SOME NOTES ON THE GRAPHICAL USES OF WRITTEN SPANISH IN BOLIVIA IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY

Abstract

It is well known that the study of the graphical uses of nineteenth-century Spanish is a field that has been neglected by researchers, which results in the persistence among these scholars of the idea that, at the time, there was a degree of orthographic chaos, which would only be resolved through the work of the Royal Academy. Based on an analysis of a series of letters written in the first few years of the century, this study aims to describe the graphical uses appearing in them and, at the same time, demonstrates that the alleged chaos in the orthography of the time is a misconception, and that what exists is more a situation of standardisation in progress, with all what this implies from a graphical perspective.