Friam

Re: [EXTERNAL] Spelling of Spanish Surnames

Posted by Parks, Raymond on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Spelling-of-Spanish-Surnames-tp7584969p7585019.html

<base href="x-msg://37/">What flame wars did the Bolsheviks settle?

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 10:11 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Ray,
 
And Russia under the Bolshevik’s, right?
 
N
 
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
 
From: Parks, Raymond [mailto:[hidden email]] 
Sent: Monday, February 24, 2014 9:30 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Cc: Nick Thompson
Subject: Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: [FRIAM] 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
SIPR: [hidden email] (send NIPR reminder)
JWICS: [hidden email] (send NIPR reminder)
 
 
 
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
 
-----Original Message-----
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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