Spelling: Green and White!

On Tuesday night, I rode over to the Butter Market, to hear a discussion of the merits (NONE, in my view) of the green (governmental) vs. white (journalistic) SPELLING of Dutch, held in an upper room of a cosy, tasty-smelling little restaurant. If you can imagine, from the early 1970s when I first studied this language (#40 globally in numbers of speakers), they have not only fairly dramatically changed the spelling (I had to jettison my trusty dictionaries from the '70s, on orders from my faculty), borrowed hundreds more English words, but now EVERY TEN YEARS, they adjust the spelling! This was a university-sponsored forum. One speaker was a former editor of the green spelling group (worked for a dictionary) and the other man was a veteran journalist and also former editor of something. There were a couple of men amongst us listeners who clearly were involved in these issues and waxed rather dramatically.

I sat there, wondering why in the world people would make a language that's already challenging even HARDER, by changing the spelling every 10 years. English spelling hasn't changed at all, in my lifetime. Grammarians haggle over possessive apostrophes, but the spelling has not changed (this does not take into account American vs. British spelling)! When I studied Dutch before, the one saving grace was that it was completely phoenetic -- NO silent sounds. Now, there's a huge amount more English in it and far fewer phoenetic spellings (e.g., "computer" is now spelled as in English; when I began studying Dutch, it was spelled in Dutch phoenetic spelling, "kompjoeter"; "boutique" was spelled "boetiek").

It was another classic example of the permutations of tolerance in this society -- how things will be argued and discussed virtually to the nth degree, seeking concensus, but rarely reaching it. Along with the tolerance credo, reaching concensus is paramount here. It's most important that everyone have a say, rather than anything be decided. This may explain why there are 21 political parties. I guess it works for them, but tonight for me was an exercise in madness. I think that they shoot themselves in the foot. What they need to do is to use a few more commas, which are virtually absent. One is forced to read things out loud and mentally, to insert commas, as the context dictates. It reminded me of when I studed Latin, in which there are NO commas (I guess they didn't exist then), but one figures things out from how the nouns are declined, and also in context. In addition to a large, hardback Dutch-Dutch dictionary, I have a paperback double set (English-Dutch and reverse). In the fall, the student center had a pile of what's known as the "Green Book" for free, so I grabbed one. It lists, a to z, 110,000 words with the correct spelling, gender and hyphenation. No definitions, no plurals and no verb tenses. While such a publication surely provides a lot of employment, being forced to use it, in addition to a dictionary, seems foolish. And I do NOT intend to buy a "White Book". I wonder how the computer spelling check copes with all of this!