DUKE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from Duke University Libraries https://archive.org/details/languagehistoryo01tren '■''.r-wfl »■ I i >; , V ■ »! i. r 1 - ’ ' .: i \ u- ♦ t’- \ 4 '' < - *n-' h;* t (i ;i ■ ? I ■ .r THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN HUTCHINSON’S UNIVERSITY LIBRARY MODERN LANGUAGES EDITOR : PROFESSOR N B. JOPSON, m.a. Professor of Comparative Philology in the University of Cambridge THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN by J. B. TREND LITT.D. PROFESSOR OF SPANISH IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE HUTCHINSON’S UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Hutchinson House, London, W.i. New York Toronto Melbourne Sydney Cape Town First Published - 1953 Printed in Great Britain by William Brendon and Son, Ltd. The Mayflower Press (late of Plymouth) at Bushey Mill Lane Watford, Herts. 4 - 1 ^ 0 - 4 7 " 7 ‘? 4 -/ * / i / TO ALBERTO JIMENEZ AND NATALIA COSSIO DE JIMENEZ IN ADMIRATION CONTENTS Preface Page ix Note X PART I Chapter i The Country 1 1 II The Latin Foundations 24 III Visigoths 37 IV Mozarabes 53 V The Language of the Oldest Poetry 67 VI Primitive Castilian 81 PART II VII Medieval Spanish 99 VIII Queen Isabel and the Scholars 113 IX Valdes and the Reformers 125 '^^IT'rhe Two Voices 140 j;- XI The Language of Reason and of Unreason 153 xii^^^nish-speaking America 164 List of Spanish words mentioned 177 Index 183 vii ;l ^-A 'J \ \ PREFACE The following pages attempt to illustrate the growth of the Spanish language in the history of those peoples who, from a “little corner” of Old Castille, have now spread over four continents. Menendez Pidal’s Ongenes have been at my elbow with the recent histories of the language by Rafael Lapesa and J. Oliver Asin. The late Professor Entwistle’s work, The Spanish Language together with Portuguese, Catalan and Basque, has also been within reach, and I have consulted How Spanish Grew by Professor Robert K. Spaulding, the only other modern book on the subject in English, though I have been able to use information which was not available when these last two scholars wrote. The Arabic studies of Julian Ribera, Asin Palacios’ indispensable glossary of the eleventh-century Spanish botanist, and other recognized authorities are mentioned at the end of the chapters most concerned, with suggestions for further reading. In including the history of the language with other history I follow the example of H. F. Muller, L’epoque merovin- gienne: essai de synthese de philologie et d'histoire (New York, 1945). I owe much to Amado Alonso, an old friend from the 1920s at the Residencia de Estudiantes, who died in America while this book was in progress, and to Professor N. B. Jopson without whose encouragement it would never have been written. The pages on the language of the oldest poetry summarize work still in progress on new discoveries — discoveries which put the beginnings of poetry in Spanish nearly a hundred years earlier than had formerly been believed. Another unusual feature is the method of illustrating the development of the language from Spanish translations of the Bible, not usually employed because they call attention to the Reformers. That is the difficulty in writing about Spain; to avoid religious bias. Alfonso VI was “Sovereign of the men of the Two Religions”; but a writer of today has to observe neutrality between Christians, Jews and Moslems, and between Catholics IX X PREFACE and Reformers, for all have made important contributions to the history of the Spanish language. The later chapters are inevitably more general than the earlier, and perhaps more approachable to most readers. They are intended to make the point that the history of the Spanish language, like that of the twenty peoples who speak it, is by no means at an end. Note For the sake of clearness, classical Latin words are printed in Roman CAPITALS, late, doubtful or hypothetical Latin words in Italic CAPITALS. Arabic words are spaced, while Spanish and other modern languages are generally given in italics. Two words placed side by side (e.g. a Latin word and a Spanish word) do not necessarily imply that the two forms directly correspond; all that is meant is that they are connected. PART I CHAPTER I THE COUNTRY Spain, the larger part of the Iberian Peninsula, is a gigantic promontory, roughly pentagonal in form, in the extreme south- west of Europe. Cut off from the rest of the continent by the natural but not impassable barrier of the Pyrenees, it almost touches Africa; Point Tarifa is nearly opposite Tangier, and the Straits of Gibraltar are under nine miles wide. Off the east coast the archipelago of the Balearic Isles commands the western Mediterranean; the Atlantic ports of Andaluda open the oceanic routes to America; while the coast of the Bay of Biscay is a great Spanish window looking over the north- western countries of Europe. At the crossing of so many ways, Spain has been the goal of repeated invasions by foreign peoples ; but it has also played an important part — often a decisive part — in the history of the world. The main feature of the promontory is the great, high- lying plateau called by Spanish geographers the Central Meseta, the table-land. “From whatever coast we penetrate the Spanish peninsula”, Unamuno wrote, “the land soon begins to be broken. We enter a maze of valleys, gorges, clefts and canyons; and at last, after some climbing, reach the meseta central, crossed by bare mountain-chains which form the wide chaimels of the few big rivers. The mountain mass of the Meseta has suffered much erosion^ — has even been worn bare — by the action of natural forces through many centuries. It often ends abruptly, leaving wide plains separated by cordilleras and sierras, Spanish geographical terms which have been “borrowed” into English. In the north, the wild, rocky sierras fall rapidly to the narrow, 11 12 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN coastal band of Santander and Asturias ; but they culminate in the Picos (peaks) de Europa, three of them over 8,600 ft. above the sea. The east side of the Meseta rises to the Picos de Urbion and Moncayo (7,600 ft.) before descending in steep steps to the Mediterranean coast. The south of the Meseta is interrupted by Don Quixote’s Sierra Morena; while on the west, before it breaks down and drops into Portugal, comes the Sierra de Credos, with the Pico de Almanzor reaching 8,573 ft. South of the Sierra Morena is a depression, the bed of what was once an arm of the sea. That depression is separated from the Mediter- ranean by more sierras, the chief of which is the Sierra Nevada, the “Snowy Sierra”, with the two highest peaks in the Peninsula, both over 11,000 ft. above sea-level: the Cerro de Mulhacen (named after a Moslem ruler of Granada) and the Picacho (great peak) de la Veleta. In other parts of Spain this might have been spelt Picazo or Picasso. The Meseta, like all great land-masses, is warmed (and cooled by radiation) more quickly than the sea or the coasts. For this reason it shows an extreme degree of heat when the sun “toasts it” {la tuesta, Unamuno said), and extreme cold when the sun leaves it. There are scorching summer days, followed by cool nights “in which one inhales the fresh, earthy breeze with delight”; and freezing winter nights, despite the brilliant, cold sunshine by day. There is a saying: “Nine months of winter and three of hell”; or, in the more polite and sonorous Castilian: nueve meses de irwierno y tres de infierno. In autumn, how- ever, one can really breathe, and conditions are serene and placid. Spain is a country of few rivers. The distribution of the “fluvial network” depends directly on the configuration of the land; and this in turn is modified by the incessant erosion of the soil by such watercourses as there are. The water flows irregularly, according to the season; heavy rains in spring and autumn flood the streams, while summer’s drought dries many of them completely. The Central Meseta has a slight tilt towards the Atlantic, causing most of the rivers to run from east to west. The river occupying the old arm of the sea between the Sierra Morena and the Sierra Nevada has kept the name given it in Moslem times: THE COUNTRY 13 Guadalquivir, the Great River. The Roman called it Baetis. The Guadiana, farther north, was also renamed by the Moslems, gmng it the Arabic prefix wadi (watercourse) but preserving the original pre-Roman name. Anas, in the last two syllables. Next comes the Tagus: Tajo, with the aspirated j {jota) in modem Spain, but Tejo (with a French j) in Portuguese and the Spanish of an earlier period. The Mino (Portuguese Minho, the Roman MINIUM) divides northern Portugal from Spanish Galicia; while the northernmost river of any size flowing into the Atlantic, the Duero (Spanish) or Douro (Portuguese) has kept its Roman name of DURIUS with no great change. The only Spanish river of importance flowing into the Mediterranean is the Ebro, mnning in a south-easterly direction and occupying the bed of what was once a great lake between the Central Meseta and the Pyrenees. The Meseta, then, is the dominating feature of the geography of Spain. It is also the most powerful influence on the climate. Spain has the privilege of being, with Portugal, Greece and Italy, the country in Europe with most hours of sunshine; but, as if to counterbalance that advantage, two- thirds of the country are short of water. The minimum rainfall occurs, it is true, at two places on the Mediterranean coast: Cartagena and Almerfa; but almost as little rain falls on the Castilian Meseta and the Aragonese depression, where there is intense drought in the summer months, sometimes beginning early and always lasting late, occasionally all the year round, and only interrupted by violent thunderstorms. Only the Atlantic coasts, and a few “islands of humidity” formed in the high mountains — the Pyrenees, the Central Sierras of Castille and some of those of Andalucfa — have rain enough, or rain dis- tributed regularly enough, to compare with countries in Europe which are more fortunate in that respect. The temperature varies widely, like the rainfall, on the Central Meseta and in any district away from the moderating influence of the sea. We cannot wonder at those medieval kings of Castille who wished to annex Portugal in order to hold their Court at Lisbon. Alfonso the Sage chose Seville ; but, in summer, that is like a frying-pan, the inhabitants say, and so is the former 14 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN ]\Ioslem capital, Cordoba, though in those daj’s it had over a thousand public baths. Ferdinand and Isabel moved their court from one waterless Castilian town to another, like an army headquarters. Yet the Emperor Charles V, with nearly the whole of Europe to choose from, retired (when he abdicated) to Yuste, just off the Meseta in Extremadura; and PliiUp II, who achieved the temporary annexation of Portugal when his medieval forebears had failed, chose the Escurial in New Castille on the southern slopes of the Sierra Guadarrama, where the climate, if never too hot, can be as cold as an}Tvhere on the Central Meseta. In this climate, “extreme to both extremes”, where the passage from heat to cold is as violent as that from drought to drenching, where there is a chill wind so gentle that it will snuff out a man but not blow out a candle, man has invented the Spanish cloak, the capa, which protects him from both heat and cold and insulates him from fellow men and surroundings. He has also developed the emphatic Castilian Spanish language, separating him from the less clear, less dramatic speech of his neighbours in Catalonia, Galicia and Portugal. Spanish, or Castilian, ^ today the language of about 80 million speakers in twenty different countries, began in a small comer of Cantabria, between the moimtains of Santander and the northern edge of the Meseta. Who the Castilians were, racially, is not our concern. The two concepts, race and language, belong to distinct domains. Race is an idea which comes from science ; language is an affair of culture and history.