Resumen

BATTISTA, Emiliano. A Catalan in Buenos Aires. The lexicographic Project of Manuel de Montolíu. Presentation and criticism. Cuad. Lingüíst. Col. Méx. [online]. 2018, vol.5, n.2, pp.221-279. ISSN 2007-736X.  https://doi.org/10.24201/clecm.v5i2.118.

Manuel de Montolíu directed the Institute of Philology of the University of Buenos Aires in 1925, he was then a young Catalan philologist trained in linguistic geography and dialectology. In his agenda of conferences and academic activities, when he was in charge of the institution, was the development of a lexicographic work, entitled: Diccionario del habla popular argentina (literally, a ‘Dictionary of the argentine vernacular speech’), an unconcluded enterprise which would however become a renowned antecedent of ulterior studies in the field of dialectal variety description (Kovacci 2003; Barcia 2004). The initiative was accompanied by the incorporation of the idealistic approach as the theoretical model of the Institute, a process that will gradually be consolidated time later during the long administration of Amado Alonso (1927-1946) (Toscano y García 2011; Battista 2013a). Thanks to it, phenomena such as the contact of Spanish with native and immigrant languages, or the not cultured (or “popular”) varieties of the American Spanish, could then become part of the range of research topics of the Institute.

In this paper, within the framework of linguistic historiography (Swiggers 2009), we analyze two groups of documents: on the one hand, a series of interventions with which Montolíu (1925a; 1925b; 1926a; 1926b) presented the work program that should give rise to the elaboration of the Dictionary; on the other hand, a series of communications given by three intellectuals of the argentine academic sphere -Almanzor Medina (1928), Arturo Costa Álvarez (1929b) and Vicente Rossi (1932)-, who, from outside the Institute, were critical of the Catalan philologist’s technical and modernizing insights, since they considered that his work still conceived the speech of Argentine people as a mere derivation of the learned Castilian norm.

Palabras llave : Montolíu; Diccionario; presentation; critics.

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