Ch (Spanish language)

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Many Spanish words that begin with ch come from South America, for example chachachá

The digraph ch is pronounced as the affricate [t͡ʃ] in the Spanish language . The ch was considered the fourth letter in the Spanish alphabet from 1803 to 1994 , with the name che and with a feminine article: la che (plural las ches ). When hyphenated , ch remains unseparated.

The special role of the ch

In 1803, the Real Academia Española , responsible for maintaining Spanish, decided to evaluate ch and ll as separate letters. Words that begin with the fourth letter ch appeared in dictionaries after all other words that begin with the letter c (e.g. capa… copa… chapa ).

The lexicographer María Moliner was the first to give up the special role of the ch and the ll in her dictionary Diccionario de Uso del Español , published in 1966/67, and to treat them alphabetically as normal combinations of letters. 1994 also decided the 10th Congress of the Association of Spanish language academies , ch and ll as common sequences of letters in the alphabet to classify. Since then, words that begin with ch have been placed between other words that begin with c (e.g. capa… chapa… copa ). Since 2010, ch and ll are no longer part of the alphabet.

Occurrence and character

In medieval Spanish, relatively few words began with ch . They behaved like 1:59 to the rest of the words beginning with c . In modern Spanish, however, their ratio has risen to around 1: 9.

Words in ch- are often expressive, onomatopoeic, or of South American origin. The lexicographer María Moliner characterized it as follows: “The sound that is represented by this letter is expressive or imitative to a high degree, that is, it forms words that are not or not only representative-objective, but rather an affective or intentional attitude express the subject (they serve above all to demean or to call out) or to suggest or imitate a sound or a movement. "

The Academy Dictionary is incomplete

The lexicographer Miguel de Toro y Gisbert (1880–1966) used the letter ch to demonstrate how incomplete the dictionary of the Academy Diccionario de la lengua española, which is authoritative for the Spanish language, is. He took a page of the Academy Dictionary, which in the 1914 edition included the words from chirivía to chocolate with 91 entries and 156 meanings. For this section he found 630 entries with 800 meanings. For this purpose he had evaluated all the dictionaries of the Spanish language, including words of dialectical origin and from South America, as well as specialist terms from botany and zoology. Miguel de Toro extrapolated that the Academy dictionary - which at the time comprised 67,000 entries - would have to be expanded to 400,000 to 500,000 entries in order to cover the entire Spanish language.

The work of Miguel de Toro has been criticized for having included extremely rare words - some of which are only recorded once -, spelling variants and even typographical errors. In addition, the Academy Dictionary - unlike the Oxford English Dictionary for English - never claimed to reproduce the full vocabulary of the Spanish language.

See also

literature

  • Pedro Álvarez de Miranda: La aspiración al "diccionario total": Un fragmento del diccionario general de la lengua española (c1933) by Miguel de Toro y Gisbert . In: Los diccionarios del español moderno , Ediciones Trea, Gijón 2011, ISBN 978-84-9704-512-4 , pp. 205-219.
  • Eduardo Arias and Karl Troller: Diccionario de la CH . Intermedio editores, Santafé de Bogotá 1999, ISBN 958-28-1051-3 .
  • Miguel de Toro y Gisbert: Un trou dans le dictionnaire de l'Académie Espagnole . In: Bulletin Hispanique . Vol. 24, 1922, pp. 225-237.
  • Miguel de Toro y Gisbert: Un fragmento del diccionario general de la lengua española . Librairie Larousse, Paris [approx. 1933].

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Real Academia Española (ed.), Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, 1st edition (2005), keyword abecedario
  2. ↑ In Spanish, el Che stands for Ernesto "Che" Guevara .
  3. ↑ Inmaculada de la Fuente: El exilio interior. La vida de Maria Moliner . Turner, Madrid 2011, ISBN 978-84-7506-930-2 , p. 254. The author suspects that this goes back to Moliner's origins as a librarian, since according to the Spanish cataloging rules ch and ll have always been treated as two letters each.
  4. ↑ Real Academia Española: Exclusión de ch y ll del abecedario
  5. ↑ Pedro Álvarez de Miranda: La aspiración al "diccionario total": Un fragmento del diccionario general de la lengua española (c1933) de Miguel de Toro y Gisbert . In: Los diccionarios del español moderno , Gijón 2011, p. 213, footnote 14.
  6. ↑ María Moliner, Diccionario de Uso del Español , Gredos, Madrid. Vol. 1, A – G (1966): “el sonido representado por esta letra es en alto grado expresivo o imitativo, es decir, forma palabras que no son, o no son solo, representativo-objetivas, sino que expresan una actitud afectiva o intencional del sujeto (sirven, sobre todo, para despreciar o para llamar), o imitan o suggest un sonido, un movimiento, etc. ”
  7. ↑ Pedro Álvarez de Miranda: La aspiración al "diccionario total": Un fragmento del diccionario general de la lengua española (c1933) de Miguel de Toro y Gisbert . In: Los diccionarios del español moderno , Gijón 2011, p. 212.
  8. ↑ Pedro Álvarez de Miranda: La aspiración al "diccionario total": Un fragmento del diccionario general de la lengua española (c1933) de Miguel de Toro y Gisbert . In: Los diccionarios del español moderno , Gijón 2011, pp. 216–218.