Just as covid affects the body, bad spelling affects the soul, says educator Alberto Santelices Salomón who, together with a group of students, carried out research on the signage of Santa Cruz de la Sierra and found 500 spelling errors that are embodied in street names and road signs. Most are related to lack of tilof, so the educator and his students asked the Municipal Council to instruct that the corrections be made. Neighbors and education experts support the initiative.
With the premise that it is better to learn by doing, the students organized themselves into groups to go on a ‘hunt’ for the misspelled words on public roads. what else they found was lack of tilde in uppercase, but there are also lowercase letters without tilde.
It is enough to walk the streets and stop to observe to find obvious errors that have been part of the urban furniture of the city for years. Error signs are locatedattached at different points, as is the case of the one on Ballivian Street, which is written in capital letters, but without the tilde, although the accentuation rules state that capital letters must be written with a tilde if applicable.
The same thing happens in many other street nomination signs, as well as in those of neighborhood names and indications of health centers and other similar ones. A striking case is the poster for the Paraíso neighborhood, which has two errors: the name of the neighborhood is without an accent mark, as is the one for Plaza Bailón Mercado.
María del Rosario Lizarazu, a resident of the center and a veterinarianBy profession, he maintains that it is necessary to make corrections, especially thinking of school-age children.
Isabel Ocampo, who works at a business downtown, supports the change, adding that mistakes are becoming more common due to the use of social media. “Wrong abbreviations are made on WhatsApp and if people are forgetting even the names of the streets, it is because they areand drives by references or by GPS”, observed the neighbor.
Likewise, on Suárez Arana and Quijarro streets, the sign that shows the existence of a path for the circulation of bicycles is without an accent and is semi-closed.
Elizabeth Banzer, who has worked near that corner for 45 years, said the sign was put up about three years ago. “From the first day we realized the lack of an accent and we laughed because that type of mistake is unusual,” the neighbor said.
Outside the city center the panorama does not change, for exampleFor example, in the university area there is a sign referencingInitial that indicates the address of the Cástulo Chávez school without the tilde. The same thing happens in the streets with names of countries in that area such as: Mexico and Haiti, for example.
Most of the signs with errors are written in capital letters and as stipulated by the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), the use of capital letters does not exempt from putting the tilde when This is required by the accentuation rules and limits that only acronyms, which are written entirely in capital letters, never have an accent mark.
“The use of modern text composition and editing systems has allowed, for decades, to write the tilde over capital letters with ease, so that there is no justification today not to apply the rules ofe graphic accentuation to the words thus written in any support circumstance. The academic spelling never gave carte blanche for it, ”says the institution of the Spanish language in one of its sections.
The educator Santelices indicates that it is important that the city’s signs are well written, not only because “the cityad gets aggressive when there are bugs on the streets spelling, but also because there is a hidden curriculum, in which children assimilate the words that are displayed on public roads”.
Steps to follow
Sarah Mansilla, municipal secretary of Culture and Tourism of the Santa Cruz commune, participated in the exhibition given by Santelices on the investigation before the Municipal Council last Thursday and indicated that it will collaborate to be able to carry outzar the corrections that are being requested, but asked for patience because it is a long project to implement.
“The city is an open book that is read not only with letters, but also with images that each person recreates in their imagination. So, being an open book, the first thing we read is what is written and that is where the signaling comes in that we learn it as it is written, “added the authority.
For her part, the councilor and member of the Education, Culture, Tourism and Sports Commission of the Council, Lola Terrazas, said that the report presented by Santelices “was a slap on the wrist” for the municipal authorities, both the Executive and the Legislative , because, although the signage of streets and avenues is the responsibility of the former, also within the Municipal Council spelling “great horrors” were found on some signs.
“Spelling on public signs is a matter of image and institutional education because if we write a callwrong, we are teaching citizens that the nThe name of that route is written badly because people copy what is written and believe that it is well done”, he highlighted.
In turn, the teacher and writer Edgar Lora Gumiel pointed out that, although it is nenecessary that the missing accents be placed on the names, it is also necessary to place signage in anothers areas of the capital that lack them.
“An investment is needed to put signage on the streets of the Plan Tres Mil or Villa Primero de Mayo, which still do not have them, and also if the change (of names) is going to be made to the streets, has to take the historical referent of the person corroborating with his birth certificate or some of his certificates: baptism, marriage or death, “said the professional.
