The Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) celebrates a plenary session this Thursday in which it will once again fly over the confrontation between tildistas and antildistas. Despite the fact that some have wanted to present the image of a RAE divided between writers and philologists on account of whether the accent should be placed on the adverb “only” and some pronouns, the reality is that the recovery of the orthographic sign in ambiguous cases (” I only work on Sunday”) was taken unanimously and without fissures. The official position of the entity led by Santiago Muñoz Machado is that there has been no revolt and that everything boils down to a “wording change” to make things clearer in cases that can lead to confusion, an option that was already planned. in ‘Spelling’ 2010.
A champion of the tilde, like Arturo Pérez Reverte and other writers, sang victory and claimed victory on Twitter for having won an “old battle.” But it is not so clear that there are winners and losers in the debate, although the author of ‘The Table of Flanders’ has anticipated that today’s meeting will be “stormy”.
The RAE is not surprised by these controversies: it has had to deal with controversies of different kinds for a long time, from the controversies caused by inclusive language to the war against foreign words.
When García Márquez advocated in the Congress of Zacatecas, in 1997, to retire spelling and send “rock axes” to hell, there were those who trembled and believed that the foundations of the language were shaking, despite the fact that the author of ‘One Hundred Years of solitude’ was a very orthodox writer and respectful of the language.
Apostles of the at @
A quarter of a century has passed since that revulsive speech and the RAE does not win for disappointment. Undoubtedly, the biggest attacks on the language come from the ranks of the defenders of inclusive language. Among them are the paladins of the @ and the ‘x’, graphic resources to integrate the masculine and feminine forms of a noun in a single word.
The problem with the use of these markers is that they are unpronounceable, so it is necessary to resort to gender splitting (“Spanish men and women”), which, according to the RAE, threatens the economy of language. The entity that ensures purity of Spanish considers that generic masculine is not discriminatory, an idea that has fallen on deaf ears in political language, except when public representatives withdraw from the rostrum.
As Álex Grijelmo, a journalist specializing in linguistic issues, argued a few weeks ago in ‘El País’, politicians use gender splitting except when the noun has negative implications. Nobody speaks, for example, of “the corrupt and the corrupt.”
The RAE has maintained a dispute with the Government –or the Government with the RAE- regarding the possibility of including gender division in the Constitution. The former Vice President of the Government, Carmen Calvo, addressed a query to the institution in this regard and the answer was negative, which angered Calvo.
The war against linguistic contamination is at the very origins of the organization. Already at the beginning of the 20th century, the “galiparlante plague” was abhorred and that they used terms borrowed from French. Sometimes the Academy finds it difficult to accept the novelties of the language and moves in the wake of the voices of the street.
The word ‘restaurant’ had been in the dictionary since 1817, but with the meaning of ‘establishment where meals are served’ it was not recorded until 1925. Words like ‘buffet’ and ‘chauffeur’, of French origin, are now fully accepted, but they faced the enmity of language purists.
“weaker sex”
The RAE’s resistance to foreign words is justified by the avalanche of Anglicisms that are sometimes difficult to justify, such as ‘abstract’ or ‘consulting’, which can be easily replaced by ‘extract’ and ‘consultant’.
Feminism, whether postmodern or classical, dismisses the institution as macho. The RAE has not excluded from the dictionary the meaning of “weaker sex” to refer to all women. Misogyny? It’s not about that, says Darío Villanueva, former director of the RAE, in his book ‘Bite your tongue’, who admits the machismo of the locution. But he warns that a dictionary mission is to include documented words from 1500, even if later the “slang, pejorative, offensive or discriminatory character” of the term is emphasized.
The RAE has maintained a dispute with the Government -or the Government with the RAE- regarding the possibility of including gender division in the Constitution
The feminist organizations were revolted by the meaning of the adjective ‘easy’, which read like this: «Said of a woman: That she lends herself without problems to having sexual relations». Such an expression appeared in the writings of Emilia Pardo Bazán and Concepción Arenal, but the RAE decided that this attribute should be extended to men and women, since the sexual revolution caused literary testimonies that speak of “easy men, boys or uncles” to proliferate like mushrooms. ».
Ethnic minorities have been very susceptible to the learned house. Soledad Becerril, former Ombudsman, requested the withdrawal of the only definition of ‘gypsy’ as ‘trickery’, despite the fact that the dictionary specifies that such a meaning should be understood as offensive or discriminatory. All in all, the uses of language are as arbitrary as they are capricious, because gypsy can also be understood, in a colloquial sense, as one “who has grace and art to win the wills of others”.
Eight years ago, the parents of autistic children petitioned the Ministry of Health to banish the meaning of autistic as a person “locked in their world, consciously removed from reality.” Another way to amend the page to the RAE is to suggest terms not included in the lexicographical treatises.
An organization of parents who had lost a child due to illness or accident complained that there was no adjective to define them, so they suggested the term ‘orophile’, with the frequently repeated argument that what is not named does not exist. An unfortunate invention, because as Villanueva proclaims, ‘orphan’ would be one ‘who loves orphanhood’. And it is not true that Spanish does not contain a word to refer to the orphans of children. It is in disuse, although it was consigned in 1791: it is “dishijado, da”.
legion of offended
The accusation that the RAE is an immobile institution is not entirely true either. In the training of professional women, words such as ‘judge’, ‘deputy’ or ‘councillor’ have been accepted.
Those offended by the RAE are legion. In 2015, an organization that smokes cannabis and marijuana sent the institution a letter reproaching it for reinforcing the negative bias of the drug, “when throughout the history of humanity it has meant much more than that and has been raw material essential and necessary for [el sector] textile, navigation, medicine, etc.” In addition, he complained of the insult of speaking ill of cannabis derivatives and not of the harmful effects of alcohol and tobacco.
Salvador Gutiérrez, linguist and academic, complained in his day that many of these protests are not exactly constructive, but are written with a bellicose and insulting tone. Gutiérrez complains that RAE is also a victim of hoaxes. A few years ago it was said that the Academy has just approved vulgarisms such as ‘almóndiga’, ‘toballa’ or ‘asín’, words that have actually been in the dictionary since the 18th century, since in their day they were variants that appeared in classic works .