Joan Coromines

Joan Coromines i Vigneaux, also sometimes written as Joan Corominas or Juan Corominas, (Barcelona, March 21, 1905-Pineda de Mar, Barcelona, January 2, 1997) was a Spanish philologist, lexicographer and etymologist, author of the Critical Etymological Castilian and Hispanic Dictionary, of the Critical Etymological Dictionary of the Castilian Language and the Brief Etymological Dictionary of the Castilian Language, which made great contributions to the study of Catalan, Spanish and other Romance languages.

Biography

Son of politician Pedro Corominas and educator Celestina Vigneaux, and brother of mathematician Ernest Corominas and psychoanalyst Júlia Coromines, he showed an interest in linguistics from a very young age. He studied at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Barcelona and completed studies in various European cities between 1925 and 1929: stays in Montpellier (where he had to take refuge due to his activities against the Primo de Rivera dictatorship), in Madrid, where He completed his doctorate, and in Zurich, where he traveled in 1929 to further studies with Jakob Jud, who influenced him so much. He also maintained contact with great professors: Grammont and Millardet in Montpellier, Américo Castro and Ramón Menéndez Pidal in Madrid. In 1930 he began working at the Institute of Catalan Studies in Pompeu Fabra's lexicographical team; in 1931 he published the doctoral thesis Aranese Vocabulary . The same year he began to prepare his Onomasticon Cataloniae, a monumental etymological compilation of all the place names of the Catalan-speaking linguistic domain based on oral surveys, a unique project in Europe that he managed to finish in the last stretch of his long life.

A Catalanist, a declared Republican and anti-Francoist, after the Spanish Civil War he went into exile in various countries, until he obtained a professorship at the University of Chicago in 1946. Among the countries where he was found was Argentina. There, in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the National University of Cuyo, he founded the Institute of Linguistics called Joan Corominas and began the publication of the magazine Anales del Instituto de Lingüística , a publication currently in force. In this Institute, the I JELING (First Conference on Linguistic Studies) is held in September 2017, which accounts for the persistence of the work of Corominas in Mendoza (Argentina). In 1950 he was appointed an adjunct member of the Instituto de Estudios Catalanes (the Catalan language academy), although he did not join until 1952, when he temporarily returned to Spain after thirteen years of exile. In 1967 he retired as a teacher in Chicago and returned to Catalonia, settling in Pineda de Mar, in the Maresme region. He then focused on the great lexicographical works that constituted the raison d'être of his life, and he rejected any offer that would distract him from that objective. Between 1980 and 1991 he prepared the Diccionari etimològic i complementari de la llengua catalana ( Etymological and complementary dictionary of the Catalan language ). In 1984 he received the Honorary Prize for Catalan Letters and in 1989 the National Prize for Spanish Letters, a high distinction granted by the Spanish Government. Corominas accepted the National Prize for Spanish Letters, endowed with five million pesetas, but wrote a letter to the Ministry of Culture complaining about the treatment of the Catalan language and Catalonia —"my only nation, and my only language, to which I lend unconditional obedience and homage are the Catalan nation and language»— on the part of the central government; ending his letter with a call to "small or modest nations like ours, rejecting the farce of single electoral colleges, imposed by mediocre rulers". For the same reason, he rejected the Grand Cross of the Civil Order of Alfonso X the Wise man and a chair at the Royal Spanish Academy.

In October 1994, he finished the Onomasticon Cataloniae, at the age of 89, the result of intense and exhaustive work, thanks to the help of his collaborators, among whom we must mainly mention Xavier Terrado, Joseph Gulsoy, Philip D. Rasico, and Joan Ferrer. The first volume (of eight) was published in 1989.

The Coromines Foundation has been in charge, for some years now, of publishing the correspondence that the author of the Diccionari kept with various personalities, a vast material that will occupy some twenty-five volumes. Corominas' correspondences with Pompeu Fabra, Francesc de B. Moll, Josep Pla, Joan Fuster, various Catalan exiles, Carles Riba and Joan Sales have already been published. The edition and annotation of these books is in charge of Joan Pujadas, Josep Ferrer and Joan Ferrer, all of them collaborators of the philologist. Another epistolary about to enter the press is that of Corominas with his teacher Ramón Menéndez Pidal, which has been prepared by professors José Antonio Pascual (who collaborated on his Dictionary critical etymological castellano e hispánico, Gredos, Madrid, 6 vol., 1980-1991) and José Ignacio Pérez Pascual. The letters cover from 1939, the year in which the linguist went into exile, to 1955. Pidal was his teacher in Madrid and always enthusiastically supported his project. Although his immense philological work was known to non-specialists at a late stage, Corominas's contribution to lexicography and to the etymology of Catalan and Spanish is extraordinarily valuable, and he was thus recognized at the end of his life through the highest academic distinctions.. He had a deep knowledge of Catalan, Spanish and Occitan, as well as Indo-European and Arabic linguistics. He also had a good knowledge of Basque, for which he was named an honorary academic of the Royal Academy of the Basque Language in 1994.