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Spelling of Spanish Surnames

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Frank Wimberly-2

Spelling of Spanish Surnames

Spelling of certain surnames (apellidos) in Spanish wasn’t standardized until after New Mexico was colonized by Spain. There are only a few spelling ambiguities that are possible in Spanish: soft “c”, “s” and “z” are pretty much indistinguishable; “ll” and “y” sound the same; “h” isn’t pronounced so you will sometimes see “hormiga” spelled as “ormiga”, for example. In New Mexico and certain other places you will see “Gonzales”, “Chaves”, “Sisneros”, and “Vasquez” while in Mexico and Spain they are almost always spelled “Gonzalez”, “Chavez”, “Cisneros”, and Vazquez”. There are many other examples.

Frank

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz

Santa Fe, NM 87505

[hidden email] [hidden email]

Phone: (505) 995-8715 Cell: (505) 670-9918

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Arlo Barnes
Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2014 2:48 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Santa Fe New Mexican: Our View: For mayor, no perfect choice

The rationale Dimas gave (in a Generation Next interview) is that he thinks the public fora Bushe`e and Gonzales have been debating in (the usual places, that is) are frequented predominantly by insiders, and not the public at large. Apparently, he thinks the best way to contact the "actual" public, then, is to flood the city with the physical equivalent of spam - polycarbonate campaign signs. I cannot vote for mayor because I live outside city limits (if you actually look at the boundaries, especially on the south side, they can be pretty ragged), but I would love to see an art campaign for defacing his (and others') posters - even his supporters could join in with favorable modifications.

It seems like the main reason behind the (more extensive than one might think?) feeling of 'no good choice' is that the main venues of discussion have focussed on politics (like funding) rather than issues and ideological/action history. Gonzales (Chrome suggested Gonzalez, is that spelling more common internationally?) may be backed by big money, but more important are the questions of whose big money, and if that will affect his actions as possible mayor, and in which way.

-Arlo James Barnes

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Nick Thompson

Re: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

How come other people can standardize their spellings and we can’t standardize ours.

Damn!

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2014 4:01 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: [FRIAM] Spelling of Spanish Surnames

Frank

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz

Santa Fe, NM 87505

[hidden email] [hidden email]

Phone: (505) 995-8715 Cell: (505) 670-9918

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Arlo Barnes
Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2014 2:48 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Santa Fe New Mexican: Our View: For mayor, no perfect choice

Frank Wimberly

Re: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2

It's called The Royal Academy. Do you want one?

Seriously, there are a few variations in Spanish orthography and more in vocabulary from country to country.

Frank

Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE smartphone

-------- Original Message --------
Subject:Re: [FRIAM] Spelling of Spanish Surnames
From :Nick Thompson
Date :Sun, 23-Feb-2014 18:12
To :'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
CC :

How come other people can standardize their spellings and we can’t standardize ours.

Damn!

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

Frank

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz

Santa Fe, NM 87505

[hidden email] [hidden email]

Phone: (505) 995-8715 Cell: (505) 670-9918

Arlo Barnes

Re: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2

Thank you. I suspected it would be something like this; it seems also this region picked up a slight excess of Xs from Mexico, which are pronounced like Js (or like Hs in English), although I must say I am at an unfortunate loss to call any to memory besides "Me`xico" itself.
EDIT: Well, we do standardize/ise on chile, while others do not...
-Arlo James Barnes

Frank Wimberly-2

Re: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

Xavier and Xalapa come to mind. Both those “x”s are pronounced like “h”.

Frank

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz

Santa Fe, NM 87505

[hidden email] [hidden email]

Phone: (505) 995-8715 Cell: (505) 670-9918

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Arlo Barnes
Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2014 6:23 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Spelling of Spanish Surnames

Arlo Barnes

Re: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

Those work. I think I was thinking of something else, but I will probably just have to run across it in the wild again to remember.
I was going to say but forgot: C de Baca is one of my favorite local surnames, because it is the only surname I know that has an abbreviation baked in (for Cabeza, head; the name translates as 'head of the cow', which I interpret [perhaps wrongly] as 'head of the herd' - a herder or leader. And due to the [common across languages] B/V association, sometimes it is spelled Vaca, hinting at common ancestry with German 'Vieh' and Latin 'pecus'). Another favorite with variant spelling (if only for one generation) is Haozous/Houser.
-Arlo James Barnes

Steve Smith

Re: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2

On 2/23/14 6:36 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:

Xavier and Xalapa come to mind. Both those “x”s are pronounced like “h”.

and Me"h"ico!

