Maria Moliner

María Moliner y Ruiz (born March 30, 1900 in Paniza , Aragon , † January 21, 1981 in Madrid ) was a Spanish archivist and librarian. Her life's work, however, consists of the dictionary of the Spanish language Diccionario de uso del español , which she worked out after work , which is now better known (with male article) as El María Moliner in Spain .

Life

María Juana Moliner Ruiz was the daughter of the gynecologist Enrique Moliner Sanz (1860-1923) and Matilde Ruiz Lanaja (1872-1932). Of the total of seven siblings, only three experienced adulthood. Two years after the birth of Maria, the family left Aragon and moved to Madrid. There the father became a ship's doctor and twice accompanied a ship on the voyage to Argentina. On the second trip he stayed there and started a new family, so that at the age of twelve María was effectively without a father. Her mother ran into financial difficulties and the daughter helped her by giving lessons.

The school education of María Moliner is poorly documented. Like her siblings, she seems to have gone to the Institución Libre de Enseñanza , as recalled by various witnesses and reported by herself, but she is not listed as a student there. At the private school, however, there was a tradition that pupils from precarious backgrounds were taught free of charge outside of regular school operations. The Institución Libre de Enseñanza was a reform school with practice-related lessons, often held in the open air, without religious or political ties, but - at that time unusual in Spain - with co-education . Nevertheless, girls were only a small minority here. The school did not lead to the Abitur ( bachillerato ), which the pupils - if they so wished - had to pass as external students. For this reason, María Moliner also formally enrolled at the Instituto Cardenal Cisneros in 1910 . (High school graduates were still a rarity at that time. In the school year 1906/07, 277 girls passed their high school diploma in all of Spain. They were usually separated from the boys by a curtain and had their own entrance to the classroom.)

María Moliner chose the path of graduation from high school in the individual subjects. In 1915 she moved with her mother to Saragossa , where life was less expensive and the family owned some land. There she graduated from the Instituto General Técnico in 1918 ; their classmates included Luis Buñuel and Ramón J. Sender , although there is nothing to indicate that they were dating. Moliner enrolled at the university in the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities, at the same time she took a job in the provincial government in Zaragoza, where she was involved in the creation of a map with place names of Aragon. With a modest salary of 250 pesetas , she not only supported herself, but also supported her mother.

According to Moliner, it was a teacher's correction in an account of a school trip to Toledo that had first got her thinking about the Spanish language. In 1916 she got in contact with the Estudio de Filología de Aragón , whose first task was to collect the Aragonese vocabulary. She was soon working there as an editorial secretary for one day a week. As a second project, the revision of the Diccionario de la lengua castellana in the edition of 1914 was worked on, whereby the task of the philologists from Saragossa was to contribute Aragonese expressions. When María Moliner completed her studies as a historian in 1922, she had also had a thorough philological training - less through her studies and more through working on two dictionary projects.

The Archivo General de Simancas is housed in the Simancas castle.

In the same year she found work as an archivist in the main archive of Simancas , where she moved with her mother and younger sister Matilde. With a salary of 4,000 pesetas, she was the still rare case of a Spaniard who was able to support herself. Her mother, who had a heart condition, tolerated the cold and damp climate of Simancas so badly that she moved to the Murcia Financial Archives as early as 1923 . In 1924 she also enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Murcia , becoming the first woman ever to attend this university. After a promotion she received a salary of 5000 pesetas in 1927.

However, she did not meet her future husband, the physics professor Fernando Ramón y Ferrando, who was nine years her senior, at the city's train station rather than at university. The two married in 1925. A first daughter died in 1926 after just a few days. Two sons followed in 1927 and 1929. After another promotion, María Moliner earned 6,000 pesetas. In 1929 Ramón y Ferrando was appointed to the chair of physics at the University of Valencia , so that the couple moved to Valencia that same year . In 1931 and 1933, María Moliner gave birth to a daughter and another son. In 1930 she also helped found a school, the Escuela Cossío , where she gave courses in grammar and literature. Above all, however, she became vice-president of the Misiones Pedagógicas . This organization brought books, film, gramophone and theater performances, as well as lectures, to the country. María Moliner got involved in the task of setting up village libraries, which were equipped with 100 to 400 books, depending on their size. Their duties included extensive inspection trips through the villages. In 1935 she managed to establish 150 village libraries in the Valencia region. Her work was so recognized that in 1935 she presented the topic of rural literature supply at the II International Congress of Libraries and Bibliography in Madrid and Barcelona. In total, the Misiones Pedagógicas had set up 5,000 small libraries across Spain.

In 1936, Moliner became director of the Valencia University Library, which she remained until the end of 1937. Here she mainly dealt with the question of how the most important book stocks could be secured during the Spanish Civil War . Because of the threat to Madrid, the government of the republic moved to Valencia in November 1936, so that Moliner got to know the key politicians of the Ministry of Culture personally. In 1937 she was still involved in drawing up the state library plan. When the government moved to Barcelona because of the civil war , the couple decided to stay in Valencia, neither to Barcelona nor - like so many Republicans - to go into exile. In 1938 a conflict arose when some of the books intended for the village libraries were to go to political parties and trade union institutions, whereupon Moliner resigned from office and returned to the financial archives.

