I'm starting off this post with a confession. My main character in The Golden City's name is misspelled. Or not, depending on how you look at it…
His name is Duilio Ferreira, but it should be spelled Duílio Ferreira. See the difference?
So what am I on about here? Well, I've been considering this since Wednesday, when I was listening to Zorba Paster On Your Health. A fan had e-mailed in a question about why we pronounce 'licorice' the way we do. Evidently this irritated him enough to get him to write in to a show that isn't about pronunciation or language at all. (Dr. Zorba handled it with remarkable aplomb.)
In the word licorice we have two difference pronunciations of the letter C. The hard C that falls before the O is pretty normal. It's that 'sh' sound at the end that's abnormal. Usually a C followed by an E is soft, like an S: rice, mice, dice, lice, and so on. But how is a foreigner supposed to know that this is an irregular pronunciation?
Well, this takes me back to poor unaccented Duilio. You see, Portuguese pretty much has one way of spelling words. There's a right way to spell a name. However, in reading older books, I've found a lot of names or words that are spelled more than one way. Eça de Queiroz? That last bit also appears as Queiros at times. Rossio sometimes shows up as Rocio. I'll stop there, but clearly, in the past, spelling wasn't as straightforward as it is now.
In fact, Portugal and Brazil and all the gazillion colonies had a high illiteracy rate, probably 85% or higher in 1902. It wasn't until 1911 that the new republic decided that, in an effort to improve literacy, they should normalize the spelling of their language. Then, in a sweeping series of conferences with philologists of Portugal and her Portuguese-speaking colonies, they hammered out the rules of how their language is to be spelled.
Interestingly enough, they are still at it, a reform in 2009 showing up on that list. Portugal even has an official list of permissible names for babies, and how to spell them (Norway has one as well, so they're not alone).
On that name list, my character's name is clearly spelled Duílio.
But back in 1902 when my books are set? Well, it's entirely possible that my Duilio would have gone about unaccented, leaving strangers to read his name and be uncertain whether the accent fell on the first or second I.
None of this helps a non-English speaker to know how to pronounce licorice, but it does raise the question of why this never happened with English, why the English-speaking world never got together and regulated the spelling of our insane language…
And for that I have no answer!
Historical Fudgery: Spelling Edition
January 14th, 7:35
2013-01-14 02:55 pm (UTC)
Politics. Spanish, French and Portuguese, three languages that had these "spelling cops" all had a degree of political unity that English didn't. For most of the 19th Century, if Great Britain did something that was a good reason for the USA to NOT do it.
2013-01-14 03:02 pm (UTC)
2013-01-14 05:30 pm (UTC)
2013-01-14 03:30 pm (UTC)
Languages evolve over time, which is why some spellings that made perfect sense at some point become illogical over time (C is a Latin letter, and it used to be uniformly pronounced as a 'K'; but then the influence of vowels 'e' and 'i' led to the sound evolve into a 'ts', and then a 's', while it remained 'K' when used before 'a', 'o' or 'u', leading to today's inconsistency where we have one letter and two sounds). With some languages, the process is particularly complex: English, for instance, underwent a Great Vowel Shift around the 16th century (a shift that is still, in some ways, in progress even now), which led to vowels mutiplying in speech, but not in the alphabet. Basically, to create a logical spelling system for English, one would have to invent new letters, something early Anglo-Saxons tried to do (hence the invention of W and K, plus others that are not used today), but which would be rather complicated today (just imagine resetting every single keyboard, computer programme, alphabetical list and dictionnary everywhere in the English-speaking world!). And things were made even more complicated by the continuous adoption of French words, given that French had its own troubles with inconsistent spelling in the Middle Ages already.