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Tom Johnson

Re: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2

Frank's comments on the sometimes and slight differences in the spelling of Spanish last names led to the selection of many folks by the secretary of state's office a couple years back as "invalid voters" because the same person's name showed up with different spellings when comparing the voter rolls and the driver's license registry, for example.

-tom johnson

On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 4:01 PM, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

Spelling of certain surnames (apellidos) in Spanish wasn’t standardized until after New Mexico was colonized by Spain. There are only a few spelling ambiguities that are possible in Spanish: soft “c”, “s” and “z” are pretty much indistinguishable; “ll” and “y” sound the same; “h” isn’t pronounced so you will sometimes see “hormiga” spelled as “ormiga”, for example. In New Mexico and certain other places you will see “Gonzales”, “Chaves”, “Sisneros”, and “Vasquez” while in Mexico and Spain they are almost always spelled “Gonzalez”, “Chavez”, “Cisneros”, and Vazquez”. There are many other examples.

Frank

Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz

Santa Fe, NM 87505

[hidden email] [hidden email]

Phone: <a href="tel:%28505%29%20995-8715" value="+15059958715" target="_blank">(505) 995-8715 Cell: <a href="tel:%28505%29%20670-9918" value="+15056709918" target="_blank">(505) 670-9918

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Arlo Barnes
Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2014 2:48 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Santa Fe New Mexican: Our View: For mayor, no perfect choice

The rationale Dimas gave (in a Generation Next interview) is that he thinks the public fora Bushe`e and Gonzales have been debating in (the usual places, that is) are frequented predominantly by insiders, and not the public at large. Apparently, he thinks the best way to contact the "actual" public, then, is to flood the city with the physical equivalent of spam - polycarbonate campaign signs. I cannot vote for mayor because I live outside city limits (if you actually look at the boundaries, especially on the south side, they can be pretty ragged), but I would love to see an art campaign for defacing his (and others') posters - even his supporters could join in with favorable modifications.

It seems like the main reason behind the (more extensive than one might think?) feeling of 'no good choice' is that the main venues of discussion have focussed on politics (like funding) rather than issues and ideological/action history. Gonzales (Chrome suggested Gonzalez, is that spelling more common internationally?) may be backed by big money, but more important are the questions of whose big money, and if that will affect his actions as possible mayor, and in which way.

-Arlo James Barnes

============================================================
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

==========================================
J. T. Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
505.577.6482(c) 505.473.9646(h)
Twitter: jtjohnson

slideshare.net/jtjohnson/presentations

http://www.jtjohnson.com [hidden email]
==========================================

lrudolph

Re: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

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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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Alfredo Covaleda Vélez

Re: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2

Frank

The X in Ximena, for example sounds in sapnish like a J, wich is your h in hill, for example.

Don´t forget the rules of the tilde and the accents. For example Chávez and Chaves have the accent in the first syllable. The Spain in América Latina, in general, has lost difference between the s and the z, and for this reason Chávez and Chaves sound the same. Something similar occurs with González and Gonzales, Both have accent in the same syllable.

2014-02-23 20:36 GMT-05:00 Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]>:

Xavier and Xalapa come to mind.   Both those “x”s are pronounced like “h”.

Frank

Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz

Santa Fe, NM 87505

[hidden email]     [hidden email]

Phone: (505) 995-8715      Cell: (505) 670-9918

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Arlo Barnes
Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2014 6:23 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Spelling of Spanish Surnames

Thank you. I suspected it would be something like this; it seems also this region picked up a slight excess of Xs from Mexico, which are pronounced like Js (or like Hs in English), although I must say I am at an unfortunate loss to call any to memory besides "Me`xico" itself.
EDIT: Well, we do standardize/ise on chile, while others do not...
-Arlo James Barnes

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Gary Schiltz-4

Re: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

While we’re on this subject, I wonder how much regional difference there is in how differently “b” and “v” are pronounced in Spanish-speaking countries. Here in Ecuador, at least the campesinos (less educated country folks) pronounce them identically. For that reason, I very commonly see the same word spelled differently (baca or vaca, barilla or varilla). I believe that more educated folks tend to pronounce “v” more like in English, although much softer. How about in Spain?

