Aina Moll i Marquès (Ciutadella, 1930 – Palma, 2019)
Aina Moll i Marquès was born in Ciutadella (Menorca) on the 14th of August in 1930. After three months, she moved with her family to Palma (Majorca) where her father, Francesc de Borja Moll, worked with the priest Antoni M. Alcover in the preparation of the Diccionari català-valencià-balear. She was the first of eight siblings, and had an austere and happy childhood, surrounded by books. In 1948, she won the Extraordinary Baccalaureate Prize and she enrolled at the University of Barcelona, where in 1953 she completed her degree in Philosophy and Letters, in the specialty of Romance Philology, also with the Extraordinary Prize. She intensively collaborated with the publishing house Moll, mainly preparing the last two volumes of the Diccionari. She was a visiting student at the Universities of the Sorbonne of Paris, Strasbourg, Frankfurt and Zurich, and got in touch with the best specialists of that time, such as Jean Boutière (1899-1967), Pierre Fouché (1931-1967), Arnald Steiger (1896-1963), Georges Straka (1910-1993), among many others. She also travelled to Besançon and other French and German cities in order to conduct her linguistic research. As a member of the Societé de Lingüistique Romane, she attended numerous international conferences. At the same time, she was travelling to Ibiza to collect dialectological material for her doctoral thesis on the dialect of Ibiza under the supervision of Dr. Badia. However, when she passed the open examination to become a teacher of French, she joined the Institut Joan Alcover in Palma (where she was temporarily teaching) and prioritized her teaching, leaving research aside. Some of the data that she collected for her thesis were published in the paper “Sufijos nominales y adjetivales en ibicenco” in 1957 at the Revista de Filología Española. There she analyzed the suffixes of the dialect of Ibiza taking as a starting point a classification based on their vitality. According to this classification, and following Professor Arnald Steiger, from whom she had taken a course in French morphology, Moll distinguished between dead suffixes, paralyzed suffixes and living suffixes. After presenting a list of the suffixes that she includes in each category, the article concludes by highlighting the various suffixation strategies used in this language variety.
She served in the organization of many academic and educational events. One of these events was the Catalan summer courses (language, literature and culture) at La Porciúncula, held from 1978 onwards. Teachers and students from all Catalan universities but also from abroad attended those courses. Some of the university professors, intellectuals and writers who collaborated in the Catalan summer courses were Antoni M. Badia, Joan Solà, Francesc de Borja Moll, Max Cahner, Josep M. Llompart and Maria Aurèlia Capmany, among many others. Another event that took place in 1980 in Majorca organized by Aina Moll and her father was the International Congress of Romance Linguistics and Philology. It was a congress of important dimensions, with over 800 attendees, including presenters, companions and the organizing committee. Aina Moll’s work as the secretary of the congress was diverse: from finding accommodation and advising on transport options to people from 30 different countries to editing the conference proceedings, a project that, unfortunately, was not accomplished.
She was a tireless cultural activist and participated in many events and campaigns for the normalization of the Catalan language. From 1980 to 1988, she was the General Director of Language Policy of the Generalitat de Catalunya. From 1989 to 1995, she was the General Coordinator of the Interinstitutional Campaign for the Language Normalization of the Balearic Islands. Doctor Honoris Causa of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Aina Moll died in Palma in 2019.
In order to promote research in the field of Catalan linguistics, the Aina Moll Award, granted by the General Directorate for Language Policy of the Government of the Balearic Islands, will be given to the best student paper in honor of the renowened philologist and linguist.