Hola a todos.
Les copio abajo un articulo aparecido en THE ECONOMIST de la semana pasada
sobre la ortografia de la lengua inglesa. Varias cosas me llaman la atencion y
por eso envio este mensaje:
1. La ortografia del inglés sufre en muchos casos de los mismos males que la
francesa: una latinizacion forzada por etimologias que muchas existian en
la mente fantasiosa de algunos. El ejemplo de "debt" en el que la "b" no se
pronuncia es similar al caso del francés "sept" en el que la "p" tampoco se
pronuncia. EN ambos casos, la inclusion de esta letras silenciosas en el
deletreo de tales palabras fue un deliberado intento por emparentarlas con
palabras latinas (debitus, septum). El caso de "six" (seis) en francés es
significativo: la "x" se pronuncia como "s" (lo que la acerca mas al castellano
"seis" que al supuesto origen latino "sex").
2. La reticencia de las persona a modificar la ortografia, lo que me hace
pensar que las lenguas escritas (aunque en algun momento puedan dejar de
hablarse) son mucho mas resistentes en el tiempo.
Tiene alguien mas detalles sobre el "Great Vowel Shift" de los siglos XV y
XVIque menciona el articulo?
Saludos.
English spelling
You write potato, I write ghoughpteighbteau
Aug 14th 2008
>From The Economist print edition
The rules need updating, not scrapping
GHOTI and tchoghs may not immediately strike readers as staples of the British
diet; and even those most enamoured of written English’s idiosyncrasies may
wince at this tendentious rendering of “fish and chips”. Yet the spelling,
easily derived from other words*, highlights the shortcomings of English
orthography. This has long bamboozled foreigners and natives alike, and may
underlie the national test results released on August 12th which revealed that
almost a third of English 14-year-olds cannot read properly.
One solution, suggested recently by Ken Smith of the Buckinghamshire New
University, is to accept the most common misspellings as variants rather than
correct them. Mr Smith is too tolerant, but he is right that something needs to
change. Due partly to its mixed Germanic and Latin origins, English spelling is
strikingly inconsistent.
Three things have exacerbated this confusion. The Great Vowel Shift in the 15th
and 16th centuries altered the pronunciation of many words but left their
spelling unchanged; and as Masha Bell, an independent literacy researcher,
notes, the 15th-century advent of printing presses initially staffed by
non-English speakers helped to magnify the muddle. Second, misguided attempts
to align English spelling with (often imagined) Latin roots (debt and debitum;
island and insula) led to the introduction of superfluous “silent” letters.
Third, despite interest in spelling among figures as diverse as Benjamin
Franklin, Prince Philip and the Mormons, English has never, unlike Spanish,
Italian and French, had a central regulatory authority capable of overseeing
standardisation.
Yet as various countries have found, identifying a problem and solving it are
different matters: spelling arouses surprising passions. Residents in Cologne
once called the police after a hairdresser put up a sign advertising Haarflege,
rather than the correct Haarpflege (hair care). Measures to simplify German
spelling were rejected by newspapers such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine, and
defeated in a referendum in Schleswig-Holstein (though later endorsed by its
legislature). A similar fate befell the Dutch, when opponents of the
government’s 1996 Green Book on spelling (Groene Boekje) released a rival Witte
Boekje. French reforms in the 1990s didn’t get off the runway, despite being
presented as mere “rectifications”, and attempts this year to bring European
and Brazilian Portuguese into line were denounced in Portugal as capitulation
to its powerful ex-colony.
There are linguistic reasons too why spelling reform is tricky to undertake.
Written language is more than a phonetic version of its spoken cousin: it
contains etymological and morphological clues to meaning too. So although
spelling English more phonetically might make it easier to read, it might also
make it harder to understand. Moreover, as Mari Jones of Cambridge University
points out, differences in regional pronunciation mean that introducing a
“phonetic” spelling of English would benefit only people from the region whose
pronunciation was chosen as the accepted norm. And, she adds, it would need
continual updating to accommodate any subsequent changes in pronunciation.
Yes despite these concerns, some changes are worth considering; it takes more
than twice as long to learn to read English as it does to read most other west
European languages, according to a 2003 study led by Philip Seymour of Dundee
University. Standardising rules on doubled consonants—now more or less bereft
of logic—would be a start. Removing erroneous silent letters would also help.
And as George Bernard Shaw observed, suppressing superfluous letters will in
time reduce the waste of resources and trees. In an era of global warming, that
is not to be sniffed at.
*Fish: gh as in tough, o as in women, ti as in nation (courtesy of GB Shaw).
Chips: tch as in match, o as in women, gh as in hiccough.
:=== David A. ===:
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