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> I am really fond of the "Real Academia Española" as they go even further than their french counterpart, and regularly change the spelling of words to reflect
by seszett 12y ago
> I am really fond of the "Real Academia Española" as they go even further than their french counterpart, and regularly change the spelling of words to reflect their modern pronounciation.
The Académie does that too, but people are so used to having irregular or (apparently) illogical spelling that the new spellings catch on very slowly. It works though, and today you rarely see someone write "clef" instead of "clé" or "cuiller" instead of "cuillère". A few verbs got their accents changed from "é" to "è" too, following modern pronunciation. All that was in 1990.
- alricb 12y agoI think it's partly because when spelling was standardized in the 17th-18th century, it was done with a "learned" view that spelling should reflect a word's origin. So you get "doigt" for finger because of the latin digitus, the circumflex to denote an S that has become silent (hôpital vs. hospital), and even overcorrections (that have been recorrected since), like nénuphar -> nénufar (ph is used to denote places where there used to be a greek phi, but nénufar comes from Arabic)
- dorfsmay 12y agoWhen it comes to spelling though, they are too slow. Why do we have 'k', 'c' and 'qu' when one would suffice? What about all the spelling we never pronouce ("ils mangent")? If the Académie doesn't do anything about it, eventually people will create their own simplifications, and that is guaranteed to be a mess.