A Spanish OED

[Paul Frank]

I hope this is not too off-topic.

The Real Academia Española (RAE) has just announced that it has begun
work on a dictionary based on historical principles. Spanish speakers
don’t have a great etymological dictionary like the Chinese Zhongwen Da
Cidian and the Hanyu Da Cidian, Morohashi Tetsuji's Chinese-Japanese Dai
Kan-Wa Jiten, the Oxford English Dictionary, or the Grande Dizionario de
la Lingua Italiana. RAE director García de la Concha says that Spanish
and Portuguese are the only Western languages that lack a great
historical dictionary. The RAE began working on a historical dictionary
in the 1930s, but gave up during the Spanish Civil War. A second attempt
was begun in 1946, but Volume I (Letter A) was only published in 1972,
and the project fizzled out. At that rate, it would have taken 200 years
to finish the dictionary. The word alma (soul) alone filled 24
small-type pages. De la Concha reckons that this time round, the project
will be completed in about fifteen years. In an article in this
morning’s El País, RAE academician José Antonio Pascual is quoted as
saying that RAE plans to work on all the letters of the alphabet
simultaneously, taking advantage of new technological tools, especially
Web-based tools, as they become available: “When you miss a train, you
may find that the next one is a high-speed train, and then you just have
to take it.” The project is expected to cost about EUR1.5 million a
year. The Spanish government has agreed to help out.

Paul
________________________
Paul Frank
Chinese-English translator
paulfrank at post.harvard.edu
http://languagejottings.blogspot.com