New Spelling System in Spanish

[Wilson Gray]

On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 1:56 PM, Federico Escobar
<federicoescobarcordoba at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Federico Escobar <federicoescobarcordoba at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â New Spelling System in Spanish
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> If anyone is interested in tracking how speakers react to massive changes in
> the rules that are understood to govern normative language, then I would
> eagerly suggest following up on what's happening with Spanish these days.
>
>
>
> There are 22 Spanish-language Academies, one per Spanish-speaking country
> --including the US and the Philippines--, and all of them tend to huddle
> around the Royal Academy in Spain. These Academies are putting together a "New
> Orthography", which has proposed to overhaul many aspects of the spelling
> rules used in Spanish. Some letters will officially change their names, some
> accent marks will officially be dropped, some traditional spellings will
> officially be changed.
>
>
>
> Of course, I've emphasized the "official" part in this process because many
> people are resisting these changes fiercely, in a Roe v. Wade climate that
> turns the decisions taken by the Academies into something akin to a Supreme
> Court ruling. And that is precisely what has been very interesting. Across
> the board, newspapers reporting on the changes rank that story as their most
> read item. People have written scores of angry comments on the Internet,
> arguing, say, that they're not prepared to give in to the Academies and
> rename letters they've always called by another name. (Some have timidly
> said they'll just have to learn the new names in order to forge a
> transnational language.) I've been getting incensed emails from people who
> are normally oblivious to anything language-related. And so on.
>
>
>
> Some people have suggested these are all publicity stunts used by the
> Academies to promote the "New Orthography", which of course people are going
> to flock to the stores to buy just in time for Christmas. In case someone is
> interested, here is one of the widely circulated stories, published by the
> most renowned newspaper of the Spanish-speaking world:
>
>
> http://www.elpais.com/articulo/cultura/i/griega/llamara/ye/elpepucul/20101105elpepucul_9/Tes
>
>
>
> F.
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

To quote from a letter to the editor:

"Ya llego a pensar que detrás de todo esto no esten los oscuros
intereses de Microsoft y sus espantosos correctores ortograficos."

--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org