^ It will be enough for the present to say that the Castilian people were li\Tng in the geographical and climatic conditions already indicated; emphatic contrasts of mountain and plain, cold and heat. The best-kno\vn examples of prehistoric Spanish culture already show two different types. In the Cantabrian and Pjnrenean districts are caves like the cave of Altamira, with its wonderful paintings of animals but no human figures. In the south-east and south are paintings of hunting, war and dancing; human activities with formalized human figures. The first type of painting is not unlike rock-painting in France; the second recalls prehistoric painting in North Africa, and suggests that THE COUNTRY 15 they belonged to people who came over from North Africa too. Among the later peoples who entered the Peninsula from the north, in historic times, were the Celts. They came in two “waves”, at long intervals. They were a pastoral people; good fighters. Strabo amusingly says that they ate butter and lived by stealing each other’s sheep ; but what their voices were like, or whether any characteristic intonation of their speech has sur- vived in Spanish, we do not know. The southern visitors, the people who came over from North Africa, are more interesting. History has called their descendants Iberians; anthropology and linguistics relate them to the Berbers of Alorocco. At the dawn of history they are found in Lower Andalucia and Southern Portugal, with a great city Tartessos or Tarshish, situated somewhere between Seville and Cadiz, trading with the Phoenicians of Tyre and offering hospitality to Greek exiles from the tyranny of Persia. They became highly cmHzed and sophisticated, made beautiful things, and were famous dancers ; they had a musical language, and laws that were recited in verse — or what sounded like verse to strangers who heard it. They had an alphabet, which has been put together from inscriptions and transliterated into Roman character ; but the meaning of the words is not known, nor is the accentuation: the rise and fall of Iberian voices. There is evidence, however (of a highly technical nature) that they had certain ways of pronouncing S, which have persisted in parts of Spain to this day. Iberian place-names, and even some personal names, became known to the Greeks and Romans ; and there are not a few words in modem Spanish which have been given an Iberian ancestrv', mainly because no adequate derivation can be fotmd for them in Latin, Greek or Arabic. Barro, for instance, mud or clay; vega, rich, fertile land like the Vega de Toledo or the Vega de Granada; nava, a high pass, or col, as in Las Navas de Tolosa; paramo, bleak, high moorland, like the Paramo de Sil near Astorga, where there was a sixth-centurv* battle between Visigoths and Suevi, or the Paramo de Pisba between Venezuela and Colombia, which BoHvar encountered on his great march across the Andes. The word comes into a Spanish-Roman inscription of the first century, .\.D., from Leon, in which one 16 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN Tullius offers to Diana the stags he killed on the paramo: IN PARAMO AEQUORE. In popular belief, Diana afterwards turned into a water-fairy; and xanas (pronounced “shanas”, i.e. Dianas) were still said to haunt the streams in those parts a hundred years ago. Roman writers knew of some thirty words for Iberian or Hispanic; some of them still exist in modern Spanish. Varro (first century B.c.) gives LANCEA (Spanish lanza, lance); Pliny has ARRUGIA, a subterranean channel or conduit, the modern Spanish arroyo, a ditch — a word also found in the Roman inscription from the mines of Aljustrel in Portugal. There is also CUNICULUS, a rabbit, which has become in Spanish conejo. Quintilian, one of the Roman writers who were born in Spain, adds the adjective GURDUS, stolid, the modern Spanish form being gordo, fat. (The premia gordo is the first prize in the big Christmas lottery.) Isidore of Seville (seventh century, a.d.) gives several words peculiar to the Spanish spoken in the Peninsula. His etymologies are not scientific, but depend on the association of ideas. Thus, for cama, bed, he says; CAMA EST BREVIS ET CIRCA TERRAM: GRAECI ENIM BREVE DICUNT. (Etym. XX, 11 , 2 ). {Cama is something short and near the ground; the Greeks, in fact, call it simply a khamai, on the ground.) He relates cama to another Spanish Latin word, CAMISIA, modern camisa, shirt: CAMISIAS VOCARI QUOD IN HIS DORMIMUS IN CAMIS, ID EST IN STRATIS NOSTRIS. {Id. xix, 22 , 29 ). {Camisas, called so, because in them we sleep in camis, that is, in our beds.) Isidore also gives for Spanish two other words familiar to travellers in Spain: MANTUM and MERENDARE. MANTUM is the origin of the manton de Manila, the character- istic Spanish shawl, so beautiful an object (if worn in the right way and on the right shoulders) before it was commercialized in the twentieth century. THE COUNTRY 17 IMANTUM HISPANI VOCANT QUOD MANUS TEGAT TANTUM: EST ENIM BREVE AMICTUM. (A mantle, the Spaniards call it, because it covers the hands only; it is really a short cloak.) (Id., xix, 24, 15.) Actually the word MANTELLUM, Spanish mantilla, is found in Plautus, and MANTU (ablative of MANTUS) is in the medieval word-list known as Appendix Probi. Merendar is what all travellers in Spain have done when they ate their picnic-lunch (meriendd) in the train. The word was also used (when there was plenty of food in Spain) for the fat sandwich given to children between 6 and 7 in the evening. Isidore says: MERENDA . . . ITEM MERENDARE QUASI MERIDIE EDERE. {Id. xx, 2, 12). {Merienda. . . . Also merendar, to eat about midday). The “etymology”, or rather, the association of ideas, was conveyed by the sound. Isidore has another and most acute observation on the Spanish of his time. “All peoples of the West”, he says, “break their words on their teeth. . . . The Spanish, for instance”. OMNES OCCIDENTIS GENTES VERBA IN DENTIBUS FRANGUNT ... SICUT HISPANI (Etym. ix, 1). It is tempting to refer this to the S and T pro- nounced up against the teeth, unlike the S and T in English which are farther back. A number of Celtic words also passed into Spanish, though it is difficult to say of any particular word whether it was there before the Romans, was brought to Spain by Roman legionaries (some of whom came from Britain^), or came in later with the Germanic invasions. It was probably a primitive Celtic word which gave origin to the Spanish Latin CAPANNA, modern Spanish cabana, a hut. Their huts would have been one of the most noticeable things about the Celts; and their clothes, which included the CAMISIA, the shirt which Isidore of Seville wore in bed. They also brewed and drank a strange concoction. Latinized as CEREVISIA, Spanish cerveza: beer. B 18 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN This produced in them a feeling of exhilaration, brigos or brivos, which appears in the Spanish and Italian as brio. In Celtic place-names, a similar termination, -briga, signified a fort; and came, in Roman times to be added to the name of a Roman commander, or other prominent person: e.g. Caesaro- briga (Talavera), Augustobriga (Ciudad Rodrigo), Flaviobriga (at or near Bilbao). Another primitive suffix used in this way was -urris, which was probably not Celtic but Basque. Gracchurris (Alfaro) was named after its founder, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, at the beginning of the Roman occupation. The uncouthness of these names in -urris amused the Spanish-born Roman poet Martial, whose home was at Bilbilis — a name which sounds as if it had been perverted by Roman soldiers from something else. So Volubilis in Morocco, may have been perverted to mean some- thing like “roly-poly”. Nowadays Bilbilis is known by its approximately Arabic name, Calatayud. To Martial, these “Celtiberian” names seemed vaguely humorous, like the strange Scottish names which to a scholar like Milton eventually “grew sleek”. Strabo says that the natives of Hispania formerly spoke several different languages; and Ennius gives a glimpse of a proud Spanish chief reminding a Roman commander to address him in “Hispanic” not in “Roman”: HISPANE NON ROMANE MEMORETIS LOQUI ME. The only one of the primitive languages of Spain to have survived is Basque, still spoken on both sides of the Pyrenees in Spain and France. The rest of the Peninsula accepted Latin, and eventually forgot its native tongues; but the pertinacious Basques preserved their own, while borrowing many Latin words and adapting them to Basque usage. In Basque there are words taken from Latin in early times which preserve sounds corresponding to an early Latin pronunciation. Something of the same kind has happened to the Latin words preserved in Welsh,^ but the Basque examples are perhaps more striking. In the proper name Marcalain, for instance, the C has maintained its primitive value of K; compare the Latin MARCELLUM. So too a Basque word for peace, pake, shows the original Latin pronunciation of PACEM.^ Basque is an unusually conservative language. Place-names — often including elements of Celtic — THE COUNTRY 19 have changed little since the tenth or eleventh centuries; and a Basque sentence, quoted by Rabelais in 1541 as a joke, might almost be Basque of today. It is not an Indo-European language, like Latin, Greek, or Celtic; efforts to relate it to a Hamitic or African language, like Berber, or to one of the Caucasian languages, have not been convincing. Its Iberian connexions are still hypothetical ; and though much might seem to favour this relationship, it remains true that, apart from minor details, Basque is not enough to interpret a single Iberian inscription with any degree of certainty.® Yet it is of great interest in the early history of Castilian, for two reasons: we know what changes took place in Latin words when they were borrowed by Basque, and the effects of Basque on the pronunciation of Castilian; and from facts like these important information on the early history of Castilian can be deduced. The commonest Basque word in Castilian — if its origin is not, after all, Iberian — is the Spanish word for “left”: izquierdo. The Basque form is esquerr, Catalan esquerre, Portuguese esquerdo. At first this word had to contend with siniestro, a word regularly derived from the Latin SINISTER which was itself a euphemism for the older words LAEVUS AND SCAEVUS. “SI MENS NON LAEVA FUISSET”, Aeneas said to Dido: “If only we had not been so foolish”; LAEVUS, stupid, the opposite of DEXTER, handy. But eventually la mano siniestra sounded too sinister in Spanish, and the Basque word has prevailed all over the Peninsula. Other common Spanish words of undoubted Basque descent refer to the family hearth (e.g. ascua, a red-hot coal or ember), to the soil [guijarro, pebble); pizarra (slate) ; to farming and the names of a few implements, plants and animals. There is also the typical Basque “beret”, or hoina. Words of this kind remain attached to the soil, like geo- graphical terms, place-names, or the names of plants and animals, and may (if they are found to be well established) provide evidence for the migrations of peoples in prehistoric times. Such evidence (according to von Wartburg,'^) may be deduced from two of the words used in Spain for the chamois. In the Alps, and also in the Cantabrian mountains, the animal had a name which turned into the French chamois and the 20 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN Spanish camuza. But in the Pyrenees — right in the middle of the zone of its geographical distribution — it is generally called isart, a word which has been related to the Basque izar, star, from the white, star-shaped mark on its forehead. It happens that there is a Berber word for star, ishrr. and the possibility arises that the word may have been brought by people speaking an African language, migrating northwards and pushing their way in between two groups of the original inhabitants who had another word for the mountain goat with the white star on its forehead. The case cannot be taken as proved; it would need many more instances of the same kind to do that. But the method of reason- ing is an example of how linguistic study may provide evidence for the prehistoric wanderings of peoples in Spain. One thing all the Peninsular peoples had in common. Except for those who lived at Tartessos, they were mainly country-people. The other coast-towns were tiny, by modern standards; and apart from the fishermen and some of the sailors, the merchants and traders were often likely to be foreigners from other parts of the Mediterranean. The Roman business men were mainly interested in mines, for the Phoenicians before them had discovered how rich the country was in silver and copper. It happens, however, that the inscription con- taining the greatest number of technical terms for mining was found in Portugal, not Spain; and though the present boundary between Spain and Portugal was not established until medieval times, an account of the Roman inscription from the copper mines at Aljustrel belongs rather to the history of Portuguese than of Spanish. One of the technical terms in that inscription, we found, had passed into Castilian in the form of arroyo, a ditch; another is losa, a crock. What will grow in a country depends chiefly on the climate. If Castille now is a treeless waste, the damp, northern fringes of Galicia, Asturias, Santander and the Basque Provinces produced oak, beech, birch, ash, chestnut and poplar trees which have all passed into the language with their Latin names thinly disguised, as if it were the Romans, or people familiar with Latin, who first noticed them or distinguished one tree from another: ROBUR roble, FAGUS hay a, BETULA ahedul, FRAXINUS/mno, CASTANEA castano, POPULUS THE COUNTRY 21 (through Portuguese influence) chopo.