Dolores Corbella, the 13th woman in its entire history, enters the RAE

The professor of Romance philology at the University of La Laguna Dolores Corbella has been occupying the seat of the letter since this Sunday d at the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) and became the 13th woman to enter this institution, which has almost half a thousand members. Born in Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 1959, philologist and expert in lexicography and language history, Corbella contributes the wisdom of academic research to debates that are not foreign to her, as she is part of other societies dedicated to language, such as the Sociedad of Romance Linguistics, the Lexicographic Network, the Association for the History of the Spanish Language and Association of Linguistics and Philology of Latin America.

Supported in the RAE by academics such as Emilio Lledó, José Antonio Pascual and Carme Riera, she assured, in her opening speech read at the ceremony, that she was taking on “a new challenge that I did not count on and that I never thought I could aspire to” .

With their entry into the conclave in charge of managing the Spanish language, there are nine women, although the maximum since its foundation in 1713 was eleven, and 37 men who contribute their knowledge to the institutionalization of a dynamic way of speaking.

In a speech entitled sea ​​of ​​words, Corbella particularly remembers María Moliner, who was rejected by academics in 1972. “Traditionally, the art of dictionary-making was attributed to men,” he read at the induction ceremony. “Actually, only since the twentieth edition of DRAE, published in 1984, has the entry been supplemented with a feminine morpheme: lexicographer, fa. (defined as) “the collector of all words that must enter the lexicon” and “a person skilled in or versed in lexicography.” It was the enormous work of the “woman, librarian and lexicographer”, María Moliner, that led to this change Dictionary of Spanish usage».

With “the sole purpose of uncovering the meaning and secret life of words,” she says, lexicographers like her are “artisans” who work with the capital that belongs, “as logically, to poets, novelists, playwrights, and journalists, but above all because of the enormous number of anonymous speakers who make up the majority, because the language is far from being exclusivist and is perhaps the most democratic cultural asset we have,” he recalls.

forgotten

In addition to paying tribute to Moliner, the co-author of the book distinguishing vocabulary (1996), the An example of a dictionary of canarisms (2009) and Historical dictionary of the Spanish Canary Islands (2001) also recovered the work of others that had been forgotten. “The names of many philologists who, in the shadows, made the history of languages ​​and the history of words their profession, remained silent for years behind the acronyms of their works or the anonymity imposed by their joint work”.

Those women who worked in silence and without recognition were María Goyri, María Rosa Alonso, Josefa Canellada (chief editor RAE reference dictionaryBetween 1979 and 1988, Elena Zamora (film director student dictionary), Olimpia Andrés (co-author of the book Dictionary of the current Spanish language) and Paz Battaner, “who taught us the importance of studying words to explain a certain historical moment in Political and Social Vocabulary of Spain, 1869-1873.

ode to the dictionary

“Letter d For me, as a lexicographer, the lowercase letter has an additional value, because it starts the word dictionary”, said Corbella, giving a speech that was above all an ode to the dictionary. In this declaration of love for a craft that “requires almost exclusive dedication and commitment”, the academician assured that “a dictionary can become the most important book for the study of any language simply because it is a summary of all the knowledge, history and customs of a people. Dictionaries are the testimonies of a civilization ».

In his case, moreover, the peculiarity intervenes, the place from where he spent his studies, in the Canary Islands. This unique way of speaking about canaries makes «ours special sea ​​of ​​words“, confirms Corbella, who replaced Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, elected in 1990 and who died in 2020. She represents “thousands of voices that the Spanish valued thanks to the fact that the first Atlantic globalization of a little more than 500 years ago had unimaginable consequences, not only in terms of linguistic enrichment, but also because of the implicit acceptance of the cultural complexity that contributed to the formation of such an extensive and heterogeneous language».

By valuing “the work of linguists and the production and publication of dictionaries”, it will lead to the construction of a “palace of memory”, as defined by “any lexicographic company”, in the Madrid halls of the RAE.