Lee, I just want to be able to teach my grandchildren to write and spell without having to apologize every third sentence for the blatant irrationality of the language they are learning.
N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2014 6:57 PM To: Nick Thompson; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Spelling of Spanish Surnames 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".) ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
