For those who don’t know, all the portuguese-talking countries made an treaty in order to unify. Different from the UK and USA (and Australia and etc) the portuguese in Portugal is much different from the Portuguese in Brazil, or Angola, or Timor and other countries, so we all made this pact.

So, for youall portuguese native born speakers (or not) what do you think about that?

I don’t speak Portuguese, but I think that is very interesting!

Excelente

From a few blogs I visited today:
New spelling in Brazil
Could you imagine what would happen if you had to adopt a new set of spelling and grammar rules? Well that’s exactly what has just happened in Brazil.
I’m sure you know that Portuguese is different in Brazil and Portugal. It all stems from 1911 when Portugal (and its territories) commissioned a standardisation of the writing system (orthography) for Portuguese; this was known as the orthographic reform of Gonçalves Viana.
Due to various disagreements and logistic issues Brazil set up an orthography of its own in 1934, with the same general principles as the Portuguese orthography, but not entirely identical to it, which lead to differences between the two languages.
Over the remaining 20th Century various moves were made to reform the languages and bring them closer together, many positive steps were taken. The main change was the signing of the Orthographic Agreement in 1990 by seven Portuguese speaking nations.
Orthographic Agreement of 1990
The agreement sets out new spelling rules for the language in an attempt to standardise its use across its 250 million users. This means that as from this week some Brazilian Portuguese spelling and grammar rules will be different.
The changes include,
•Ruling out of letters c and p from the European/African spelling when silent
•The removal of the diaeresis mark [ a weird name for those two little dots placed over letters) from Brazilian spelling
•The elimination of the acute accent from the diphthongs éi and ói in paroxytone words (e.i.: idéia = idéia, heróico = heroico / idea/ heroic)
•Spellings such as anónimo and anônimo, facto and fato, both will be considered legitimate, according to the dialect of the author or person being transcribed.
•Common guidelines for the use of hyphens and capitalization.
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Brazil and Portugal have signed a few orthographic (spelling) reform agreements in the past, but could never come to an understanding. Portugal enforces the 1943 agreement. Brazil goes by the one signed in 1945. If all Lusophone countries sign the new agreement now in gestation, it will be in effect in 2009.

The idea behind the proposal to again update the Portuguese language is unifying spelling rules in Brazil, Portugal and Lusophone countries Angola, Mozambique, São Tomé & Príncipe, Cabo Verde and Guinea-Bissau. There are other countries in the world, though, where Portuguese is one of the official languages.
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“Brazilians and Portuguese regularly complain about how badly the others speak what is supposed to be a common language. Brazil’s popular soap operas, known as novelas, are shown all over the world with subtitles – even in Portugal since the Portuguese can barely follow what the Brazilians have done to their language. [well, I would need subtitles for "Coronation Street” please – British soap opera- since I speak "Canadian")

In turn, Brazilians find the Portuguese spoken in Portugal to be antiquated, creaky and quaint."
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@ Pedro: thanks goodness it won’t change the pronunciation a bit which is awesome! Everything else such as eliminating an accent here, taking away silent words over there, I think these changes are simply useless and silly. According to the news not even the scholars know how to handle these yet. So, maybe we shouldn’t sweat the small stuff. My humble opinion though. What about you, what’s your view on this?

Holly smokes!! There was a long post….

My question is, even if the pact goes into effect, will people actually abide by it? After all, if you’ve written a certain way your whole life, I’d imagine it would be hard to change it all of a sudden?

Well, it’s not all of a sudden, because we heard about this like 3 or 4 years go…. and, like Angela said, it didn’t changed the spoken portuguese, just the written one.

Nowadays the scholars have already a understanding about the agreement, here in Brazil they say it’s not enough and still needs more change but for now is good! Besides here wont change as much as will in Portugal, for example.

The ellimination of silent letters it is a good ideia, see the example about the word “Fact” in Portugal used to write “facto” and in Brazil “Fato”, but both had the same, brazillian, speaking, so it’s better to make it simple, right?

And, finishing, yes, Ginny, here in Brazil, people are trying to abide this, all newspapers, books and written material are respecting the new agreement, so in time, I guess, everybody will be too.

I actually found an overview of the changes made and found them fantastic. While it means that there are a number of rules I will have to re-learn but the benefit of being able to almost* perfectly communicate through the written language with people that otherwise would be unintelligible is exponential. It’s almost like learning a new language with out actually doing anything.

Acho também que é uma boa coisa :-)

I, too, think this is a good thing. Spoken languages are a living, evolving thing, and spelling usually follows — with a variable delay, but follows anyway. And the fact that different cultures sharing the same language actually manage to agree on new spellings and rules is nice :-)