the Japanese language
in general is at a miserable standard. The root of the problem is, in my
view, the lack of understanding that the writing system (simple, short,
phonetic system would be convenient) and the reading system (redundant,
oppositional, complicated, sometimes historical/etymological system
will help one to understand readily) are diagonally opposed entities.

Russia changed her spelling system in November 1918 as people
had ceased to write hard signs at the end of words and had difficulty
to guess whether to write <jat'> or <e>. It is absurd to force uneducated
people to write properly, but it is quite another to force educated people to
throw away the proper way of spelling/punctuation/hyphenation. The traditional
spelling was somewhat difficult to master, but was not dificult to read
at all. Moreover, it was far easier to understand as it was full of
oppositionals ("ee, eja", "oni, onje", "ljesa, les", &c.)
  It appears to be that they have thrown away the mother types ("litery")
of "i", "jat'" and hard signs during the ninety twenties ("thita" was
already hard to find -- many typewriters didn't have it right from the
beginning --, izhica was primarily used for a substitute of Roman numerical
five, now replaced by a Y-like U). But that was not enough to force
the "correct spelling". As a matter of fact, we have seen Orthografichekij
Slavar' published almost every year with small revisions, but we also
know that most of the publishers and printing shops paid little attention
to the revised, "most correct" spellings. People were taught that naturalized
words did not have repetitive consonants --"ofis" instead of "offis"-- but
why "Rossija" had two esses no one could possibly answer (because she was
great?). Russia had issued many, many laws regulating citizen's life, but
being "proizvol'noe" too much,
not all the laws were observed in the same effectiveness. When the Academy
of Sciences published two versions of Russian dictionaries (the seventeen
volume thing and the four volume thing, I remember), the copies first
printed in the same year did have different spellings/punctuation/hyphenation!
The matter was more serious when one printing shop was in Leningrad and
another was in Moscow. But we all know that no one was punished for violating
the law. (*endnote)

It is wrong to assume that linguists are interested only in official
languages enforced by Staatsgewalt(law, in English?) Accent researchers
and dialectologists are abundant, minority language researchers are
"too many" (we may have more Ainu scholars than Ainophones by now).
Censor system may force publications to be coded in an official
language, but no one can force people to speak/write "properly".
Languages/accents/dialects are easy to corrupt, but are hard to die.

Emigre publications went on using traditional coding as they lived
outside the domain of the evils. It is a pleasant memory of mine to
have met Father Nadson in London years ago and to be shown the Bible
DTP'ed in Belarusan by his Macintosh.

Alina, I think, we are not in a position to advise others whether
they ought to obey the law or not. The fact that some dissidents
ended in a political failure by breaking a law means nothing.
Some people would prefer to act as dissidents rather than claim to
be one behaving as conformists. All those depend on the political
judgement of everyone, not mine nor yours. And mind you, the end result
may not always justify the means.

Cheers,
Tsuji

------
*endnote
I may have mentioned this already, but an intersting story of GOST:
The GOST says they have ratified ISO and thus Russians are supposed to
use ISO-8259-9 (something like that, if you wish to be accurate) for
digital communication. I asked the "dezhurnaja" of the reference counter,
will one be punished by not observing GOST?, & was taught, "yes,
certainly". & I inquired, "This data base of GOST is coded in Microsoft's
private encoding, neither in GOST nor its previous version called KOI.
Will the user of this data base be punished?" I am afraid I sounded like
a nasty bureaucrat of Czarist era as she obviously took me for being unserious.
  Japan is not exception either: a recent JIS (Japan Industrial Standard)
defined some typographic rules, but the official document that printed
those rules ignored all this completely!! ha-hah-hah.