Tomás Navarro Tomás was a Spanish philologist, librarian and linguist, His work inthe field of Spanish Philology is one of the key contributions to the Spanish Scientific modernization movement of the twentieth century that took place in the Center of Historical Studies. He is considered one of Professor Ramón Menéndez Pidal’s dearest students. He was also an academic with the Royal Academy of Spanish and Director of the National Library before he fled to the United States in 1939 where he founded the North American Academy of the Spanish Language
Life
He received his Doctorate degree in Madrid as disciple of Ramón Menéndez Pidal and Miguel Asin Palacios. He then joined the Faculty of Librarians and Curators. and was introduced to the field of Linguistic research as an editor of classic texts such as Las Moradas by Teresa de Jesus and the poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega. These were first published in the collection “La Lectura” and then in “Clasicos Castellanos” by the publisher Espasa-Calpe. Between 1912 and 1913 he was the recipient of a scholarship by the Assembly for advanced studies, to study phonetics and dialectology in French, German and Swiss Universities. Upon his return, he became a collaborator in the Spanish Philology magazine and was appointed as Director of the phonetics laboratory in the CEH associated to the JAE. He is credited for introducing research methodology to the field of Linguistics in Spain, particularly the Scientific method and its application in teaching the Spanish language. This is clearly imprinted in his “Manual de Pronunciacion Espanola” published in 1918. As Director of the experimental phonetics laboratory in the CEH he mentored many students. Two of these students, who later married, were the dialectologists Maria Josefa Canellada and Alonso Zamora Vicente. It was in this role that he sponsored and supported the research work to generate the Linguistic Atlas of the Iberic Peninsula or ALPI by its initials in Spanish. Aurelio Espinosa, Lorenzo Rodriguez-Castellano, Manuel Sanchis Guarner,Francesc de Borja Mo, Anibal Otero were some of the researchers that comprised the team in addition to their Portuguese colleagues Rodrigo de Sá Nogueira, Armando Nobre de Gusmão y Luís Lindley Cintra.