^ Natural meadows, VKKTKpraderas, covered wide stretches of the valleys and the sides of the mountains. Woods, BOSCI basques, grew up to the snow-line. This list of Latin and Spanish words by no means implies that the two forms directly correspond; it shows merely that they are connected. BETULA is not continued exactly in abedul, CASTANEA in castano, or PRATA in pradera. Again BOSCI has a general agreement with basque, but the Spanish word looks like a loan from Provengal, and is certainly not the natural direct continuation of the Latin BOSCUS. Woods and meadows were found, too, in the Pyrenees and at the higher levels in Castille, with the great pinewoods of Guadarrama and Gredos, Urbion and Cuenca. The reaction of an average Spaniard of today, driving through a wood, is not “How beautiful!” but “How profitable!” {jQue riqueza! What riches!) Yet replanting has never kept pace with cutting though some of the oldest documents in the language are warnings or penalties for the man who should cut down a tree. Ouipina taiare, infarquen-la (Whoso shall cut down a pine tree, let them hang him), was a piece of customary law in a village on the borders of Portugal, and the legislators were right; the more the trees were cut, the drier the climate became and the typical vegetation turned to heath and moor. In some parts of Castille ilex (encind) is about the only tree left ; with a carpet of those inconspicuous aromatic plants which the Romans hardly noticed but the Moslems used for medicines. A Spanish herbalist of the thirteenth century, writing in Arabic, gives the local, Romance names of the medicinal plants which he is describing as well as the learned names in Arabic — Arabic at that time being the language of scientific learning, not Latin. Many of these plants are still known in Spain by their Arabic names, or names as near the Arabic as a reasonable countryman could get: retama, Spanish broom; jara, bramble, and many others. Then there were the tough, drought-resisting grasses: atacha (doubtfully Arabic) feather-grass ; esparta (Greek), esparto-grass; together with sweet herbs like tamilla, thyme (Greek); ramera, rasemary (Latin); salvia (Latin) sage, espliega (Latin SPICULUM) lavender. 22 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN Castille is often considered a great country for cereals (in which the Roman goddess Ceres still has her name) ; but actually only a quarter (26.6%) of the land is under cereals, mainly wheat trigo (TRITICUM), and then barley, cehada, rye centeno, and oats avena, with their Latin names unchanged. These alternate, in the rotation of crops, with chick-peas, garhanzos, and green peas, guisantes, while in the third year, the fields lie fallow, barbecho, VERVACTUM. In the dry climate and poor soils, of which in Spain there are so many, the system is a two-year one: am y vez\ PER ANNU(M) ET VICE(M), a Spanish-Roman farmer might have put it, a year and a time; or else they burn the bush, sow and reap for a year or two, and then let the land revert to weeds and scrub. In the south the olive-tree, olivo, is Latin, but the fruit, aceituna, Arabic; while the orange has a name through Arabic from Persian. The fact of the name of a thing being Latin or Arabic does not prove that it was introduced by Romans or Moslems; but it shows whether the people who spoke Latin or Arabic in Spain took an interest in the object or its cultivation. A great part of Spain (over 40%) is pasture, and the proportion in Castille even larger. The spread of Castilian Spanish from its little corner near Burgos was the spread of pasture against cultivation, of migratory shepherds against sedentary cultivators. It is unsound to assume that the Castilian language owes any of its characteristics to the fact of the original speakers being war-like shepherds and cattle-men, jealous of their freedom, having to shout to one another in dust and wind. Yet the speech of these men, no less than their as- sertiveness, had an emphatic quality which the speech of other men in the Peninsula did not possess. Catalans and Portuguese may not, superficially, have much in common in their tempera- ment; but their languages have common features which the Castilian of the high inland Meseta has either lost or never possessed. In Lisbon, and to a less extent Barcelona, the man speaking Spanish seems, from his emphatic clarity, to be giving orders or declaiming something in the theatre. Yet when our acquaintance with the language improves, we find that there are very few expressive effects of speech of which Castilian Spanish is incapable. THE COUNTRY 23 ^M. de. Unamuno, En torno al casticismo (1895), reprinted in Obras completas, Vol. I, Residencia de Estudiantes, Madrid, 1916, and in Coleccion Austral, No. 403. Buenos Aires-Mexico, 1945. An excellent short account of Spanish geography is that of L. Martin Echeverria, Nuestra Patria. Barcelona, 1938. ^Amado Alonso, Castellano, Espanol, Idioma Nacional, 2 ed. Biblio- teca Contemporanea, Buenos Aires, 1949. ®W. von Wartburg, Problemas y metodos de la lingiiistica, anotado para lectores hispdnicos por Ddmaso Alonso. Madrid, 1951. It seems, however, that the enduring processes of differentiation in the use of sounds by spoken languages depend on the genetic differences between the races speaking them. Evidence has lately been provided by blood- group surveys and by the systematic study of the genes in large populations. It shows a significant relation between the history of human migrations during the last 3,000 years and an agreement with the present distribution of certain sounds in European languages and their historical development. It is now therefore possible to study the relations between race and language on rigorously genetic principles which may have consequences of importance in the history of language. See C. D. Darlington, in Heredity, I, 1947, 269-286, and III, 1949, 121-122. *M. P. H. Cbarlesworth, The lost province, or The worth of Britain, Cardiff, 1949. ®J. Caro Baroja, Materiales para una historia de la lengua vasca en su relacion con la latina. Acta Sahnanticensia: Fil. y Letr. I, 3. Salamanca, 1946. See also Los pueblos del norte de la Peninsula Iberica, Madrid, 1943. ®E. Gamillscheg, Romanen und Basken. Abh. der Geistes- und Sozial- wissenschaftlichen Klasse, Mainz, 1950; 20, 21. Menendez Pidal considers the Basques the successors of the Iberians, while Gomez Moreno states that in Roman times the modem Basque Provinces were already inhabited by a non-Iberian population; the Basques came into the present Basque country, he thinks, in advance of the Germanic invaders in the fifth century. ’W. von Wartburg, Les origines des peuples romans, Paris, 1941. ®R. de Sa Nogueira, Critica etimologica, Lisbon, 1949; 158. CHAPTER II THE LATIN FOUNDATIONS The Latin language was spread in Spain by a land-empire won by land fighting. Greek speech and Greek ways had been brought by sailors and merchants, trading in the coast towns and sometimes venturing up the rivers; so that the Romans when they landed in Hannibal’s Spain between 218 B.c. and 206 in the Second Punic War, found a civilization of small towns by the sea, created by the Iberian inhabitants under the influence of Phocaean Greeks, Phoenicians and Carthaginians, on a Greek or Near Eastern pattern. The first Romans to arrive, after the soldiers, were business men, operating on a larger scale than the Greeks or Phoenicians. There were also prospectors, mining engineers and agricul- turalists, and these were followed by civil servants. They built schools and gradually brought the town populations to accept their ways. Meanwhile the Latin language had been marching into the interior with the legions, probably leaving behind it a trail of “pidgin Latin,” like the pidgin English of the Far East. Numantia was destroyed in 133 B.c., the Cantabrians and Asturians submitted in 16 B.c., and eventually Latin became the language of government and civilization all over the country. Remote mountain villages might go on with Basque or Celtic, and the seaports still spoke Greek; but the Latin language, like Roman institutions, became practically uniform over the whole country. It was a supple form of unity; the spoken Latin showed variations depending on the part of Italy from which the colonists had come, and the territorial divisions and institutions avoided the rigid pattern afterwards so damaging to the welfare of the Spanish people. Towns and individuals learnt to be public-spirited, to combine in public works. Nothing in Spain shows better what Rome meant, or what the Roman ideal accomplished, than the eleven Lusitanian hill-towns combining 24 THE LATIN FOUNDATIONS 25 to build the great bridge over the Tagus, the Puente de Al- cantara, with an inscription recording the fact in Latin. The Latin which gave rise to Spanish and the other Romance languages was not the written language; it was the Latin of everyday speech. The Latin of the schools was invented first by Cicero, and then made “more certain” by Julius Caesar. Now Caesar is notorius among Latin writers for having the greatest proportion of verbs at the ends of the sentences — 84% in principal sentences and 93% in dependent clauses. Cicero, who wrote in a freer and more familiar style in his letters has a considerably smaller proportion of verbs at the end; and the proportion declines through Livy (63% and 79%) down to Petronius (51% and 67%) who, of all the classical prose writers, came nearest to Latin as it was actually spoken. In medieval Latin writers the proportion is even less: the pious nun, Aetheria, w’ho wrote an account of her pilgrimage to the Holy Places and was once thought to be Spanish, has 25% and 37%; and St. Augustine, 13% and 22%.