[lg policy] Rebelling Against Spain, This Time With Words: The Royal Spanish Academy is lopping two letters off the Spanish alphabet, reducing it to 27.

[Harold Schiffman]

Rebelling Against Spain, This Time With Words
By ELISABETH MALKIN
MEXICO CITY — The Royal Spanish Academy is lopping two letters off the
Spanish alphabet, reducing it to 27.

Out go “ch” and “ll,” along with lots of annoying accents and hyphens.

The simplified spelling from the academy, a musty Madrid institution
that is the chief arbiter of all things grammatical, should be welcome
news to the world’s 450 million Spanish-speakers, not to mention
anybody struggling to learn the language. But no. Everyone, it seems,
has a bone to pick with the academy — starting with President Hugo
Chávez of Venezuela.  If the academy no longer considers “ch” a
separate letter, Mr. Chávez chortled to his cabinet, then he would
henceforth be known simply as “Ávez.” (In fact, his name will stay the
same, though his place in the alphabetic order will change, because
“ch” used to be the letter after “c.”)

An editorial in the Mexican daily El Universal declared the new rules
to be an affront to the national identity: “Spelling is not just an
imposition; it serves to maintain a minimum of coherence and sense to
what is written and said. Can this be dictated from a conference room
abroad? A country that is proudly independent would not accept this.”
The editorial went on to ask, “Would the United States accept dictates
from England over the use of English?”  They are just as upset on the
European side of the Atlantic. Comments have poured forth on the Web —
1,450 of them as of Thursday night — after the first article on the
changes appeared in the Spanish newspaper El País at the beginning of
the month. The word “absurdo” pops up a lot.

“It’s kind of a magic realist moment. They decide that 2 of 29 letters
will disappear,” said Ilan Stavans, a Mexican who is a professor of
Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College. “All the
dictionaries will have to be remade, which is good for selling the
Royal Academy’s dictionary, which they keep producing as though it’s
the Bible.”  Professor Stavans compared it to the authority that
English-speakers turn to, the Oxford English Dictionary, which
stresses common usage rather than imposing it from above.

The Spanish academy needed 800 pages to explain the new simplified
rules. Among other changes: letters with different names in different
countries get just one name (which is rather like telling Americans
that the last letter of the alphabet should be called “zed”). Iraq
becomes Irak and quásar is now written as cuásar.

The spelling rules will go on sale by Christmas in Spain. Latin
Americans will have to wait a bit longer.

There have long been complaints about Spanish spelling. At the first
international congress of the Spanish language in Zacatecas, Mexico,
in 1997, the Colombian writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel García
Márquez declared, “Let’s retire spelling, the terror of all beings
from the cradle.” But he admitted that his pleas were little more than
“bottles flung to the sea in the hope that they would one day come to
the god of all words.”

That god remaining silent, the Royal Spanish Academy has been filling
the void since it was founded in 1713. “They have an oracular way of
presenting things, like Moses coming down from Mount Sinai,” Professor
Stavans said.

“In my mind, it’s a relic of the 18th century,” he added. “We have to
wait for Spain to say how we speak.”

For those who live and breathe Spanish, the academy’s priorities seem
a little off. “We are a language in debate,” said the Mexican writer
Paco Ignacio Taibo II. “Unfortunately, the academy isn’t ahead of the
debate, it’s behind.”

To its credit, the academy takes pains to emphasize that it works
collaboratively with its associated academies in 21 other
Spanish-speaking countries, including in the United States. Early
meetings on the new spelling rules were held in Chile; the text was
completed this month in Spain; and it will be ratified by the academy
and its sister branches at the Guadalajara Book Fair in Mexico on
Sunday.

In an e-mail, Juan Villoro, a Mexican writer living in Barcelona, was
philosophical about one change that seemed to strike at the core of
Spanish speakers’ poetic souls on both sides of the Atlantic. Under
the old rules, the word “solo” takes an accent when it means “only”
and has no accent when it means “alone.”

The academy rubbed out the accent, arguing that the meaning would be
clear from the context. “Sometimes, the law has nothing to do with
justice,” Mr. Villoro wrote.

Luis Fernando Lara, a scholar at the Colegio de México who coordinates
the preparation of a Spanish dictionary used in Mexico, waved off the
academy’s new rules: “We’re free in this world not to listen to them.”

As for the changes in the names of letters, Mr. Lara resorted to a
line from a classic American song to describe the spat:

“I like tomato, you like tomahto,” he said.

Although he did not say it, the title of that tune, written by George
and Ira Gershwin, was understood:

“Let’s call the whole thing off.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/26/world/europe/26spanish.html?_r=1&sq=rebelling
against spain&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print

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