Yesterday I had a linguistic panic attack at my gym. I always speak Spanish with the staff there, who are are uniformly Latina, and they know that I’m interested in the language. Yesterday one of them asked me why Spanish has more letters than English. This was a mistake on her part, because I immediately launched into an explanation of how the Real Academia Española (more accurately, a majority of the world’s Spanish language academies) eliminated ch and ll from the alphabet in 1994.
Afterwards the question popped into my head: what about rr, the Spanish double r that denotes a trill? Along with ch and ll, rr is the language’s third purely consonantal digraph, meaning a sequence of two consonant letters that together represent a single consonant sound. Was rr also affected in 1994? (I was 99% sure that it wasn’t.) If not, why not? And why hadn’t I thought about this before? (That was the panic part.) I bailed on my workout early.
Once I got home and consulted my bookshelf and the Internet, I quickly reassured myself that rr had never been part of the Spanish alphabet, and so had not merited the same scrutiny as ch and ll. Any easy proof of rr‘s inferior status is that words containing an rr have always been alphabetized as they would be in any other language. For example, in the 2006 compact Berlitz dictionary that I still keep on my shelf (but rarely use these days), corrupción precedes corsetería and perro precedes persecución. You will find the same order in an older dictionary. If rr were part of the alphabet, between r and s, then all cor- words would precede all corr- words, and all per- words would precede all perr- words.
That is exactly how ch and ll were treated before 1994. In a modern dictionary pecho ‘chest’ precedes pecoso ‘freckled’ and callar ‘to be quiet’ precedes calor ‘heat’. However, in pre-1994 dictionaries, pecoso preceded pecho and calor preceded calle. Because the digraphs ch and ll were then considered full-fledged elements of the Spanish alphabet, all pec– words preceded all pech– words, and all cal- words precede all call- words.
In fact, this uniquely Spanish version of alphabetical order motivated the 1994 alphabet reform. As I wrote in my first book,
The change in the alphabet...simplified language processing software. Before 1994, software routines that relied on alphabetical order needed to make exceptions for Spanish, since all Spanish words with c were alphabetized before those with ch, and likewise for l and ll. For example, culebra ‘snake’ was considered alphabetically prior to chico ‘boy,’ and luchar ‘to fight’ prior to llano ‘flat, plain’—a bizarre phenomenon from a non-Spanish perspective. With ch and ll eliminated as separate letters, Spanish no longer required special computational handling. [From Question #45, "What happened to ch and ll?"]
The question remains: why was rr never treated like a letter in the first place? I don’t know (maybe some reader does), but I have a theory. In written Spanish, words can begin with any consonant, and also with ch or ll, but not with rr. Because a single r at the beginning of a word is pronounced as a trill, there would be no difference between, say, rojo ‘red’ and a hypothetical rrojo. In this sense the ch and ll digraphs were more salient than rr. Surely this is why they were added to the alphabet.
