The RAE has just announced the addition of numerous terms and meanings (around 3,800), to his Dictionary of the Spanish Language, being many of them linked to the technological field. So though ‘Audio’ already existed as a term, for the first time they are collected the two most common meanings of the same: “sound file” and “sound message that is sent digitally”.
‘Bío’ no longer refers only to natural foods, but rather includes the meaning of “brief personal presentation, especially the one that the user of a social network includes in his profile.” And, from now on, you can do ‘glue cutter’ of a URL, or merely ‘paste’ the link in said bio, give ‘intro’ and so ‘redirect’ your users to your website and ‘to share’ with them your content.
Yes, all these meanings have been included in the new update of the Dictionary … just as they have been ‘bot’ (as automated software and as short for ‘robot’), ‘paste’, ‘netiquette’, ‘cyber bullying’ Y ‘cybercriminal’ (and its derivatives), ‘geolocate’ or ‘webinar’.
The truth is that none of these terms can be said to be particularly controversial, although it may take some time to get used to the bitcoin accent. But the The relationship between the RAE and the new technological terms has not always been so peaceful.
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New words that nobody used before entering the DLE (or after, by the way)
The acceptance of new terms and meanings by the RAE is often controversial. This is a consequence of the duality of its mission: on the one hand, they have to act as notaries (taking note of how its speakers use Spanish) and on the other, legislators (the famous motto of “Clean, fix and shine”).
And things get even more complicated when we focus on the technological field: the rapid introduction and evolution of technologies, platforms, programs and devices exposes Spanish – as well as all the languages of the world except English – to a constant stream of neologisms that are difficult to match with your own spelling rules.
Many of us have in mind what happened in 2001 with the incorporation of ‘cederrón’, considered by many users of the Cervantes language as a not entirely successful adaptation. And that being kind: the truth is that we have never seen this term used in texts that did not debate its own RAE.
And, when it was incorporated into the Dictionary, its use was non-existent and the ‘CD-ROM’ form was part of our usual vocabulary; now technological evolution has condemned both to irrelevance:
‘Cederrón’, like ‘piérsin’ and ‘futbol’, is what is known as a “graphic adaptation”, since it changes the spelling but not the phonetics of the original foreign language.
If the LEDs of the routers light up, could it be a matter of jackers?
And what about ‘jaquer’ (and ‘jaqueres’) by ‘hacker “https://www.genbeta.com/” hackers’? I, personally, will have used more times (two or three, well) the parodic term ‘juanker’ (as an ironic reference to the one who goes as a hacker through life without having a clue) than the academic ‘jaquer’, the truth. Yes, it is true that no we can limit ourselves to resorting to the pre-existing ‘hacker’, since the meaning of ‘hacker’ https://www.genbeta.com/ “jáquer ‘is much broader.
Another example would be the most unknown ‘zum’, hispanized version of ‘zoom’ (and recommended compared to the latter in the Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts), when talking about the effect of zooming in or out of an image, or the photographic device that allows it.
He joined the DLE in a date as far back – for the purposes of this debate – as 1992 And, in fact, according to the RAE records, it was used on occasion by the press during the following decade:
#RAEconsults The adapted spelling «zum» is documented in our data bank; see this example: «A total of three megapixels of resolution, a Pentax optical zoom that triples the size of the image» («The” flashes “of” Tentaciones “». «El País» newspaper, 9.5.2003).
– RAE (@RAEinforma) June 29, 2020
And let’s not forget another famous case, like ‘router’ and ‘routers’… A plural that few of you will have used, but which is the only option in Spanish taking into account the similar construction of ‘pubescent “https://www.genbeta.com/” pubes “and” crater “https: // www.genbeta.com/”craters’.
Another adaptation from the same period was that of the English term ‘LED’, which is no longer in capital letters (to be based on acronyms) to become the Spanish ‘led’ … it is rarer to the ear that its plural is ‘ledes’, no matter how similar your case is to that of ‘red “https://www.genbeta.com/” redes’.
Why doesn’t “tweet” squeak at us as much as “give in”?
However, the truth is that some other similar adaptations based on phonetics have fared better than ‘zum’ and ‘cederrón’, and they have been extensively incorporated into our vocabulary.
This would be, for example, the case of ‘tweet’, the Spanishization of ‘tweet’ (publication made on the social network Twitter, whose literal translation would be ‘pío’), incorporated by the RAE in 2012. Although the English term continues to be used, that no longer occurs with its derivatives: we all agree that, in Spanish , a Twitter user is not a ‘tweeter’, but a ‘tweeter’.
What is the difference between this term and the previous ones? I suspect it lies in that the adaptation started with the speakers, rather than being a ‘top-down’ imposition carried out by the RAE. The following graph from Google Trends shows that, by the time the use of ‘tweet’ was accepted, it had already started to be used in Google searches (compare with the use of ‘cederron’ above):
‘Guasapear’ is not yet admitted by the RAE (it has only been included in the Observatory of Words) and ‘guglear’ is accepted by Fundéu as an alternative to “searching in Google”, although they continue to recommend the latter form
The RAE said no to ‘ibuc’, but may say yes to ‘strimero’ (from ‘streamer’)
And if from ‘tweet’ we derive ‘tweeter’, it should not surprise us to learn that the RAE recommends translating ‘youtuber’ as ‘yutubero’ … sounds weird, yes, but ‘strimero’ will sound weirder when – if it chooses to be consistent and apply the same rules – the Academy finally incorporates into its Dictionary an equivalent to the English ‘streamer’.
On the other hand, it is fair to recognize that the RAE It only opts for this solution when Spanish speakers have been unable to impose —or too lazy to think— an inherently Spanish alternative.
Thus, fortunately, the institution has never accepted terms such as ‘imeil’ or ‘ibuc’ in its dictionary, since they already existed widely used options such as “email” and “e-book”.
‘Tweet’, ‘tablet’, ‘blog’ and ‘e-book’ all landed together at the DLE in 2012
Yes to ‘blog’ instead of ‘blog’ (and ‘chat’ does not mean what you think)
But nevertheless, in some cases, the RAE is committed to literally picking up the term Anglo-Saxon even though there is a 100% Spanish alternative. This would be the case of ‘Blog’, an abbreviation for ‘weblog’ (web + log: literally ‘web notebook’).
We not only had at hand a linked and similarly loud term like ‘bloc’, but before the triumph of the Anglo-Saxon term – as the most veteran will remember the times when blogs were made with Movable Type and not with WordPress – this coexisted for several years with the very Hispanic ‘blog’, in a metonymic reference to the “logbook” … and yet both entries in the DLE refer only to their nautical meanings.
But it should not surprise us that ‘[cuaderno de] blog ‘will never update its possible meanings to include that of technological origin: after all, for the RAE, ‘chatting’ is still only a colloquial way of “drinking flat” —That is, glasses of wine—, without its association with ‘chat’, a term that the DLE does pick up, although obviously without considering it verbalizable (convertible into a verb, go).
Shall I get it off the ‘aplis’ store?
“If from ‘television’ we derive ‘tele’ and from ‘pen’ we get ‘pen’, obviously from ‘application’ we must derive ‘app'”, some illustrious academic must have thought on an inspired day. But no one that we know – apart from the RAE itself – uses “apli” as an abbreviation for “application”: the rest of us mortals continue to choose “app”.
In fact, in the first 7 pages of Google search results, the term “apli” is applied in 99% of cases to a well-known Spanish stationery brand. None of the results refer to its meaning as a Spanish abbreviation of application.