W JHEN the history of Portuguese orthography is written, there will be no more interesting chapter than that dealing with the work of Gon<;alves Viana and the modern spelling reform. The work of Gonsalves Viana, which began with his Bases da Ortografia Portugueza in 1885, was crowned by the adoption of the nova ortografia in Portugal in 1911. And twenty years later, the nova ortagrafia was adopted in Brazil by the so-called Ac6rdo Ortogrdfico Luso-Brasileiro between the Brazilian Academy of Letters and the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon. This Ac6rdo, because of its incompleteness and ambiguity and because of the failure of the Brazilian and Portuguese governments to fully indorse it, did not bring about complete uniformity in orthographic precept or practice. Yet the degree to which it has succeeded is truly remarkable. The nova ortografia' of 1911, slightly amended by Decree No. 2,553 of November, 1920, was the official spelling of Portugal when the two Academies agreed in March, 1931 on certain Bases para um Ac6rdo Ortogrdfico.2 The Portuguese government did not approve these Bases but simply amended the Reform of 1911 a second time by Decree No. 7,117 of May, 1931,3 in which certain of the clauses of the Bases were approved with altered wording. The Brazilian government approved the Bases in a general way by Decree No. 20,108 of June, 1931 but this Decree was implemented by an interpretation set forth in a Formuldrio Ortogrdfico published in the Revista da Academia Brasileira de Letras, XXXVI (July, 1931), 290-300. And most of the terms of this Formuldrio were in turn approved by Decree No. 292 of February, 1938. There are only three major divergencies between the spelling of Portugal and that of Brazil.