Re: gunar marcks

>Lighten up!  I think that students and scholars of world-system theory or
>anything else, for that matter, have a responsibility to spell words and
>names correctly.  So, yes, I was kidding, but the point made is serious.
>One of the most obnoxious by-products of internet communication is a
>growing indifference to orthography, grammar, punctuation, and the like,
>all of which are necessary for clarity and effectiveness of communication.
>
Orthography is a big issue elsewhere - in the seventies there was in Holland
what might be called a `Trotskist' spelling of Dutch with leftist groups
introducing the `new' phonetic spelling of Dutch, since the `old' spelling
(often as illogical as English) discriminated workers - thus `socialist
publishers in Nijmegen' you would normally write as `Socialistische
Uitgeverij in Nijmegen' (SUN) but this Trotskist publishing house then wrote
`Socialistiese'. It was quite symptomatic they shifted to `Socialistische'
in 1985 (I believe) and now they are simply SUN-publishers.  I call it
Trotskist since the communist party did not adopt new spelling - partly, I
guess, to distinguish themselves from the Trotskists so that it remained
'communistische Partij' instead of `communistiese' - with the ritual
spelling-errors of course.

Interestingly enough the former Maoist/Trotskist party the `Socialist Party'
(SP) is now one of the biggest parties of the country and I believe they
still spell it as `Socialistiese Partij' though they may have switched to
`Socialistische Partij' meanwhile to distance themselves from their
Maoist/Trotskist past meanwhile.

Of course, these are minor problems compared to, say, Uzbekistan which
shifted from Arabic, modified Arabic, Latin, modified Latin, Cyrillic,
modified Cyrillic, back to Arabic script again - within eighty years with
every shift in the political line!

Best wishes
R.J. Barendse