Catalogs of non-standard terms: description of a discursive tradition and a research source for 19th Century Chilean Spanish

Abstract

In the 19th century several linguistic registers were published in Chile destined to the teaching of the standard language, and the correction of variants considered vulgar. These texts belong in different “discursive traditions” (Kabatek 2018), such as grammars, dictionaries, idiomatic corrections and a type of text, not yet described, that presents voices alphabetically arranged, in two columns side by side, with the labels non-standard– standard, 49 just like the Appendix Probi written ca. 3rd century AD. We call this discursive tradition “censorship catalogs of non-standard voices”, which had a wide development in the Chile in the19th century and is mainly represented by the Catálogo anónimo de 1843, the appendix of the Compendio de gramática castellana (Reyes 1854), the Correcciones lexigráficas (Gormaz 1860) and some sections of the Incorrecciones del castellano (Guevara 1894). To identify this tradition, we use Kabatek’s postulates, which allow the description as based in its environments and its symptomatic elements. The result is the description of a particular textual format and a linguistic content of greater relevance: the corrected voices in them, such as adré for adrede, aletudo for alado or aguada for abrevadero, reveal phoneticalphonological, morphological and lexical phenomena typical of the non-standard language, so they constitute important sources for the study of the evolution of Chilean Spanish.