Even in such a small country as Ecuador, there are many regional differences in pronunciation, for example in certain regions, double L is pronounced sort of like “jy”, i.e. llave is pronounced almost “JYAH-vay” or “ZHAH-vay", while in other regions, it is more “YA-vay”.

Gary

On Feb 23, 2014, at 9:14 PM, Alfredo Covaleda Vélez <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Frank
>
> The X in Ximena, for example sounds in sapnish like a J, wich is your h in hill, for example.
>
> Don´t forget the rules of the tilde and the accents. For example Chávez and Chaves have the accent in the first syllable. The Spain in América Latina, in general, has lost difference between the s and the z, and for this reason Chávez and Chaves sound the same. Something similar occurs with González and Gonzales, Both have accent in the same syllable.
>
>
> 2014-02-23 20:36 GMT-05:00 Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]>:
> Xavier and Xalapa come to mind. Both those “x”s are pronounced like “h”.
>
>
>
> Frank

Alfredo Covaleda Vélez

Re: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly-2

Frank

Almost a a rule, I think that almost all the surnames originated in Spain bring accent in the penultimate syllable. If surname ends in S and accent is at the penultimate syllable, forget the tilde. But when accent is at the penultimate syllable and surname ends in Z, put the tilde. Both sound the same.

2014-02-23 18:01 GMT-05:00 Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]>:

Spelling of certain surnames (apellidos) in Spanish wasn’t standardized until after New Mexico was colonized by Spain. There are only a few spelling ambiguities that are possible in Spanish: soft “c”, “s” and “z” are pretty much indistinguishable; “ll” and “y” sound the same; “h” isn’t pronounced so you will sometimes see “hormiga” spelled as “ormiga”, for example. In New Mexico and certain other places you will see “Gonzales”, “Chaves”, “Sisneros”, and “Vasquez” while in Mexico and Spain they are almost always spelled “Gonzalez”, “Chavez”, “Cisneros”, and Vazquez”. There are many other examples.

Frank

Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz

Santa Fe, NM 87505

[hidden email] [hidden email]

Phone: (505) 995-8715 Cell: (505) 670-9918

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Arlo Barnes
Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2014 2:48 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Santa Fe New Mexican: Our View: For mayor, no perfect choice

The rationale Dimas gave (in a Generation Next interview) is that he thinks the public fora Bushe`e and Gonzales have been debating in (the usual places, that is) are frequented predominantly by insiders, and not the public at large. Apparently, he thinks the best way to contact the "actual" public, then, is to flood the city with the physical equivalent of spam - polycarbonate campaign signs. I cannot vote for mayor because I live outside city limits (if you actually look at the boundaries, especially on the south side, they can be pretty ragged), but I would love to see an art campaign for defacing his (and others') posters - even his supporters could join in with favorable modifications.

It seems like the main reason behind the (more extensive than one might think?) feeling of 'no good choice' is that the main venues of discussion have focussed on politics (like funding) rather than issues and ideological/action history. Gonzales (Chrome suggested Gonzalez, is that spelling more common internationally?) may be backed by big money, but more important are the questions of whose big money, and if that will affect his actions as possible mayor, and in which way.

-Arlo James Barnes

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Owen Densmore

Re: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

Administrator

In reply to this post by Arlo Barnes

Hells bells, no difference than Europe in general. Densmore, Dinsmore, Dinsmuir, Dunsmore. I'd be amazed if the European of us could not find several variations. I suspect we were late to the party.

-- Owen

It began in various parts of the world at different times.
In England, surnames became generally hereditary during the 13th.and 14th. centuries (1200 and 1300s) They mostly came about from a place of origin, like Wood, Hill, Field, Sheffield or London, an occupation, like Smith, Cook, Baker or Butcher, a personal relationship, William/son, John/son, Thom/son, or with a prefix like Mac, or from a physical characteristic, like Short, Strong, or Redhead. Some may even have taken the name of the lord of the manor they were tied to.

Surnames began simply because there were just too many Tom's John's and Williams, it became necessary to have another way to identify people, instead of John the son of William the smith, it gradually became John Smith, the son of William the smith, and although John Smith might have been a farmer, he continued using his father's name, passing it down to his son, and so on.

