Walter's Famous German Language Essentials Guide

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d]

On Thu, May 05, 2016 at 09:28:01AM +0000, Chris via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> There was a spelling reform in Germany in the 1990ies. Portuguese
> spelling has been reformed several times (and there are two major
> spelling systems Brazilian and Portuguese Portuguese)[1], and in
> Spanish it has also been a to and fro (Latin America vs. Spain). All
> these languages have produced a vast body of literature too and still
> spelling reforms have been pushed successfully. So quantity is not an
> argument. First, most people don't have problems reading texts in
> older spellings, and second, it only takes one or only half a
> generation of school children to make the new spelling feel "natural".

You're quite right, of course.  A lot of it has to do with inertia.
People just prefer what they're used to, rather than what's objectively
better.  And children will just grow up liking whatever they were
taught, so the key to success really just lies with education. :-)

In the early days of the introduction of Simplified Chinese writing,
there was a lot of resistance from older educated folk, especially
Chinese immigrants overseas (such as the significant population in
Southeast Asia) who perceived it as a "denigration" of the old writing
system. The older, more complex system preserves some of the arguably
flagrant shenanigans by ancient Chinese scribes who went overboard with
the whole derivation from radicals idea and invented some of the most
ridiculously complex characters that nobody uses. This was perceived to
be superior because, well, it was more "literary" (whatever that
means!), and it shows the clear derivation of the character from ancient
constructs -- you could guess at the meaning of an unknown character
just by extrapolation from its various intricate components, obviously
very useful when you encounter an unknown obscure overly-complex
character that nobody actually uses (much less pronounce!).  Plus, it
just *looked* more artistic, nevermind the fact that the sheer number of
strokes made the writing laughably inefficient in today's impatient
world.

Well, fast-forward a couple o' decades, and now almost all overseas
Chinese populations have adopted the new system, and the present
situation is well illustrated by one instance when a child piped up one
day in class, saying that the teacher had made a mistake in her writing.
Afterwards, the teacher had to explain that it was actually not a
mistake, but an older way of writing the same character. The youngster,
of course, knows nothing but the new system, and has no reason to regard
the old system as anything other than a "mistake". Which, perhaps, it
is. :-D


[...]
> But hey, it's just a coding convention. We shouldn't be too attached
> to spellings, especially if reforms make it easier to spell (i.e. to
> spell out a word as you hear it in your head) and parse text. It's a
> code to communicate, not a religion.
[...]

It's a falsehood that you can just spell out a word "as you hear it in
your head". No writing system actually does that, even though some come
pretty close. Almost all writing systems are compromises, balancing
etymology, grammatical marking, ease of use, and closeness to actual
pronunciation -- the latter of which is actually an extremely thorny
issue due to the existence of myriads of dialects and personal
pronunciation peculiarities. If you're merely talking about what's
spoken in the Queen's court, then there's no issue, but it's a big
problem when applied to the diverse regional English dialects across the
globe. The way a Texan spells will be incomprehensible to a Briton, for
example.  (But perhaps that would actually be an advantage of sorts, in
recognizing that Texan is actually a different language, contrary to
popular belief. :-P)  Or, for that matter, American vs. Australian.  It
would cause a splintering of dialects.  Even across different persons
within the same dialectal community, there are bound to be subtle
differences that would make a difference in a pure
spell-it-as-you-say-it system.

Chinese writing is actually an ironic illustration of the last point, in
fact. Thousands of years ago everybody spoke the same ancestral tongue,
but since then, the original ancient Chinese language has splintered
into what's commonly called "dialects" today, but in actuality are
completely different languages on their own. The distance between, say,
Mandarin and Cantonese is far greater than between Spanish and
Portuguese, for example, yet for some unfathomable reason we regard the
latter as separate languages whereas the former are somehow still mere
"dialects".  But in spite of that, the one thing they all have in common
is a writing system understood by all -- thanks to the writing *not*
being phonetic, which is something usually regarded as a bad thing.
Since the writing isn't phonetic, it has survived as a common system of
communication in spite of thousands of years of sound change and
language drift, which in any other community would have caused complete
breakdown in communication. (Of course, it's not a *perfect* common
system of communication, because "dialectal" differences are in some
cases big enough that one "dialect" would use characters that don't
exist in other dialects, or some words can't be represented at all. But
still, you can at least understand each other to a workable extent just
by having pen and paper handy, which is a lot more than can be said for,
say, an Englishman trying to communicate with a Russian, having no
common writing system at all, even though thousands of years ago their
respective ancestors spoke the same proto-Indo-European tongue.)

So you see, "write as you say it" isn't quite the panacea as it may
first appear to be. Neither is "keep the ancestral spelling even though
nobody actually talks that way anymore, just so we can communicate with
the Russians in writing in spite of having completely mutually
unintelligible pronunciation".  All real-life writing systems are
compromises between conflicting goals. (Reminds one of programming
language design, doesn't it? :-P)


T

-- 
May you live all the days of your life. -- Jonathan Swift