The Language Academy gets involved again with the use of the ‘solo’. This Thursday, in the plenary session, the academics approved a new usage wording to be published in the next edition of the Panhispanic Dictionary of Doubts, which says that it is “mandatory to write the adverb solo without accents”. Until then nothing changes, the alteration of the wording comes next: “It is optional to label the adverb ‘only’ in contexts where, in the opinion of the writer, its use entails a risk of ambiguity.” In the conflict of ambiguity, the choice of the writer will prevail, who will be able to use the diacritical tilde at his discretion. That is, everything remains in the hands of the user.
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Further
The problem comes on Friday. To communicate the change, the linguistic part of the RAE prefers to say that “nothing has changed”. But academic writers prefer to say that everything has changed and Arturo Pérez Reverte himself, defender of the accent in ‘solo’, has reacted in networks against the position of the Academy, saying it is giving “biased and inaccurate information” about whether or not this change adds “nothing new.” From the communication department of the RAE they have asked this newspaper for margin to clarify the position and issue an official position in the face of this clash of interests: “The decision that was made on Thursday in plenary session is unanimous. It consists of adding ‘in the judgment of the writer’. A wording change has been approved”, they explain.
It was a norm that was shipwrecked in ambiguity. Since 2010 it was mandatory not to use the diacritical tilde, but it was also optional to do so if there was ambiguity. More than a decade after having sown confusion in the population and among the academics themselves, the rectification arrives: it will be at the discretion of the writer whether or not to check the adverb to distinguish it from the adjective. There each one.
Internal Debate
What has happened for the RAE to blur this matter even more? First, the very division of academics. A large part of them did not even commune with her. Especially the creators. When they left the Academy and sat down in front of their notebooks, their typewriters or their computers, they decided to declare themselves in rebellion against the house of the word and keep the mark on the novelties that were offered to their readers in bookstores.
Faced with these, linguists resisted the thrust of those who write with theoretical arguments. Academics opposed to resolving the ambiguity argue that the tilde “in the adverb ‘solo’ would imply extending the use of the diacritical tilde to an exorbitant number of uses,” Salvador Gutiérrez wrote in 2016 in an extensive report against the diacritical tilde. This academic, who took office three years after the change of criteria in 2010, is a professor of General Linguistics at the University of León and is the key figure in the diacritical tilde schism.
But three years after obtaining the majority of the votes of the academics so that coherence prevailed over ambiguities, he acknowledged to EFE that attention to the advice issued in the Spelling of the Spanish Language it was “unequal”. The diacritic use of the tilde was still used to distinguish between the adverb and the adjective. The press and textbooks immediately complied with the new orders set forth in the Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas (DPD). The publishers also turned the recommendation into a sacrament that only the chosen and the stubborn could skip. Among them, a part of its academic authors.
technical arguments
Salvador Gutiérrez is also the director of the Department of “Spanish up to date” and maintains that “you have to operate with technical rules, although some academics were taught something else at school.” That is why Salvador Gutiérrez maintains against the use of the tilde a reason of theoretical “coherence” of the Spanish grammatical art. Two years ago he showed his fed up with this issue and asked the insubmissive academics to stop their stubbornness, because they lacked technical arguments with which to defend themselves. According to his criteria, this Thursday “the rule has not changed”, despite the clarification that has been included.
Luis Mateo Díez defends the opposite. He has always been one of those stubborn who think that the change was “unnecessary” and that the tilde is forceful to resolve the conflict. He was willing to continue to insist on its use because he believed in academic disagreement. “The new decision is reasonable. The freedom of the writer is above ”, he explains to this newspaper. “The use of the tilde is so natural that I had no discussion. What we writers claimed was the expressiveness of our language. The important thing is that for the RAE, from this Thursday, the use of the tilde is not incorrect. They are very healthy creative discussions and the contrasts between creators and linguists are very healthy. Because language is not an exact science and, furthermore, it belongs to the people. The Academy is fine as a notary, so that it does not spoil us, ”says the academic Luis Mateo Díez.
criteria changes
Soledad Puértolas entered the Academy the year of discord and the author of opera music removed its tildes, although its preference is to keep it. “I did not understand anything about the debate when I arrived. But I abided by the rule. Now we see that the logic of use leads us to recover the norm of 1999, not that of 2010”, explains the academic from ‘armchair G’.
The diacritic tilde fight is an old academic showdown. In 1959 the New prosody and spelling rules allowed the diacritical tilde. In 1999, the Spelling of the Spanish language decided that the tilde could be used when there was a risk of ambiguity. He Panhispanic Dictionary of doubts of 2005 was much more emphatic: “The tilde will be used obligatorily in adverbial use to avoid ambiguities”.
And so we come to Spelling of the Spanish Language of 2010, in which all the Academies reviewed, studied and made observations, criticisms and proposals and verified “the rarity of cases of possible double interpretation”. That is to say, the ambiguity was not so common as to maintain the happy tilde. They chose to eliminate the obligatory nature of accentuation even in cases of possible amphibology and turn it into an error. It happened to be persecuted as a bug.
The language navigates in a polysemic sea: “Bordeaux wine”, “My grandfather was serene”, “Ramón was raised in the palace”, “It was a magnificent boat”… But there is a graphic accent, which allows us to distinguish in writing and , especially, in reading, two identical words in the written form. homographs. But different because one is tonic and the other is unstressed. The first is marked with a tilde, the unstressed is marked by its absence.
goodbye to mistake
“What worried me the most was that its use would be penalized,” says Soledad Puértolas. “From now on what will I do? I’ll put it on whenever she wants. And the students, too. Because until this Thursday they could commit a mistake and fail the exam for using it. It wasn’t like that before, I think it’s good that its use has been decriminalized. The tension between linguists and writers over language is normal, and we must come to an understanding. The creator plays with language and we must avoid punitive use. The publishers are something else, we are going to see how they react from now on”, indicates the narrator.
Others like Antonio Muñoz Molina, who at the beginning of this dispute declared himself against the recommendation, have ended up rectifying their position and abandoning the accent. In All that was solid, an autobiographical essay published by Seix Barral in 2013, reviewed democratic Spain to understand why the country was going down without dropping the diacritical accent. In your steps on the stairs, from 2019, was no longer there because the author preferred to abide by the rules “to maintain the unity of the language”, as the academic explained. Soledad Puértolas, author of opera music (Anagrama, 2019), he has also renounced it, although at this time he has recognized that “the norm is somewhat confusing.”
The playwright Juan Mayorga, an academic since 2018 in the ‘m chair’, was reluctant to stop doing it. In 2014, the publishing house La Una Rota brought together a 25-year edition of his texts, where the accent is clearly visible. But in the recent publication of his works, he has complied with the RAE standard. José Luis Sampedro never took the tildes out of him. in the prologue of Indignant (Fate), the best seller of non-fiction by Stéphane Hessel, did not resign: “The guilt of the financial sector in this great crisis has not only not led to it; The suppression of high-risk mechanisms and operations has not even been considered”, could be read in the book from the end of 2010.