Otherwise it would have been George the cooper, son of John the farmer, son of William the smith, etc.,etc. In addition, the wives names complicated matters to an even greater degree, it was inevitable that a less complicated system had to evolve.

On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 6:49 PM, Arlo Barnes <[hidden email]> wrote:

Those work. I think I was thinking of something else, but I will probably just have to run across it in the wild again to remember.
I was going to say but forgot: C de Baca is one of my favorite local surnames, because it is the only surname I know that has an abbreviation baked in (for Cabeza, head; the name translates as 'head of the cow', which I interpret [perhaps wrongly] as 'head of the herd' - a herder or leader. And due to the [common across languages] B/V association, sometimes it is spelled Vaca, hinting at common ancestry with German 'Vieh' and Latin 'pecus'). Another favorite with variant spelling (if only for one generation) is Haozous/Houser.
-Arlo James Barnes

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Nick Thompson

Re: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

In reply to this post by Frank Wimberly

Seriously. I want one. I think our language makes orthography a contradiction in terms.

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2014 6:22 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Spelling of Spanish Surnames

How come other people can standardize their spellings and we can’t standardize ours.

Damn!

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2014 4:01 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: [FRIAM] Spelling of Spanish Surnames

Frank

Frank C. Wimberly

140 Calle Ojo Feliz

Santa Fe, NM 87505

[hidden email] [hidden email]

Phone: (505) 995-8715 Cell: (505) 670-9918

Nick Thompson

Re: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

In reply to this post by lrudolph

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: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]]
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

Tom Johnson

Re: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

Well, since we've gone this far...

I have yet to land on a singular pronunciation of "yo.". It can vary from the hard Y as in "Joe" to "yo" like yo-yo.
My preliminary observation: the farther south one goes in LatAm, the harder/stronger the "y", as in "Joe". But better data is clearly needed. I wonder if linguists have done any mapping of Spanish as has been done for American usages?
-TJ

On Feb 23, 2014 6:50 PM, "Steve Smith" <[hidden email]> wrote:

On 2/23/14 6:36 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:

Xavier and Xalapa come to mind. Both those “x”s are pronounced like “h”.

and Me"h"ico!

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Brent Auble

Re: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

My brother-in-law is from Bogota, Colombia, and he pronounces most "y"s and "ll"s as a hard "j".

Brent

From: Tom Johnson <[hidden email]>
To: "Friam@redfish. com" <[hidden email]>
Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2014 11:40 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Spelling of Spanish Surnames

Well, since we've gone this far...

On Feb 23, 2014 6:50 PM, "Steve Smith" <[hidden email]> wrote:

On 2/23/14 6:36 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:

Xavier and Xalapa come to mind. Both those “x”s are pronounced like “h”.

and Me"h"ico!

============================================================
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

Alfredo Covaleda Vélez

Re: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

In reply to this post by Tom Johnson

Tom

In Argentina and Uruguay Y is pronounced almost like your sh in shopping. In general in Colombia there isn´t difference in the pronunciation of LL an Y.

2014-02-23 23:40 GMT-05:00 Tom Johnson <[hidden email]>:

Well, since we've gone this far...

I have yet to land on a singular pronunciation of "yo.". It can vary from the hard Y as in "Joe" to "yo" like yo-yo.
My preliminary observation: the farther south one goes in LatAm, the harder/stronger the "y", as in "Joe". But better data is clearly needed. I wonder if linguists have done any mapping of Spanish as has been done for American usages?
-TJ

On Feb 23, 2014 6:50 PM, "Steve Smith" <[hidden email]> wrote:

On 2/23/14 6:36 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:

Xavier and Xalapa come to mind. Both those “x”s are pronounced like “h”.

and Me"h"ico!

============================================================
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

============================================================
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lrudolph

Re: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Nick,

Don't apologize--take the tack that Wayne O'Neil took in his lexicographic
introduction to (at least the first edition of) the American Heritage dictionary:
English spelling includes a *lot* of useful information about the history and
otherwise-hidden relationships of our words. (I'd quote some examples but all
our copies of that dictionary are on another floor and I'm too lazy at the moment.)
Teach the kids that spelling is a fascinating key to hidden history! I'm sure
they're smart enough to catch on to that, given the hint. Make it a game!

