Absolute peace does not always reign in mid-afternoon contests. An example of this has been The hunterwhich on December 29th triggered, probably without realizing it, a deep and thoughtful linguistic debate. The protagonist is Jose Manuel Leivaa Malaga team that was close to winning and did not do so due to the construction of the plural of Santa Claus.
This is how he told it through in the verdict. In compliance with the contract I cannot reveal any internal issues of the program, and logically I will do so. However, I am going to tell my personal correspondencebegan his story, always under the premise of recognition of the professionalism and magnificent treatment that the RTVE team provided him.
That place where ambiguity is born
You will have seen that when Santa Claus’s plural question in Spanish bounces as a spokesperson for two other contestants I said Santa Claus. The presenter considered it incorrect and clarified that the correct plurals are Santa Claus or papanoeleshe says, clarifying that that mistake made them lose since there were only two seconds left on the scoreboard and, if they were right, it is physically impossible for the hunter to be read another question and, furthermore, to answer it.
Once the program ended, he says, he filed a challenge to the Legal Counsel of Mediacrest, the producer of the format, and that they, in turn, again denied the reason based on what was stipulated by the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE). But Leiva was not going to give it up. I submitted a query to the RAE and it responded that If it were an occasional use of the proper noun in plural, the capitalization would be maintained and the first element could be pluralized or kept unchanged.. That is to say, both are fine.
The point is that the Santa Claus would be, as Leiva explains and as it was clarified to him by the RAE, that rarer and, therefore, less recommended while it is preferable that the name not remain unchanged. But words are very important here. And less recommended does not mean wrong. This is what the former contestant says: The Santa Claus will be a correct plural and less recommended.
Terrible policy financed with public money
Here the topic takes a turn. The expression Santa Claus is common in part of Andaluca, the Canary Islands and Latin America and this was argued in an expansion of the resource to The hunterwhich, just as it is sensitive to the reality of the linguistic variety of Spain (being a national-level program, asserts Leiva, who adds: And I think it’s great that he greets Galician, Catalan, Basque or Valencian contestants in their native languages, on the other hand, he doesn’t recognize Andalusian varieties. like this one from Santa Claus, despite being approved as the RAE has shown.
Not finding one, he says, he goes to Mediacrest’s Legal Advisor, and regretting the terrible policy financed with public money from RTVEwho would not have accessed a simple phone call To clarify everything, he decides to go one step further and wears this grievance towards Andalusian speech to three institutions: the Office of the RTVE Hearing Ombudsman, the Spanish Ombudsman and the Andalusian Ombudsman. He assures that the mistake is not clarifying the question whether the plural should be recommended or not and crosses out the question of ambiguous. Finally, he states that, despite everything, in his family there are more of the Three Wise Men.
