New Dictionary Published By the Real Academia Española
This tip was due last Friday, but we thought it would be better to send it today, to start the New Year with interesting news.
The Real Academia Española de la Lengua (RAE, Spanish Royal Academy of Language), has just published a long-awaited book: The Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts. It was finally released to the public in the last quarter of 2005.
This heavy, 500-page Dictionary of Doubts has some very remarkable features. Besides clearing up thousands of doubts on the conjugation of some irregular verbs, accepted or unaccepted usage of foreign words, additions to the general vocabulary, generally misspelled or misused terms, common grammatical mistakes and dozens of other linguistic niceties, it represents a huge effort to actually set the basis for a truly international Spanish, one that can be spoken, understood and generally accepted throughout all Spanish speaking countries of the world, that is, throughout Latin America and Spain; hence its name: Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts, with the prefix “pan” meaning “all-embracing”, or “throughout the whole”.
This is good news for us also, as we have to deal with these problems on a daily basis, more so now that we have corroborated that much of the new information contained in the Pan-Hispanic Dictionary was already part of our linguistic stock.
Just to mention a single example amongst hundreds of others: it is now widely accepted that the correct spelling of two-syllable enclitics of the form [Imperative] + [me, te, se, nos, os, la, las, lo, los, le, les…] should have no diacritical accent. That is, they should be spelled thus:
With the verb dar
- Deme (give me), instead of déme
- Date (give yourself), instead of dáte
- Dele (give him, her), instead of déle
- etc.
Or , with the verb ser
- Seme, instead of séme
- Sele, instead of séle
- Senos, instead of sénos
- etc
Or , with the verb ir, or ver
- Veme, instead of véme
- Vete, instead of véte
- Velo, instead of vélo
- etc
We are pleased to announce that our former version, starting with 4.0 two years back, already conjugated these verb forms in the now “official, academically correct “ way. You can corroborate this fact by simply writing the correct and the incorrect spelling and running them through ESI’s spell checker. |
