If today we write in a text that “a hacker critical of ageism believes that the increase in the price of beer encourages gentrification” we may be mixing the colloquial register with the formal one, that is to say, it will be a sentence not very adequate, even artificial, but today it is, at least, normative according to the recent additions to the Dictionary of the Institute of Catalan Studies (IEC), which were made public this Monday to coincide with the day of Blessed Ramon Llull , as has been done in recent years.
The members of the Philological Section of the IEC Màrius Serra, Sandra Montserrat and Magí Camps have presented at the Institute’s headquarters the 30 words that have entered the dictionary in the last year, as well as the 278 modifications. “We can’t talk about new words – warns Camps – because they already existed and were used, only now they are normative because we know they are not catchphrases”.
Yes, some of these words are hacker, ageism (and ageist), beer, gentrification (and gentrify), but they also include bethlem, botulism, donassa or tarat/-da, as well as numerous gentiles (aneuenc/-a for the Àneu valleys, Maresmenc/-a by the Maresme, Pitiús/-üsa by the Pitiüses islands or Saforenc/-a by the Safor).
Montserrat wanted to emphasize the importance of some incorporations, such as the case of Bethlehem, which is where outside Catalonia the nativity scene is called, and cited the Catalan-Valencian-Balearic Dictionary: “In Catalonia there is now a movement to restore this custom, but instead of betlems they are usually called nativity scenes, especially in the Barcelona region; on the other hand, from Tarragona down, in the kingdom of Valencia and the Balearic Islands, the name for betlem is well preserved”. Montserrat, who lives in Elche, has also explained that some changes have wanted to avoid a view exclusively from Catalonia, as well as the change to Basque, which is what is called the “chafogor” in a large part of the Catalan language domain. In this sense, for example, the entries uncle and aunt have also been modified, which in the meanings Valencian uncle and Valencian aunt make it clear that only “in Catalonia” are the cousins ??”of the father or the mother”. In these two words you can also see some of the concerns of the IEC in recent years, because, as Montserrat has said, “social changes cause linguistic changes”. Thus, it now also alludes to the “husband of the aunt or uncle” and the “wife of the uncle or aunt” respectively. And of course, the husband and wife entries themselves have changed and no longer mark the gender of the couple, but rather speak of the spouse.
They also have to do with the evolution of society the incorporation of donassa, which may well refer to a “corpulent, exuberant woman”, or to a “woman, especially of the contemporary era, signified by her intellectual contribution intellectual, artistic or civic”, meaning that has been added to modify its “masculine parallel”, homenot; but not only that, because if before it was also a “woman who masturbates”, without adding anything else, now it specifies that it can designate a “woman who has the air of a man, often said derogatorily”.
In any case, the IEC does not want to wallow in the past – a verb that the dictionary already includes normatively without going through the cracks – in the past, but as Camps said thanks to technology today we have a “dynamic dictionary”, to the point that the dictionary definition itself has been modified: it can now be electronic without having to specify anything else.
