Dolores Corbella, a new academic at the RAE, recalls that Spanish belongs to "anonymous speakers", not only "to poets, novelists and journalists"

Dolphins (bufeos, in the Canary Islands and part of Latin America), like words, sail the seas from shore to shore, that was what the philologist Dolores Corbella (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 63) maintained this Sunday in her admission speech to the Royal Spanish Academy. years).

The first woman to occupy the small d chair – a seat that has only had five predecessors since 1847 – assured that “the pan-Hispanism that every Canarian carries implicitly” is the “knot that links the European West with the American West”.

Hence the title of her speech,

because those thousands of voices that Spanish treasured thanks to that first Atlantic globalization of just over five hundred years ago had unimaginable consequences, not only in terms of linguistic enrichment, but also due to the implicit acceptance of a cultural complexity that has contributed to shaping such an extensive and heterogeneous language”.

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Corbella's story was about "pan-Hispanism as a recognition of diversity."

The new academic wanted to focus "on the overseas diatopic marks [linguistic differences by virtue of geography] in the academic tradition", or what is the same: the lexical disparities between speakers of different continents do not separate, but unite.

“Even if the continent changes, the content will continue to reflect our particular image of the world because, as Manuel Seco, the master of Spanish lexicographers, pointed out: 'The dictionary is much more than the reserve where words are confined.

It is first and foremost a tool designed to make us understand the messages of those who share that language with us, and to help us better communicate with them.

But much more:

For Corbella, professor of Romance Philology at the University of La Laguna, "words belong, as is logical, to poets, novelists, playwrights and journalists, but above all to the immensity of anonymous speakers who make up the majority, because language is far from being exclusivist and is perhaps the most democratic cultural asset we have.

The lexicographer [in charge of feeding the dictionaries] simply must account for the meaning of each of the words used by all the speakers in any register and in any place”.

Language is far from being exclusivist and is perhaps the most democratic cultural asset”

For the new academic, Spanish experienced "a process of globalization at the end of the 16th century", at the same time as "the encounter with other peoples" took place.

“Along with the dialectalisms of European Spanish, metalinguistic information on the lexical peculiarities of Spanish in America soon began to appear in the bilingual and monolingual lexicography of the golden age.

In fact, the first vocabularies and glossaries of words and meanings dedicated exclusively to the Spanish-American lexicon inaugurated a lexicographical tradition of a differential nature that has been maintained until today”.

Corbella poses at the Royal Spanish Academy before the admission ceremony. Andrea Comas

According to Corbella, the first glossary of American words ―Vocabula

(1516)― edited by Antonio de Nebrija, includes definitions of sweet potato, bohío, cazabe, caribbean, cannibal, iguana, yucca, maguey, corn, manatee, Taino or tuna.

An effort that Antonio Pigafetta continued in his

, as a climax to the expedition of Magellan and Elcano, as well as numerous missionaries with their Hispano-Amerindian dictionaries and glossaries.

The professor also recalled that the Peruvian Diego de Villegas y Quevedo Saavedra, an academic in 1733, and who occupied the letter m, left behind him a trail of words and phrases that begin with this consonant and that are still in common use: corn, cornfield , mate, corn on the cob, María tree, Indian melon, mico, mazamorra or New World.

Scholars complained in 1816 that Americanisms "were flooding the Dictionary"

In fact, the editors of the

(1726-1739)

they were aware that "they had not been able to exhaust [include] the extensive Ocean of the Spanish Language, due to the multitude of their voices."

In 1816, even some experts were opposed to so many entries from America, because they were "flooded our

", which made it necessary to resolve "what temperament should be taken to choose some and suppress others, or to delete them all".

In 1859, an intermediate decision was made: to develop a lexicon "by region" in order to "acquire the greatest possible volume of voices, locutions and phrases of particular use in the Spanish provinces and in the Latin American States, to undertake as soon as possible, and carry out the most complete

of Provincialisms that it is given to publish”.

But after the independences, discontent over the scant Spanish-American presence in the lexicographical center became recurrent on the other side of the Atlantic.

The Venezuelan Andrés Bello, in 1847, wrote that his compatriots had "as much right as Aragon and Andalusia to have their accidental divergences tolerated" in the

For his part, the Chilean lexicographer Aníbal Echeverría, in 1900, argued in the prologue of his

: “It is not possible that a huge number of individuals who speak Spanish in the New World do not have the right to be admitted in a timely manner as their own, their peculiar words, in attention to the environment in which they live, since that franchise is held by the provincialisms of Aragon, Andalusia, etc.

