In conversation, a few years ago, with a journalist I slim from passing a phrase that she raised to headline: “Today’s error can be tomorrow’s rule.” I did not discover any Mediterranean to language historians, but, perhaps, to the general public. And condenses well, I believe, the essence of what occupies those: Explain linguistic change, give an account of how and why languages change. (But the presence in the verb phrase can, which implies that not all deviations from the norm triumph).
A recent movie‘Conclave’, has suggested these lines. The great, meridian accentuation rules of our language force, as is archisabido, to mark with tilde all the esdrújulas, and hence, naturally, conclave carries it.
Not so in Italian, which does not distinguish plains from esdrújulas through graphic accents, which forces us to know that, in that language, conclave It is flat. It is natural: formed in Latin, conclavefrom the preposition cum and the name Clavis ablative, The Italians have maintained the prosodic accent in their place, While the Spaniards, surely for conferring a certain prestige plus to the esdrújulas, have transferred the tonicity to the last sipulture (Menéndez Pidal spoke about “Esdrujulista mania”: the one that Farrago, medulla, made a driver, marrowor, at the vulgar level, it converts interval in interval).
As progress is made in the eighteenth we find growing number of examples of
conclave
esdrújulo
As for the significance, it is visible – probably, more to Italians than us – that is ‘with a key’, since locked up the church cardinals gather when they have to choose a new pontiff.
Well then, In Spanish it was also a flat word. A simple look at the diachronic corpus of the Spanish of the RAE is enough to find ancient poetic texts (fifteenth century) in which the voice establishes consonant rhyme with ways such as Ave, soft, severe, key, etc (or like knowsby the way).
In it ‘Dictionary of authorities’ (1729) The word of the word does not present, neither in versals nor in Versalitas, any. But in the texts that are cited in the article – in the “authorities”, precisely – the word, highlighted in italics, also appears with a tilde on the A (conclave) And this is not for following a spelling rule of the moment, but for reasons, let’s say it, didactics, to warn the reader that the word was flat.
Perhaps it was starting to stop being. As progress is made in the eighteenth we find growing number of examples of conclave esdrújulo. The oldest is A curious passage of 1728 in which Fr. Manuel de Larramendi criticizes condescension with such accentuation. However, since 1754 the Academy is given by good in the ‘spelling’ of that year and in later, and since 1780 in the ‘dictionary’.
“Today,” he says ‘Pan -Hispanic dictionary of doubts’– Only the esdrújula form is used conclave. The flat etymological conclave It has fallen into disuse and should be avoided ». A good example of error triumph, turned into a rule,
#Conclave
