Spelling reform will NOT make Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese uniform!

From BBC News:

Brazil embraces spelling reforms

Brazilians start 2009 facing the task of learning new spelling rules that have just come into effect.

The spelling reforms have been agreed by Portuguese-speaking nations, but the language seems set to have different written forms for some time to come.

In Portugal, there has been fierce resistance in some quarters to the changes because many of the changes are to spell words the Brazilian way.

Portuguese is the official language of more than 230m people worldwide.

Brazil, by far the biggest lusophone nation, is the first to adopt the new spelling rules.

Spellings are standardised, and silent consonants are removed in order for words to be spelt more phonetically, turning, for example “optimo” (great) into “otimo”.

Various accents are also no longer needed.

The alphabet grows by three letters to 26 – k, w and y were already in use but until now frowned on by purists.

Proponents says the move will make the language more uniform globally, making such things as internet searches and legal documents easier to understand.*[see comment below!]

However, it may be some time before there is a uniform version of written Portuguese.

Cape Verde and Sao Tome and Principe have ratified the spelling accord but have not fixed a date for introducing the changes.

East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Angola have said they are interested in approving the accord but have not yet done so.

‘Capitulation’

Portugal has ratified the changes but also has no set deadline for introducing them.

And it is there that resistance is most keenly felt.

Thousands of people signed a petition against the reforms, arguing that it amounted to adopting Brazilian spellings.

“Of course it is a capitulation to Brazilian interests,” Portuguese MEP Vasco Graca Moura told BBC Brasil.

“The day that Brazilian orthography can be used everywhere Portuguese is spoken is of huge benefit to Brazilian economic interests, especially those involved in producing schoolbooks,” he said.

But Angolan writer Jose Eduardo Agualusa believes that the reforms will be of most benefit to African countries.

“Right now in Angola, there are two ways of spelling – the Brazilian and the Portuguese way. That in a country whose great challenge is to ensure literacy among its people,” he said.

* My personal comment:

In fact, this passage is nonsense. European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese will always be two different language variants, with very strong incompatibility issues (and very strong feelings toward each other ). The spelling reforms only changes about 0,5% of Brazilian Portuguese words and about 1,5% of European Portuguese words. Besides, the reforms only apply to the spelling, and not to things like syntax, region/culture specific vocabulary and pronunciation. So the reforms will not unify both variants into one and only ‘language’.

Also, internet searches will only be more difficult, not easier, since it’ll be more difficult to differentiate (at first look) Brazilian from European Portuguese in internet search results, while both language variants will still be different from each other everywhere else. A translator for Brazilian Portuguese searching for a term in Brazilian Portuguese will have much more trouble after the new spelling floods the Web, since both Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese will appear at first sight as the same variant. This is problematic if, for example, the translator in question doing a search on the internet finds a legal term in a Web page that he thinks has been written in Brazilian Portuguese, when, in fact, it has been written in European Portuguese (but he doesn’t know it because of the somewhat uniform spelling). The term will probably be unsuitable for use in a Brazilian text, but if the translator doesn’t know it is a term of European Portuguese, then if he decides to use it, it’ll be a wrong translation. And vice-versa. So, because of the spelling reform, Portuguese translators and terminologists will have to double their attention in terminology searches — not to mention their attention when trying not to mix old with new spelling. Only those with very good search skills will be able to differentiate one variant from the other.

And, most important of all, the new spelling reform will NOT change the fact that you need a native speaker of Brazilian Portuguese for a translation that’ll be used in Brazil and a native speaker of European Portuguese for a translation that’ll be used in Portugal.

Tags | Palavras-chave: acordo ortográfico, língua portuguesa, nova ortografia