LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

Reading Ilya U. Topper’s article in the Instituto Cervantes’s El Trujamán , “¿Quién asesinó al verbo matar?” (July 29, 2026), in which he bemoans the chaotic drift of Spanish into the passive voice, giving examples with matar , I find myself in agreement with him. I have pointed this out several times because, although the passive is part of the Spanish language, its use differs from English, and Spanish has ways of avoiding it and employing the active voice, which, according to Strunk and White, “is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive.” However, I differ with Topper on the reason why the passive voice is slowly replacing the active voice. He states: “El origen de esta evolución del idioma casi con certeza es un error en las traducciones del inglés, fomentado por los programas multilingües: aunque Google Translate es hoy bastante versátil según el contexto, la frase aislada «he was killed» sigue traduciéndose como fue asesinado”, blaming human translators and AI programs....

  Luis García Montero , a minor Spanish poet closely aligned with the ruling Socialist-Communist Party , was appointed Director of the Instituto Cervantes . Under his tenure, the institution has increasingly reflected political priorities rather than linguistic or cultural ones. Following the party’s unsuccessful attempts to influence the Real Academia Española , García Montero has lately criticized the Academy itself. Fortunately, distinguished writers such as Álvaro Pombo and Jesús García Calero have spoken out in its defense. Founded in 1713, the Academy has unified the Spanish language across 24 countries, maintaining a single grammar and orthography through the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española . The RAE continues to do more for the cohesion and expansion of Spanish than the Cervantes Institute has since García Montero’s appointment. Let's keep ideologies away from cultural institutions.