Lexicon Is Designed to Illuminate the Doubting Tomas

For Spanish-speakers struggling with pervasive English intruders, such as “e-mail” and “overbooking,” comes this advice from linguistic watchdogs: Just say them in Spanish.

It’s one of thousands of suggestions in the new “Panhispanic Dictionary of Doubts,” a book that also tries to sort out tricky words in Spanish for the 400 million people who use the world’s fourth most-spoken language.

For “e-mail,” it recommends using “correo electronico,” correo meaning mail. The recommended replacement for “overbooking” -- heard mainly at airports -- is “sobrecontratacion,” which literally means over-contracting.

For a dictionary, it is becoming something of, well, a “bestseller” -- an Anglicism now common in Spanish but frowned on by the tome’s authors, the Royal Spanish Academy and its sister groups in 21 other Spanish-speaking nations and territories. They prefer “superventas,” from the Spanish ventas, which means sales.

The publisher, Ediciones Santillana, says the book has sold about 200,000 copies since coming out in late November. It is in its second printing in most countries and was among the five or six top-sellers in Spain for Christmas.

The august overseers of the language of Don Quixote took five years to compile the dictionary. Fielding daily e-mails and other queries on spelling and grammar, the academies had realized that people’s doubts about proper Spanish often matched up, forming a pattern from Madrid to Mexico City, Bogota to Buenos Aires.

“When we make mistakes, we make them together,” said Gregorio Salvador, vice president of the Royal Spanish Academy. “We coincide even in our errors.”

And they have the same doubts -- hence the book’s title.

Take the words “juez” (judge) and “medico” (doctor). Once the jobs were mainly done by men, but changing times have brought more women into the professions. So should the grammar of gender -- feminine nouns in Spanish end in “a”-- apply, turning the words into “jueza” and “medica”? Yes, the dictionary says.

It contains almost 8,000 entries, most addressing doubts over Spanish words rather than foreign ones that have crept into everyday use.

As for the latter, the book says that if there is a Spanish way to say the same thing, it should be used.

“Ticket,” another common Anglicism, should morph into “tique,” the watchdogs say. “Bluff” -- as in a card game -- should shed an ‘f’ and become “bluf,” with the vowel sound like that of moon.

But “chat,” the Internet kind at least, is accepted as is. As all Spanish infinitives end in either -er, -ar or -ir, the dictionary suggests a new verb to express this brand of communication: “chatear.”

For “Web log,” or “blog,” the academics reach into the world of maritime terminology for the phrase “cuaderno de bitacora” -- meaning a ship’s logbook -- and recommend adding “ciber” to come up with the probably doomed “ciberbitacora.” The term is virtually never heard, at least in Spain. They also cite “ciberdiario” as a possibility, but it is just about as rare.

France also is working to fend off the increasing number of English words creeping into everyday French. Government documents now use the made-up word “courriel” to replace e-mail. But the prestigious Academie francaise, which tries to keep French pure, has failed to kill such Anglicisms as “les stars” for celebrities and “le weekend.”

The new Spanish dictionary says it is OK to use a foreign word, but with a catch: Give it a Spanish flair.

“We prefer them a bit cooked,” said Humberto Lopez Morales, president of the Spanish language academy in Puerto Rico.

The Internet is the Internet no matter where you log on, but in Spanish it’s pronounced with an accent on -net. A Spaniard referring to a sports jacket -- “chaqueta de sport” in Spain -- should stick an “e” in there and pronounce it “chaqueta de esport.”

“We like that better,” Lopez Morales said.

Spanish is the fourth most spoken language after Chinese, English and Hindi, and some projections indicate it might be second by 2030.

It already is second only to English as a tool for international communication, Lopez Morales said.

Like English, Spanish is spoken in so many countries that it has become a language rich in you-say-tomato, I-say-tomahto nuance.

There are 18 ways to say ballpoint pen -- including “boligrafo” in Spain, “lapicero” in Colombia and “birome” in Argentina.

Spanish motorists drive “coches,” Argentines use “autos” and Mexicans clog their streets with “carros.”

In the end, the dictionary’s recommendations are just that -- suggestions -- because languages are alive, with words that are born and words that die. Speakers have the ultimate say.

“When all the speakers of a language commit the same mistake, the mistake is no longer a mistake. It becomes the norm,” said Salvador at the Royal Spanish Academy.