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Emilio
Lorenzo Criado, philologist: born Puerto Seguro, Spain 10 June
1918; married (five children); died Madrid 2 July 2002.
As
one of the "numbered academics" of the Real Academía
Española (RAE), Emilio Lorenzo spent the last quarter of his 84
years as one of the chief custodians of the "purity and
elegance of the Castilian language", and also championed
correct English in Spain. Founded in 1713, the academy has only
46 members of his exalted rank, designated not in fact by
numbers but by letters of the Spanish alphabet – Lorenzo was
represented by the lower-case h.
Born in the tiny village of Puerto Seguro, Salamanca, Lorenzo
was 18 when the Spanish Civil War erupted. While he was
conscripted into Franco's army, his father was far away
defending the doomed republic. The two were reunited after the
war in Madrid, where Lorenzo took his first degree in philosophy
and literature.
After further studies, in Munich, he completed a doctorate in
modern philology and, after some years as a schoolteacher, was
awarded a chair in Germanic and English at Complutense
university in Madrid, where he ran a prestigious institute of
modern languages and translation.
The English language was his second home and from the 1950s his
most important writings dealt with its influence – sometimes
helpful, sometimes egregious – on the language of Cervantes,
spoken nowadays by 10 times the population of its mother country
and exposed to the mixed blessings of globalisation.
One has only to flick through a Spanish newspaper to see a
company that is a "líder" in its sector advertising
for a director of "márketing"; the sports pages, of
course, major on "fútbol" rather than the now
obsolete "balompié" originally preferred by the RAE.
A corner kick is "un córner"; the manager "el míster";
a penalty "un penalty", and so on. Ordering a gin and
tonic, the correct "ginebra y tónica" might earn a
blank look while "gintónic" will produce the desired
results.
Lorenzo did not resist the acceptance into Spanish of words that
other languages did better; but it annoyed him, for instance, to
hear wild strawberries described as "salvajes" – a
literal translation from English – when the pukka Spanish is
"silvestre". He was elected to the RAE in 1980, but a
bout of meningitis (which left him almost totally deaf) meant he
could not take up his seat for more than a year. When he did so,
it was with a magisterial acceptance speech on "the
supposed sufferings and shortcomings of our language".
His most important books included essays on contemporary Spanish
as "a language on the boil", or "at the
crossroads"; he also wrote standard textbooks of English
and Spanish, and among his translations were versions of the
Nibelungenlied and Jonathan Swift. His later masterwork,
Anglicismos hispánicos (1996), running to more than 700 pages,
explored not only the infiltration of Spanish by loan words like
detective, chip or bypass but the way that clumsily direct
translations from English were giving existing Spanish words
altered meanings or introducing dubious grammatical innovations.
In some cultured Spanish circles, the definitively correct usage
of a given term is known as its "emilio lorenzo".
At three universities, the Complutense, Las Palmas and the Menéndez
Pelayo in Santander, Lorenzo was for many years in charge of
some of the most popular – and rigorous – courses in Spanish
as a foreign language.
Although an academic to his fingertips, Lorenzo was not the
ivory-tower type: on the contrary, he kept a close eye on
newspapers and popular culture to chart the evolution of the
language. He was consulted on issues of house style by at least
two quality papers, ABC and El País, where the cartoonist
Forges keeps up a coruscating commentary on Spanish yuppiedom's
infatuation with English, usually in a quaintly mutilated form.
Even in his eighties, Lorenzo was senior consultant on a
handbook of terminology in telephony and mobile communications.
His many honours included the German Grand Cross of Merit, the
rank of Chevalier des Palmes Académiques and doctorates from
Seville and Salamanca. Sadly, English academia does not appear
to have fully acknowledged its debt.
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