Don't write "curasán," but do write "brauni": the new edition of the 'Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts' is here.

“Twenty years is nothing,” said the tango Volver , made popular by Carlos Gardel. However, in matters of language, in two decades some words are born, others die, and still others change their meaning, which generates indecision among Spanish speakers when it comes to writing or pronouncing them: should delicatessen be written with two s's or one? Well, to resolve these kinds of questions, the new edition of the Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts (DPD) has just been published, expanded and updated with respect to the previous one, which was launched in 2005. This work, published by Taurus, is sponsored by the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) and the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language (ASALE), which brings together the 23 Spanish language associations in the world.

The first edition of the DPD "sold well and had an impact, in addition to being the first pan-Hispanic academic work," said Salvador Gutiérrez Ordóñez , a member of the RAE and director of the work, during the presentation of the dictionary this Thursday in Madrid, at the RAE headquarters. We will still have to wait for everything to be published on the dictionary's website.

This edition includes approximately 7,000 entries, of which 370 are new, and of these, 362 are neologisms and foreign words. "Furthermore, the American form of Spanish is given greater presence," emphasized the director of the RAE, Santiago Muñoz Machado , who summarized the history of the DPD. "Work on the first edition began in 1998, a registry of the most common questions posed to academies was compiled, media style guides were used, and the work was published in November 2005." In November 2019, during the Asale congress held in Seville, "it was agreed to produce a second edition," he added.

The doubts that are resolved are of a phonographic nature (pronunciation, accentuation, punctuation, spellings), morphological (plurals, feminine, conjugation), syntactical (construction problems, concordance, leísmo, dequeísmo) or lexicosemantic (lexical improprieties, censurable semantic calques, neologisms or foreignisms), according to the RAE.

For example, some people confuse the word "aegis" with "hijra." The former means "protection or shelter" and not "command," a usage that has, however, been documented. Nor can it be used in the sense of "flight or exile," because that's what the word "hijra" refers to, which originated to designate Muhammad's flight from Mecca to Medina in 622.

Bullying is a disgrace that sometimes occurs in classrooms. However, academics have found that this Anglicized word is becoming more prevalent in the Spanish expression "acoso escolar." The aforementioned delicatessen "is more commonly used with a double s," but the dictionary's graphical adaptation of this German-origin English word, which means delicacies, is to spell it with a single s.

Continuing with delicacies, brownie, a chocolate cake, can be spelled as we pronounce it, brauni, without fear of being thought ignorant. This is the DPD's proposal because this spelling reflects the pronunciation of the original word, which is typical of Spanish, not other languages. Without leaving aside sweets, some people say curasán to refer to the half-moon puff pastry roll known as a croissant, an adaptation of the French word croissant . Well, that's not correct. There is, however, a "minority and inadvisable" usage, croasán.

From French to Latin. The word quorum is written in italics. However, scholars indicate that it can also be written quorum, in roman, to designate "the number of individuals necessary for a deliberative body to reach certain agreements." Lobi is also proposed for lobby or campin for camping, but, as Salvador Ordóñez has emphasized, "what the DPD says does not necessarily triumph." He also indicated that in words ending in a consonant plus a final Greek i, such as body or ferry, the use of the word "quorum" is becoming more widespread. Latin i: bodi, with its plural, bodis; or ferry.

“Foreign words are a constant that cannot be stopped. This dictionary indicates whether their use is justified or not,” added Gutiérrez Ordóñez. “Foreign words usually appear first in scientific publications and the press, then there is a long, academic stage in which it is determined whether they have become established in common usage and are then added to the Dictionary of the Spanish Language.” The academic noted that “the Spanish language is multicentric; there are different educated norms because it is spoken in more than 20 countries, although they share a common foundation.”

The DPD also addresses doubts about place names and demonyms, especially those derived from non-Latin languages. Gutiérrez Ordóñez discussed the place name of the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro: it is written with an accent and should not be pronounced, as some people do in imitation of Portuguese, " rio de yanéiro ."

One quantitative difference from the first edition is that this time, the examples of terms cited include "3,260 works and 399 periodicals from all Spanish-speaking territories, including the Philippines and Equatorial Guinea." This means that 1,661 more works and 237 more periodicals have been cited than in 2005.

The head of the RAE's Current Spanish Department (created in 1998), Elena Hernández Gómez, has commented on other changes to the previous DPD that illustrate the evolution of the language. In the first edition , hyphen could be written with an accent , but now it is specified that it should only be written without one. Or the word bizarro, which was warned in 2005 that it was incorrect to use it in the sense of rare or extravagant. Twenty years later, this is now common.

The situation is different with the plural of "máster": it is said that "másteres" may be "more common," or "masters." The academics thought in the 2005 edition that the former would displace the latter, but this has not been the case. Another development is that in some countries the word "yoga" has been registered as a feminine form, which had not previously occurred. Furthermore, it is proposed to use "espá" for "spa" for this type of hydrotherapy establishment. "We are not inventing it; everything is documented, and we encourage Spanish speakers to use these terms, which do not separate spelling from pronunciation," emphasized Hernández Gómez, who concluded with a peculiar case: the word "braille," which designates the tactile writing and reading system for the blind. In Spain, it is usually pronounced "bráille ," but in Latin, " bráile ." The academics recommend, once again, "accommodating spelling and pronunciation in usage." So we are faced with two different pronunciations. But, as always, Spanish speakers will have the last word.