In 1939, Valencia was taken by the rebellious Franquists . Her husband, then Dean of the Faculty of Science, was immediately dismissed. Both spouses had to go through the " depuración " procedure, a test of opinion for allegedly left or liberal state employees. Although there were numerous denunciations against María Moliner, she managed to portray her commitment during the time of the republic as a purely professional zeal. The judge ruled that she was allowed to stay at her job and was only downgraded by a total of 18 pay steps. The proceedings against her husband - who was unemployed at the time - dragged on until 1943. Eventually he was again admitted to the civil service, but also downgraded. He took up a professorship at the University of Murcia while the family stayed in Valencia.

In 1946 Fernando Ramón y Ferrando was appointed to the chair of physics at the University of Salamanca . María Moliner moved to Madrid and found work as a librarian at the College of Industrial Engineers , a job she found spiritless. The couple had a weekend relationship and Moliner was looking for some spiritually stimulating activity. In February 1952 she first sketched a plan for a dictionary of the Spanish language. She calculated that the effort would be six months, at most two years. The model was the Learner's Dictionary for students of the English language, which her son Fernando had brought with her from Paris that same year. According to her biographer Inmaculada de la Fuente, one motive was that the censors could not object to a dictionary, even if it came from a “leftist”. Moliner did not have an office of his own, but worked out her dictionary at the dining room table after work.

The dictionary

method

María Moliner developed her dictionary without contacting professional philologists, which is why she came up with some original solutions. At first she just tried to get all the meanings of a word, later she added the etymology of these words. This was followed by the word field with words of similar meaning. You can use your dictionary to find the right word for an idea. Her invention of “families” was innovative: she broke out of the alphabetical order by listing all words from the same root together. So follow approximately deseo (German: request), the words deseable (desirable) desear (wish, desire), desearse (desire) and deseoso (eager). Another innovation was that she treated ch and ll as one letter.

The starting point was the Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia Española , which is authoritative for the Spanish language, supplemented by numerous lemmas that María Moliner had found in the press. Moliner checked all the definitions in the Academy's dictionary, rewrote them, and grouped them into "families." According to her own words, her intention was: "The structure of the entries is calculated in such a way that the reader first gets a first impression of the meaning of the term through the synonyms , which is concretized with the definition and confirmed with the examples." The María Moliner also contains a grammar of the Spanish language, as shown by entries like verbo (verb). For this article alone, which is 42 pages long in the dictionary, Moliner used the work of two summer holidays.

The María Moliner is not a dictionary of the entire Spanish language, because Moliner expressly excluded "obscene" words, a procedure that was then common internationally. For the second edition, however, she considered including some such words, but did not feel competent. Since this dictionary was developed by a single person, the preferences of its author can also be read from it. Botany - María Moliner was a great plant lover - has been taken into account extensively and in detail. The entry pez (fish) is also long.

Publication history

In 1955, María Moliner signed a contract with the Gredos publishing house to publish her dictionary. She knew her main contact, Dámaso Alonso , from before the civil war, when he was professor of literature in Valencia. From 1955 she hired female employees to help her by the hour. By the early 1960s the body of the dictionary was completed and the tedious work of correcting it - at a time when books were still being set in lead - began. The first volume was published in 1966, the second volume followed a year later - it took María Moliner fifteen years to complete her work.

In Spain during the Franco period, the publication was a cultural event. The first edition was reprinted over ten times. Time and again, the clarity of their definitions has been praised. Although the use of the dictionary took some getting used to with the criss-crossing organizational principles of alphabetical order and intermediary “families”, it has become the favorite dictionary of writers. Nobel laureate in literature Gabriel García Márquez praised it as "the most complete, useful, meticulous and enjoyable dictionary of the Spanish language". With its almost 3000 pages and three kilos, it is more than twice as long as the dictionary of the Royal Academy and, in his opinion, more than twice as good. Indeed , unlike the Academy's dictionary, María Moliner avoids largely circular definitions and tautologies .

Royal Academy response

María Moliner tried to mitigate the foreseeable conflict with the Royal Academy , which is responsible for the maintenance of the Spanish language in Spain, by emphasizing that she had created a dictionary of the use of the Spanish language, as the actual title suggests: Diccionario de uso del español . The immense success of their dictionary nevertheless challenged the academy. Three Academy members - Pedro Laín , Rafael Lapesa and the Duke of Torre - proposed her for a seat in the institution in 1972. It would have been the first time a woman had been elected to the Royal Academy. In fact, the academics chose the linguist Emilio Alarcos Llorach . One of the members who rejected María Moliner was Camilo José Cela , who later won the Nobel Prize for Literature . The rejection made her name even more popular among the Spanish public. When a woman - the poet Carmen Conde - was elected to the Academy for the first time in 1978 , she felt that her place really belonged to María Moliner.

