The History of Spanish
Introduction
In this essay, I will explain the
Spanish language in brief as it is today and its development from its origins.
This information has been gathered
from various reputable sources.
As with most languages, there are
different regional dialects of Spanish, and there are different languages that
are classified as Spanish or are recognised in Spain, for example, Galician and
Catalan, both of which can be traced back to the same historic roots. At the
present time, Spain also has another language, Basque, which is unrelated to
Spanish and doesn’t have any known traceable roots, known as a language
isolate.
The variety of Spanish that I will
discuss is the official language of Spain which is Castilian.
Geography
Spain has three bordering
countries, the largest being France, followed by Portugal, then the smallest
being Andorra. It also has a border with the British Colony of Gibraltar. It
has a land mass of around 500,000 square kilometres. To its eastern edge is a
natural border, the Pyrenees mountain range separating it from France and
Andorra. To the north is the Atlantic Ocean and to the south is the
Mediterranean Sea. To the west, there isn’t a natural border separating it from
Portugal, nor at the very tip of Spain where Gibraltar sits at Spain’s closest
point to the Northern point of the African Continent, where Spain has a small
colony of its own, Ceuta. All of these factors have an influence on how the
Spanish language has developed.
Spain also has colonies around the
world, but for this essay, they will be ignored. ( worldatlas.com 2016)
Language Basics
Spanish, like all other related
Romance languages has a basic syntax that follows the Subject, Verb, Object
rule (SVO). It uses the Roman alphabet, and at this point, sounds similar to
English, which it is not. ‘The alphabet and spelling’ is similar, but with one
extra morpheme ‘ñ’ (Astruc et al., 2012), accents are also used over some
vowels to indicate stress. The phonetics for each morpheme can also differ in
comparison to English. For example, the ‘j’ in the English word ‘jam’ has the International
Phonetic Character, ’ dʒ’ whereas,
the ‘j’ in the Spanish word ‘jota’, (which is the name of the letter ‘j’), has
the International Phonetic Symbol ‘x’ (Concise Oxford Spanish Dictionary, 2009 P.xviii), which is not used in English, but
sounds like the ‘ch’ in the Scottish word ‘loch’. Besides the lexis, there are
many other differences. All articles are either masculine of feminine, for
example, ‘la naranja’, (the orange(f)) compared to ‘el naranjo’. (the orange
tree(m)) Adjectives are mainly placed after a noun, although it is not always
the rule for example, ‘el gato negro’ (the cat (m) black) literally in English
‘the black cat’. Adjectives also follow the masculine, feminine rule, as in the
previous example ‘el gato negro’ (the male black cat), compared to ‘la gata
negra’ (the female black cat). This rule also extends to inanimate objects.
Verbs are conjugated in such a way
as to express the person, the tense and the participle. The verb ‘hablar’ is
the infinitive form of ‘to speak’. Using the present tense as an example, the
verb conjugates as follows.
Yo hablo-I speak
Tu hablas- you (informal) speak
Usted habla-You (formal) speak
El/Ella habla-He/She speaks (Astruc
et al., 2012)
This is a regular verb where only
the ‘ar’ part of ‘hablar’ changes to express the person, in doing so the
personal pronouns can be dropped, they are normally only added for emphasis.
The Spanish language also uses intonation to invert verbs, using the Spanish
verb ‘ser’ (to be) (Astruc et al., 2012), eres manolo, can mean either you are
Manolo! Or, are you manolo?, depending on the pitch and its position.
These examples are only a very
brief introduction in both contrast and comparison to the English language.
Where did it all begin?
Many text books on language
history, especially the Romance languages, start their historic journeys from
the period of classical Latin. But what came before classical Latin? Sir
William Jones (1746-94) was a philologist and scholar of ancient India, he was
also a speaker of numerous languages. Whilst working in Bengal, India as a
Puisne Judge, he mastered the Sanskrit language. His aim was to translate Hindu
laws into English, during this process, he realised a link to other ancient
languages, Latin and Greek, this link could not have been coincidental. ‘To
Linguists, he is known for having developed the concept of comparative linguistics’
(Cannon G. 1971, P418) and a link between European and Indian languages. This
link was later to be known as the Proto Indo-European language. (PIE)
As a
result, a great deal of effort has been committed to re-creating the language
both written and orally. One such scholar is Dr Andrew Byrd. ‘Dr Byrd has
managed to re-create an approximate version based on knowledge of ancient texts
in Indo-European languages, such as Latin, Greek and Sanskrit.’ (Pleasance,
2013)
As PIE spread from it disputed
place of origin, changes took place as it came into contact with other
civilisations, the differences in direction led to the differences in those
changes.
