Madrid (EFE) who decided yesterday in full.
The plenary session of the RAE agreed yesterday that “it is optional to mark the adverb ‘only’ in contexts where, in the opinion of the writer, its use entails a risk of ambiguity”, and maintains the obligation to write it without a mark in contexts where there is no such risk .
“For example, if someone writes accents in a sentence like ‘Only Ana came to the party’ it will be difficult for her to explain the existence of a double interpretation”, the RAE has indicated on its Twitter account, in which it has explained that the The norm leaves open the possibility that neither the adverb “only” nor the demonstrative pronouns “this, that and that”, with their feminine and plural forms, are ever used.
“If the speaker perceives that there is a risk of ambiguity and writes that tilde, he will have to justify it,” the Academy has pointed out.
Salvador Gutiérrez Ordóñez, the academic director of Spelling and the Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts (DPD), has explained to EFE that the plenary session of the RAE approved a clearer wording of the norm to publish it in the Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts, where it will be added that the tilde is “in the opinion of the writer”, a “paragraph” that, in his opinion, does not change the norm.
The tilde in “only”, in the opinion of the person who writes
However, the academic and author Arturo Pérez-Reverte assured after the plenary session on social networks about this agreement that “sometimes old battles are won”, referring to the claim in this regard that writers members of the RAE have maintained for years.
Pérez-Reverte expressed his satisfaction with this formula in which, he said, all the academics had agreed, since it does not destroy the initial formulation but allows a more reasonable use of the tilde in these cases, since the author of the text is the who decides whether or not to use it.
Likewise, Luis Mateo Díez, also an academic and writer, has told EFE that with this agreement “the matter has been solved”: “naturalness has solved the problem” and the accent will be “in charge of whoever wants to use it”, stressed the author.
According to plenary sources, the norm in its previous wording did not define in whose opinion the ambiguity could exist and there were cases of exams and oppositions in which its use subtracted a grade because it used to depend on the criteria of the teacher or the examiner, while now It will be at the discretion of the writer.
Contrary to the tilde: “It has no linguistic justification”
On the contrary, for the linguist Elena Álvarez Mellado, this tilde has no linguistic justification: “there are many words and many expressions that are ambiguous in Spanish and that is not why we are putting tildes”, which in Spanish are used following the rules of accentuation” , which are quite “rigid” in this sense, he has indicated in statements to EFE.
“There are some exceptions and particular cases, but the ‘only’ one has no linguistic justification,” said Álvarez Mellado.
“We have a very transparent and clear accentuation system and these types of exceptions do not add anything, they complicate the system and the supposed benefit of avoiding ambiguities does not justify adding an exception”, he stressed.