End of life and continuation of the dictionary

In 1961 her husband had retired; María Moliner continued her job as a librarian and retired in 1970. She has never known herself as a feminist . At a time when women had the legal status of minors in Spain, she and her husband had an equal marriage. In the early 1970s, her husband lost his eyesight, so he needed her help. Nonetheless, she started the revisions for a second edition. Her husband died in 1974 and María Moliner showed the first signs of Alzheimer's disease , which eventually became so severe that she no longer recognized her own children. She died on January 21, 1981 at her home in Madrid.

Her youngest son Pedro took over the preparation of the second edition, but passed away from cancer in 1985. Then his wife Annie Jarraud, who was a linguist by training, took over the task. The eldest son Fernando, on the other hand, tried to prevent the publication of the second edition, which he felt was a desecration of his mother's memory. The second edition of María Moliner - increased by around ten percent and thoroughly revised - was finally published in 1998. The third edition from 2007 - mainly supplemented by numerous Americanisms - was developed by Joaquín Dacosta. It was also published on CD-ROM , which among other things offers the possibility of displaying the lemmas inversely, i.e. using the dictionary as a rhyming dictionary .

literature

• María Moliner: Diccionario de uso del español . Gredos, Madrid. Vol. 1: AG (1966), Vol. 2: HZ (1967).
• María Antonia Martín Zorraquino: La lexicografía hispánica ante el siglo XXI . Gobierno de Aragón, Zaragoza 2003, pp. 249-282.
• María Pilar Benítez Marco : María Moliner y las primeras estudiosas del aragonés y del catalán de Aragón . Zaragoza, Rolde de Estudios Aragoneses 2010, ISBN 978-84-92582-14-3 .
• Inmaculada de la Fuente : El exilio interior. La vida de Maria Moliner . Turner, Madrid 2011, ISBN 978-84-7506-930-2 .
• Pedro Álvarez de Miranda: Una vida entre libros y palabras: María Moliner Ruiz (1900-1981) . In: Los diccionarios del español moderno . Trea, Gijón 2011, ISBN 978-84-9704-512-4 , pp. 221-231.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Usually January 22nd is given as the date of death. The statement here follows de la Fuente: El exilio interior ..., p. 313, as well as the testimony of her own son Fernando.
2. ↑ de la Fuente: El exilio interior ..., p. 46.
3. ^ Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
4. ↑ María Moliner had written: "yo fui la primera que llegué a la casita" , which the teacher corrected in "yo fui la primera que llegó ..." , see de la Fuente: El exilio interior ..., p. 50 .
5. ↑ Archivo de Hacienda de la Delegación de Murcia
6. ^ II Congreso Internacional de Bibliotecas y Bibliografía
7. ^ Ministerio de Instrucción Pública
8. ^ Archivo de la Delegación de Hacienda de Valencia
9. ^ Biblioteca de la Escuela de Ingenieros Industriales
10. ^ Albert Sydney Hornby et al .: A learner's dictionary of current English . Oxford University Press, London 1948.
11. ↑ de la Fuente: El exilio interior ..., p. 223.
12. ↑ 1968 brought her son Fernando Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases in the 1962 edition with him from a trip abroad. María Moliner commented that Roget did what she intended, see Fernando Ramón Moliner: Roget (1852), Moliner (1966) . In: El País . November 10, 1998.
13. ↑ quoted from: de la Fuente: El exilio interior ..., p. 23: “La estructura de los articulos está calculada para que el lector adquiera una primera idea del significado del término con los sinónimos, la precise con la definición y la confirm con los ejemplos. "
14. ↑ de la Fuente: El exilio interior ..., pp. 247f.
15. ↑ de la Fuente: El exilio interior ..., p. 274.
16. ^ Gabriel García Marquez: La mujer que escribió un diccionario . In: El País . February 10, 1981: “el diccionario más completo, más útil, más acucioso y más divertido de la lengua castellana” '
17. ^ Gabriel García Marquez: La mujer que escribió un diccionario . In: El País . February 10, 1981: “tiene dos tomos de casi 3,000 páginas en total, que pesan tres kilos, y viene a ser, en consecuencia, más de dos veces más largo que el de la Real Academia de la Lengua, y - a mi juicio - más de dos veces mejor. "
18. ↑ Manuel Seco - himself a member of the academy - gives ayudar as an example , which is defined as auxiliar, socorrer ; auxiliar is again defined as dar auxilio and auxilio finally as ayuda, socorro, amparo , which closes the ring, see Manuel Seco : María Moliner: una obra, no un nombre . In: El País , May 29, 1981, p. 36.
19. ↑ de la Fuente: El exilio interior ..., p. 24f.
20. ↑ Spanish language website of the eldest son Fernando Ramón Moliner, in which he protests against what he believes was a failed second edition of the dictionary