“.

It is not possible that a huge number of individuals from the New World do not have the right to have their words admitted”

Taking advantage of historical events and the cultural and economic perspectives opened up by the vast market of the newly independent colonies, Vicente Salvá's

(1846) was a pioneer by including more than 1,500 Americanisms in its record.

“Thus arose a non-institutional nineteenth-century lexicographical tradition with the common denominator of breaking the effective monopoly enjoyed by the Academy in the field of Spanish lexicography”.

Faced with the threat, the RAE then changed its way of proceeding and tried to recover the lost ground.

Starting in 1884, it was Americanized thanks to the academies that had emerged in the New Continent.

“Proof of that change was the incorporation in that twelfth edition of the motto Americanism (m. Word or own and private turn of Americans who speak the Spanish language).

A mark was also added to the names of the overseas regions still belonging to Spain (pr. Antill., pr. Cuba, pr. Filipinas, pr. Can., as well as pr. Mall., pr. Bal.) and those of the new countries that emerged after independence (Colom., Chil., Ecuad., Méj., Per., Venez., together with the encompassing abbreviation Amér.).

In 1925, Amér was included.

Central, Argent., Bol., El Salv., Guat., Guay[aquil], Hond., Nicar., P. Ric., Pan., R. de la Plata, Salv. and Urug.

, organized with broader criteria, in such a way that the material that makes up the

includes some 70,000 words with 120,000 meanings.

The 'Dictionary of Americanisms includes 70,000 voices and 120,000 meanings'

The already academic did not forget her native Canary Islands in her speech, which has had the

“It is difficult to explain”, Corbella stressed, “that the border and the solitude that the ocean implies have not served to deepen the isolation of the archipelago, but rather, on the contrary, the words have flowed naturally between one and the other Atlantic shore.

These ties began at the time of the annexation of the last islands (between 1493 and 1496) and were reinforced with the continuous transfer of islanders who, from the beginning of the 1500s and until the middle of the last century, crossed the Atlantic in search of El Dorado in those promised lands.

There they helped found cities, from Montevideo (where 50 Canarian families arrived between 1726 and 1729) to a royal Barataria in the State of Louisiana (founded in 1763 and relocated by Governor Bernardo Gálvez —not Sancho Panza— from 1782,

Corbella, during his speech at the Royal Spanish Academy.

Andrea Comas

And with those emigrants came the oldest words, such as the words used by slaves in sugar mills.

“They traveled with the cane seedlings and the sugar masters from the eastern Atlantic to the Antilles, and then from there they continued their route to New Spain and the rest of the continent.

This is what happened with words like bagacera, bagasse, cachaza, canaverero, fornalla, furo, guarapo, panela, rapadura, remillón, tacha, tachero, tank, tendal, zoca, among many others”.

With the emigrants from the Canary Islands came the oldest words, with their cane seedlings and the sugar masters”

Corbella has become this Sunday the ninth academic in office, although there are two more elected pending their admission speech (Asunción Gómez Pérez and Clara Sánchez), out of a total of 46 members, although with four vacant seats.

Four of the last five incorporations have fallen on women.

But the Canarian professor recalled that lexicographers have been mostly men.

In fact, she highlighted that only from the twentieth edition of the

(DRAE), published in 1984, the entry was completed with the feminine morpheme: lexicographer.

All of this, despite the fact that María Moliner (1900-1981), the woman who "performed a feat with few precedents, wrote alone, in her home, with her own hand, the most complete, most useful, most accurate and funniest in the Castilian language”, the

He was replied by Pedro Álvarez de Miranda de la Gándara, professor of Spanish Language at the Autonomous University of Madrid and librarian of the RAE.

“The central and most beautiful idea of ​​the new academic discourse rests on the fact that, despite the fact that the words island and isolate belong to the same lexical family and suggest isolation, the words have flowed constantly and naturally between one and the other. another shore of the Atlantic, that great sea of ​​words that has not acted as a barrier, but rather the opposite”.

Like the buffeos, of which Spanish speakers wrote, from Vargas Llosa to

Guevara.