Now, normalisation has been tried in many places over the world. I think American spelling is largely a result of normalisations proposed by Webster at the turn of the 19th century, which is why American spelling today is marginally more consistent than British spelling. Spanish was normalised around the 18th century, I think, and French in the 17th century (not that it made things much simpler, but well). The problem with normalisation is that is can only work if you have either 1) very low literacy levels (you can only tell so many people to change early-acquired habits at a time), or 2) an authoritarian government, that can tell everybody to accept to learn how to write again from scratch (to some extend, I think that's what happened when Turkey ditched the Arabic alphabet for the Roman alphabet). Or both. Problem with English is that by the time it had evolved enough to had spelling and pronunciation completely unrelated to each other, Britain had also colonised much of the world and begun its industrial revolution, meaning that by the time a normalisation started to be sorely needed, the literate population was already too large and wide apart to do anything. Plus literati were just fine with learning how to spell words by heart, and I'm not sure government were really preoccupied with educating the masses, so long as the factories were running and the workforce kept quiet.
Add to this that normalisation of language often serves as a huge political tool: while pretending that their only aim is to facilitate literacy, governments can use it to reinforce national unity, and eradicate local dialects (when you have a normalised language, you don't have as many excuses to just use the local language you grew up with and consider it 'normal', since it precisely deviates from the official norm). Some countries need to use it, some choose other solutions.
In any case, I don't think it could work in the present. Nowadays, in countries that have official norms for language (such as France or Portugal), most proposed reforms of spelling are inscribed as alternative spellings, as you can't just tell millions of people that the spelling they learned hs become wrong overnight. If anything, it serves as a re-diversification of language... making things more complicated again ;)
(wow, that's the longest non-answer I remember writing in a while!)
2013-01-14 04:11 pm (UTC)
Yes, I don't think this would be possible in English any longer. Too many people would argue about every single proposal, rather like what happened with the demotion of Pluto. Then again, Pluto has been demoted....
But I suspect that the very low literacy levels were the reason that this could be pushed through initially....but they were still making corrections to spelling in 1990, long after Salazar was gone. And somehow they even got the former colonies (and eventually Brazil) to go along with that most recent adaptation.
I'm wondering if there's just less linguistical ego in the Portuguese world.
2013-01-14 05:23 pm (UTC)
Politics might also play a part here: Portugese is one of the most widespread languages in the world, yet it is rarely put on a par with Spanish, English or Mandarin in many places. A collective desire to have a more recognised language may also lead to people being more willing to adapt to new corrections that may seem to 'perfect' it, to make it more coherent or practical (unlike what happens with the English- or French-speaking worlds, where people value the 'old nobility' of their language so much they can't see any changes as positive).
2013-01-14 05:33 pm (UTC)
ETA: Most of the changes seem to have been removal of superfluous letters and diacritical marks, btw.
Yes, I can definitely see your point there. As far as I could tell, most of the corrections were mandatory in Portugal, but voluntary in other countries like Brazil (which took 20 years to adopt the last set of changes). I do know that Brazil doesn't seem to follow the naming list that Portugal has, yet one of the changes seems to have originated in Brazil and was picked up later in Portugal.
I'm still mildly surprised that the former colonies went along with this, but they seem to have cooperated in 1990. Growing up in a former colony of
Spain,FranceMexico, we would be very loathe to accept their guidance in just about anything...Edited at 2013-01-14 05:36 pm (UTC)
2013-01-14 10:02 pm (UTC)
But yes, the Spanish Royal Academy controls Spanish spelling, to the point that two years some newly imported words were Hispanicized:
tweet (as in Twitter) is now properly spelled tuit in Spanish
gay is gai
sexy is sexi
piercing is pirsin
meeting is mitin
whisky is güisqui
jazz is yas
manager is mánayer
beefsteak is bistec
baseball is béisbol
That's now how I see them spelled in the newspaper. And I giggle every time I see them.
2013-01-14 10:22 pm (UTC)
BTW, I was reading a book from 1915 that claimed that Amadis of Gaul was actually a Portuguese story, but had survived only in Spanish. Any truth in that? (The source has very limited credibility for me, so I don't have any moey riding on this.)
2013-01-15 09:29 am (UTC)
http://amadisofgaul.blogspot.com.es/200
2013-01-15 01:19 pm (UTC)