Computer-Mediated Communication

Public Group active 1 year, 5 months ago

Political context of orthography

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    Jorge Alvis
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    Dear colleagues,

    This is the first part of my post. The second part will be about the “zone of social variation” in Sebba’s argument.

    I
    As a linguist educated in a country with more than sixty natives languages, the orthography of the indigenous languages was a subject of interest in my institutional environment. Nevertheless, besides practicing phonetic transcriptions and doing some morphosyntactic analysis of data collected from those languages, I don’t remember any formal homework related to its writing. So, when I say that the orthography of our languages was a subject of interest I mean that it was one of the topics my department (as part of a public university) had included in its political agenda. It was the late Nineties in Colombia and we had a new Political Constitution.

    What I remember is that none of my teachers were fully prepared to develop this job: to help to create the orthographical systems for such amount of languages. It is also clear in my mind that some leaders from those native communities were not fully comfortable with the idea of developing a writing system coming from the “Spanish model”. I guess that the reason was historical and political at the same time: for decades, the Summer Institute of Linguistics worked across the country with native communities and their languages, they (the SIL) created spelling systems (based on the Roman alphabet), grammars books, and dictionaries in order to evangelize these population. So, in the new political context shaped by the Constitution (1991), where native communities had gained the power of self-determination, they didn’t want to repeat the same history, I guess.

    I mention this as a way to recall the first time I thought about orthography as a problem, and not as something clear or transparent. In this sense, Sebba’s chapters help us to understand that orthography is not only a visual interface that allows speakers to connect sound with meaning through marks (signs) on a surface but rather the system itself, as well as the way it is used by people, represents social voices and identities (p. 104).

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