Lola Pons: “I speak Spanish. Castilian is to talk about the Cid”

Lola Pons is an active philologist, attentive to the uses and defense of a language that she prefers to call Spanish rather than Castilian.

Her new book,

(Arpa), is an appeal to stick out a language that loses position in the network compared to English.

She was born in Barcelona 45 years ago and is a professor at the University of Seville.

Ask.

She is an honorary member of the Proofreaders Union.

Is it an endangered species?

Response.

It is not, although they do not have the weight that they should have.

A badly corrected text can give rise to an adverse sentence for a company or very unpleasant mistakes.

I defend them.

Q.

We use Anglicisms for things that have been done all our lives.

Which have come to stay?

R.

I sincerely hope that runners are not left to be called

, but

which in Spain was called almazuela, has come to stay.

All the words that name traditional realities that did not have a philosophical paradigm or a monetary value adhered to end up being replaced by new ones.

It is unavoidable.

Sometimes there is a lot of stupidity.

Q.

Which do you find most foolish?

R.

The

the

the

that they use in Italy and it is the well-being of a lifetime.

The worst thing is that connotations are lost.

I have two battles: email instead of

or harassment instead of

which is an aseptic anglicism.

Harassing has many connotations such as harassing, harassing, or belittling that

does not include.

We should review it.

Lola Pons photographed in Seville on November 23.

PACO BRIDGES

Q.

Does Spain defend it well?

R.

There are notable efforts from the RAE or Fundéu.

But in science you have to be careful because you cannot stop generating a Spanish lexicon.

It would be going backwards.

Q.

Certain Anglicisms are favored by Google and its algorithms.

To what extent does this hinder the Spaniard's defense?

R.

Of course it conditions and I understand that what gives the most revenue is used.

But a part of that relationship with English has to do with the amount of content and that is where you have to work.

On issues such as Artificial Intelligence in Spanish, it is a challenge not to lose position.

Q.

Isn't it unfair that in an EU where England is no longer there, the language is English?

R.

It is extremely unfair, it is another of those battles that we must fight and not only philologists.

Diplomacy, politics has to deal with the use and weight of Spanish, a boost is needed.

Q.

Can the battle against English be won?

R.

We must keep in mind the good position that French has achieved in the world, which has been normalized as a scientific language, has been legitimized in many forums and things have been done well.

Spanish can also aspire to it.

Its speakers demographically exceed French.

Q.

What are we doing wrong?

R.

We must do self-criticism.

It cannot be that from Spanish institutions we are encouraged to write scientific articles in English, it is a delay.

We have spent years, centuries, trying to get hold of the ground that Latin historically had, a very long battle from the 13th century until now, from jurisprudence to science, which began by being written in Latin.

To stop doing it is a setback.

The Ministry of Universities has encouraged us to use English.

This is ridiculous, especially in disciplines like mine, which is the History of the Spanish Language.

We have gone backwards.

And we can even make up for part of the damage.

Q.

Spanish or Castilian?

A.

I speak Spanish.

I speak of Castilian when we talk about what was written until the fifteenth century: the

Juan de Mena,

But from the 16th century you have to speak Spanish.

If an Andalusian and a Paraguayan understand each other, it is because we speak the same language, and if it has to have a name, it is Spanish.

Above all, because the Spanish language is not only an evolution of Castilian, but in it there are Catalan, Aragonese, Leonese, Navarrese, Portuguese, Andalusian elements... And in that Spanish of all, the standard Spanish, there are traits that have come from side places and that's why it makes more sense to call it Spanish.

The Constitution calls it Castilian and I respect individual preferences, but there are striking things: the secondary school subject taught in Andalusia is called: Spanish Language and its Literature and that makes us think that literature is Castilian, when students study García Márquez , for example, universal, Spanish-American things.

Q.

Does saying Spanish impoverish the dimension of our language?

A.

Exactly.

It impoverishes the historical dimension with which Spanish has been constituted and hides the existence of a Castilian dialect.

Just as in dialectology we study Murcian, Extremaduran or Catalan Spanish, we can also study the Spanish studied in Castilla, which has features that are not in the standard.

Q.

Does the inclusive language burden you, they and they?

R.

I am not a user of those combined phrases.

I do not censure them because they are born from an inclusive intention, but I do not want them to be imposed on me at all because I consider them unnatural, unless there is an explicit clarifying effort.

Changes are born in society, not in language.

The old Spanish said: “Berna is coming”, with the feminine participle.

Now we say “she has come”, with the masculine participle.

And we are not for that reason worse users of the language and nor more macho.

Q.

And

,

?

R.

Elles is a proposal made from above, we will see what happens in the future.

It reflects an interesting social reality and a challenge that we are experiencing, but for now it is a form under observation.

Q.

Is the RAE too slow and strict before the feminine?

A.

Dictionaries are always behind usage.

When a form enters the dictionary it ensures that it has already been generalized in the standard of a society.

The RAE cannot be a police force, but a notary for the speakers.

How long to wait?

I am in favor of putting them in quarantine.

Sometimes we believe that a word that today does not fall out of our mouths will survive in our language.

Something gets fashionable and then it's a flash of a day.

Let's no longer talk about yuppies or surprises, but they were in the journalistic context and someone in 15 years will have to be able to understand.

Others that arose in the pandemic as covidiots we no longer use.

Q.

Have networks and mobile phones done a lot of damage to language?

R.

Not mobile phones, what has done a lot of damage is the lack of reading, that is what has most affected spelling.

Our spelling rules are excellent, but many people don't expose themselves to good spelling: they don't read well-corrected texts.

Cell phones popularize abbreviations and alternative forms, but the medieval people abbreviated much more than we did and they didn't write badly for that.

Social networks are a huge treasure trove of documentation.

Twitter gives us a huge corpus, a huge database to document the history of a lexical novelty.

We philologists use everything from wasap audio to Twitch to document contemporary linguistic changes.

That is why I do not demonize the networks in this sense.

Spelling must be taught from an early age and penalized, be it in the language exam or in another subject.

with b is bad in Language and good in Mathematics.

Q.

Are autocorrects playing a good role?

R.

The school is also out of school, we are all catons and if the autocorrect becomes a new caton for those of us who write on mobile phones, I do not demonize it.

Of course, I ask that you include "Lola" in the dictionary, because everyone calls me Lila (laughs).

P.

I don't tell you what they call me!

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