The “Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts” says that it is ideal to write “only” without an accent

A new Pan-Hispanic dictionary of doubts resolves the “useless” controversy over the tilde of only. The way to correct this is to never emphasize it, although anyone who believes there is an ambiguity can do so. This is how the standard text is collected in the second edition of this non-normative dictionary directed by Salvador Guitiérrez Ordóñez and presented this Tuesday at the ninth international language congress held in Cádiz. This will allow the use of expressions like lol, Jackerand whiskey.

Along with these wordings, its digital version includes the final text of the tilde rule in a controversy that has gotten out of hand. “There is no change in wording. It remains a ghost of 2010, but a little clearer. Ideally, nobody writes it with an accent,” Gutiérrez stressed. “Then the wording was a little dark, because it referred to the previous one, to the one from 1999, which was dark. Now the wording is much more exhaustive and clear.

Gutiérrez Ordóñez has led the Español al Día department since 2008, and Arturo Pérez-Reverte pointed him out in full controversy over the label only, who criticized the explanations offered on Twitter. “‘Nothing new added’? Will they have to justify themselves? I regret to say that the RAE, under the leadership of anti-tildeist academics, is giving biased and inaccurate information,” said the creator of Captain Alatriste.

For Gutiérrez, it was a pointless and almost “useless” polemic “It’s a minimal thing. Imagine that we are talking about a pandemic or pancreatic cancer, and you say that your nail hurts”, he explains very vividly.

When was the Academy founded? only It was written without an accent, and it was written without an accent for a hundred or so years. It was around 1880 when the Academy said that out of habit, and that it is not normative, it is emphasized, and that happened with teaching, and teaching was the cause for us all to learn some rules and then it is difficult to change them. But at the age of 59, the Academy reflected and suggests that it should not be emphasized”, explains the academician.

“Before, some monosyllabic expressions were accented, like saw, whether, he was, I was and the Academy decided that this tilde must be removed ». “The Academy must adopt rules that are coherent. If on the one hand he says that monosyllabic expressions are not stressed, and on the other hand he says that diacritical stress serves to distinguish stressed words from unstressed words. He only It doesn’t make sense because those are two empowering words,” he says.

“When we went to school, we were taught that the tilde is used to indicate the intensity of a syllable or word and to distinguish it from another or other words, but not to distinguish meaning” “Tildes are not for clarification. If that were the case, we would have to plant them everywhere,” he quipped.

The controversy, however, is still alive and has forced the defenders of always marking this voice to “switch sides”, such as the writer María Dueñas who is participating in this Congress of Languages ​​in Cádiz. I was one of those who emphasized, but I think I will change my mind and be a ‘syntildist’,’ he says. We’ve been too wrong about purism more than once: When this came out, I was heartbroken, but I’d prefer the Academy’s latest proposal, says philologist and author Time between stitches.

The pan-Hispanic dictionary of doubts is different from the language dictionary. Answer the questions that the speakers ask us. They have many doubts. More than five hundred questions are asked every day in Spanish al Día, and the dictionary is in front.

“It is important to maintain some rules of the game for language unity. The emphasis is a bit ridiculous and may have something to do with the personality and character of some people, but we would be wrong to abandon that interest in deciding on common standards,” said Luis García Montero, director of the Cervantes Institute, a few days ago.