On 9/1/2011 11:59 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
I believe that the deprecation of the digraphs as separate letters occurred as the telephone became widely used in Spain, and the telephone company demanded an official proclamation from whatever Ministry is responsible for culture that it was OK to treat the digraphs as two letters (specifically, to collate them that way), so that they could use the programs that came with the OS.
The main 'standards body' for Spanish is the Real Academia Española in Madrid, which works with the 21 other members of the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Real_Academia_Española .wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Association_of_Spanish_Language_Academies While it has apparently been criticized as 'conservative' (which is well ought to be), it has been rather progressive in promoting changes such as 'ph' to 'f' (fisica, fone) and dropping silent 'p' in leading 'psi' (sicologia) and silent 's' in leading 'sci' (ciencia). -- Terry Jan Reedy