The RAE has published the Chronicle of the Spanish Language (Espasa), a work that includes a section on the “most relevant” doubts and queries in Spanish with its recommendations, such as those referring to the writing of the onomatopoeia of the laugh .
In this sense, the Royal Academy explains that the convention for the onomatopoeia of laughter is ‘ha, ha, ha’, separating the repeated elements with commas. “Each ‘ha’ of laughter is an independent tonic element, which is why it is not appropriate to write them together, as if it were a single word,” he clarified.
In addition, he has argued that the spelling ‘ha’ corresponds to the representation of laughter in English or French. “It must be remembered that, except in voices from other languages, the hache does not represent any sound in Spanish,” the RAE has clarified in the Chronicle of the Spanish language 2020.
Another explanation for a common doubt included in the book is that of Why do you say ‘with me’ and not ‘I feel’. “To explain this anomaly, we have to go back to the Latin language. The Latin preposition ‘cum’ (‘with’) was postponed to personal names (‘mecum’, ‘with me’), something that did not happen with the Latin preposition ‘ sine’ (‘without’), which always appeared before (‘sine me’, ‘without me’).
It also includes other curious responses, such as the recommendation to write an ’emoji’ after a period when “it affects the entire message” or to always use a colon after a greeting in letters and emails -since the use of comma in this context is “an Anglo-Saxon custom”-.
In addition, the learned house clarifies that ‘don’t scratch’ should be written instead of ‘don’t scratch’ when “in colloquial youth speech” one refers to “going crazy”. Likewise, she highlights that the most appropriate greeting formula is both ‘good morning’ -the most used in the Spanish-speaking world- and ‘good morning’ -from the River Plate area-.
When speaking of the feminine of ‘arbitro’, Spanish-speakers should refer to ‘the arbitrator’, while the RAE also admits the use of plurals such as ‘people’ when it is ‘expressive’ or ‘stylistic’, “so named because it provides greater expressiveness or emphasis”.
On the other hand, the work refers to old debates as a possible incorrectness in using the pronoun ‘I’ in front of a list of people. “It is advisable to place it last for reasons of courtesy, but it is not linguistically incorrect for it to appear first,” he explains.
The ‘Chronicle of the Spanish language 2020’ also includes a space to collect the ten most frequent words during this year in the Spanish-speaking space. As with the new entries in the dictionary, the disease has been the protagonist, with ‘quarantine’ and ‘pandemic’ among the favorites of users. Also included in this list are other terms such as ‘coronavirus’, ‘confinement’, ‘contagion’, ‘distancing’, ‘mask’, ‘telework’, ‘asymptomatic’ or ‘uncertainty’.

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