The alleged battle that has been waged in the Royal Spanish Academy for the use or not of the accent in the adverb solo is nothing more than borage water. The amount of energy that has been wasted on a sad tilde, which does not contribute anything to the linguistic debate, seems unbelievable.
The writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte has been brandishing that graphic accent on the adverb for a long time like his captain Alatriste the musket. But in recent days the struggle has heated up considerably and anyone could think that the palace where the RAE has its headquarters has been the scene of a pitched battle.
Nothing is further from reality. The RAE has not moved from its position, established in the 2010 Spelling, but fed up with seeing the adverb only with an accent, it has added an explanatory note that has lit the fuse. Sometimes the explanatory notes are carried by the devil. Luckily, as Santiago Muñoz Machado, director of the Academy, declared at the conclusion of the plenary session on Thursday, the blood did not reach the river: “The announcement of a hard and stormy plenary session fortunately has not given more of itself; You see that I come without any dressing”.
Thus, the rule remains the same: the adverb only does not have a diacritical accent to distinguish it from the adjective; the graphic accent can only be used in exceptional cases in which there is ambiguity in the opinion of the writer: like a needle in a haystack.
What exit has the writer who, stubborn, wants to classify the adverb alone, as well as the pronouns of this family? Well, do it without raising so much dust. When you're a bestseller you can afford to write the words however you like, and his publisher will respect that. Peace here and then glory.
As Juan Ramón Jiménez did with the use of the letter jota in all cases je, ji – his Poesías escojidas serve as an example – a writer is free to transgress the orthography for the sake of literary creation if he considers it so. It is not necessary to drag everyone down when fighting such a small battle.
In the simplification of the spelling that JRJ defended, he also advocated the elimination of the silent hash, which he considered completely unnecessary, as the Italians did at the time. Or the change of the X for the S in words like Most Excellent. looking for a phonetic spelling closer to the pronunciation.
Also the suppression of the be or the pe in ostáculo and September. In the latter case, over the years the RAE ended up agreeing somewhat by allowing the two spellings: september/september. But the Andalusian writer never intended to seek complicity among other people. He wrote as he considered, period.
A few decades later, in 1997, it was Gabriel García Márquez who called for spelling simplification in his opening speech at the first International Congress of the Spanish Language, held in the Mexican city of Zacatecas. The Colombian writer defined the current spelling as "a drag", although that of Spanish is one of the clearest spellings that exist.
The two Nobel Prize winners, who defended a spelling closer to the pronunciation of the words, did not go much further, since the academic rhythm is far removed from the heat of battle. For this reason, we must not give more importance to the title of solo than it really has.
Now, if one takes into account the media repercussion that this debate has had, one might think that, from now on, just as the Instituto Cervantes adopted the letter eñe with its unique virgulilla as the emblem of the institution, a hypothetical split of The Royal Spanish Academy, made up of the wayward academics led by Pérez-Reverte, could well adopt the adverb only with an accent as a coat of arms. For the motto, something like Clean, fix, give splendor and only put unnecessary accents.
Borage water.