^ Like modern German, Latin alw’-ays tended to put the verb at the end of a dependent clause, but that offers no particular difficulty in speaking. The position of the verb and other questions concerning the order of words, were gradually simplified as Latin spread out- wards in ripples from Rome. It should be remembered that Latin was a sonorous language for speaking, unsurpassed for weight and solemnity. VerralP pointed out the immense part which Latin assigns to mere sound. Like Spanish later, Latin had to provide w'ords of command, terms of treaties and epitaphs on dead dictators ; but it also produced resounding and beautiful verse for reading aloud, and was only read silently by a few trained experts, comparable with those nowadays who are able to read in silence a piece of music or an orchestral score. What seem, to modern readers, difficulties in the order of words — the deliberate separation (hyperbaton) of nouns and adjectives in Virgil, Cicero and Tacitus, for instance — may have seemed intelligible and natural to those who originally listened to them read by a trained voice, with all the pauses correctly given, the length of the syllables accurately measured, and that expressive rise and fall of the voice which we can 26 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN never recapture. The Romans had not (as we have now) to puzzle out Latin on a printed page, with few stops and no quantities. There is no doubt, however, that the order of the words, like the quantity of the vowels, was gradually simplified. Latin was not always the pompous, official language of public debate. The real stuff of Latin is found in the comedies of Plautus; and his characters, conventional though they are, talk with the same unceasing flood of amusing and expressive words which we find in the two Spanish archpriests — ^the fourteenth century poet and the fifteenth century prose writer — and the author of the inimitable novel in dialogue, usually known as La Celestina, who must have read the whole of Plautus, or all that was available about 1490. Both La Celestina and the Plautine comedies are an image of daily life, IMAGO VITAE GOTI- DIANAE; the vocabulary of ordinary conversation is close to satire, and Horace put satire on the same high level as comedy. Plautus was addressing the Roman public at large; he had to hold their attention by pointed expressions. Roman Latin was not an intellectual language like Greek or French,® it was the language of the Roman people, full of ready-made phrases and vigorous expressions ; and since words and expressions are blunted by use, new ones had constantly to be invented. People often preferred a long word to a short one, an expressive derivative to the original form, and many do so now. An example of this is the fondness for “frequentative” verbs: forms of verbs expressing a forceful or repetitive action, doing something vigorously and doing it several times. Take the verb “to sing”. The primitive form was CANERE; but even by the time of Plautus that was only used in special senses, and it was the frequentative CANTARE which meant to sing — the form which has descended to Spanish and other Romance languages. Terence, in one of his comedies, when he wishes to describe someone who kept on singing, has a new frequentative form, CANTITARE. In much the same way SALIRE has come down to Spanish with the meaning “to come out”; while the sense of leaping and dancing comes from the frequentative SALTARE. The same difference is seen in HABERE, to have, and HABITARE, to inhabit, THE LATIN FOUNDATIONS 27 AGERE, to do, and AGITARE, to put in motion. They suggest the modern Spanish words haber and habitar, accion and agitacion. Sometimes the original short form of a word has dropped out, even from classical Latin, and the longer and more expressive frequentative is the only form found. Though there is CAPERE, to take, it was made more emphatic in CAPTARE, and then a preposition was added in front. So there were ACCIPERE and ACCEPTARE, INCIPERE and INCEP- TARE, each of which has a parallel in Spanish in the frequenta- tive forms aceptar, incepcion] concibir, concepcion, decepci6n\ exceptar, excepci6n\ percibir, percepcion. It should be under- stood, however, that words like aceptar, concepcion, cannot be regarded as natural descendants of the Latin ACCEPTARE, CONCEPTIO. They are learned words, or at least semi- leamed; for the natural Spanish continuation of the Latin group -PT- is -T-, which we see in APTARE giving alar, to tie ; CAPTARE, catar to look. The case of SPECTARE is more complicated. The original Latin form is found only in compounds, or in sub- stantives like SPECIES or SPECULUM; but the frequenta- tive SPECTARE did not give SPECTATOR, nor is SPEC- TATOR represented in Spanish by espectador, which is a learned word. The popular development of SPECTATOR, from the oblique case SPECTATORE-, would — if there had been no educated influence on it — have given espechador. Similarly the Spanish especie is a purely learned adaptation of SPECIES; though espejo (mirror) is presumably popular and derived from SPECULUM, like teja (tile) from TEGULA, and in much the same way as vi^o (old) from the diminutive VETULUS. A peculiar and interesting example of these prepositional preflxes is CON- or COM-, which showed that the action of the verb, whatever it was, had been carried through or carried out. Like other changes which came into Latin on the way to Romance, it had a value that was expressive, and in at least one instance it kept the vulgar Latin of Spain on a different level from that of France. For eating, EDERE, Plautus, followed by Latin-speaking Spaniards, used COM-EDERE which has 28 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN survived in comer\ while in France the Latin word used was the coarse MANDUCARE which needed some centuries of use before it became the polite manger. Another popular effect which was to have a great develop- ment in Spanish is often found in Plautus too. That is the use of diminutives — ^for familiarity and affection, but also for amuse- ment or contempt. Instead of VETUS, for an old man, Plautus prefers VETULUS, the form from which (through VETLUS and VECLUS) the Spanish viejo is derived. Cicero also uses the word, affectionately, in MI VETULE, writing to an old friend, Trebatius. A diminutive of BONUS was BELLUS, which has come down to modern languages, including Spanish, with the sense of beautiful — in classical Latin PULCHER — but is some- times used by Plautus ironically: TUUS PATER BELLI- SUMUS (Mercator, 812) “Your amazing (or admirable) father”, because, at his age, he had smuggled a woman into the house. The language of gallantry naturally made extensive use of diminutives; examples may be found in the Pompeian inscriptions or in any of the comedies of Plautus. There were also Latin diminatives which had lost all sense and feeling of diminutives while still Latin: AURICULA, diminutive of AURIS, ear; vulgar Latin ORICLA, Spanish oreja; and BUCCA, Spanish boca, a word for mouth com- parable in Rome with the English slang “mug”. The word CABALLUS also has the form of a diminutive; but the sense is pejorative: the original meaning was not a good horse, but any Bort of horse. The early comic poet, Lucilius [Frag. 153) uses it of “a jolter, a loathsome, lazy nag” SUCCUSSATORIS TAETRI TARDIQUE CABALLI, and Martial, the Spaniard (Epig. 1, 41, 20): POSSES VINCERE TESTIUM CABALLUM. . . . Yet, in Spanish, caballo became the only general word for a horse, and caballero the horseman, the knight, the gentleman; though horse-lovers — and there were many in Mexico with Cortes — generally referred to their mounts by some more des- criptive or technical term concerned with colour. The classical EQUUS disappeared; but EQUA remained for a mare; a Roman inscription in Spain refers to a dealer who sold MULOS, MULAS, ASINOS, ASINAS, CABALLOS, EQUAS. Later, THE LATIN FOUNDATIONS 29 a document from San Salvador de Ona, dated 822,^ refers to “a yoke of oxen, 100 cows, mares 80, horses and mules 20”: VIGUM BOVUM, C. BAKAS, EQUAS LXXX, CABAL- LOS ET MULOS XX; while the Fuero de Madrid of 1202 has a penalty for those who kill with deliberate intent (matare per vial qiierencia) VEL BOVE AUT BAKA VEL CABALLO AUT EQUA AUT MULO VEL MULA AUT ASINO. A mare is still egua in Portuguese, and yegua in Spanish. There is no Plautus, unfortunately, for the everyday speech of a Roman town in Spain. That is a pity, for if he had lived on the Mediterranean coast of the Peninsula, he would have made as much fun of the Greeks as Plautus himself ; and for Plautus (it has been said) Latin was the language of business but Greek the language of pleasure. Juvenal disliked Greeks, and would have brought in speakers of various Semitic languages, like the “Syro-Phoenician” proprietor of an inn in the suburbs where a high official off duty might drive his own chariot and a girl in a short skirt bring him a cup of wine. There might also have been a Spanish “hostess”, a COPA, like the one in the Virgil Appendix, who would sing and dance with castanets for anyone who would come into her garden out of the dust and heat. Martial, we know, made fun of the curious words and habits of his own home, far inland on the high Spanish plateau; and Spaniards ofte n spoke Latin wit h a strong Spanish acc ehty ThatX^s true of the EmperorTJadrian, whose fatheUcame from the Roman veterans’ settlement at Italica, near Seville, and his mother from Cadiz ; so that he might have been expected to speak in a somewhat Andalucian manner. The story has often been repeated at second hand; it will be well to see what the author actually says in the Scriptores Historiae Augustae, III, 101. Hadrian was still a young man, though holding the office of quaestor. Being detailed to transact business for the Emperor Trajan and in particular to convey messages to the Senate and read them out, AGRESTIUSPRONUNTIANS RISUS EST: he pronounced in a country way and was laughed at. After- wards he had to work hard to acquire a thorough mastery and fluency in the Latin lan guage. ^ People in Romah~Spaiyp fobablv scribbled on the walls, as they did at Pompeii before the eruption of Vesuvius which 30 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN buried it in a.d. 79.® But no Spanish graffiti of that kind have ever been published, so that we are wit hout the one certain guide to how Latin was really spoken there. Yet the~SpahishiTr?CTip- tions we have, "stiff and formal fhbugh*they often are, give some information on what Latin in the Peninsula was like. The stonecutters had copy-books, no doubt; but the words they carved often look as if they belonged to the language of the carvers themselves. We find, for instance, learned words like BASELICA, ENPERIO, A LEMENIBUS ECLESIE, for BASILICA, IMPERIO, A LIMINIBUS ECCLESIAE; FELEX, FEMENA, FUET, GENETOR, for FELIX, FEMINA, FUIT, GENITOR; TETULUM and BIXIT for TITULUM and VIXIT.® These are not confined to Spain but are spread over the whole Roman world. The genders, too, were apt to be confused in inscriptions — as indeed they deliberately are, sometimes, in Petronius, when he makes his queer, bibulous characters talk of VINUS and FATUS, as if wine and fate were masculine instead of neuter. These spellings are not purely accidental; there is a principle, or tendency, at work behind them. The change in Latin from a musical pitch-accent to an emphatic stress-accent — in modern Spanish they are combined— led to an indistinct gabbling of many of the vowels. Classical Latin had had ten vowels, five short and five long, the short vowels taking half the time to pronounce. The relation, expressed in the notation of modern music, would be that of crotchet to minim ( J to ^'). During the second and third centuries A.D. the clas sical Latin vowels gradually lost the difference between short and long. They were no longer distinguished by quantity or duration, but by quality or “colour” ; they became “open” or “closed” according to whether they were pronounced with a wider or narrower space between the tongue and the palate. In this way, the short vowels became open, the long ones closed; but in Spain the accented vowels were reduced fro m ten to s even.