Contrary to neighboring languages such as Spanish or French, whose orthographies were set by language academies in the 17th century (French) and the 18th century (Spanish), Portuguese had no official spelling until the early 20th century; authors wrote as they pleased with substantial difference in spelling or other elements. Orthographic standardization In 1911, the newly formed Portuguese Republic, concerned with improving the literacy of its citizens, charged a commission of philologists with defining a standard orthography for Portuguese. The result was what has come to be known in Portugal as the orthographic reform of Gonçalves Viana. The new standard became official in Portugal and its overseas territories at the time, which are today the independent nations of Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe, and East Timor, as well as the Chinese S.A.R. of Macau and the Indian state of Goa and territories of Daman and Diu, and Dadra and Nagar Haveli. In 1938, Brazil set up an orthography of its own, with the same general principles as the Portuguese orthography, but not entirely identical to it. Basic principles The authors of the first spelling reform of Portuguese, imbued with the modern ideas of phonology, rejected the etymological spellings current in the previous centuries, preferring a more phonetic orthography, like those of Spanish and Italian. On the other hand, considering that the period of Galician-Portuguese troubadorian poetry had been a golden age of Portuguese literature, they aimed to keep the new orthography as close to the medieval spelling as possible, in spite of some phonetic changes which the language had undergone. The resulting orthographic standard was essentially a compromise between these intents, on one hand, and common traditions, on the other: in a few cases, spelling conventions which went against etymology but had long become customary were made official. Thus, the reform kept some graphemic distinctions for phonological traits which were not present in every dialect, but still present in at least some areas: between z and intervocalic s ( and in medieval Portuguese, but now reduced to in most dialects), between c/ç and s(s) ( and in medieval Portuguese, but now reduced to in most dialects), and between ch and x (originally and , now just in most dialects, although the distinction is still retained in some). The unstressed vowels e and o were also retained for word-family homogeneity and etymology when they were pronounced as i