Nick asks:
> How come other people can standardize their spellings and we can't
> standardize ours.
>
>
>
> Damn!
Well, in the first place, the case of actual Spanish-as-she-is-spoke, including
all its
dialectal differences, isn't quite as clean as the official Castilian standard
that Frank has
cited. For instance, Galician is (I am assured) mutually intelligible with
Portuguese
(specifically, the dialect of Portuguese spoken in the nearby parts of
Portugal), and
Portuguese is famous for the difficulty of decoding the written language into
(any of the many
and various dialects of) the spoken language.
In the second place, two desiderata are incompatible. It is evidently
desirable to many,
including you, Nick, to be able to have a written language that encodes the
spoken language in
a faithful manner. But it is also desirable to many (including, I hope, you)
to be able to
read texts written in one's language in earlier periods, when the pronunciation
is *very*
likely to have been (often, *very*) different. In one European country (I
forget which one;
it was either the Netherlands or one of the continental Scandinavian countries)
a fairly
recent spelling reform, designed to fulfil the first desideratum, reportedly
made texts from
even a hundred years ago totally unreadable (in their original form) by modern
schoolchildren.
We can at least recognize Shakespeare--and certainly Dickens!--as writing in
something like
our English, even if many of his rhymes and jokes don't work for us. ("Busy as
a bee" was a
better joke when "busy" was pronounced as we'd pronounce "buzzy".)
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