Academics suspend hostilities and ratify agreement returning tilde to “only”

“I come without bandages, alive and well”. The director of the Royal Spanish Academy, Santiago Muñoz Machado, took this Thursday with humor the heated debate about the tilde in the attachment only and demonstrative pronouns. He confirmed that the debate on the orthographic sign took place in a courtly atmosphere, far from the “stormy” atmosphere predicted by the writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte. The plenary session of the Academy decided to leave the decision on marking the term to the “literary” in case of confusion.

The director of the RAE insisted that it was not a modification of the norm, but a “change in wording”. “Last week we came to the conclusion that the resolution could be improved. Since 2010, the Academy has held that it should not be labeled only in its adverbial function. However, the exceptions were not formulated as clearly as possible,” said the representative of the institution. So there was no going back.

The approved text is as follows:

a) It is mandatory to write the adverb ‘only’ without a tilde in contexts where its use does not involve the risk of ambiguity.

b) It is optional to mark the adverb ‘only’ in contexts where, in the opinion of the writer, its use involves the risk of ambiguity».

The decision must be confirmed by the next Congress of the Spanish language to be held at the end of this month in Cádiz, although on Wednesday at a telematic meeting with representatives of 22 Spanish academies in Latin America, all those responsible expressed their unwavering approval of the new text.

“There are no winners”

“Nobody has given up and there are no winners, although some public communications seem to suggest otherwise,” said Muñoz Machado. Despite the fact that blood did not flow into the river, the division between writers and linguists still exists. The former insist on marking “only” for sentimental reasons and respect for deep-rooted tradition, while the latter are in favor of not doing so, in order to simplify the rules.

However, Muñoz Machado admitted mistakes in communicating the conclusions. He argued that it was uncertain, as the RAE explained on Twitter shortly after the measure was approved, that the use of an accent had to be “justified”. Nor was the decision accepted unanimously, as was said at the beginning, but it was made by “consensus”, because there was an academic who voted against it.

“There are no tildeist and anti-tildeist positions, we are people of a different formation: in the RAE, a third are grammarians, a third are creators and a third are people of recognized prestige, but we get along very well,” he stated. .

With regard to spelling errors, opposition examiners must not penalize one who improperly uses graphic emphasis without an ambiguous context, because the power now lies with the writer, not the evaluator. “We tried to avoid that so that students would be confident when it came to placing the accent mark.”

For hours before the meeting, divisions persisted, which did not disappear, but only softened. For Félix de Azú, the question is “very simple. In the Academy there is a group made up of philologists, grammarians and syntax experts, who make up the scientific group. And then we are writers, who unanimously respect the accent. Scientists, technicians are against it. The result? Honestly, let everyone do what they want”. The philosopher and writer defends the spelling accent for “aesthetic” reasons: “Writing is not something that simply has to be decided for technical or scientific reasons. That’s why I say that everyone manages as they know how and there is no, so to speak, official dictatorship. “The French, who have an orthography infinitely more complicated than ours, tried to simplify it, met with brutal opposition, and could not reform it.”

In any case, De Azúa plays down the matter and claims that the controversy lacks much substance. “It’s the same enthusiasm that drives Messi or Ronaldo fans. One thing or another is chosen for this reason to maintain social life. In the Basque Country they have an expression that I really like, the one that says: ‘you have to put some blood on it’”.

Writer and translator Clara Janés likes to classify “solo” as an adverbial function. “I’ve been doing it all my life and there comes a time when it’s hard for you to change. It seems clearer to me, what will I do? The dust raised by the spelling mark does not remove the soil from the poet: “It does not worry me too much.” Everything in life is transient.”

The Minister of Education, Pilar Alegría, admitted that she is an incorrigible tildist. “I am one of those who always kept ‘only’ and, furthermore, in my head I always said that it has an accent because you can say only. I am 45 years old, I also come from EGB,” he said in an interview for TVE.