Carreter, Spain’s man of letters, dies

4 March 2004

MADRID – Linguist, journalist and  literary critic Fernando Lazaro Carreter died Thursday. He was 80.

Carreter, who was a former director of Spain’s Royal Academy of Language, the body which decides what is in the Spanish language.

He died in hospital in Madrid with relatives near him.

Lazaro Carreter was born April 13, 1923, in Zaragoza, some 300 kilometres (186 miles) north of this capital.

He died at 1:30 a.m. (0030 GMT) from “a series of ailments for which he had been hospitalized for several days,” relatives said.

A prominent expert on 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century literature, Lazaro Carreter held a doctorate in Romance Languages and Literature and became the University of Salamanca’s first head of linguistics in 1949.

He held this position until 1972, when he was selected to fill the Spanish Department’s chair at Madrid’s Autonomous University and to be a Royal Academy member.

In 1978, he took over the Spanish Language Department chair at Madrid’s Complutense University, a position he held until April 1988, when he retired at 65.

On several occasions, he served on judges’ panels for such literary contests as the Prince of Asturias Literature Prize and the Cervantes Prize.

He was a visiting professor at the Universities of Heidelberg, Toulouse and Texas (Austin) and had given lectures at universities in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the United States, Venezuela and Japan.

He was also an associate professor at the Sorbonne University Paris III.

Lazaro Carreter was a language consultant for EFE News Agency and co-authored its style manual.

[Copyright EFE with Expatica]

                                        Subject: Spanish news