(1927-2002)

The philological education of Juan Miguel Lope Blanch, who arrived in Mexico at an early age, was influenced by his two great teachers at the Universidad Central de Madrid: Dámaso Alonso and Rafael Lapesa. There he earned his bachelor’s degree in Romance philology with high honors (1949) and began his doctoral studies in the same field (1949-50). Some years later, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México would award him a doctorate in Spanish letters (1964).

Although he offered classes at the UNAM Summer School (now the Teaching Center for Foreigners), the Universidad Iberoamericana, and the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia, his teaching was mainly at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the UNAM. There he was the driving force behind the creation of a specialization in linguistics, to which his courses introduced new dimensions. Lope Blanch contributed greatly to the teaching of advanced Spanish, Romance philology, Spanish philology, the Mexican Dialectology Seminar, Latin American Spanish, the history of Spanish linguistics, and the Linguistic Research Seminar. Over time his teaching helped to train a strong body of professors in linguistics, a specialization lacking in the undergraduate program in Spanish language and literatures. And we owe to him the creation of the master’s and doctoral programs in Spanish linguistics.

Aware of the potential for an academic journal that would bring together linguistics and literature, the two areas of the undergraduate program, in 1961 Lope Blanch created the Anuario de Letras. During its 40 years under his direction, the Anuario featured the voices of the most important Hispanists of the second half of the twentieth century.

Soon after his arrival in Mexico, in 1953, Lope Blanch published “Observations on the Syntax of the Spanish Spoken in Mexico,” the first of his many studies of Mexican Spanish. Convinced of the need to study the linguistic reality of Mexico, which at that time was little and badly understood, in 1967 he founded the Center for Spanish Linguistics. Although it was created to carry out studies of Mexican Spanish, it also became the site of two major international projects that are still active: the “Coordinated Study of Educated Linguistic Norms of the Major Cities of Iberoamerica and the Iberian Peninsula,” and the “Diachronic Study of Latin American Spanish,” which have involved prominent researchers from the most distinguished philological institutions in the Hispanist world. The first of these projects, now called the “Juan M. Lope Blanch Project in Educated Spanish Norms,” reveals its creator’s brilliant vision and his love for the Spanish language: it was his effort that brought together the study of linguistic modalities from both sides of the Atlantic. Some years later, he began a description of the popular Spanish of Mexico City, and, not satisfied merely with these accomplishments, in 1988 he started a project on the Spanish spoken in the southwestern United States, with the collaboration of various important universities in that region.

In 1959, Lope Blanch joined the Center for Linguistic and Literary Studies at El Colegio de México, where he taught courses in the doctoral program in linguistics and guided his students along the paths of urban and rural dialectology. His seminar carried out a foundational study of the vitality of the indigenous lexicon in Mexican Spanish that responded emphatically to complaints about its excessive influence. But his most important work at El Colegio de México was the Linguistic Atlas of Mexico, a monumental work of Mexican dialectology and, I daresay, of Spanish dialectology, published jointly with the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Lope Blanch was Professor Emeritus of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, winner of the Mexican government’s National Prize for Arts and Sciences in the field of linguistics and literature, Researcher Emeritus of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores of the National Council on Science and Technology, winner of UNAM’s National University Humanities Prize, President of the Latin American Linguistics and Philology Association, Honorary Vice President of the UNESCO International Federation of Modern Languages and Literatures, Honorary Vice President of the Conseiller de la Societé de Linguistique Romane, and Corresponding Member of the Academia Argentina de Letras, the Academia Chilena de la Lengua, and the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española.

A teacher par excellence, a creator of spaces devoted to research, the author of internationally recognized major projects: Juan M. Lope Blanch was all of these things, but not just these. There is also his individual work, which reflects his philological conception of the study of language, of which he was a tireless defender. It would be impossible to describe all of the more than 400 texts that make up his work, but allow me to mention a few landmark studies, obligatory citations in the scholarship of our language: 1) The note he prepared for Gili Gaya’s Curso, where some of his observations (the differentiation, for example, between an indirect complement clause and a final clause) were included by the Real Academia Española in its Esbozo de una nueva gramática de la lengua española (1973); 2) his apt observations about Mexican Spanish included in the most recent edition of Rafael Lapesa’s Historia de la lengua española; 3) his contributions concerning the true influence of the indigenous lexicon to Mexican Spanish; 4) his indispensable studies of the Spanish of Yucatán; 5) his observations on the Mexican reduced verb paradigm; 6) his clear explanation of the uses of the simple and compound preterit in Mexican Spanish; 7) his dedication to various aspects of the history of Mexican Spanish; 8) his analysis of the use of tense in Berceo, a reference point in the study of that author; 9) his foundational study of Elio Antonio de Nebrija; 10) his research on the classical linguistics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; 11) his comparative studies of varieties of speech in Spanish, which address issues of grammar and discourse analysis; 12) his forays into the theoretical intricacies of the definition of the grammatical clause; 13) his proposals for the classification of those clauses; 14) his philological approaches to the works of the most distinguished representatives of our literature; 15) the care with which he founded and directed the Anuario de Letras for 40 years; and, finally, 16) the Atlas Lingüístico de México.

Juan M. Lope Blanch died unexpectedly on May 8, 2002, leaving an immense human and academic void, but leaving us—those of us who were privileged to be his students and to work with him, and all of those who have approached his great philological works—an example of generosity, of scholarly integrity, and of the love of our Spanish language.

ELIZABETH LUNA TRAILL

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México