La Democracia hosted this Thursday the unique meeting between the president of the Canary Islands Academy of Language, Humbertoi Hernández Hernández, and the president of the Canary Islands Academy of Science, José Méndez Pérez. An activity that is part of the celebration of the X Anniversary of the Mercedes Medina Díaz Association.
The president of the ACL began his speech by pointing out that the most important thing in his professional career is “to have been able to dedicate himself to what he really likes”. “As a vocational teacher I have had the fortune to dedicate myself to what I am really passionate about”, says Hernández.
“What is the Canary Islands Academy of Language? Well, it is a foundation, we are not a Royal Academy, but we are real, we exist”, the speaker expressed with grace, being constituted by the Parliament of the Canary Islands in 1999. Its main objectives are “to recognize and respect the idiomatic and intellectual freedom of people”, avoiding any excluding attitude, as well as “to reject and condemn all linguistic or intellectual dogmatism, since there is no idiomatic modality superior or inferior to others”. They also recognize that “Canarianity is a linguistic and cultural fact that is defined and explained as Hispanic”, so it proclaims as its own “both the rich variety of the language that unites us, as well as that of its literatures, and undertakes to stimulate and disseminate the knowledge of one and the other”.
“Some may believe that the Royal Spanish Academy already fulfills this function by maintaining the unity of the Language, however, art. 3 of the Spanish Constitution already expresses the immensity of Spanish modalities spoken in different territories and the need for their recognition and protection”, points out Hernández, who adds that there are “five dialectal modalities of Spanish in the different American latitudes that have an Academy, the modality of Spanish spoken in the Canary Islands deserved its creation, given its genuine exceptionality”.
The ACL has carried out an intense lexicographic work with the creation of the “Basic Dictionary of Canarismos”, published in 2010 with almost “5000 entries”. This can be consulted free of charge on the website of the Academy page and whose next edition, thanks to the consultations carried out and the contribution of new words, “already has 11,200 entries, still in its revision phase. Being very interesting the appreciation in this regard of said increase, “because the language never stops growing while it is alive, dictionaries are never finished since the language does not degenerate, as some think, but evolves. Right now, in these days with the eruption of the volcano of La Palma, another word has jumped into the arena hijacking our attention, such as the already famous fajana, because according to one meaning it only occurs indoors due to movements of the land, but in different places such as the coast of Gran Canaria, there is evidence of a use of the same term in a multitude of coastal areas”.
Hernández presented the last great project that the ACL is carrying out, “the Corpus of Spanish of the Canary Islands (CORPECAN)”, with the aim of preserving the current lexicon spoken in the archipelago, through a documentary bank of recordings, “so that a researcher or person with curiosity from anywhere in the world, can search how different terms are pronounced, or even the same word in different places of the islands, through interviews and recordings of citizens of different ages and places of residence”. To conclude, he made some considerations regarding the use of Canarianisms, and their omission for being considered “erroneous terms”, using as an example the phrase “that chinijo is restless, when we want to say that he is restless, being understood as a poorly formed word, since it does not follow the linguistic norm of Spanish because it is really a word that comes from Portuguese, due to the long presence in time in the archipelago of people of that nationality, with the consequent cultural exchange, being other terms, such as mojo, of the same origin”.
Canary Islands Academy of Science
The act continued with the presentation by the vice president of the Association Manuel Betancor González, of the president of the Royal Canary Islands Academy of Science Don José Méndez Pérez, who began by congratulating the organization for its Anniversary, “knowing that it is not easy to maintain an altruistic and cultural activity of a high level over a decade”.
Academies are born in a general way, due to the inability of medieval universities “to respond to the needs and questions proposed by the Renaissance, with Italy being one of the most relevant precedents”, such as the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, because “these animals were characterized by their good vision, and one had to be very prepared to solve the problems, having to have very good scientific vision”.
Although the oldest that still exists today is the Royal Society, former Royal Society of London for the Advancement of Natural Science, to which, for example, Newton, Ramón y Cajal belonged and, on the other hand, the Academy of Sciences of France, both created in the seventeenth century. “Seeing Spain the creation at the national level of its first Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences in 1847 during the reign of Felipe V, although, with illustrious precedents, such as the Academy of Mathematics of Madrid of the sixteenth century”.
The initial project of the creation of the Academy was due “to the initiative and confluence of many efforts, making a well-deserved mention to the figure of the eminent mathematician Don Nácere Hayek Calil, and of the deans of the Faculties of Mathematics, Chemistry and Biology of the University of La Laguna, of those of the Higher Center of Marine Sciences and Faculty of Informatics of the Polytechnic University, today University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, as well as of the deans of the Official Colleges of Doctors and Graduates in Philosophy and Letters and Sciences and Chemistry of the Canary Islands”.
“When Democracy arrived, academies began to emerge in the Spanish state; in fact, there were already two in the Canary Islands, specifically in Tenerife, the Royal Canary Islands Academy of Fine Arts of San Miguel Arcángel and the Royal Academy of Medicine of the Canary Islands, the Royal Canary Islands Academy of Science (RACC) being recognized in the Official State Gazette in 1987, granting it the Royal denomination, after more than 25 years of existence, in 2014. Constituting the three the nucleus of Royal Canary Islands Academies associated to the Institute of Spain since 1989”, pointed out the speaker.
Being the Canary Islands a volcanic region properly, the RACC should have a Section of Earth and Space Sciences that deals with this branch of Science, being able to see lately frequently in the media talking about the volcano of La Palma, to one of the members of the Academy Juan Teodoro Carracedo Gómez, since one of the main functions of the Academy is scientific dissemination.
To conclude the presentation highlighting the importance of research in the Canary Islands, and on the island of Lanzarote properly, he made a reference “to our countryman Don Blas Cabrera Felipe, father of Spanish Physics, a person who rubbed shoulders with Albert Einstein, one of the most recognized scientists in History. A person who, when presenting himself as an academic to the famous Academy of Sciences of France, won by 40 votes to 2, to a Nobel Prize winner, the Dutchman Niels Bohr, the physicist who revolutionized the atomic model and is studied in all the institutes of the world today”.
Curriculum of both presidents
The president of the Canary Islands Academy of Language (ACL) Don Humberto Hernández Hernández, is a doctor in Spanish Philology and professor at the University of La Laguna, his main lines of research being Lexicography, the relations between Spanish and the media and the teaching of Language. He has been director of the University School of Teacher Training, now Faculty of Education and dean of the Faculty of Information Sciences, both of the University of La Laguna. He has published numerous research and dissemination articles in the press at the regional level, as well as books and dictionaries, such as School orientation dictionaries. Contribution to the study of Spanish monolingual lexicography. In addition, he has been awarded the Leoncio Rodríguez Journalism Prize and has been a Special Mention of the Miguel Delibes National Prize.
As a representative of the Royal Canary Islands Academy of Science we have been able to enjoy the presentation of Don José Méndez Pérez, president of the same, doctor in Sciences and professor at the University of La Laguna, whose research activity has focused mainly on the study of integral transformations, both from a classical point of view and in spaces of generalized functions or distributions, as well as in the analysis of their applications. He has published more than 50 scientific articles, has been dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and director of the Department of Mathematical Analysis of the University of La Laguna, being distinguished with the IV Alonso Nava y Grimón Prize, the Gold Medal of the University of La Laguna. Recently the Faculty of Sciences named its Hall of Degrees of its Mathematics Section after him, in recognition of his scientific and teaching work.
