In a world where it's increasingly difficult to live in Catalan, reading a newspaper in Catalan every day is a space for linguistic freedom. The media are arguably the largest producers of verbal language, and it makes perfect sense that the linguistic debate occupies the top spot in the communications received by the Readers' Ombudsman.
The institutional status of Catalan, which must share official status with the fourth most spoken language in the world, and the disadvantage this entails in terms of international recognition and the appeal of strong waves of migration, develops a component of sociolinguistic resistance that further encourages debate.
Today I present two new linguistic questions, and I'll announce that I have another one on the back burner. First, math teacher Lucía Bayo reminds me of a complaint about the game. Synonym Race. By beautifully defining herself as a "numerical citizen," she brings to light the fascinating and ancient relationship between letters and numbers that has been created by algebra and Kabbalah, and by mathematical writers who have launched literature with three Nobel Prize winners (Echegaray, Solzhenitsyn, Coetzee). Alice in Wonderland and Dracula; being able to descend these heights in the "lowlands" of a newspaper is a luxury.
Professor Bayo writes to me: "I have played the game of synonyms for the first time. To the solution of the game, likely and TRUE were considered synonyms.
"100% likely = TRUE, but only likely may be quite far from TRUE.
"Example: I buy 60% of the numbers in a lottery. It's more likely that I'll win than not, but we wouldn't say that I'm going to win for sure.
"Moreover, although in common language it is often considered likely = quite likely, This is still not equivalent to TRUE.
"If you buy 90% or 95% of the numbers in a lottery, you're likely to win, but you're not certain that's the case.
"If a medicine cures around 90% or 95% of patients, it cannot be said that it will cure all patients. This becomes clear if we translate this into the number of people: if there were 100,000 patients, around 5,000 to 10,000 would not be cured.
"It is clear that the game of synonyms is a game, a game of words that leads from a first word to a last one that will hardly be a synonym of its own. The game asserts that there are homonymous words with different meanings, obviously, to obtain these chains. funny. However, likely does not mean TRUE in no sense.
"As a math teacher and a numerical citizen, I would like the ARA newspaper, which is sometimes so concerned about the level of math, to collaborate by showing rigor when it comes to using basic mathematical concepts. I demand the same care in the treatment of mathematical concepts as in the use of language."
A few months ago, I attended to subscriber Daniel Gamper about the application of the verb to people bring down. Although in this case it frees me from publishing his opinion, I take pride in his human interest.
Gamper says: "[...] Today on the web I saw the headline that I indicated in the attached image ["An afternoon hunting for repeat offenders in the center of Barcelona"]. In addition, being right next to your section, all of this has made me think again. The issue is the same as the use of the verb bring down: Do police officers hunt people? Are repeat offenders animals that should be hunted? Why isn't there talk of "arrests"? Is it sensationalism to attract readers?
These are rhetorical questions, of course. I'd like to think that a large portion of the paper's readers would prefer to read a paper that pays more attention to this kind of thing.
I have conveyed these matters to Professor Josep Lacreu, head of the Linguistic-Technical Resources Unit at the Valencian Academy of Language. Given the context of instability I have referred to regarding the "mistreated language" (I cite Raimon because it is entirely relevant), I thought it appropriate to take advantage of the unity of the language proclaimed by both the IEC and the AVL, and I give my expert opinion.auctoritas to one of its most specialized members. Josep Lacreu is a linguist and lexicographer, former professor at the University of Valencia and head of the Language and Translation Advisory Service of the Generalitat Valenciana, with a vast catalogue of publications.
Lacreu writes: "Respect for the use ofhuntapplied to people, it should be noted that the Valencian Normative Dictionary perfectly includes this meaning: "To pursue and capture (a person, an airplane or a ship)." This is evidently a figurative sense of the first meaning, which reflects the traditional use of this verb, referring to animals. But this use ofhuntIt has been documented since ancient times: "The priest should not go hunting wild beasts, but he should hunt souls," said Saint Vincent Ferrer in one of his sermons, dated 1410.
"Modernly, some compound words have also been created from the roothunt-, which target people, such asbounty huntereithertalent scout, which reinforce the expansion of this figurative meaning of the verbhuntAlso noteworthy in this same sense is the film directed by Arthur Penn in 1966, starring Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda and Robert Redford, titled in EnglishThe Chase, and translated into Catalan, very significantly, asThe hunt for man.
"As for the wordsTRUEandlikely –Lacreu continues–, we believe that, as the reader who has addressed her diary points out, they do, in fact, have a dubious equivalence. They are not antithetical concepts, but they can hardly be substituted for each other without further ado. When we describe an event that has not yet taken place aslikely, it is precisely excluded that we can consider itTRUE. Probability is projected onto the future or onto an unknown past that we reinterpret based on clues, and therefore always with a certain degree of uncertainty, which may be greater or lesser, but we can never be completely sure that it will be as we predict.
In conclusion, the Reader's Ombudsman echoes Professor Bayo's criticism and recommends treading carefully when it comes to language games, an area with a teaching function in which the ARA cannot fail to teach Catalan sufficiently. Based on Dr. Gamper's reflection, I believe it is worth taking this into consideration and carefully refining the vocabulary for sensitive topics—with excessive zeal, if necessary—because the linguistic humanism employed by the philosophy professor is necessary in a political world that, in opposition to grammar, has had to resort to genocide.
I am deeply grateful for the contributions of Professors Bayo, Gamper, and Lacreu, an intellectual asset that should help us improve our everyday language, which we put into writing in the daily feat of word-making. I conclude with an aesthetic homage to mathematics and invite you to decipher the enigma:
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