Mexico's 'Commission for the Defense of the Spanish Language' (1981-82)
This paper focuses on one of the most intriguing and short-lived corpus language planning efforts in the history of Mexican Spanish—the Comision Para La Defensa del Idioma Espanol (Commission for the Defense of the Spanish Language). Formed in 1981 and disbanded the next year, the Commission’s concentration during its short tenure was the cleansing of Mexican Spanish grammar of so-called errors as well as the Mexican Spanish lexicon of English borrowings. Those linguists who worked on the Commission were both prescriptive as well as descriptive in perspective, and hence some very valuable linguistic work resulted. This paper compares some of the Commission’s findings with the state of English borrowing in Mexican Spanish today.
Ortografía de la lengua española
Nueva edicion revisada, actualizada y ampliada de una de las obras troncales de la Real Academia Espanola. La nueva "Ortografia de la lengua espanola" presenta unas caracteristicas propias que la hacen mas solida, exhaustiva, razonada y moderna que su predecesora, editada en 1999: 1. Es mas descriptiva, detallada y explicita, con el fin de solucionar muchos problemas concretos que se les plantean a los hablantes. 2. Es accesible a cualquier hablante alfabetizado, pues evita en lo posible tecnicismos y expresiones de dificil comprension. 3. Es una ortografia razonada. 4. Es una ortografia moderna, pues incluye apartados novedosos como los dedicados a la ortotipografia. 5. Es una ortografia moderadamente reformista. 6. Es una ortografia didactica. 7. Es una ortografia panhispanica, concebida y realizada desde la unidad y para la unidad de la lengua.
Old English Manuscripts in the Early Age of Print: Matthew Parker and his Scribes
Covering the first dedicated program in the study of and publication of Anglo-Saxon texts, my dissertation examines the sixteenth-century origins of medieval studies as an academic discipline. By placing recent scholarship on media, materiality, cognition, and intellectual history in conversation with traditional paleographical methods on medieval and renaissance manuscript culture, I argue for a new way of understanding how early modern scholars studied and presented the medieval past. I take as my focus a corpus of emulative Anglo-Saxon manuscript transcriptions produced under Elizabethan Archbishop Matthew Parker. Equal parts facsimile and edition, these transcriptions are a unique example of early modern scholars navigating the often competing demands of late sixteenth century manuscript and print culture. This dissertation is, in part, an attempt to catalogue and document the extent of Parkerian Anglo-Saxon manuscript transcriptions. Temporally displaced from their source texts, Parker and his scribes directly modified many of the medieval manuscripts they recovered by editing, rebinding, cropping, and annotating them according to their own interpretive desires and publication needs. These transcriptions place Parker’s early modern scribes into the textual community of early medieval scribal culture, but their printed manuscript editions are an attempt to bring medieval documents into contemporary discourse. They developed new typefaces modeled on manuscript exemplars and attempted to reframe the printed version of a medieval text as an authoritative surrogate