~ The short and long A’s became one; the long E was confused with the short I (except in Sardinia) becoming closed E; the long O and short U became closed O. Oliver Asm shows the position of the accented vowels in Spain by the^Mlowifig table. ’ THE LATIN FOUNDATIONS 31 Classical Latin Vulgar 1 Latin Spanish Short Al Long A j A A fPATREM 1 ANNUM padre ano Short E Open E IE BENE bien Long El Short I J Closed E E /PLENUM 1 TIMET lleno teme Long I I I VITEM vid Short 0 Open 0 UE BONUM bueno Long 0 1 Short U J Closed 0 0 /TOTUM IBUCCAM todo boca Long U U u CUPAM Cuba This refers to vowels which bore the accent. When un- accented, 'Th'eru~wss~no~Hiifefence between^op'i^n and closed E or O; so that there were only five unaccented vowels in vulgar Latin, and the fate of these in Spanish depended on theix position in the word. Before or after the accented syllable, an unaccented vowel disappeared. Initial vowels, however, generally survived, while E and I in final syllables became in- distinguishable before consonants; the inscriptions give FECET, VIVET, QUIESCET instead of the classical ending in -IT. LEBES appears for LEVIS, in expressing the familiar hope that the earth may lie lightly on the buried body. Among the diphthongs, what happened to AE varied in different countries ; in Spain the tendency was for it to become long E. It ceased to become a dipthong in the Peninsula about the end of the first century. AU remained for a long time distinct from O ; it still is, in Roumanian, Rhaeto-Roman and Provencal. In Portuguese, it became OU and then 01. In Spanish, PAUCU- became ^oco, but the change was late; if it had taken place earher, PAUCU- and POCU- would have given, in 32 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN Spanish, pogu. There were some words which the monumental masons could never spell. One of these was MAUSOLEUM; and since no one in Spain had probably ever heard of King Mausolus, a monument on that scale was variously described as MAESOLIUM, MESOLIUS, MISOLEO, with other simplified spellings more or less in accordance with the pronunciation. A change which was important from the beginning, in Spanish, was that of T into D, P into B, C into G. We find IMUDAVIT for IMMUTAVIT, SAGRADUM for SACRA- TUM, EGLESIA for ECCLESIA, LEBRA for LEPRA. For a long time, too, the final -M had been falling away; even in classical times it was elided before a vowel, and before a consonant it was perhaps pronounced in the Portuguese manner, with a “nasal resonance”. In verbal forms and case- endings -M has disappeared everywhere in the Romance languages. In monosyllables, notably CUM, DUM, QUAM and SUM (an exception among verbal forms) the treatment of -M varies; when it survives in such isolated examples in Spanish it has always become -N. Even in inscriptions, QUEM appears as QUEN, on the way to the Spanish quien. QUAM and TAM become CCLdATand 7MW which are already modern Spanish; and today Spaniards reproduce a foreign word ending in -M by -N, as they have long done in Addn for Adam; Adam and Eve indeed have come to be pronounced as a single word: Adanieva (Adan y Eva). Again, the Catalan general Prim, the master mind of the revolution of 1868, is always pronounced by Castilians in a way which approximates (if only very roughly) to “preen”. It is clear that final -M was hardly pronounced at all before a vowel, and not much before a consonant. It also dropped away from case-endings, giving the impression that the ablative was being used instead of the accusative. Some- times the -M is omitted for no apparent reason, leading first to an “objective case” and then to a condition in which all the case-endings are the same and the meaning has to be conveyed by prepositions, as it is in Spanish today. An IN MEMORIAM inscription becoming MIMORAM suggests that the word had not been copied but dictated. With the disappearance of final M went the disappearance THE LATIN FOUNDATIONS 33 of the neuter. Inscriptions in Spain sometimes begin HIC MUNIMENTUS, instead of HOC MONUMENTUM ; MANCIPIUM becomes MANCIPIUS, though here the change of gender went with a change of meaning. MANCI- PIUM was “property”, or a permanent possession. Life, Lucretius said, was given to no one as personal property but as usufruct for all: VITAQUE MANCIPIO NULLI DATUR, OMNIBUS USU. But in the Roman Empire, and in medieval Spain, property could include slaves; and so MANCIPIUS became the equiva- lent of a slave, and — on the principle of P becoming B — mancebo, the Spanish for a youth. So, too, MANCIPIA, a female slave, became manceba who was often a mistress as well ; and later, a man who kept a mistress was described as amance- bado. Latin neuter plurals in -A sometimes became feminine i singular as they did elsewhere. FATA, the Fates, came to mean a fairy: (cf. French fee), Spanish hada. The neuter plural FOLIA became a feminine singular: Spanish hoja, French feuille. By the opposite process, a Latin feminine sometimes became a neuter plural. This produced a singular in -UM, and then in Spanish, became masculine. Such is the explana- tion of ALTARIA (heights), ALTARIUM, otero, a high-lying meadow. Reference has been made to the increasing emphasis of the stress-accent; how it accounted for the confusion between the dipthhong AE and short E, and for the vowels in unaccented positions in a word being gabbled and then dropped. With a strong stress on theDO-of DOMINUS,the second syllable was not heard; and the result was DOMNUS, which had been known as long ago as Plautus, followed by DOMNA, and eventually becoming the diieno and duena of Spanish. Don is irregular in its development, but what is left of the original Latin word is practically the stressed syllable. The increasing strength of the stress-accent accounts, too, for U and I before another vowel being pronounced like the English W or Y, and then dropping out. So, in Spain as well as at Pompeii, QUIETUS became QUETUS and then quedo; FEBRUARIUS, FEBRARO, febrero. Vulgar Latin intensified c 34 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN the loss of these unaccented vowels. OCULUM became OCLUM, and eventually olio, oio and ojo. VETULUS, we saw, passed through VETLUS, VECLUS (one of the vulgar pro- nunciations expressly forbidden by the Appendix Probi) to the Spanish viejo. AURICULA became ORICLA (also forbidden by the Appendix) and the modern Spanish oreja, now only used for the ear of an animal. MULIERE (four syllables) became MU-LIE-RE, old Spanish muller and the modern mujer\ VINEA (three syllables) became VI-NEA, vinna and so vina, thus originating the palatal sounds ll and n which are the characteristic though not exclusive property of Spanish.® The condition has already been mentioned in which all the case-endings had become the same, and the meaning was conveyed by prepositions. By the fourth and fifth centuries prepositions had practically taken the place of case-endings. Phonetic changes were partly responsible for this and also the need for emphasis; but habits of mind were departing farther and farther from phrases of a synthetic type. Another example of the tendency to analytical ways of expression is the appear- ance of the definite article. It is, perhaps, one of the more archaic features of Latin that is has no definite article, and one of the triumphs of the great Latin writers that they could dispense with it. In conversation, the place of an article may have been filled by pointing and shouting; for an article is a means of refer- ring to one definite person or thing, and not to another. Speakers of Vulgar Latin gradually grew accustomed to using demonstrative pronouns in this way; ILLE and IPSE. The sixth-century nun Aetheria, on her wanderings, tends to use IPSE rather than ILLE. In Spain, ILLE was more favoured, and gave rise to the el of modern Spanish. The feminine is la (ILLA), plural (from the accusative plural of the Latin) los and las. The indefinite article, in the Vulgar Latin of Spain, UNUS, UNA, UNUM, can be traced back to Plautus (though it is not habitual with him) and the language of gallantry: UNAM VIDI MULIEREM AUDACISSUMAM. The meaning is not “one” but “a”. The same use is found in the Vulgate: the widow, in the story of the widow’s cruse, UNA VIDUA, is not one widow but a widow. From the fourth century, UNUS was generally used as the indefinite article. THE LATIN FOUNDATIONS 35 Writers nearest to the spoken language used it more and more, and it has remained the indefinite article in Spanish. Phonetic changes, again, were partly responsible for what happened to the Latin verb, and more particularly to the classical Latin future. There had been confusion over REGAM and AUDIAM (in the third and fourth conjugations) being both present subjunctive and future. Gradually that form seemed to suggest the future rather than the subjunctive. MONEAM (the second conjugation) came, by analogy, to be used for the future, instead of MONEBO. VIDEAM and QUIESCAM followed. Even the first conjugation was in- fected; a sixth-century medical writer has PURGET for PURGABIT. There was also the confusion of B and V, referred to before. Martial had remarked that, to some people, living and drinking were the same thing: VIVERE EST BIBERE. The result was that two persons in the future of the first conjugation made “homophones” with those of the perfect, and sounded exactly alike: AMABIT — ^AMAVIT, AMABIMUS — AMAVIMUS. Another form of future already existed: one composed of the infinitive and the verb “to have”, CANTARE HABEO ; and it came into greater use, being less likely to misinterpretation and more graphic and expressive. Vossler has compared the Lucretian calm of reasonable people, and the religious delirium and impassioned lethargy of people in an age of faith, with the change in what the future meant. In Vulgar Latin, he says, the meaning of the future was forcibly diverted from the practical direction of duty, and then the flexional form proved unnecessary. “I will” and “I shall” were replaced by “I have to”, and the modern Spanish future was formed, like the French, by joining an abbreviated part of the verb “to have” to the infinitive of the main verb.^ Today the same process is taking place once more. Those who speak Spanish (especially in Buenos Aires) seem to be avoiding the future tense in any way they can. Voy a ir (I-am- going to go) for ire (I shall go) ; voy a decir (I-am-going to say) for dire\ yo se lo voy a dar (I to-him it am-going to give) for se lo dare. The fact, according to Damaso Alonso,^® seems to be that the future tense is once more beginning to seem affected, to belong to the literary language rather than to that of familiar 36 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN conversation. In Madrid one hears manana voy (tomorrow I-go), and manana tengo que ir (tomorrow I-have to go). From the first century of the Christian era, it has been remarked, ancient civilization had begun to lose vitality as our own seems to be losing it today. There came a time when invention ceased; no more new ideas were expressed, in learning or in thought; there were no new fornis of art. The spirit was everywhere conservative. Then political unrest and economic difficulties made intellectual pursuits more and more difficult; and there were only revivals, each one more unsatisfactory than the last. This is the moment when colloquial, vulgar Latin begins to move perceptibly in the direction of Spanish and other Romance languages; and though for a long time educated people did what they could to defend correctness of speech and writing, their own familiar language was becoming something much freer than before and swept them along with it. The break-up of the Roman Empire removed all restraint in speech and soon there were practically no more cultivated people left. ^P. Linde, Die Stellung des Verbs in der lateinischen Prosa. Glotta, XII, 1923, 153-178; and J. Cousin, Evolution et structure de la langue latine. Paris, 1 944. ^A. W. Verrall, in A Companion to Latin Studies, Cambridge, 1910. ^A. Meillet, Esquisse d’une histoire de la langue latine, 5th ed., Paris, 1948. q. del Alamo, Coleccion diplomdtica de San Salvador de Ona, Madrid, 1950. °E. Diehl, Pompejanische Wandinschriften, 2nd ed., Berlin, 1930. V. Vaananen, Le Latin vulgaire des inscriptions pompeiennes, Helsinki, 1937. ®A. Camoy, Le Latin d’Espagne, 2nd ed., Brussels, 1906; J. Vives, Inscripciones cristianas de la Espaita romana y visigoda. Barcelona, 1941. ''Historia de la lengua espanola, 6th ed., Madrid, 1941, p. 150. ®R. Lapesa, Historia de la lengua espanola, 2nd ed., Madrid, 1950. ®K. Vossler, Geist und Kultur der Sprache, 1925. ^“W. von Wartburg, Problemas y metodos . . . ed. Damaso Alonso, Madrid, 1951, p. 