| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | Portuguese language reform law goes global
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Paul Dixon wrote:
The big problem with the recent spelling reforms is the elimination of accent marks to indicate pronunciation. There is no way of knowing that "queijo" and "cinquenta" have different pronunciations for the QU group, while the old spelling "cinqüenta" made the pronunciation clear. The same with "ideia" and "odeia" and countless other words. This is a devastating process that started back in 1971.
The best solution is to go back to Portuguese as it was between 1943 and 1971, when there were many more accents (called 'differential accents') to solve this kind of problem, so everyone would know that 'sede' (thirst) is pronounced with a closed E (as it was spelt 'sêde') while 'sede' meaning seat (of a company) has an open E.
Another example: a newspaper headline "Corredor de ônibus para a Radial Leste" could be interpreted as either "Bus lane for the Radial Leste" (with a neutral or positive bias) or "Bus lane stops the Radial Leste' (in the sense that it worsens traffic) and someone would have to read the whole article to find which is intended. (Radial Leste is a major traffic artery in SP and has serious traffic congestion problems)
I bet many Latin-chars-using languages "envy" (if that's at all possible) English, for its diacritic-free feature. Of course, Polish, Czech, Hungarian et al. have good reasons to envy it much more than Portuguese.
Of course, the largest PT-speaking population is in Brazil, that's an undeniable fact. At the dawn of computer age, Brazil was under military dictatorship, which "protected" the country from anything made overseas, preventing the entry of imported computers, so that ROI-driven major IT developers didn't care about compatibility with PT diacritics.
We were fortunate that French and Turkish use the C-cedilla, so it was in the original ASCII set. However the tilde for A and O wasn't. I don't recall having seen the tilde in any language other than PT. So it simply wasn't there.
I recall using early word processors and printers on the PC-XT running DOS circa v3, and quite often tildes were smartly replaced with umlauts (Danke schön, German!).
However diacritics are still a problem in computing. Yet today, on most systems I enter my name (José) without the accent. Every time I write is correctly, I get replies, forms, end even ID/credit cards with variations like Josy, JosÒ, Jos, JosÇÇÇÇÇÇÇÇ, and so on.
Yesterday I read some text explaining that Portugal, being a small country in Europe, caused its politicians to shift their spelling towards the Brazilian way, so they could add 200 million speakers/consumers to leverage the commercial importance of the PT language in the EC. This would explain why so many Portuguese "blame" Brazilians for the reform.
Indeed, the unwanted language havoc it created in Brazil was enough for Brazilians to blame the Portuguese for that. Yet we didn't. Overall, we are "ignorant" as a whole, and are deliberately preserved so, in order to enable the kind of politicians we have to get elected... the kind of politicians who bowed to and signed that reform agreement.
So the riddance of accents makes sense, when all that politicians (not linguists!) want is to make PT more palatable worldwide, no matter what.
Wh dn't th nv Hbrw? I mean, why don't they envy Hebrew? It uses dots and dashes for most vowels, and dots to differentiate B/V, T/S, P/F, O/U. These dots and dashes are present in school and prayer books for those who haven't mastered the language, however they are completely absent in all everyday text.
I've said the reason already. Literacy in dot/dash-free Hebrew requires having mastered the language. If the present (and many past) Brazilian politicians let our people master the PT language, we Brazilians - as a whole - would have access to information, get more educated, and never vote for these crooks again! It would be self-defeating.
It was a political decision, made as any decision like a "feudal" tax increase. Linguists didn't have a vote. Therefore if the Portuguese want to blame Brazilians for that, they are right! However they should blame Brazilian politicians, and not the Brazilian people altogether.
[Edited at 2015-05-26 12:22 GMT]
[Edited at 2015-05-26 12:25 GMT]
| | | | Balasubramaniam L. 
India
Local time: 16:04
Member (2006)
English to Hindi
+ ...
SITE LOCALIZER | I can relate to this! | May 27, 2015 |
José Henrique Lamensdorf wrote:
Yesterday I read some text explaining that Portugal, being a small country in Europe, caused its politicians to shift their spelling towards the Brazilian way, so they could add 200 million speakers/consumers to leverage the commercial importance of the PT language in the EC. This would explain why so many Portuguese "blame" Brazilians for the reform.
Indeed, the unwanted language havoc it created in Brazil was enough for Brazilians to blame the Portuguese for that. Yet we didn't. Overall, we are "ignorant" as a whole, and are deliberately preserved so, in order to enable the kind of politicians we have to get elected... the kind of politicians who bowed to and signed that reform agreement.
So the riddance of accents makes sense, when all that politicians (not linguists!) want is to make PT more palatable worldwide, no matter what.
Wh dn't th nv Hbrw? I mean, why don't they envy Hebrew? It uses dots and dashes for most vowels, and dots to differentiate B/V, T/S, P/F, O/U. These dots and dashes are present in school and prayer books for those who haven't mastered the language, however they are completely absent in all everyday text.
I've said the reason already. Literacy in dot/dash-free Hebrew requires having mastered the language. If the present (and many past) Brazilian politicians let our people master the PT language, we Brazilians - as a whole - would have access to information, get more educated, and never vote for these crooks again! It would be self-defeating.
It was a political decision, made as any decision like a "feudal" tax increase. Linguists didn't have a vote. Therefore if the Portuguese want to blame Brazilians for that, they are right! However they should blame Brazilian politicians, and not the Brazilian people altogether.
I am these days learning to read Urdu, a sister language of Hindi, but which is written in a different script based on the Persian script.
The Urdu script has exactly the same problem that you have mentioned here - it is predominantly consonant-based, with vowels and vowel markers (diacritical marks) omitted altogether in all but the most elementary level Urdu teaching books. Like Hebrew, Urdu script assumes you have already mastered the phonetics and spellings of the language and that you know how and where to mentally insert the vowel signs in the script.
This can be problematic for a new learner like me, especially when the Hindi script from which I come, is extremely elaborate and precise with every sound (both consonants and vowels) having a separate and explicit symbol in the Hindi script.
Mercifully, the school textbooks of Urdu that I am using are meant for child learners and come with diacritical marks, but I am still finding the transition from these books to more mature texts (such as a newspaper article in Urdu script) very trying.
Coming to the issue of Portuguese, I am personally of the opinion that any top-down reform movement of languages, whether it is instituted by politicians or by linguists, is bound to fail, because the natural tendency of languages is to evolve from bottom upwards (ie., from its general speakers to the educated ones - grammarians, lexicographers, etc.) and not the reverse.
I think the various versions of Portuguese should be independently recognized as separate languages and it is futile to artificially try to fuse these versions into one. They have all been evolving independently for centuries now and have made significant (and different) choices at various stages of their development and have all developed into more or less mutually incomprehensible languages.
This will also improve communication and reduce confusion.
[Edited at 2015-05-27 06:21 GMT]
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