“Entre nalgas protegido”: Escatología y contracultura del Humanismo al Barroco

Abstract

emie Française. The academicians also included words with which they were themselves familiar from actual usage, following, as Chapter 3 shows, the practice of Covarrubias, whose Tesoro de la lengua castellana of a century earlier paid considerable attention to colloquial language. It then follows through successive editions of the RAE dictionary, highlighting such matters as the policy towards archaisms, down to the present-day ASALE 23rd edition, which seeks to represent the full diatopic diversity of the Spanish-speaking world. Chapter 4 looks at the RAE’s other lexicographical publications: the overtly normative Diccionario panhisp anico de dudas, the Diccionario de americanismos, and the specialized terminological dictionaries, the Diccionario hist orico and the online corpora; to these the normative work of the Fund euRAE might have been added (although that embraces all aspects of Spanish, not just lexis). Chapters 5, 6, and 7 extend the study to the RAE grammars and orthography. Chapter 5 deals with the general question of normativity in grammar from Nebrija onwards, while Chapter 6 examines the modern Nueva gram atica and the Glosario de t erminos gramaticales. The sea-change in the former, which is essentially a descriptive grammar of educated Spanish giving a generous account of diatopic and diastratic variation, with “recommendations” rather than prescriptive instructions, and hence giving total priority to usage, is, as noted above, remarkable for such a publication. The latest Ortograf ıa, however, covered in Chapter 7, receives rather scant attention, which is a pity given that in some respects it puts the clock back in terms of attention to usage. The spelling of words like guion and fie is problematic because some speakers pronounce them monosyllabically, turning the sequence of vowels into a diphthong, while others pronounce them disyllabically (guion, fie); the latter should necessitate a written accent on the second syllable, which ends in -n or a vowel (gui on, fi e). And so it was, with the RAE formerly allowing both spellings, before the latest iteration of the Ortograf ıa, which decrees that the written accent’s purpose is not to indicate syllable division and that there must be uniformity in practice: a complex series of conventions are therefore developed for using the written accent in such situations which do not depend on syllabification but on vowel sequence. All in all, this book will be warmly welcomed, especially by historians of linguistic thought. As a linguist, I would have welcomed the analysis of more illustrative examples (along the lines of the one immediately above), and found that the irrepressible exploration of bibliographical detail sometimes makes the argumentative thread difficult to follow; but for all that the sidetracks are highly rewarding. On the practical front, and no doubt beyond the author’s personal control, I must, however, record regret that the unfortunate custom of giving references via footnotes has been adopted (without an author index) and that there is no thematic index. Both kinds of index I would regard as essential in a book which contains so much rich detail.