165. Passim-. J. B. Hofmann, Lateinische Umgangssprache, 3rd ed., Heidelberg, 1951 and for the historical background, J. B. Trend, The Civilization of Spain, 1943, (Home University Library). CHAPTER III VISIGOTHS On the last day of the year 406, tribes of Vandals, Alani and Suevi crossed the Rhine (which was probably frozen over) and defeated the Franks guarding the frontier for the Romans. They passed quickly through the country, looting, murdering and destroying, until they reached the Pyrenees. There they found the passes defended; and it was only after three years that treachery behind the lines led to the death of the two Roman commanders and the retirement of the troops, looting as they I went, all the way to Palencia on the Castilian Meseta. The j Germanic and Central European tribes crossed over into Spain between 28th September and 13th October, 409, spreading horror and devastation wherever they went; the Roman reactions were uncoordinated and failed to stop them. After two years an arrangement was made by which they became recog- nized allies of Rome, FOEDERATI; and the land was divided so that the newcomers received two-thirds, and those of the original inhabitants who were left alive, one third. To escape from the invasion they had crowded into the towns. Crops had been destroyed and animals slaughtered, their carcasses left to rot. Starvation appeared, with cannibalism and pestilence. Moreover the invaders brought with them a new type of venereal disease. Salvian, writing in 445, describes these conditions as “the ' government of God”; the healthy barbarians, he claimed, were honest and noble, while the Hispano-Romans were entirely to blame through their moral depravity. What an invasion by Vandals really meant has been shown from the literary sources by Pierre Courcelle,^ while the available evidence from docu- ments and inscriptions is set out and collated by Robert Grosse in Vol. IX of the Fontes Hispaniae Antiquae? It is no longer possible to take the romantic or clerical view. The most that can be said is that the surviving Hispano-Roman country-people, 37 ' 38 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN speaking vulgar Latin, were obliged to take things as they came. An exacting, Germanic master speaking a form of Pidgin Latin, might be unaccountable in behaviour; but he could be more tolerable than the corrupt, late Roman bureaucracy which he had replaced, and in any case the invasion had reduced them all to penury and the verge of starvation. The Vandals eventually crossed over to North Africa; their , only memorial is in their name and that of And alus (Vandalus) •J which the Moslems afterwards applied to most of Spain but which was later confined to the ancient province of Baetica. The Suevi were steadier than the others; they founded a kingdom in Galicia and the north of modern Portugal, which lasted nearly two hundred years until it was finally absorbed by the Visigoths; and they brought over with them a new and deeper plough than had been known either to the Iberians or the Romans — one which resembled the heavy plough of the Belgae.^ The Visigoths were the last invaders to arrive. They had had a longer history than the others. Originally from Gothland in the south of Sweden, they made their way to Eastern Europe, and their language was still heard near the mouths of the Danube as late as the sixteenth century.^ They invaded the Roman Empire and were admitted as FOEDERATI; their armies fought for Rome. They reached Gaul, and for nearly a century inhabited a province with the capital at Toulouse. In 451 when Gaul was invaded by the Huns, the Visigoths had the largest share in their defeat, and lost their leader, Theodoric, in the battle. Early in the sixth century the Franks expelled them; and they crossed over into Spain, trekking along the Roman roads with their possessions piled on carts. Some stayed in Barcelona, but others eventually settled on the Meseta, chiefly in the region of Soria, Madrid, Toledo, Segovia, Palencia and Burgos. Excavation of their tombs in that area® has thrown light on their condition: armed farmers and cattlemen, sometimes buried with their weapons. It would take a good archaeologist to see what a man looked like from a cracked skull and a broken sword, or hear a woman talking from a gold ring, a bracelet or two, and the pin with which she fastened her clothes. But they must have talked of the usual VISIGOTHS 39 things, probably in a mixture of pidgin-Latin and late Gothic. 1 The men certainly talked about law; for the curious fact ' emerges that the area in which there are most Visigothic I tombs, is that in which old Germanic customary law took i deepest root and afterwards appeared in the local charters i or fuer os. ^ This is unexpected; for the chief contribution of the ! Visigoths to western civilization — apart from the incomparable j pieces of jewellery which they must have learnt to make (or had i made for them) in Eastern Europe — lay in the Visigothic laws: Lex Romana Visigothorum and other collections culminating in the Forum Judiciim (in Spanish, Fuero Juzgo) which are dis- tinguished from the old Germanic customary laws by their greater modernity and contact with the principles of Roman law. The authors of these codes, or those who drafted them for Euric and other Visigothic kings, were probably ecclesiastics, brought up in the Roman tradition; it is unlikely that the Germanic invaders paid much attention to them. The Castilians i afterwards preferred the ancient customary law because it gave them a sense of freedom from the dictation of an external authority; and they were Castilians, apparently, who (though there is no direct evidence) inherited from the Germanic invaders their love of epic song. The Visigoths were never very numerous: 100,000 has been suggested for the number of those who actually crossed into Spain. They had a military aristocracy and a heretical Arian clergy, and these between them seem to have set standards of conduct in high places which must be among the lowest ever kno^vn in Europe. The “Visigothic Tradition” is founded on treachery, murder, lust, and a complete disregard of all the decencies of life ; yet it is out of a fabulous story of this Gothic nobility that the real glory of Spain was fashioned. To begin with they were a military caste; pride (orgullo) is one of the words they brought to Spain, which the Spaniards may have learnt from them or from the Franks. They began, no doubt, by speaking their own language; but no Gothic MSS., inscriptions or scraps of writing have ever been discovered in the Peninsula, and it seems that when they wrote, they wrote in Latin. The Hispano-Romans picked up some other Gothic words besides pride — ^words concerning war and other things which interested 40 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN the Visigoths; but the Gothic contribution to the Spanish language is unimportant, moreover it is hardly yet possible to be sure whether a Germanic word is Gothic, Suevic, or Frankish from across the Pyrenees. The chief Visigothic contribution to Spanish morphology is the suffix -engo, seen in the word gardingo, a retainer of a Visigothic count, and in a few old Spanish words like realengo, royal domain, or abadengo, the domain of an abbot. The majority of the Spanish words of Gothic origin have corresponding forms in other Romance languages: guerra war, robar rob, guardar guard, yelmo helmet, dardo dart, espuela spur, estribo stirrup, luva (old Spanish gauntlet, modern Portuguese glove), espia spy, albergue shelter, sala hall, arpa harp. They include heraldo herald, embajada embassy, tregua truce. Among the few words not concerned with war are hato flock, ganso goose (cf. modern German Cans), ganar to pasture cattle {ganado), or sometimes to till the soil, alodio “allodial” land, brotar to bud, and talar to cut down or destroy. Rueca, distaff, may also be Gothic in origin; it displaced the Latin word COLUS which was taken into Basque as goru but never appeared in Spanish. The fact that tipo visigodo, a fair Visi- gothic type, is still one of the greatest compliments that can be paid to a woman in Spain, shows that Visigothic women did not pass altogether unnoticed. Considering the importance attached to Visigothic law, it is surprising to find in Spanish so few legal terms of Gothic origin: feudo fief, lasta voucher or receipt for a load or cargo, sayon executioner. Visigothic ostentation and Visigothic hospitality are remembered in Spanish words like ataviar deck oneself out, garbo adornment, grace, agasajar -welcome effusively, espeto spit or turn-spit, ufano abundant, escanciano cup-bearer, and perhaps gana, literally, opening the mouth wide for some- thing to be put into it. The only direct influence of the Goths on the Spanish language is to be found in the names of persons; but these only came later, when Gothic times and Gothic blood {sangre de los godos) had become a legend among the moun- taineers of Asturias, and the wild Celtic inhabitants had begun to attack their neighbours, Christian as well as Moslem, on the strength of a fabulous story: the Reconquista. VISIGOTHS 41 From 415 to 507 the Visigothic court was at Toulouse; from I 507 to 711 they ruled from Toledo. Between the military occupation of Spain by Euric in 468 and the defeat of Roderick by the Moslems in 711 there were thirty-five Visigothic kings, of whom at least seventeen met with a violent death. Pope j Gregory the Great reproached the Visigoths for the “detestable custom” of assassinating every unpopular monarch. The monarchy was not hereditary but elective; a son sometimes succeeded, but the first act of a new reign was generally to 1 extinguish all possible rivals. The administration was based on i what they had seen or understood of the later Roman practice ; I but it seems to have been rough and ready, when not hopelessly ; incompetent. The Roman MUNICIPIUM was once thought I to have survived all the centuries of Visigothic and Moslem i rule, down to the independent Christian states of Castille and ' Leon. That is now known to be an illusion.'^ The DUOVIRI, AEDILES and QUAESTORES disappeared, and there was no longer a council. From the sixth century the government of a Spanish town was in the hands of one man, a COMES (count) or JUDEX (judge) — a Goth though he had a Latin title. The count was the military and civil head of the adminis- tration — a system which the Visigoths had found in sixth- century Gaul and had imitated. They were always an army of occupation, and the royal representatives were necessarily military chiefs. Round the chief was the Germanic COMITA- TUS; its members in Spain were called by the Gothic names gardingos or the Latin FIDELES. Before 500 it is rare to find any mention in Spain of a Goth capable of mental activity or skilled employment. The in- scription on the tombstone of a Gothic doctor, RECCAREDUS MEDICUS is a unique example.® About 580 it was said of one Massona that, though a noble and a Goth by birth, he was extremely quick-witted.® He was a holy man and became a bishop, and once overcame a tiresome Arian adversary (VIRUM PESTIFERUM) in a theological dispute; after that, like a real muscular Christian, he showed them how to break-in a horse. It is a pity that we do not hear of more like him; but intelligence usually led the Visigoths to crime. A Greek doctor who had settled in Merida was regarded with such rever- 42 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN ence that he was made a bishop — an honorary bishop, presum- ably — ^for his medical gifts. But Erwig, who usurped the throne of Wamba and was the son of a Greek doctor and a lady of the Gothic royal household, used his knowledge of drugs to put the aged but vigorous and unpopular king to sleep with an infusion of esparto. While under the influence of the potion he was shaved and tonsured so that he might never again occupy the throne, and was conflned for the rest of his life in a monastery. In this way his plan for compulsory military service — the only thing which might have saved the Goths from the Moslems — was indefinitely postponed ; but when Erwig, in his turn, was forced to abdicate, he took the precaution of being shaved and tonsured too, so that no one should kill him as a claimant of the crown. Writing had become a rare accomplishment, and the arrival of a book in the country in 649 — it was the Moralia of Pope Gregory the Great — ^was a more important affair of state than the arrival of a royal princess. The book was not for reading, 't was treated like a talisman — ^the Holy Grail, for instance, 't’he reason was that hardly anyone could read or write; there were no materials for doing so. Parchment was too expensive, slate too difficult to manage, and the supply of papyrus had stopped when the Moslems conquered Egypt in 639. Writing, in fact, had become almost impossible, and the spoken language had no longer any standard of uniformity to guide it.