Autor: Merriam A. Grain

You shall forgive the spelling, I didn’t look up the correct way to write it; neither I looked up the original name the character must have in your country. In any case of correction, just point it out and I will since almost every single day I make a mistake.

Maybe you know the name because you watched the cartoon (or don’t know the name but will recognize the cartoon as soon as I tell you the plot) and this will irk you maybe… but explanations come justified by the fact I CAN’T nor I will assume you know. Yes, you are very smart and have a very ample culture. Yet, being a knowledgeable person doesn’t mean you know everything. Do you happen to know Bolek and Lolek[1]?  There are people who are walking encyclopedias but that doesn’t mean they know it all.  On such track…

Mumra was the antagonist villain in an animation in which some humanoid cats arrive to planet Earth after a cataclysm or something in their native planet. As you can guess due to the name, Mumra was a mummy who could (through some magic arrangements), get up and apply his own McCarthian anti cat plan.  Thus the cats (name omitted for copyright reasons), had to fight the mummy.

Ah… And what the heck does Mumra have to do with language changes? And why are you bringing language into a fiction writing blog? Keep calm and keep reading. I’ll get there. Slowly but steady.

RAE

RAE

You might not know but in the Hispanic speaking world, there’s an institution in charge of the surveillance of the Spanish language, called the Real Academia de la lengua Española[1].  Such thing doesn’t happen in English. English is «free» of bureaus of the sort. All you have is the Oxford dictionary (no, I’m not mocking, just pointing out the difference). But the RAE is not a bureau. It is a thing in Spain we take as layout for correct grammar and spelling (ortografía).
And well, I was playing a question game… Some time ago for I haven’t gone there lately. There was a comment about this question in particular.

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[1] After all, very few English speaking people speak nor read in Spanish

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THE COMMENT

Blah, blah… grammar explanation so not concerning to us, English speakers… <<To conclude, both spellings are correct, not because its use in Argentina and Paraguay but because of the RAE.

Such are changes the RAE makes to adapt to the uses of people. I disagree but we have to accept what the RAE says>>.

Is the RAE in the wrong for allowing real life people’s usage of language to change the rules? Is this a crime or is it wiser to adapt to times? Is the language a privilege of the dictionary or is the language a business of its speakers?

WHAT DOES LANGUAGE CHANGE HAVE TO DO WITH FICTION WRITING?

… It is one of the tools of writing.  It is not the most important but we all know what reality is to fiction. The game we play of fiction being real is only possible when it feels real. Thus, as a feature of reality, LANGUAGE IS AN IMPORTANT DETAIL either if you WANT IT OR NOT.

Dictionaries (for English) and Royal academies (for Spanish only?) are the big guideline’s to keep our ranting as comprehensible as possible. Yet, it is suicidal to subtract ourselves from the natural changes of language. Languages change or they turn into the immortal Mumra.

English ain’t a language fossilized! No. It is not. Yet, English has a strange rule. The rule is not native, neither does it come out from English speakers. It was copied from Latin. Differently from French, Spanish, Italian (forget Korean in the list, they have a very unique system to negations) which take very well a «I don’t want nothing»; English takes this as a horrible grammar error.

And what I mean is that the rule was arbitrarily imposed through a death language because someone thought it was fancy. And the language where the rule comes from is Mumra, the immortal. It is artificially kept there as it was, raised from its rest to bug us by adding new words changing the new words to suit its immovability.

Is grammar an attempt to add cyanide to the language, in a slow fashion so it becomes a living mummy? Or is it something we all agree upon so we can understand each other? And I don’t mean this degradation in which we end up having dictionaries of 28 words, like the ones in 1984[2]. I mean the change of the dictionaries and rules to suit what is in use. Like: «Give me two waters». That doesn’t exist! I’ve heard that… In a movie. And I bet it happens. In spite of the rule of uncountable nouns for water.

Nonsense?! Yes, it is. It is today’s nonsense. You might get infuriated and protest. Do. That’s why we can comment. You could also like it. Given the case, push the like button please. Or subscribe. It takes me ages to fix problems with SQL and other stuff and disappear from the net a month or two but I’m a cockroach. I’ll survive!

Pasto kalo.

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[1] I don’t think so, it was a Polish animation of 1975, a year in which Poland was still part of the URSS and since you’re reading in English the odds of it being available on your country are very low. But if you did, comment and tell me where you’re from.

[2] Novel I haven’t read and probably won’t. I know about the contents since its plot, is explained by the Colombian Historian Diana Uribe in her series about the Cold war.