“Let’s put aside writing, the horror of humankind from the cradle: let’s bury the axes in the rock, let’s sign a delimitation agreement between ge and jota, and let’s use our minds more on written accents, which in the end no one can achieve.” Where it says “tears”, it should read “tears” and “one should not confuse a gun with a gun”. The year is 1997, we are at the first International Congress of the Spanish Language, and the person who said these words is Gabriel García Márquez.

The latest news that spelling errors will reduce the grades of Selection exams by up to 10% has once again brought to the fore those who have been opposing the “set of rules regulating writing” for decades. And so we asked ourselves: Does the idea of ​​overriding spelling rules make sense?

What’s with my writing? As argued by Carlota de Benito, professor of Ibero-Roman Linguistics at the University of Zurich, “Spelling is not done by writers as they write, but is a code that attempts to represent language in a space (paper, screen) where it is deprived of one of its most important features, sound.”

That is, these are a set of strategies that attempt to ‘clear’ the language jungle to “compensate for the expressive and communicative deficiencies” of writing. Although we often don’t realize it (and I’m following Benito here), writing relies on a huge amount of ‘technical analysis’: phonological analysis, which assigns each sound to a letter; prosodic, which decides whether a word is checked or not; morphology, which describes where words begin (and where they end); or the syntactic one, which – reduced to the minimum expression – tells us where to put punctuation marks.

So, while linguists have argued for decades that we do not “speak for better or worse” (because language is formed when speakers speak), things change when we touch on the issue of spelling: “spelling changes when we start from a scientific analysis. It must be based on logical reasoning” and is therefore “a strong normative role” makes sense.

From word to action… That’s the theory and it makes sense. As the RAE acknowledges, there are “coding” reasons for writing standards. That is, “transforming the formulation of a message through the rules of a code”. To do this it’s about “always handling the technical arguments”, getting code that best adapts to the actual workings of the language.

And in fact, it is so commonsensical that no one objects to it. If we review the “anti-orthographic” proposals, we find that the vast majority of relevant proposals do not speak of an anarchy of codes in constant conflict or of the most isolationist orthographic solipsism.

So what do they recommend? When you look at García Márquez’s first text, he doesn’t say “let’s ban the use of written accents forever”, he says “let’s use more logic”. Moreover, a few lines before, he says, “Let’s humanize their laws, let’s learn from the indigenous languages.” […]Let’s assimilate technical and scientific neologisms quickly and well. […]”Let us negotiate with a good heart the barbaric gerunds, the endemic ney, the parasitic dequeism, and return the splendor of esdrújulas to its present subjunctive”.

I quote Gabo and his speech, for convenience but also for clarity. The suggestions (whether in Spanish or other languages) attempt to make us think about spelling conventions to ensure that they do not disguise an artificial and arbitrary lack of options in the search for “logical proportionality” (on which the code should be based). and the various “intentions and styles” that also occur in written language.

We talked about the wave of the conflict. After all, written language also intersects with numerous social, historical and cultural issues. The best example of how ‘blind’ one can be to technical arguments is the (never overcome) debate about the accent of the solo.

Let’s review: In 1952, academic Julio Casares noticed that emphasizing the word ‘only’ (when it can be replaced with only) was inconsistent: actual situations in which ambiguity arises (without the context that resolves it) These were few and far between. was brought.

For the preparation of the 1959 Orthograph, the Academy discussed this, and although it concluded that Casares was right (“there is no emphasis on the solo in RAE broadcasts since that year”), it left it as follows: Salvador Gutiérrez, coordinator of the ‘Orthography of the Spanish Language’, said that the option “to avoid breaks” was optional. He declared that he was affiliated. There’s a lot more to this “breakup avoidance” than meets the eye.

“Who purifies, corrects, and magnifies the spelling itself?” Because this debate shows that (despite the enormous efforts of many professionals) the definition of spelling rules is far from being an impartial, aseptic and logical process. For Nebrija’s sake! Spain’s largest institution is on the brink of splitting as a group of academics refuses to be consistent with self-imposed norms.

It is logical (and even understandable) that there are those who raise their eyebrows and call for the same rules to be revised; either to simplify and modernize, to make it more inclusive, or to better represent the uses of different language varieties. They will come up with practical suggestions that may or may not be true, may or may not be problematic, but these seem like topics worth discussing.

Consequences of rules. First of all, when we use the spelling filter as a filter to access certain public spaces (as in the decision to downgrade by 10% due to spelling and grammatical errors).

To give a very simple example (and quite controversial) but it is worth seeing. There are large areas in western Andalusia where the pronunciation of words is exactly the same in plural and singular, and numbers are marked with the article (“el niño” https://www.xataka.com/”los niño”). A phonological analysis will tell us that ‘los niño’ is correct and that, in fact, the presence of literals in the plural is not something foreign to Spanish. However, if someone writes “children” in the 2025 EBAU, they will make a typo.

Because? Because that’s the norm. And in this context, it seems reasonable for someone to ask whether “the rule we decide” is to (arbitrarily) restrict the possibilities of scribes and harm some linguistic variants over others. After all, learning the norm (and consistently following it after learning) will always be much more difficult for a person who does not pronounce according to that norm than for someone who does.

Image | University of Navarra

in Xataka | The discussion about the emphasis on “only” encapsulates everything that is wrong with RAE (and their egos).