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Laredo Morning Times
Wednesday, June 23, 1999
NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL
Hazelwood begins serving sentence
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Capt. Joseph Hazelwood put on an apron and gloves Tuesday to help prepare salad at a soup kitchen as part of his community service over the Valdez oil spill. After nine years of appeals, Hazelwood began his sentence of 1,000 hours of service on Monday by loading roadside junk onto a truck. The move indoors will allow him more meaningful work, said his lawyer, Michael Chalos. “Sure, people would have loved to see him picking up trash, but that doesn’t really give anything back to the community,” Chalos said. Hazelwood was the skipper of the oil tanker Exxon Valdez when it ran aground in 1989, spilling 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound. It was the nation’s worst oil spill. He was convicted in 1990 of a misdemeanor charge of negligent discharge of oil. Hazelwood, 53, worked silently at the soup kitchen Bean’s
John Adams letter sells for $635,000
BY RICHARD PYLE Associated Press Writer NEW YORK — A letter written by John Adams three days before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, predicting “a great expence of blood” to secure freedom from England, sold at auction Tuesday for a record $635,000. An anonymous buyer captured the letter in spirited bidding against a New York documents dealer representing an unidentified museum. The price was a record for a letter by Adams, the Revolutionary War figure and second president, and a record for any signer of the Declaration of Independence. The seller was not identified, Sotheby’s said. The July 1, 1776, letter was sent to Archibald Bullock, a former member of the Continental Congress from Georgia. In it, Adams refers to the discussion about the Declaration of Independence — due to begin in Philadelphia that day — as “the greatest debate of all.” “May Heaven prosper, the newborn Republic, and make it more glorious than any former Republicks have been,” he wrote in the letter, complete with idiosyncratic spelling and capitalization. Adams further wrote: “The object is great which We have in View, and We must expect a great expence of blood to obtain it. But We Should always remember that a free Constitution of civil Government cannot be purchased at too dear a rate as there is nothing, on this side (of) the New Jerusalem, of equal importance to Mankind.” Sotheby’s spokesman Emma Cunningham said the previous record for an Adams letter, set in 1993, was $380,000 for a 1775 plan for new state governments.
AP Photo
AT WORK: Former Exxon Valdez captain Joseph Hazelwood prepares breakfast. Cafe, emptying lettuce into a answer reporters’ questions. container for salad. He wouldn’t
Spanish protection involves negotiation
BY MARLISE SIMONS c.1999 N.Y. Times News Service MADRID, Spain — Few places in Madrid are more exclusive than an austere mansion on Ruiz de Alarcon Street, just above the rambling Prado Museum. Loftiness is exuded from its marble halls, plush salons and shelves stacked with outsized books clad in fading vellum. All the portraits are of famous writers, here Lope de Vega, there Cervantes. This, the inner sanctum of the Spanish Royal Academy, is seldom seen by ordinary citizens. But for all its elitist aura, it is the people’s business that goes on here, the business of the 400 million or so speakers of Spanish, which developed a millennium ago on the high plains of Castile and now ranks among the world’s most widely spoken languages. Every Thursday, the 46-member Academy meets to “cleanse, fix and give splendor” to the Spanish language, as its motto promises, and to carry out its mandate to give awards, settle points of grammar and spelling and prepare the latest authoritative dictionary. It has done so since 1713. But if the Academy once ruled with absolute authority over the vast Spanish empire, the Americas now have their own language academies that propose home-grown changes. Disputes have even led to threats of linguistic schisms. So, with 9 out of 10 Spanish speakers now living outside Spain, the Royal Spanish Academy has learned to consult and negotiate. “The stern matriarch in Madrid has become more like a benign grandmother,” said an Argentine diplomat here. “She keeps an eye on her adventurous offspring, but she gives advice, not orders.” Preserving the unity of the language through a universal spelling is currently the institution’s first objective, said Victor Garcia de la Concha, director of the Academy. “It’s wonderful that our language, which is so dispersed, has kept a single set of spelling rules,” he said. “In fact, it’s a miracle.” It has been helped, he said, by the fact that “Spanish has one of the most phonetic spellings of the great languages.” Among the other most widely spoken languages, Hindi and Arabic have become diverse and English spelling is not uniform, the director lamented. His voice rose as he pondered danger. “If you allow lots of variants or reforms, you create division, even chaos!” he exclaimed. “Spelling is a very serious matter. It’s the instrument to defend the unity of the language.” On a recent Thursday, the Academy had barely opened its session with the traditional invocation “Come, Holy Spirit” in Latin when the gathering around the great oval table was confronted with different views over the use of accents in Spain and in Latin America. On the agenda was a new guide to spelling, to replace a 1958 version later this year. There were questions: should a word like guion (meaning, among other things, screenplay) have an accent on the second syllable? Usage said yes. But some Latin American linguists had argued that they pronounced the word as one syllable, so no accent was required. “Any change will be discussed and approved word for word together with the other 21 academies,” said Gregorio Salvador, a member of the spelling commission. “So the new guide will not be a Spanish but a panHispanic version.” The drafting committee, he said, had been mindful of criticisms from the Americas, among them that the Madrid Academy is too Spain-centric. At one point in the draft text, the Academy used the phrase driver’s license, which in Spain is permiso de conducir. Protests arrived from the Americas noting that in Peru and Ecuador it was called a brevete and elsewhere a licencia. The example was dropped. This search for consensus among 22 academies (two are in countries where Spanish is not the first language, the United States and the Philippines) may seem cumbersome, but Salvador sees safety in numbers. “Changes have become very rare now,” he said. “If someone proposes a change and others are against, it does not happen. We need at least a threequarter majority to make important decisions. Keeping unity is even more important than accuracy.” While written Spanish may be closely monitored, the spoken language continues to diversify. In Spain, Catalan, Basque, and Galician all affect Castilian. In the Americas, the distinct speech of, say, Mexicans, Argentines, Cubans or Chileans can quickly be spotted. Salvador said it was the accent of the Andalusians, the easygoing southerners who lengthen their vowels and swallow their consonants, that was first exported to Spain’s colonies and set the tone for the softer Spanish of the Caribbean. In the New World, Spanish was enriched by the vocabulary of the continent’s Indians and by waves of immigrants. It took time and pressure for the remote Academy in Madrid to adjust and accept widelyused Indian words. But its latest official dictionary, published in 1992, added hundreds of words from the Quechua language of Peru, from Araucano of Chile, from Guarani of Paraguay, and from Nahua of Mexico. Some Nahua words, of course, were adopted long ago, even in English: xocoatl became chocolate; ahuacatl turned into aguacate and avocado; tomatl is now the ubiquitous tomato. The Academy director insists that protecting the language does not mean closing it off. Outside words have always percolated into the Latin dialect that became Castilian: In the Middle Ages, it absorbed some 5,000 Arabic words from the Moorish rulers (many starting with al, like alcatraz), followed by myriad Italian and French words. “Now we are getting hundreds of Anglicisms, but the language will absorb and digest them,” he said. He cited mitin (meeting), futbol, and, of course, there is guisqui (whisky). But will they enter the Academy dictionary? “It may take a little while,” the director said with a laugh, adding that the Academy did not believe in the line taken in France, which a few years ago tried to legislate against Anglicisms. “Nobody can seal a language anyway,” he mused. “The Romans already said that in matters of language, usage is more powerful than Caesar.”