Monthly Archives: December 2007
‘I love chocolate’ …I know that, but do you know about the origin of the word chocolate?
In my professional teaching experience it’s very common to find out that many students are often unaware about lots of the aspects relating to the nature of the Spanish language vocabulary when they start their learning process.
For example, they often find it surprising that a Spanish word like chocolate or tomate comes from Pre-Columbian languages. Most of them tend to assume that terms like these are naturally derived from English words; so when I explain to them that these structures come from Native American languages they take it as a very new fact to them.
All the native tongues from the American continent – either dead or still in current use – have made an outstanding contribution to the enrichment of the Spanish language. There is a vast amount of words which have already been officially included into Spanish dictionaries; however, there still are an even larger amount of them which are still waiting to be incorporated into such dictionaries.
These language structures are commonly referred to as Americanisms. All these terms come mainly from Amerind (or Pre-Columbian) languages, which have found a path into spoken and written varieties of Spanish and are generally used by native Spanish speakers in their daily language. Because of this factor, they must be included into dictionaries as a matter of fact.
What it really matters from the linguistic perspective it’s that the terms to which we are making reference here, are vernacular items belonging to the lexicon of a regional or national group of native Spanish speakers; thus there is no need to apply other considerations in order for them to be included into any particular type of dictionary which may be released by a publishing house or for the words to be admitted by a Spanish language academy.
The main purpose of any language dictionary is to provide a complete list of all the words which are actually used by any sizeable amount of its speakers.
Spanish to be reintroduced as school subject in the Philippines
The website elcastellano.org/noticia informs that Spanish is to make a return to the Philippines’ school system. It says that the announcement was made by President Gloria Arroyo in a visit to Spain at the beginning of this month.
The news item gives a historical detail of the main aspects related to the Philippine’s connection with Spanish language and culture.
It says that the decision to reintroduce Spanish to the education system of the Philippines will contribute to bring back this country to the historical roots it shares with the rest of Spanish speaking countries of the world, in particular those from Latin America.
Since the time it was discovered and colonized by Spain in 1521, Spanish became for 350 years the official language of this nation. The Philippines was part of the last colonies of Spain which it lost in 1898 in the Spanish-American war. After independence in 1946, Spanish was reinstated in the school curriculum but it was withdrawn from it during the Marcos’ era and has since then lost its place in the educational system of the Philippines.
Despite the fact of being a Spanish possession for such a long time, the Castilian tongue didn’t become the main communication vehicle for the majority of the the Philippinians, who remained using their vernacular languages, which were nonetheless permeated by Spanish especially in the lexical area.
The historical details for the Spanish language not to have taken a firm hold in the Philippines are too complex to be examined in a short post like this.
It’s worthy to note that this news item also mentions that eighty percent of the Philippines’ historical documents are written in Spanish. This is a fact that I didn’t know until now.
Spanish is a language closely connected to the history and culture of the Philippines. The teaching of this language at all levels of the educational system in that country will make a great contribution for its people – among other things – to know, to study and research in their original source more than three and half centuries of its past which is written in Spanish.
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Two Pre-Roman phonological features adopted permanently by Spanish
The trilled (very marked and rolled) sound of the combination rr as found in perro, barro or tierra and in letter r as in dormir or tener, is one of the most difficult – if not the most difficult – sound encountered by most people learning Spanish as a second language.
Well, I must tell my students from now on not to blame the ancient Romans for their predicament, as this particular sound was brought into the developing Castilian tongue by Basque language speakers in medieval times.
I always thought of the trilled r as a feature of the Latin language that was inherited by Spanish. But just last night in ‘La Página del Idioma Español ‘ at elcastellano.org, I read an article by Sergio Zamora in which he names this sound and the dropping of the phoneme represented by f in ancient Latin words but since then substituted by a silent h, in words like harina, hierro and humo, as two features of the Basque language adopted by Spanish very early in its gestation process.
Zamora points out that the suffixes rro, [rra, rre, etc] and the absence of the phoneme for f, were two clear traits of Basque before they were transferred as phonological features of Castilian Spanish.
Basque is an ancient Non-Roman language that has left its imprint in these two phonological properties still present in all modern Spanish varieties. These two language aspects made a significant contribution towards distinguishing Castilian Spanish from all the other languages derived from Latin such as Galician, Portuguese and Catalan that were developing simultaneously in the Iberian Peninsula.
Corpus of Spanish offering 100 million + words
I’ve just opened an email from elcastellano.org reporting of an interview with Dr Mark Davies from Brigham Young University in which he talks about the benefits that his work on a corpus of the Spanish language, can provide to people interested in the aspects of written and spoken Spanish.
The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics by P. H. Matthews defines the term corpus in the first sentence to this entry as
Any systematic collection of speech or writing in a language or variety of a language.
Spanish possesses a vast oral and written corpus which can, with the help of the new IT technologies and the arduous work of academics like Dr Davies, be now available to the general public and Spanish language researchers.
This excellent corpus del español (http://www.corpusdelespanol.org/) is an invaluable tool to research aspects connected to the evolution of the Spanish language as the documents entered in its database comprise a very large amount of historical material going as far back as the 1200′s.
Any word, phrase, or combination of words in any given form can be searched for at the corpus del español website. Apart from the historical aspects connected with the language structures a person may be searching for, they can also search for terms as used by academia, the news, fictional writing and oral language.
Like for the corpus of any language, Dr Davies’ work is complex and therefore difficult to explain its mechanisms in a brief post like this. The best approach – in my opinion – is to spend some time at his website and follow the instructions given there.
I’ve only been able to have a quick look at this website. I’m pretty sure that I’ll be using it at a regular basis. I’m adding it right now to my links here.
