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| Guess what this is? |
Today and yesterday have been rainy and cool. I don’t really mind, I prefer it to the heat,
but it has discouraged the tourists from coming, and the town is very
quiet. The birds sit on their favourite
perches, the antennae, and gossip, while the rain falls steadily onto the
fog-shrouded town.
After a very leisurely breakfast I wandered over to the
Galapagos – I tend to gravitate between two islands – for lunch. It, too, was very quiet, with very few
customers, who made little noise. It was
almost like the time when I came here just before Fermeture Annuelle in November, when the town closes
down so all the natives can have their holiday, and I was pretty much the only
tourist around. I really loved that
time, so peaceful and quiet and restful!
I used to fantasize about holidaying in Greenland
at the height of the dark season, and basically hibernate – La Bourboule in
mid-November is fairly close to that ideal.
While eating my, as always, excellent lunch, I read the
German magazine, Der Spiegel. There was
a story about grammar and spelling which yanked me out of my tranquillity. In the 1990s the German Spelling Authorities
decided yet again to change the way certain German words are spelled, amidst
some controversy, and introduced such horrors as ‘fotografie’ and ‘stopp’. To this day it hurts my aesthetic
sensibilities to read these noble words so massacred. The change was supposed to make it easier for
children to learn how to spell, but according to another article in the same
magazine children’s spelling has seriously deteriorated since then.
I am not surprised. Every
time they change the ‘correct’ spelling of a word most of the adult population
cease to be able to write their own language any more and thus can’t help the
young ones with their homework. What these
‘reformers’ never seem to realise is that schools play only a small part of an
education. The entire environment of a
child contributes to its education. Every
time someone reads a newspaper, a book, a maintenance manual, an e-mail, s/he
learns about spelling and grammar. If
the standard of literacy of these texts is low, then language skills will
eventually deteriorate, whatever a school may have taught. Much of the adult population will never, or
only slowly over time, adopt the new spelling conventions, so their e-mails,
notes, letters, contributions to newspapers and magazines, will not reflect the
new approved method of spelling.
Moreover, changing the spelling of words makes a huge number
of existing publications suddenly wrong.
So if children are learning a language in the only manner which will
benefit them in the long run, viz by reading anything they can get their hands
on, including older books found in libraries and their relatives’ bookcases,
they are going to be confronted with all manner of spelling, depending on the
time the book was printed, and will get hopelessly muddled as to which spelling
is ‘correct’.
Another reason why I wish they left the language alone is
that by for example spelling ‘photographie’ as ‘fotografie’ we disguise the Greek
ancestry of the word, make it harder to understand its heritage, and thus lose
part of the richness of the language. Every
word carries its history within itself, and one of the joys of language is the
unpacking of this history.
For example, the German word ‘beten’ (praying) comes from
‘bitten’(begging/asking) – have you ever considered the light this throws on
our relationship with God? Basically, is
communicating with God just about asking for something? In English it is the same idea, of course –
the word ‘pray’ is also used to ask for things, as in the phrase ‘pray tell’,
although this use is now rare. If we changed
‘beten’ to ‘beeten’ to reflect its pronunciation better, one would assume it
was related to ‘Beete’ – beets. As this
would lend a decidedly vegetarian aspect to our relation with the deity I for
one would strongly oppose such a change.
This aspect of words is especially interesting when learning
a foreign language. For example,
yesterday I learned the French word for ‘meatball’ – ‘boulette’. ‘Boulette’ is a German word for a ground beef
patty in a bun – a Hamburger!
Discovering these kind of connections and interactions between words
gives me great pleasure, and every time the words are changed this pleasure is
imperilled. If ‘Boulette’ were spelled
‘Buledde’ it would be much more difficult to recognise the connection.
By changing the spelling of words like ‘Photographie’
Germans sunder themselves from other languages, which continue to use the Greek
version, and thus make it harder for foreigners to learn German. And why, incidentally, wasn’t ‘Philosophie’
changed to ‘Filosofie’, or even ‘Viehlohsovieh’? Perhaps a step too far for the nation of Kant
and Hegel?
And anyway, how dare these spelling gurus tell people what
is right and what isn't, and consign entire libraries and works of literature
to the dust bins of history? Goethe sometimes
signed himself as Göthe, does that mean that the greatest German writer couldn't
even spell his own name? No, it just shows that he was playing around with language, and if he could, surely so can we? Language
belongs to all of us, and personally, as long as I can understand what someone
is trying to communicate, let them please themselves!
Anarchy Now!!!!
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| Doorhandles of the Galapagos, this time right side up! |
