Madrid (EFE).- The academicians of the RAE have agreed this afternoon in a “peaceful” plenary session and in which neither writers nor grammarians have felt “defeated nor victorious” that the possibility of putting an accent on the adverb “only” when In the opinion of the writer, there is ambiguity, it is a modification of the wording of the norm.
This was indicated at the end of the plenary session by the director of the Royal Spanish Academy, Santiago Muñoz Machado, who has decided to appear before journalists after the debate raised about the accent in the adverb “solo” and the demonstratives with the aim of not having “different voices” that explained the conclusions and agreements of the plenary session: “We have reached a peaceful solution and we have had a great plenary session”, he stressed.
All this after last Thursday’s plenary session agreed on a new wording that will be included in the Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts in which it is stated that “it is mandatory to write the adverb ‘only’ without an accent in contexts where its use does not entail risk of ambiguity and it is optional to check in contexts where, in the opinion of the writer, its use entails a risk of ambiguity”, whose different interpretations created controversy.
There were, he has considered, “communication problems since it was said that it had been approved unanimously when there was a vote against” and also “there was haste in communicating the agreement and expressions in tweets that were not the most precise.”
unanimously approved
The director of the RAE has clarified that while in the previous plenary session the agreement was taken by consensus and not unanimously as they had stated, since there was an academic who did not agree, the minutes of this Thursday have been approved unanimously and, therefore, “the position of the RAE is ratified.”
“Some academics see this step as very important in line with what they have been claiming and therefore have taken it as a personal success, a victory for their positions, and other academics who are more in favor of the rule as established, They have manifested in a more emphatic way that the rule has not had any variation”.
“It is not a modification of the rule but of the wording of the rule”
Specifically, “it is not a modification of the rule but of the wording of the rule”, said the director of the RAE, who explained that there are times when “the interpretations of the rules may imply a new rule but the will has been to modify the wording to clarify it”.
In addition, he has indicated that last Thursday’s plenary session did not agree that the use of the tilde had to be justified, as stated in a tweet from the RAE the following day: “If the speaker perceives that there is a risk of ambiguity and writes that tilde, You will have to justify it, ”the tweet indicated.
an old polemic
Muñoz Machado recalled that it was about resolving an old controversy, since ten years ago this matter began to be debated with different positions among academic grammarians and those responsible for spelling, unanimously in favor of eliminating the tilde, and writers, in favor of her.
“With this the academy clarifies, it resolves an internal criticism and also an external controversy because it is not only that it has been debated at length among academics but also outside,” said the director of the RAE, who recalled that the problem that was raised is who decides when there was ambiguity: in a school or in undergraduate or university entrance exams, spelling errors are scored and if the teacher or examiner is the one who establishes the ambiguity, it creates insecurity in the writer.
He has also indicated, in response to a tweet from the academic and writer Aruro Pérez-Reverte, in which he assured that this Thursday’s plenary session would be “stormy” that “fortunately, it has not given more of itself”, and although “those who have wanted to intervene have spoken with all the force that they have thought, all in very courteous terms.
“No one has given their arm to twist because the grammarians have willingly accepted and the writers also that this paragraph is sufficient to satisfy the question,” stressed the director of the RAE, who yesterday convened the rest of the language academies Spanish to explain what was agreed since all the regulations are made in common and unanimously supported “the exact appreciation of the RAE when resolving this problem”. “We are happy,” he summarized.