Latin
On its spread to the South West of
Europe, PIE developed into what we call Italic and as chronological changes
took place it then went on to become Latin, the language of the Roman Empire.
‘Latin came to be used in Spain as
a result of the gradual incorporation of the Roman Empire’ ‘Romanisation began
in 218BC.’ (penny R. 1993) When talking about Romanisation, I am not talking
about the Classical Latin written by scholars and the educated in Law, Science
and Religion. The Latin that I am discussing is the vernacular language, as
spoken by the Roman soldiers that presided in Spain. ‘To take a simple and well
known lexical example, the word meaning ‘horse’ in literary Latin is EQUUS’,
the Spanish word for horse is ‘caballo’ ‘the latter descends from caballus,
which where it appears in literary Latin means ‘nag; workhorse’, but which in
non-literary language was evidently used in the generic sense ‘horse’. (Penny
R. 1993)
That non-literary variety is the
Latin or Vulgar-Latin that would most probably have been used by the Roman
soldiers. Those Roman soldiers would also have had their own regional and
social dialects as they were recruited from different areas of the Roman
Empire. At the same time as the Romans were occupying the Peninsula, the
natives would have become bilingual incorporating their own Celtic and Iberian
languages into the Latin of Governance and Trade.
Data of the native languages is
scarce, but inevitable that mixing would occur until, ‘The Visigoths had forced
an entry into the Roman Empire in the late fourth century’, ‘the Visigoths were
partly Romanised before their entry into the Peninsula,’ (Penny R. 1993)
speaking Germanic bilingually.
Arabic
711AD brought the Islamic invasion
from North Africa, which lasted until the mid fifteenth century. This had an
enormous impact, ‘creating the conditions for substantial lexical and semantic
borrowing from Arabic.’ (Penny R. 1993) The Arab invaders didn’t control the
whole of the Peninsula during their stay, that and the resistance from those
uncontrolled areas would be their downfall. One of those uncontrolled areas was
that of the Kingdom of Castile, whose conquest was to re-conquer the Peninsula
and they did so moving southwards, the last part of the Peninsula to be
conquered was Andalucía. Spain was eventually recaptured by the Catholic
Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella.
Standardisation
‘The creation of standard Spanish
is arguably the result of the work of one man, Alfonso X the learned, King of
Castile and Leon (1252-84).’ (Penny R. 1993) Alfonso began writing in a way of
spelling that represented the vernacular pronunciation at that time. ‘A further
important aspect of Alfonso’s activities was the consistent use of Castilian as
the language of administration,’ (Penny R. 1993: P16) prior to that, writings
can be found that represent regional dialects.
Summary
In the course of this essay, I have
only touched on how the Castilian Spanish language has arrived at the stage
that it is today. And it is constantly changing. New technology gives the need
for new words, words are borrowed through intercultural encounters, (both through
technology and face to face) Words are dismissed as they become obsolete and
accents change as people move more freely.
Alfonso X had a great part to play
in the Standardisation of Spanish, as did his ancestors and the Roman Empire
who gave him the lexis to be able to write his standard Spanish.
Also noteworthy is the Islamic
Moors and the Visigoths, whose language in some form would have assimilated
into the Spanish that we hear today.
The Standard Spanish of King
Alfonso X is not the same as the modern day Spanish, 750 year of change have
taken place with the language evolving to the needs of society and culture.
‘The reason that ‘Spanish’ is
differentiated from other Romance languages like ‘French’ is that over time,
‘they have become mutually unintelligible.’ ‘Another reason for the distinctive
labels such as ‘Spanish’, ‘French’ etc., is that the rise of the nation-state
in Europe, has demanded a separate linguistic identity for each state, as an
expression of its cultural and political identity.’ (Penny R. 1993)
1,573 Words
References
World Atlas . com (2016). Spain Land Statistics. Retrieved from http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/europe/spain/eslandst.htm
Astruc L., Comas-Quinn A., Furnborough C., Rosell-Aguilar
F., de los Arcos B., Arias-McLaughlin X. (2012). Portales Beginners Spanish Book 1. Glasgow: Bell & Bain Ltd.
Concise Oxford Spanish Dictionary. (2009). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Cannon G. (1971). Sir William Jones’s Indian Studies. Journal of the American Oriental Society,
91(3), 418-425. DOI: 10.2307/600260
No comments:
Post a Comment