Madrid (EFE).- The Canarian philologist Dolores Corbella has entered the Royal Spanish Academy this Sunday, where she will occupy the “d” chair, a new incorporation that, as she has highlighted, represents for the institution “a reaffirmation of that pan-Hispanism that all canary carries implicit “.
Corbella (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1959) has entered the RAE this afternoon after reading her speech “A couple of words” and after being elected by the plenary session of the institution in February 2022, after her candidacy was presented by academics Emilio Lledó, José Antonio Pascual and Carme Riera.
The Canary Islander, who replaces Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, who died on July 21, 2020, in chair “d”, has thanked his appointment with the “certainty” that his incorporation into academic tasks represents a “reaffirmation of that pan-Hispanism that all canary carries implicitly, as a bridge that unites the immensity of the ocean.
Hence the title of his speech, ‘A sea of words’: “Because those thousands of voices that Spanish treasured thanks to that first Atlantic globalization a little over five hundred years ago had unimaginable consequences, not only in terms of linguistic enrichment , but also due to the implicit acceptance of a cultural complexity that has contributed to shaping such an extensive and heterogeneous language”.
As a lexicographer, the professor of Romance Philology at the University of La Laguna has focused her speech on the “job of the lexicographer, of the dictionary maker” and has highlighted the patrimonial value of any lexicographical company “as a palace of memory”.
Aware that we are currently experiencing “a time of many changes” and that in the very near future “the dictionaries of use will put aside this type of fixed arrangement”, he has assured that its content “will continue to reflect our particular image of the world”.
“Dictionaries -he pointed out- are testimonies of a civilization and, as cultural objects, they constitute a privileged place of reference and an archive of all knowledge”.
In her words, she also recalled other lexicographers whose works “were silenced after the acronyms of their works”, such as María Moliner, María Goyri, María Rosa Alonso from the Canary Islands; Romanist and dialectologist Josefa Canellada, Elena Zamora, director of the Student’s Dictionary, and Olimpia Andrés, co-author, together with her teacher Manuel Seco, of the Dictionary of Current Spanish.
In addition, he has affirmed that lexicographers are “archaeologists of words” and that their “palaces” are dictionaries, which “contain the memory of this extremely rich intangible heritage that identifies us, the voices of our knowledge and beliefs, popular terminologies and the words of our daily life”.
“The most important dictionary of a language, on which all the others are based or should be based, is undoubtedly the historical dictionary, because it includes all the partial vocabularies that we can imagine and it constitutes or should constitute the foundation of any lexicographical project”. has pointed out.
The new occupant of chair d has finished her speech “convinced” that her commitment to the Royal Spanish Academy will allow her to continue with this task of “continuing to discover and value the richness of such an extensive language” that, with the passage of time, , has shown that “not even the immensity of the sea constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to its unity”. EFE
The entry The Canarian philologist Dolores Corbella defends pan-Hispanism upon joining the RAE was first published in EFE Noticias.