He IX International Congress of the Spanish Languagein Cádiz, concluded this Thursday and left a crossroads of writers and intellectuals who starred in the Argentine Martin Caparros and the Spanish Arturo Perez-Reverte.
It is that Caparrós called to imagine a new denomination for the language spoken in Latin America and proposed “American“, a name that escapes its imposition under “blood” and “crosses”, and that refounds the difficulty of naming our language -sometimes Spanish, other times Castilian-.
That same Tuesday, Caparrós shared an article from the Spanish newspaper on his Twitter account The vanguard, titled “Martín Caparrós advocates calling Castilian ‘ñamericano’”. Among the responses to the tweet, there was one from the Spanish writer, journalist and academic Arturo Pérez-Reverte. “I have a proposal,” wrote the author of Revolution and shared an image with a logo and the word “Gilipañol”, derived from asshole (“fool or idiot”, according to the Panhispanic dictionary of doubts of the Royal Spanish Academy).
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Thus Perez Reverte defined the term: “Gilipañol, the 1. adj. Pertaining to or relative to Gilipañol. 2. m. Artificial language, but in remarkable expansion, which sister to the Spanish-speaking assholes of Spain, much of America, the Philippines, Equatorial Guinea and other parts of the world”. Ironically, he added that he would take his proposal to the next RAE plenary.
This led to the Argentine responding to him, also from Twitter: “That is the language in which you write, right?”
“Ñamericano”: Caparrós’ proposal
The chronicler, the only Argentine guest, participated in the second day of the International Congress of the Spanish Language held in Cádiz in the activity “Spanish, common language. Miscegenation and interculturality in the Spanish-speaking community“, moderated by writer and academic Carme Riera and with the participation of Juan Villoro, Alonso Cueto and Ángel López García.
Regarding the title of the table, Caparrós, the first to start his presentation, wondered with a certain irony “A common language?” and he stated: “I am interested in asking if the common language, the one that communicates us, the one that creates this community that brings us together here is it really spanish“.
He then referred to the word “Spanish” and pointed out that “there are names that do not name completely because they can name such different things that they end up not naming anything. Names that are the subject of debates, debates without subject matter, names that are misunderstood “. For Caparrós, “the Spanish word is usually one of them.”
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And he maintained that “perhaps the time has come to look for a name for that language that It is not that of an empire that imposed it by blood and crosses, a common name if possible but that is not the name of one or the other“. That could be, according to the author, “American”, since “The ñ is the standard of our language, it modifies the notion of American to make it ours.“. In his proposal, the word is not tied to his kingdom, as in the case of Castilian or Spanish.
“Ñamericano is only one option, surely there can be better ones. I do not expect us to find it now, what I would like is for us to agree on the need to look for it and thus, one day, we will know what language we speak, what our language is called” said.
Caparrós has been using the term “ñamericano” for a long time; even in 2021 he published a volume of chronicles which he called “We are America“, a word that he invented from taking that “banner” that is the ñ. “I thought that putting that letter in the name gave them something of that identity,” he explained to telam in an interview regarding the publication of that volume of chronicles.
On the other hand, he referred to the officials who “boast” about the growth of Spanish in the United States and pointed out: “If I were them, I would keep quiet about it, I would try to hide it. The vast majority of those millions are immigrants and children of immigrants, people that they went to the North because their countries were not capable of sustaining them, they escaped the violence or the poverty of their natural places. The growth of Castilian in the United States is a measure of Latin American failure”.
JD / CP
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