Dear Readers,
I came across this info through another list serve and I thought it would bring an interesting discussion here on this blog.
The Portuguese Government recently approved changes on the spelling of European Portuguese to change the spelling of many words into the Brazilian Portuguese spelling. I personally think the European Portuguese was lost in time, changes were past due, but changes which would reflect their own reality, not converting to the spelling of another country.
We linguists know that there’s no better or worse version of a language, just diversity and different dialects which are products of environment, space, time, people.
Variables which are specific to each country where the language is spoken. You might say this is orthography only. Regardless, apparently this is a major reform which will, in my opinion, bring confusion to language professionals who work with European Portuguese.
What do you think? Does anybody else have any information on this topic?
I would be interested in learning more.
Any readers work in Europe?
Here is the link posted on the other list:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7405985.stm
Regards,
Claudia Krusch
CK Translations LLC
This spelling reform is a major step in giving the Portuguese language global prestige once and for all. Uniformity of spelling will unify the written Portuguese language on 5 continents as one written language irrespective of different accents. This only bodes well for the future of the Portuguese language which is already the 6th most spoken native language in the world with 230 million speakers. Portuguese is growing in leaps and bounds every day, and will soon be adopted as one of the official languages of the UN. The Portuguese language is even more powerful now because of the spelling reform.