As to "blatant irrationality":

English orthography is only "irrational" if (as you, despite my urgings, appear
to continue to believe) the single measure of "rationality" is "faithfully reflects
pronunciation"--meaning *your* pronunciation and not necessarily that of the guys in
the next state, or the previous half-millennium. Think of all those "dropped Rs"
that most of our fellow Massachusettsians have in their non-rhotic speech: would
you really want your grandchildren to drop the "r"s from their spelling when and
if they move to the East Coast? What about the "wh" digraph? In my dialect, the
first sound in words like "what" and "when" is aspirated (and the written "h"
shows that the dialect of the people who froze English spelling was, in that
respect, like mine--though now that aspiration is quite rare): "what"/"watt" and
"when"/"wen" are so-called minimal pairs in my speech. Witch side, in your
model of rationality, whins that match? ... And so on for all the many other
examples in all the many other dialects.

I admit that there are cases where more "phonetic" spelling would elucidate
facts about English grammar that are largely obscure. For instance, there are
*two* verbs "have" in English (historically, of course, they're one verb):
the auxiliary "have" is pronounced either "v" (as in "I've been there") or
"haff" (as in "I have to go now"), while the true verb meaning "possess" is
pronounced "havv" (as in "I havv three copies of the American Heritage
Dictionary"). Similar statements apply to "used" and other auxiliaries.
Would *that* group of spelling reforms make you happier or sadder?

> 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: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]]
> 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".)
>
>

Parks, Raymond

Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: Spelling of Spanish Surnames

Nick needs to switch to Lojban - http://www.lojban.org/ - then his written language will perfectly match his spoken language and he will be unintelligible to all but a small fraction of the human race. The pronunciation vs. spelling problem is like the QWERTY vs Dvorak problem is like the 120Hz vs DC is like US vs metric is like…. Humans are lazy - if they have used something to the point of muscle/nerve/subconscious memory, they are reluctant to change. The only time such change happens is, interestingly, associated with Imperial central governments (metric under Napoleon, Modern German under Wilhelm and Bismarck).

Ray Parks

Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager

V: 505-844-4024 M: 505-238-9359 P: 505-951-6084

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On Feb 24, 2014, at 5:46 AM, <[hidden email]>

wrote:

Nick,

Don't apologize--take the tack that Wayne O'Neil took in his lexicographic
introduction to (at least the first edition of) the American Heritage dictionary:
English spelling includes a *lot* of useful information about the history and
otherwise-hidden relationships of our words. (I'd quote some examples but all
our copies of that dictionary are on another floor and I'm too lazy at the moment.)
Teach the kids that spelling is a fascinating key to hidden history! I'm sure
they're smart enough to catch on to that, given the hint. Make it a game!

As to "blatant irrationality":

English orthography is only "irrational" if (as you, despite my urgings, appear
to continue to believe) the single measure of "rationality" is "faithfully reflects
pronunciation"--meaning *your* pronunciation and not necessarily that of the guys in
the next state, or the previous half-millennium. Think of all those "dropped Rs"
that most of our fellow Massachusettsians have in their non-rhotic speech: would
you really want your grandchildren to drop the "r"s from their spelling when and
if they move to the East Coast? What about the "wh" digraph? In my dialect, the
first sound in words like "what" and "when" is aspirated (and the written "h"
shows that the dialect of the people who froze English spelling was, in that
respect, like mine--though now that aspiration is quite rare): "what"/"watt" and
"when"/"wen" are so-called minimal pairs in my speech. Witch side, in your
model of rationality, whins that match? ... And so on for all the many other
examples in all the many other dialects.

I admit that there are cases where more "phonetic" spelling would elucidate
facts about English grammar that are largely obscure. For instance, there are
*two* verbs "have" in English (historically, of course, they're one verb):
the auxiliary "have" is pronounced either "v" (as in "I've been there") or
"haff" (as in "I have to go now"), while the true verb meaning "possess" is
pronounced "havv" (as in "I havv three copies of the American Heritage
Dictionary"). Similar statements apply to "used" and other auxiliaries.
Would *that* group of spelling reforms make you happier or sadder?

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: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]]
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".)

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