Aye. In a way it has the same intent that ISO does, to act as a general reference. If you have an ISO standard for something and your local Standards Bureau is part of ISO, you know that their own version of the standard will be either the exact same as ISO’s (but with a local code) or its translation: there is no need to compare UNE 9001 with BSI 9001 or with NF 9001.
All those style manuals? In Spanish, the style manual is the Ortografía published by the Academies. Companies and publishers may have additional requirements such as which fonts to use but if you have a doubt about whether to insert a comma or not, your reference is the Ortografía.
Also, despite what some may think and the fact the main dictionary is under RAE (usually associated with Spain), the local academies help maintain the local dialect (in an official, standard form, of course), and keep the vocabulary richness and regionalisms. As has been shown here, many of the false friends in Spanish are perfectly acceptable words, they just vary in their use according to region. I know my local Academy has done a few ad spots showcasing our regionalisms. It helps to not feel that your language is not “good”, that it is recognized and valued. And the DPD aids greatly in the pronunciation sense, as you can tell someone from another region “No, I speak perfectly well for my dialect/region, where x or y are accepted.”
Also, back to the Spanish false friends… Nava, have you seen the wonderful youtube song about a sample of them in Spanish?
Thanks, Nava and KarlGrenze, for your clear and helpful explanations. I chose to use the New York Times style manual for most (not all) of my spelling, grammar, and word choice decisions while writing my dissertation, so I can well grasp the utility of a guide of some sort to what is generally considered appropriate to certain professional writing contexts.
I still get a feeling that some folks mistakenly ascribe organizations like the RAE as being something more than this, however. Call the book I used the “Royal New York Times Manual,” it doesn’t change what it is. A lot if it just comes down to how we value internal consistency in any written work. The NY Times manual admits up front that, for many entries, they could have just as well chosen some other option, but they had to pick one, just so their writers would sound similar to each other. The concept of “correctness” in some deeper sense never enters into the picture, nor should it.
Okay, enough of this…it’s getting to be a hijack, my apologies! Back to the fun topic of faux amis…
Nava was using RAE materials for a completely different purpose than the “standardized style manual for professional writing” – she was using them to find out how the words “lima” and “limón” are used by Mexicans and others in daily life.
Do those same RAE materials really attempt to serve that purpose? That’s a totally different thing. For US English, the most ambitious publication for that is called the Dictionary of American Regional English, or DARE. A massive, multivolume undertaking, DARE is nowadays supplemented in its purpose by all kinds of Internet polls and whatnot, some of them informal (including some akin to, say, this very thread), others more philologically and statistically sophisticated.
The publications by any of the Spanish Academies really do attempt that. They are the final word (heh) regarding questions about vocabulary, grammar, orthography, and pronunciation of the Spanish language. The RAE has numerous examples where they do include regionalisms, and as shown by Nava, she managed to find an online version of one of the regional Academies demonstrating the point we were making. And yes, several of the Academies, if you check them, have printed materials that include the regionalisms (which include a lot of false friends).
Are there words that are not defined or present in the main dictionary (the one at RAE), nor in any of publications of the sister Academies? Yes, certainly. That may be because that word has not yet been classified or collected by the regional Academy for whatever reason, or that the Academies have agreed that that word, albeit widely used, is incorrect, and it’s use in formal communication is unacceptable (many neologisms and anglicisms fall in this category).
The documents I was using to look up words are not the same one as the one I called a “style manual”: I looked for words in different Dictionaries; the style guide is the Ortografía, which deals with spelling, punctuation and so forth. It’s not a dictionary. Dictionaries tell you that a certain word carries a graphic accent and another one doesn’t, but not how to figure out which words will without looking them up, or when to use colons and when semicolons; the Ortografía does not tell you the meaning of words (other than words it’s defining because they are required in order to understand the book itself).
IN countries that have an official language, it is valuable to have a definition of what that language is.
The advantage of having an official language is, that when dealing with a representative of the state you can rightously demand that communication in the official language be understood.
The disadvantage of having an offical language is, that when the government deals with you, they can rightously refuse to communicate in a language you understand.
This whole official language idea underlies the conflict between Catalan and Spanish mentioned above: conversely, the conflict between Catalan and Spanish underlies the whole idea of having an Official Language in Spain.
About that quite, indeed, rather, what what discussion (too tired for quotes, which require two keystrokes each on iPad).
In US, in informal situations where our own opinion or action, or that of someone else, is either self validated from a previous opinion now evident or commented on as to its good value, we say, with a distinct accent on “what:”
“Is that some fancy parking, or what?” (said about someone else or self)
“Is she beautiful, or what?”
“Can I write interesting posts, or what?”
That last one reminded me of another, more obnoxious one (it was a character’s catch phrase and marker of personality in the movie Shampoo):
“That’s some fancy car, am I right or am I right?”
