Leopoldo Lugones: Etymology and power. Antecedents and precedences in La Nación (1923-1925)

Abstract

The following paper analyzes a series of press articles on etymological issues, published by Argentine writer Leopoldo Lugones in La Nación from 1923 to 1925. It is an organic whole of sketches aimed at cultural and political intervention, allowing Lugones, on the one side, to go further with his philological project, first essayed in his 1913 conferences, later published in El Payador. On the other side, these notes anticipate the bigger project, his Diccionario etimológico del castellano usual, which he would publish in the pages of El monitor from 1930 on. With critical tools developed in the fields of glotopolitics, discourse analyses and literary studies, these notes –contemporary to the Ayacucho speech and the foundation of Buenos Aires’ Institute of Philology– shall be analyzed inserted in other textual series present in the same newspaper (Ricardo Rojas’ ‘eurindian’ notes, interventions by a professional philologist like Américo Castro, etc.), conceiving them at the same time within a broader discursive realm, as well as anchored in a historical momentum in which Lugones’ public figure becomes highly present. The main thesis in this paper is that Lugones’ etymological sketches represent a strong glotopolitical gesture, bounded to a homogeneous image of the Nation, every time that they, on the one side, legitimate a part of the native Latin American lexicon on the basis of lettered traditions taken for prestigious (Greek and Arab traditions), and on the other, they are bringing up an immunization process for language in face of those items stemming from Latin American indigenous cultures.