^® Further, even if there had been materials for writing and enough readers to make books known by reading them aloud, there was no one with anything to say. The mental exhaustion of the invaded Roman provinces was complete. Even Gaul which had produced such good late Latin writers as Ausonius, Rutilius Namatianus and Sidonius Apollinaris, fell silent after Gregory of Tours. In Italy there was no one much after Cassiodorus and Boethius; and Spain, which even during the earlier Germanic invasions had produced so good a poet as Prudentius and historical writers like Orosius and Hydatius, had no one after St. Martin of Braga (d. 580) who came originally from what is now Hungary and lived in the Suevic kingdom which is now Northern Portugal and Galicia. He gives attrac- tive information on local supersitions, and writes in a simple VISIGOTHS 43 but correct Latin in which there is no trace of the spoken language. Justus, Bishop of Urgell in 540, produced a com- mentary on the “Song of Songs”, discussing the meaning quite frankly though by means of allegory.^^ g_ Udefonso wrote on perpetual virginity and S. Braulio, Bishop of Saragossa, a life of St. Emilianus (S. Millan) which is the stiff and frozen source of Berceo’s sparkling, primitive Castilian poem of six hundred years later. Then, except for St. Isidore of Seville (see Chapter I) there was no one writing in the Roman Empire any more, until Latin was revived under Charlemagne by a Frank (Eginhard), an Englishman (Alcuin), a Goth (Theodulphus) and a Lombard (Paulus Diaconus). The fact of being a relatively primitive people in contact with an older civilization led the Visigoths to adopt certain Roman institutions, along with their Latin names. They lost their own language ; but for over two hundred years, until the last century of their rule, they had little contact with the “natives” and down to 655 mixed marriages were forbidden. The Goths kept apart, and often formed settlements of their own which survive in place-names like Goda, Godos, Godojos, Godones, Gudillos, Gudin, Gudino, together with Gotor, Toro and Villatoro, from the genitive plural GOTHORUM. This was not only in accordance with their own view, but went with the Hispano-Roman view as well. The Visigoths had been pagans; and then, when converted to Christianity, had adopted the Arian heresy — “an amateurish piece of theology” Newman called it,^® which to Catholic Christians was, if anything, worse than not being Christian at all. The failure of an alien race to comprehend the Greek subtleties of the Trinity might be excused ; but orthodoxy demanded the belief that the Father was not older than the Son, “being of one substance with the Father” ; and to the theologically uneducated it seemed contrary to experience that a father should not be older than his son. The Visigoths persisted in their error until the reign of Recared. The chief difference lay in the words of the Gloria, the Catholics singing Gloria Patri ac Filio ac Spiritui Sancto, but the Arians, Gloria Patri, per Filium, in Spiritu Sancto. This doctrinal difference was always a source of mistrust and an occasion for treachery. The Franks were Catholics, and the 44 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN Catholic bishops in Visigothic Spain constituted therefore a “fifth column” of Frankish sympathizers. For many years Frankish and Visigothic ruling houses intermarried for political reasons, the bride accepting the religion of her husband. This arrangement was first upset by the Catholic Frankish ladies, who not only declined to accept Arianism but even at times con- verted their Arian Visigothic husbands to Catholicism. The husbands went to all lengths to avoid this, and were, indeed, completely demoralized by their religion. Amalaric tried every trick to persuade Chlotchilde (or Crotiquilda), his beautiful Frankish wife, to abjure her faith; on more occasions than one he commanded the slops to be emptied over her as she was going to church. This brought her brother Childebert with an armed force, and Amalaric lost his life hesitating whether to go on board a ship or go back for his treasure. Childebert rescued his sister, and an immense booty of jewelled church plate, but Chlotchilde died on the journey back to Paris. The same difficulty beset Leovigild who, though an Arian, was one of the more civilized and far-sighted of the Visigothic rulers, and had first permitted mixed marriages between Goths and “Romans”. He asked in marriage for his elder son, Her- menegild, Ingunda (or Inguntis), daughter of Sigbert I of Austrasia. The bride was brought to Spain with great pomp; but she upset all her father-in-law’s plans for a united Arian Spain by refusing to accept the Arian communion herself; in fact she even converted her husband to Catholicism. The guilty pair were treated leniently at first; he was appointed to the governorship of Seville, but it soon became banishment and then a siege by the king’s men. Hermenegild sent Ingunda and his young son to the most civilized ruler of the time, the Emperor at Byzantium; but the mother died on the way, and there are letters from her Frankish relations asking the Emperor and Empress to be kind to the boy. Hermenegild was captured, exiled again and then executed for high treason of which he was certainly not innocent. He was afterwards canonized at the instance of Philip II, but the real tragedy was his father’s. The second son. Recared, had meanwhile been betrothed to Riguntis, daughter of the King of Soissons. A Visigothic VISIGOTHS 45 embassy arrived to fetch her away, and the king provided an adequate escort. But on the way to Spain, between Soissons and Toulouse, they were attacked by brigands under the Frankish Count Desiderius; the dowry was stolen and Riguntis taken prisoner. Recared, when he came to the throne in 586, had the satisfaction of capturing and killing the turbulent count; but no more was heard of poor Riguntis, and Recared married his stepmother. His importance lies in the fact that he abjured Arianism, and Visigothic Spain was united under a Catholic king. But this, though it gave greatly increased power to the Catholic bishops, brought little improvement to the state of the country. Formerly the leaders of the Church had been of Roman descent, and had preserved some sense of Roman administrative ability; now, to judge from the names of those who attended Church councils, most of the bishops were Goths, and instead of administrative ability and statesmanship, we find unworkable centralization and virulent antisemitism. The object of the foregoing pages has been to show some- thing of the savagery and confusion to which the invaders had reduced Spain. Indeed, it was the confusion they caused rather than their habits of speech which transformed the Latin spoken in the Peninsula. To the cruelties of war and invasion were added the isolation from Rome; and the loss of the old stan- dards of Roman life and Roman speech can be more readily understood when we think what that isolation really meant. Menendez Pidal has pointed out some of the consequences.^® First there was the paralysis of all means of communication and the danger of travel shown by the story of Riguntis and her capture by bandits on the way to marry King Recared. Though this actually happened north of Toulouse, it might quite well have taken place south of the Pyrenees, since there were cer- tainly Visigoths in Spain who did not recognize Recared, even after his conversion. Again, it took the king a year to report his conversion to the Pope; and it was several years before the Pope’s reply was received from Rome. What language or languages were spoken in Visigothic Spain is pure conjecture, or at most deduction; but it is im- portant to try to establish how far vulgar Latin had developed 46 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN in the direction of Romance at the time of the Moslem con- quest;^® for the Christians who submitted went on talking it, though cut off from other Christians in the north and east. Eventually the Axabic-speaking invaders learnt it too, so that Moslem Spain became bilingual. At the Visigothic court in Toledo — a fantastic, provincial Ravenna in those days, perched on the top of a bare rock with the Tagus swirling round it — the few who had any education probably spoke scholastic Latin, like the writings of St. Ildefonso or Isidore of Seville. Euric wrote it, though clumsily; but in the last century of Visigothic dominion the less instructed seem to have spoken a vulgar Latin full of Romance words and expressions, saying CINGIDUR for CINGITUR and RELIOSIS for RELIGIOSIS. Latin of this kind was still being used for wills and other legal documents in the Asturian-Leonese kingdom in the tenth and eleventh centuries; though it was developing in the direction of Spanish and Portuguese. P, T, K and F became B, D, G and V: ACCEBI DE TIVI (TIBI), UXORI MEA, DUOS BOVES . . . DE COLEGIO SANCTI JACOBI ABOSTOLI . . . EREDIDADE MEA PROBIA ... IS CINGIDUR TERMINIBUS . . . SICUT GODIGA LEX DOCET . . . CUM OMNIA SUA EDIVICIA (EDIFICIA). G was apt to drop out from Latin words, so that the official called VILLICUS REGIS appeared as VILLIGO REIS; and a horse with a silver saddle and bridle was described as KABALO CUM SELA ARIENTIA (ARGENTEA) ET FRENO ARIENTIO. As everywhere in vulgar Latin, not only in Spain, NS was reduced to S, so that PRAESENS became PRESES; an L before T turned into U: SALTIS, meadows, becoming SAUTIS; ARMENTARIUS, herdsman, developed the diphthong AI: ARMENTAIRO, which led to the Portu- guese -eiro and Spanish -ero. Some vowels changed: e.g. RIVULO to RIBOLO, FLUMINE to FLUMENE. These spellings may be carelessness, or ignorance of scholastic Latin. On the other hand they may be the deliberate choice of a language currently spoken: something between the Latin of the schools and the Romance of those who had had no schooling at all, a language which was less solemn and VISIGOTHS 47 affected than the Latin of the liturgy and the chronicles. This popularized Latin still kept a passive voice (e.g. CINGIDUR), a future participle {AVIDURA for HABITURA), and some- thing of the declensions, conjugations, prepositions, conjunc- tions and adverbs of the classical language, but transformed by popular pronunciation. These forms all occur in the Latin written later in Leon; but Menendez Pidal thinks that this may be a survival of the Latin spoken in the fifth and sixth centuries, when the Romance languages were beginning to be formed. But country-people had no Latin to remember; and they would have spoken, as their everyday language, the beginnings of a Romance patois — the speech to which vulgar Latin had been reduced after two hundred years of Visigothic misrule and neglect. What that patois was like can only be deduced from the later forms of neighbouring dialects — Galician and Leonese on the west, Aragonese on the east. With the Moslem conquest, however, we begin to get more definite information; for Arabic writers have recorded the strange and odd-sounding words used by the “Romans”. In Visigothic times people would have used the palatal LL in fillo (FILIUS) for “son” instead of the modern Castilian hijo] and the voiced DZ vsx fazer (FACERE) to do or make; feito (FACTUM) done and muito (MULTUM) much, rather as in modern Portuguese. Initial G as such (i.e. in the English get) was no longer heard in words like genairo {enero, January) ; the sound was presumably a weak dy or even a weak y. The combination MB had not yet dropped from palomha (paloma) pigeon. Other guesses at Visigothic Romance may be made from tendencies which are not as a rule found outside Spain: doubling the L at the beginning of LUNA, LINGUA, and giving it a palatal pronunciation, lluna, llengua. There may have been an expected diphthongization in the verb “to be”: tu yes, el ye. Es, e{t) must originally have been enclitic, unac- cented forms, adopted into normal Spanish and driving the ye-forms into dialectal usage. The diphthong which has now settled down as the UE in pueblo may have oscillated between pueblo and puablo. 