Well, the point is not about the institutions being old, is about them being useless and therefore not needing substitutes at all, but in any case I can’t imagine any downside whatsoever in substituting anything by better alternatives, which, I don’t know if prudent, but does sound logical,
I don’t consider the language academies as useless, but that is just my opinion (like yours is the opposite), so we can agree to disagree.
As to the downsides in substituting things by “better” alternatives, I am thinking, for instance, of the archival problems technological progress has introduced. As an example, there are huge amounts of data that cannot be accessed anymore because they are kept in obsolete formats in tapes that are degrading with time, and risk being lost forever. At my work (I am a patent examiner at the European Patent Office) that is a serious problem.
When those data were put there, of course it was “better” than keeping them on paper. Unfortunately the paper records can still be accessed 100 years later (even if the access itself is not quick and easy)… But tapes created in the 1980s cannot be accessed anymore, unless you take them to very specialized labs and transfer them to other media – and there are lots of tapes that very likely we won’t have time to transfer before they degrade beyond illegibility. It seems as if a growing repository of data will have to be constantly transferred as technology advances to avoid losing it because the disks they are in cannot be read anymore or have degraded beyond legibility.
Another example of an “old” technology that in certain aspects will be better than the “new” ones is manual typewriters. The German secret services (and apparently others as well) have brought them back from retirement in order to deal with very sensitive information that would be at risk of easier eavesdropping if it were typed in computers.
Anyway – this is simply to say that “new” does not always automatically equal “better”, and that there are upsides and downsides to it. Like there are to everything else, I might add.
And I have completely hijacked the thread with this. Apologies!
This should have come with a “liquid in the mouth” warning.
Please remit a new HP laptop keyboard (American version, none of that Commie Foo stuff!) to the address that I shall email to you.
Additionally, don’t judge our Merkin liberties to name our children anything we want. I’ve named my children Mailbox, Pylon, and Curtain. I can do that because FREEDOM!
(Seriously, your post is hilarious.)
For the record, I object to that reform, too, because my German teacher taught us the old spellings so my daughter thinks I’m hopelessly unhip.
An older example of name [del]Nazis[/del] Quislings: Biker Changes Name To Harley Davidsen
Sr Siete, I’m too lazy to search for it, but recently the subject of the Ortografía came up. EFL posters were surprised by this concept of “a single manual of style for everybody”, and saw that it’s a lot easier to have a single one than to have a multitude. If you think that’s not important, I’ll assume you’ve never had to format your writings in different ways and use different spellings of the same word for different teachers or publications.
Put me squarely on the side of “while they’re not, nor do they attempt to be, the source for ‘what is a word’, they certainly do have their uses.” Such as, providing a single manual of style for over half a billion people.
Yes, but again, we are literally writing to each other right now using a language that has no need for that single manual. And yet the differences between say, Australian English and US English are smaller than the differences between, say, Mexican and Chilean.
So English speakers can choose between spelling “disk” or “disc” and there’s not ruling body telling them which one is the acceptable one, and yet they seem to survive that terrible ordeal.
So why would the idea of lacking an official ortografía in Spanish be such a drama, when it’s clearly not one in English?