The Corpus of Spanish by Dr Davies is a primary resource for any person wanting to know in detail aspects relating to the historical, syntactic, and semantic nature of the Spanish language.
Spanish is the fourth most important language in the world
Yesterday I bought the book Empires of the Word a Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler. I’m sure it’ll be a fascinating summer holiday reading.
Skimming the book’s index I found that the author lists in one of its last chapters the current top twenty languages of the world as spoken by native and non native users. According to his list only Mandarin Chinese, English and Hindi are above Spanish.
Ostler quotes the number of people speaking Spanish at 417 million.
Considering that Spanish is the official language in twenty one nations and that the birth demographic indexes in those nations are still growing very fast, the figure quoted above is only bound to get bigger in the foreseeable future.
Spanish with all its phonological advantages (i.e. simple sound patterns), rich and vast lexical repertoire, sophisticated verbal structures and tenses – and not to mention its Latin inherited charm – is a language with a bright future that has a lot to offer to its native and non native speakers.
The word ‘resiliencia’ came to Spanish via English
Until today I didn’t know that the word ‘resiliencia’ was used in Spanish. I have always used resilience or resilient as terms fully associated with the English language. Then today I received in my mailbox an email from ‘La Palabra del Día’ (www.elcastellano.org/palabra.html), in which as usual for this excellent service, it provides a very thorough explanation about the etymology of this word.
According to La Palabra del Día, the word resiliencia is not listed in Spanish dictionaries but it says that it’s a term widely used in physics and the social sciences. All of these aspects are new to me!
A big surprise was to find out – although I suspected it – that the word resiliencia and its English cousins (i.e. cognates) like resilience or resilient all originated from Latin. However, the biggest surprise was to know that the word in reference here came to Spanish via the English language.
It was very interesting to know that resiliencia didn’t arrive into Spanish from Latin; that it wasn’t a vernacular Spanish term as I’d expected it to be, if I followed the logic that Spanish is a language almost completely derived from Latin. The analysis of this word explains that resiliencia in its English equivalents was first used in this tongue before being transferred to Spanish, a language derived from the source that gave origin to this term!
The people behind La Palabra del Día at elcastellano.org must be congratulated for maintaining this very excellent service for the study of Spanish, which makes the understanding of the deeper meanings of words a fascinating and intellectually challenging task.
P.S:
It’s also important to note here, that this word in spite of its etymological roots – i.e. that of being so closely associated with the intrinsic nature of Spanish – and of its practical usage in contributing to the enrichment of this language, has not yet been incorporated into the dictionaries as pointed out by La Palabra del Día.
The word resiliencia is not an isolated case, there are thousands and thousands of words, especially of Americanisms (words vernacular to Hispanic America) which for very convoluted reasoning from language academies, find their particular paths of inclusion into Spanish language dictionaries, to be a very difficult and bureaucratic process. But enough of this, I’ll add more to this subject in a future post.
Below I reproduce the text found in La Palabra del Día.
Resiliencia
Esta palabra no se encuentra en los diccionarios castellanos, aunque es muy usada en la Física y en las ciencias sociales. El vocablo nos llegó desde el inglés resilience para expresar la capacidad de un material de recuperar su forma original después de haber sido sometido a altas presiones; en esa acepción, equivale a la cantidad energía que un material es capaz de almacenar cuando la presión lo obliga a reducir su volumen, y se expresa en julios por metro cúbico.
El psiquiatra infantil Michael Rutter (1970) y el neurólogo, psiquiatra y etólogo francés contemporáneo Boris Cyrulnik, inspirados en el concepto físico, introdujeron el término a la Psicología para denominar la capacidad de las personas de superar tragedias o acontecimientos fuertemente traumáticos.
Cyrulnik, cuyos padres judíos fueron asesinados por los nazis, estudió la capacidad de recuperación de los sobrevivientes de los campos de concentración y de niños criados en orfanatos. Resiliencia es una de esas palabras de origen latín que, curiosamente, nos han llegado a través del inglés, en este caso, del vocablo resilience, que a su vez se derivó del latín resilio, -ire, (saltar hacia atrás, volver de un salto) compuesta a su vez por el prefijo re- y el verbo salire (saltar).
Is it called Spanish or Castilian?
When I was a secondary school student, I used to study the subject ‘castellano’ – Castilian, in English – as part of the curriculum. At that stage it was natural for me to call ‘castellano’ the subject that studies my mother tongue, as for me ‘español’ (Spanish) and the name of the subject were the same thing.
Very often my students ask me whether there is any difference between the two terms. I usually explain that in English, Spanish is more often labeled that way, to denominate the official language of Hispanic America (Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Cuba, Argentina, etc) and the dominant official language of Spain.
As a school subject, Spanish is generally known as ‘castellano’ in Spanish speaking countries. In English it is more often labeled ‘Spanish’. In Spanish both terms are used interchangeably when speaking about the language in general terms. However, to make reference to its nature, the term ‘Castilian’ takes precedence.
In Spain, ‘Castellano’ is used instead of ‘español’ when is necessary to make very clear that the term refers to ‘Castilian’ and not to any other of the Spanish languages such as Galician or Catalan.
Spanish can also be called ‘Castilian Spanish’ to make the distinction referred to above. Castilian as the main language of Spain has come to be identified as ‘Spanish’, a fact that is quite evident by the popularity of its usage.
Most Spanish speaking countries in South America use the term ‘castellano’ when they are referring to Spanish in general.
In strict terms, the real name of Spanish is Castilian, as this language has its roots in Castile, a region of Spain. On the other hand, ‘Spanish’, as the most popular name for this language in English, can also be used as just another name for the language of Castile. The name ‘Castilian’ is always relevant in order to study features of Spanish relating to its linguistic or historical nature.
