Beginning in the 3rd century, before the coming era, the Romans conquered the Iberian Peninsula. This period gave rise to several regional languages in what is now Spain, including Castilian, Catalan and Galician.
One of them would become Spanish—but not for another 1,500 years. Those years tell the origin story of what has become a global modern language. During the Roman occupation, colloquial Latin, often called "vulgar Latin", mixed with local languages.
About 75% of modern Spanish comes from Latin, including syntactic principles.
For example, verbs are conjugated in the same way as in Latin. And like other Romance languages, nouns have gender: el sol, the sun, is masculine, while la luna, the moon, is feminine.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, a series of other powers conquered the region. First came the Visigoths beginning in the 5th century AD.
They spoke an East Germanic language that would eventually become part of German and contributed some words to the language that would become Spanish.
Then the Umayyad Caliphate expelled the Visigoths. They spoke Arabic, which left a strong mark on modern Spanish: more than a thousand words come from Arabic.
They often start with an "a" or "z" sound, and sometimes include an "h".
In 1492, the Catholic Church consolidated its power with two monarchs, Isabella and Ferdinand, expelled Muslims and Jews, united the separate territorial states into one nation, and adopted one of the local languages as the official language.
That language was from the Castellano, or Castilian,
kingdom of the kingdom, which was located centrally in Spain and was home to Madrid. It then became Castellano Español, or Spanish. But the Spanish of 1492 was the old Spanish, very different from the Spanish of today.
That same year, Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, beginning the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Native Americans speak an estimated 2,000 different languages.
Over the next few decades, most of them were forced to adopt Spanish at the expense of their own languages. Still, words from indigenous languages became part of the Spanish language.
From Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec empire,
came the "ch" and "y" words such as "chapulin" and "coyote." Words like "cancha", "chullo" and "poncho" come from Quechua, a language spoken in the Peruvian Andes.
Some of these words describe things that did not exist in the Spanish dictionary before, while others replaced existing Spanish words even in Spain.
By the time Miguel de Cervantes published the first part of "Don Quixote" in 1605, the language was more akin to modern Spanish than the plays of his contemporary William Shakespeare were to modern English.
In the 18th century, French language and culture were highly fashionable in Spain and later in Spanish America. While the two languages already had commonalities from their common roots in Latin, Spanish acquired new words from French during this period.
In the 19th century, throughout Central and South America,
people revolted to gain independence from Spain. People in the newly independent nations continued to speak the language of their former oppressors. Today, Hispanics make up about 415 million residents of the United States.
Spanish is the official language of 21 countries and Puerto Rico. By 2021, only English, Mandarin and Hindi have more speakers.
How did a language so widely spoken around the world not split into new languages the way Vulgar Latin did? There is no easy answer to this question.
Other languages that spread through colonialism,
such as French, combined with indigenous languages to form entirely new languages.
Some would argue that Spanish, a mixture of Spanish and English, is a separate language or is on the way to becoming one.
But although a person in Buenos Aires may occasionally use words that are not entirely understandable to someone in Bogota or Mexico City, Spanish maintains enough uniformity of syntax, grammar, and vocabulary to remain a single language. keeps
Comments
Post a Comment