![]() ![]() ![]() Dodsley wanted Johnson to make a dictionary of the English language. ![]() Two hundred and six years before Maria Moliner thought to assuage her ennui by dictionary-making, Samuel Johnson, a rather obscure and not especially successful writer, was approached in his London rooms by a publisher named Robert Dodsley. The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Marquez, writing in 1982, gleefully noted that Moliner's dictionary was more than twice the size of the RAE's, which he thought appropriate, since in his judgment it was "more than twice as good." But in 19, the two volumes of Maria Moliner's Diccionario del uso del español appeared, weighing about seven pounds and comprising more than three thousand pages. Instead it took fifteen, and it's a miracle that it didn't take far longer than that, especially when you consider that the Authorities of the first Academia labored over their project for fourteen. She expected the work would take her two years. But, Maria Moliner wondered, what about preserving a record of Spanish as it was actually used? It was not a Diccionario de Autoridades she wished to produce but rather a Diccionario del uso del español - so she titled her project. The task of these Authorities was to preserve good Castilian Spanish, to purge it of impurities and unnecessary accretions, and to send it along to the next generation in a pristine state. These days the RAE's chief production is simply called the Diccionario de la lengua espanola, but at the founding of the august body, in 1713, its members worked on what they came to call the Diccionario de autoridades: the Authorities' Dictionary. To some degree this task constituted a protest - a protest against the work of the official guardians of the Spanish language, the Real Academia Español. She decided that she would produce, all by herself, a dictionary: a complete dictionary of the Spanish language as it was actually used. ![]() So she passed the time by returning to her deepest intellectual love, linguistics and lexicography. Moliner (born in 1900) had been one of the few Spanish women of her time to take a university degree, in history, and though it was an honors degree an academic position was unthinkable: even as a librarian she suffered from suspicion, prejudice, and a dearth of intellectual challenges. But the children were mostly grown now, Maria's husband was often away, and her work as a librarian provided little stimulation. She and her husband had moved to Madrid some years before, from Valencia, to educate their children. In 1952 Maria Moliner seems to have grown bored. ![]()
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