Quote:
|
Originally Posted by ZaphodBeeblebrox
Around 1975, The Government of Portugal, Decreed their Spelling, Would Be Normalized, "ph" Became "f", "ck" Became "c", and Middle "y" Became "ll" ...
Spain, Is Only NOW, Doing The Same Thing; Didn't Mark Twain, Suggest Something Similar, for English?
|
Though even there, it's a tricky issue. Because although one might naively assume that the Portuguese government "owns" Portuguese, in fact it doesn't, the biggest reason being that there is another, larger country where people also speak Portuguese. In that case, if I remember correctly, the Brazilian government also carried out a reform so the two are pretty much harmonized. But in the case of English, the Americans, at the initiative of Webster, I'm pretty sure, carried out some attempted reforms of spelling. Some of them caught on (like centre --> center, and colour --> color), but there were others that never caught on. In France, too, the French Academy does try to keep control over the language, but in that case as well, you have Senegal, Haiti, etc., and the French government has no sovereignty there.
So basically, everything's a mess. But it can't be any other way.