I have had these past weeks find out a great display of pages, airwaves and screens around the arrangements of the Academy of English spelling. So brazenly that the majority (not what's left of people or people) admire, swallow and shut up, forcing me to drop back here four platitudes on the subject, and not the others released. The English spelling is not bad for such niceties of whether or not to grant to write the accent of this or just not because the and is called, and Greek or ye: this spelling is bad and nasty because, example, since the official English lost the phoneme H (some dialects remain almost now in use, when they say "hunger", "deep" or "stifle"), the scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth academic and hands were free to play with the letter h order that what had been written in Castilian aver omre or man and have to be written, given that in Latin (and learned they were, knew their little bit of Latin) was written and habere homine, or because, once it was canceled in Castilian opposition of phonemes distinction made in writing in the language which is distinguished, dig (or, which was the same, cauar) and Lavor, but fit and taste, BYV points (when the finished eighteenth distinguished from each) were abandoned decisions of cults, which enjoin write mouth or grass, not for nothing, but because in Latin were bucca or herba, but cow and crow, because in Latin had been UACC and Corunna, and the imperfect of the 1 st, which for centuries had been Castilian and ava had written, when the distinction between the letters b / v did not respond to anything in the language, would send to be written with aba, because it is written in Latin.
these you can look like a pair of innocent pedantry of religion, but, oh reader, as culture is power, have brought to people, which has lost the gift of writing as one speaks, no know what to expect with the h, b or v, and must, to "write well", which is to demonstrate their culture, appeal to authority, need manual spelling and, at the height of progress, the billet of 800 pages of spelling of the Academy. Not to mention
(El Pais, December 16, 1991, explain ostáculos transgressions subcoscientes) cases in which more and more cultism introduced in the language, the spelling was consistent academic unashamedly what in the language of Origin was written, to produce things like strange, obscure, or transportation, no one had ever heard in Castilian, but, by force of culture, some conscientious speakers to come to be pronounced.
In a word, the spelling of English is bad, and almost as bad as English or French, in the sense that it is a constant betrayal of what is really in the phoneme and prosody of language, and costituye and an endless series of pitfalls and traps for people who speak so well as speech because he does not know how he does that, start writing, I would just let him write as we speak.
And it was so easy ... You have no more to see how to write languages \u200b\u200bthat had not ever written, decent scripts were invented, more or less success, and less or more intrusion of low pedantry mounts, but they respond to what was the vocation of writing itself, and especially alphabetic, which was visually play all (or at least the principal) and single entities and rules that the language had, so to the hundreds of languages, African, Amerindian, Polynesian, Australian, which for two centuries have come to be written by the work of linguists, scholars, but with common sense of what was the role of a writing, or are there near the case of the Basque language and its dialects and unified, for which the experts have established an honest normal writing, which does not have to hold out the serious reader to enter traps unless the phonemes.
And even for languages \u200b\u200bloaded with ecclesiastical and cultural manipulation as the Slavic or Germanic scripts were created (the Cyrillic writing in ancient Bulgarian Bible or of Ulfilas Gothic, or the ones used to write the songs Eda Norse or Beowulf in Old English) that clearly responded to modern languages, and that many avatars have come to give in writing of national languages, like Russian or German, that despite some complications such as cumbersome to gather two or three letters to write a phoneme (al. sch) give due consideration, if not prosody, at least the phonemic their languages \u200b\u200band, and is very near, when it became necessary for the Italian a "revolution from above" in the scriptures, was not so difficult to establish that, except for very occasional clumsiness or hassle, do not mislead the reader not primarily about what is to Look on the tongue.
just for today I think is a bit of why it is that can or should achieve such great care, propaganda and splendor, the trifles of spelling rules, is that power, for their states and capitals, is first important to ensure that the language be confused with writing (and culture in general), since writing (as the computer versions of traditional and digital) is something that can be managed from above, by laws and by schools, which are bought and sold and is worth money and promotion in society and the regime, while the tongue is the only machine that gives everyone free, non- anybody and nobody can send it, which has its own laws, secret, where no authority to intervene (such as in writing) and not in a language changes made in their laws from time to time, without anyone personally decide, but a gathering anonymous buzzes below there souls. And of course a thing like this is a constant danger to the order, you need that does not exist or, if this ideal is not just met, at least be hidden and confused with other things manageable, and not know that there and still alive.
Agustin Garcia-Calvo is Professor Emeritus of Classical Philology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Proposal
