Spanish Alphabet to Lose Two Letters
November 26th, 2010
The Royal Spanish Academy is lopping two letters off the Spanish alphabet, reducing it to 27. Out go “ch” and “ll,” along with lots of annoying accents and hyphens.
The simplified spelling from the academy, a musty Madrid institution that is the chief arbiter of all things grammatical, should be welcome news to the world’s 450 million Spanish-speakers, not to mention anybody struggling to learn or translate the language.
But no. Everyone, it seems, has a bone to pick with the academy — starting with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.
If the academy no longer considers “ch” a separate letter, Mr. Chávez chortled to his cabinet, then he would henceforth be known simply as “Ávez.” (In fact, his name will stay the same, though his place in the alphabetic order will change, because “ch” used to be the letter after “c.”)
An editorial in the Mexican daily El Universal declared the new rules to be an affront to the national identity: “Spelling is not just an imposition; it serves to maintain a minimum of coherence and sense to what is written and said. Can this be dictated from a conference room abroad? A country that is proudly independent would not accept this.”
The editorial went on to ask, “Would the United States accept dictates from England over the use of English?”
They are just as upset on the European side of the Atlantic. Comments have poured forth on the Web — 1,450 of them as of Thursday night — after the first article on the changes appeared in the Spanish newspaper El País at the beginning of the month. The word “absurdo” pops up a lot.
“It’s kind of a magic realist moment. They decide that 2 of 29 letters will disappear,” said Ilan Stavans, a Mexican who is a professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College. “All the dictionaries will have to be remade, which is good for selling the Royal Academy’s dictionary, which they keep producing as though it’s the Bible.”
Professor Stavans compared it to the authority that English-speakers turn to, the Oxford English Dictionary, which stresses common usage rather than imposing it from above.
The Spanish academy needed 800 pages to explain the new simplified rules. Among other changes: letters with different names in different countries get just one name (which is rather like telling Americans that the last letter of the alphabet should be called “zed”). Iraq becomes Irak and quásar is now written as cuásar.
The spelling rules will go on sale by Christmas in Spain. Latin Americans will have to wait a bit longer.
There have long been complaints about Spanish spelling. At the first international congress of the Spanish language in Zacatecas, Mexico, in 1997, the Colombian writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez declared, “Let’s retire spelling, the terror of all beings from the cradle.” But he admitted that his pleas were little more than “bottles flung to the sea in the hope that they would one day come to the god of all words.”
That god remaining silent, the Royal Spanish Academy has been filling the void since it was founded in 1713. “They have an oracular way of presenting things, like Moses coming down from Mount Sinai,” Professor Stavans said.
“In my mind, it’s a relic of the 18th century,” he added. “We have to wait for Spain to say how we speak.”
For those who live and breathe Spanish, the academy’s priorities seem a little off. “We are a language in debate,” said the Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II. “Unfortunately, the academy isn’t ahead of the debate, it’s behind.”
To its credit, the academy takes pains to emphasize that it works collaboratively with its associated academies in 21 other Spanish-speaking countries, including in the United States. Early meetings on the new spelling rules were held in Chile; the text was completed this month in Spain; and it will be ratified by the academy and its sister branches at the Guadalajara Book Fair in Mexico on Sunday.
In an e-mail, Juan Villoro, a Mexican writer living in Barcelona, was philosophical about one change that seemed to strike at the core of Spanish speakers’ poetic souls on both sides of the Atlantic. Under the old rules, the word “solo” takes an accent when it means “only” and has no accent when it means “alone.”
The academy rubbed out the accent, arguing that the meaning would be clear from the context. “Sometimes, the law has nothing to do with justice,” Mr. Villoro wrote.
Luis Fernando Lara, a scholar at the Colegio de México who coordinates the preparation of a Spanish dictionary used in Mexico, waved off the academy’s new rules: “We’re free in this world not to listen to them.”
As for the changes in the names of letters, Mr. Lara resorted to a line from a classic American song to describe the spat: “I like tomato, you like tomahto,” he said.
This is an interesting article, particularly the quotes from various professors and authors. I’m a little confused!!
I’m a Spanish teacher who is married to a Spaniard. I am from the USA, studied Spanish in both Latin America and Spain. It wasn’t until I purchased the Barron’s Spanish Grammar pocket book that I discovered that in April of 1994, the Association of Spanish Language Academies met in Madrid and voted to eliminate the CH and LL as separate letters.
The book I mentioned states “The move was taken to simplify dictionaries, to make Spanish more compatible with English and to aid translation and computer standardization.” Apparently 21 countries were represented and the vote was 17 in favor and 1 opposed, 3 abstentions. The source for this information was pg 16 International Section of The New York Times on May 1, 1994.
So, if they voted to do this in 1994, why is Real Academia Espanola just now announcing these changes 16 years later? The dictionaries I use published here in the US already contain the removal of CH and LL as letters.
I think you’re right, this appears more that the Royal Spanish Academy is about to release a new book! It is strange though as my son is at a Spanish school and when learning the alphabet a few years ago (cerca 2004) the letters CH and LL were definitely distinguished … perhaps the Academy is just taking advantage of the power of the internet to once and for all let everyone know what happened some 16 years ago! ha!
This piece of news is wrong, this decision was taken by the assembly of the 22 Academias de español from all the Spanish speaking countries. This is not a decision by the Real Academia in Madrid. Please, check your sources, because it was very clear in El Mundo, El País and the Spanish media as a whole.
Seems pretty clear too – “the academy takes pains to emphasize that it works collaboratively with its associated academies in 21 other Spanish-speaking countries”
“Would the United States accept dictates from England over the use of English?”
More like Americans don’t accept dictates even from other Americans when it comes to this sort of thing, and rightly so.