1 48 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN Neither the Visigoths nor the Mozarabes ever wrote Romance intentionally. The remains of that language have to be looked for in Arabic, in the poems of Ibn Quzman, at the beginning of the twelfth century, and above all in the eleventh and twelfth century kharjas (Chapter V) the Romance tail- pieces of the lately discovered poems in Hebrew and Arabic. Until those were deciphered, there were no complete phrases extant in Mozarabic Spanish; only separate words quoted — often in amusement — by Arabic-Spanish authors, place-names, and the local names of plants mentioned by Arabic writers on medicine. These, however, give an idea of the special phonetic peculiarities of the Spanish people living under Moslem rule — sounds which must have developed in the time of the Visigoths. Place-names, again, preserve vestiges of what Romance in Visigothic times was like before the Moslem conquest. In the province of Granada there are villages with names ending in -eira\ Lanteira, Capileira, Pampaneira, and several others. These might be taken for names from Galicia or Portugal ; but the explanation is that this termination -eira is an earlier form of -era. Galician and Portuguese, more archaic in this respect than Castilian, have preserved it; and among the Mozarabes of Andaluda — Christians living under Moslem rule — it survived from Visigothic times, from lack of evolution in their dialect, once the Moslem conquest had engulfed them. There were other forms suggesting Galician or Portuguese: noite (NOCTE) night and leite (LACTE) milk, while Castilian now has noche and leche. Feito (FACTO, Castilian hecho) has already been mentioned. Uello, eye, is a stage in the develop- ment of OCULO, more in the direction of the Portuguese olho and the Catalan ull than the modern Castilian oyb; yet we find this primitive form still existing today in places so far apart as Asturias in the north-west and the Pyrenean parts of Aragon in the east. From these observations it has been possible to draw con- clusions of great value. The Peninsula, in the Visigothic period (Pidal teaches), presented an aspect that was practically uniform from the point of view of linguistic geography. VISIGOTHS 49 The districts 'U'hich today are Galicia and Aragon were in communication linguistically through successive transitions which passed across the centre of Spain; the remains of these transitional patois are the still-surviving dialects of Asturias, Leon and Aragon. Castilian was no more than “a poor linguistic divergence”, Americo Castro calls it, in a far corner to the north of Burgos. It stammered sounds which were strange to other speakers in Spain. The future Castilians attracted attention by saying noche instead of noite or nueite. They said eiiero and not Janeiro, janer or giner. They pronounced hazer {hacer) with an aspirated H (which they afterwards lost sooner than their neighbours) and a “voiced” Z, with a real recollection (and a felt, substantial identity) with FACERE, facer or fer. They said muyer, for woman, with a Y like the Argentines, and not muller with a palatal L, like the Galicians or Aragonese. When the reconquest began, the Castilians showed political gifts superior to those of the inhabitants of other regions. Their dialect advanced towards the south, and the united language of Central Spain was split in the middle and driven back on Leon and Aragon. The Visigothic and Mozarabic dialects faded away; “but their importance remains to mark the point at which, together with those reached by Leonese and Aragonese, enable us to establish the linguistic map of the Peninsula before Castilian had emerged”. These points will have to be considered in greater detail in later chapters. Before leaving Visigothic Spain, however, another aspect of the Visigothic age must be mentioned: the influence of Greek. There was a certain amount of Greek spoken on the south and south-east coasts, and it was encouraged by the troops and officials sent by Justinian between 554 and 625.^® Byzantine traders had reached Spanish ports and followed the courses of rivers into the interior; they had even crossed the waterless country to Merida (Emerita) which the Romans had only made habitable by the construction of three aqueducts. A curious collection of sixth-century lives of the “Fathers of Merida” shows that they included not only Romans and Goths, but also Greeks two of whom became bishops. We find Greek merchants coming to Merida to sell their silks and oriental wares, and landowners still with Roman names. To this period the D 50 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN Spanish word bodega, cellar, probably belongs, showing the result of Peninsular phonetic changes on the Greek word apotheke. The history of the time is to be found in the proceedings of the Church Councils. The Catholic bishops, with their training in the administrative tradition of Rome, had always been the real power in the country; and on the conversion of Recared, though they no longer had the training, they openly took the upper hand. But it was too late. The Visigoths had dreamed of a united Spain, subject to their own ruling class and governed centrally and despotically from Toledo. The struggle to achieve this ideal has been disastrous all through Spanish history. The Romans, with their separate provinces, and local autonomy allowing for regional differences, were far more alert to the real conditions; they were indeed the only rulers who have ever known how to govern Spain. But the Visigoths of Toledo thought otherwise, and with their dream of a centralized, uni- form state went the persecution of those who did not conform: Greeks and Jews; and it was this, more than anything else, which proved their undoing. Some of the towns on the Medi- terranean coast had been effectively Greek for centuries.^® Under Justinian they formally became part of the East Roman Empire. The Visigoths wrested these towns from Byzantium; but, by doing so, left them open to invasion from North Africa i which, by the middle of the seventh century, was already oc- | cupied by the Moslems. The persecuted Jews were looking to North Africa, too. ' The Moslems seemed more tolerant than the Christians, and i might be encouraged to cross the Straits and occupy Spain. , When the invasion took place in 711 and 712, the flamboyant i Visigothic army, with King Roderick borne in a litter, was ! first paralysed by the desertion of the partisans of the late king, , Witiza, and then destroyed by a handful of determined men with the sea at their backs. They had no horses, but they had a new religion which proclaimed that all men were equal in the sight of God, and their victory was overwhelming. Many ; Visigothic strongholds were garrisoned by Jews, who opened the gates to their deliverers, while the Hispanic-Roman inhabitants : seemed indifferent to whether their rulers were Visigoths or j VISIGOTHS 51 Moslems. The country which had cost Rome two centuries of arduous campaigning — “the long wars of fierce Numantia” which Horace and his friends found so wearisome to read — was occupied by Islam in little more than two years. The Visigothic period is hardly a definite age, either for the history of Spain or the history of Spanish. The increasing confusion merely hastened the breakdown alike of Roman in- stitutions and of the Latin language. The dividing line comes in 711, with the new Islamic institutions brought by the Moslems and the new Romance language coming out among the Hispano-Roman Christians who had submitted to them. The Moslem invasion, once considered to be the greatest disaster which ever befell the Peninsula, is now seen to be second only in importance and benefit to the occupation by the Romans. 52 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN ^P. Courcelle, Histoire litteraire des grandes invasions germaniques, Paris, 1948. “Fontes Hispaniae Antiquae. Ed. A. Schulten y L. Pericot. Ease. IX: Las fuentes de la epoca visigoda y bizantinas. Ed. y com. por Roberto Grosse. Barcelona, 1947. ®J. Dias, Os ar ados por tugueses, Coimbra, 1948. ^See The Four epistles of A. G. Busbequins concerning his embassy into Turkey. Done into English, London, 1694. ®H. Zeiss, Die Grabfunde aus dem Spanischen Westgotenreich, Berlin, 1934. See also W. Reinhart, La tradicidn Visigoda en el nacimiento de Castilla, in Estudios dedicados a Menendez Pidal, I, 534, Madrid, 1950. For the Gothic language in Spain, see especially Gamillscheg, Romania germanica, Berlin, 1934; and Historia lingiitstica de los Visigodos, in Rev. de Fil. Esp., XIX, 1932, 234 ff. ; J. M. Piel, Os names germanicos na toponimia portuguesa, Bol. de Filologia, Lisbon, II, 1933, 105. Generally: F. Lot, Les invasions germaniques : La penetration mutuelle, Paris, 1935. ®I owe this piece of information to Dr. J. M. Batista i Roca. ’C. Sanchez Albornoz. ^Fontes, IX, 106-107; J. Vives, Inscripciones cristianas de la Espaha romana y visigoda, No. 288, Barcelona, 1942. ^Fontes, IX, 176. Genere quidem Gothus, sed mente promptissima. ^®R. Menendez Pidal, La unidad del idioma, in Castilla, la tradicidn, el idioma. Buenos Aires-Mexico, 1945. *^*For St. Martin of Braga, see particularly Montague James, Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. III. ^‘‘Fontes, IX, 130. H. Newman, Arians. London, 1833, etc. Compare J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, London, 1950. ^^Fontes, IX, 124. Nam plerumque procedente ilia ad sanctam ecclesiam, stercora et diversos fetores super earn proieci imperabat. ^®R. Menendez Pidal, El idioma espahol en sus primeros tiempos. Buenos Aires-Mexico, 1900, and Americo Castro, Santa Teresa y otros ensayos, Madrid, 1929, p. 99. ^®F. Gorres, Die byzantinischen Besitzungen an den Kiisten des spanisch westgotischen Reiches (554-624). Byzant. Ztschr., XVI, 515 ff., Leipzig, 1907 ; and L'Espagne byzantine in Etudes byzantines, T. II, Paris, 1944. ^’’Vitae sanctorum patrum emeritensium. Text and translation . . . by J. N. Garvin, Washington, 1946. CHAPTER IV mozArabes It is becoming more and more apparent, as research on the subject proceeds, that the real creators and preservers of the Spanish language were not so much, or not only, the dissident Castilians in the North but the Mozdrahes: those “arabized” Hispano-Roman Christians in the south who, with no particular love for the Goths, had willingly accepted the new conquerors, lived among them and were treated on the whole with tolerance and respect. The word mozdrahe is an excellent example of what happened to an Arabic word when a Christian Spaniard tried to pronounce it. The root, or what the Arab grammarians call “the naked verb”, is ‘aruba: he spoke Arabic, or simply, he was an Arab. But the Arabic verb has many derived forms, forms “with extension in them”, expressing such different types of meaning as doing a thing repeatedly, making someone else do it, doing it yourself or for your own advantage; while the tenth form usually implies a wish. No Arabic verb has all the forms (except in a grammar); but every verb has some of them. An illuminating example, if not strictly an accurate one, might be taken from the verb k at aba, he wrote. The second form kattaba should mean he wrote repeatedly, he was a scribe; the fourth form aktaba, he made someone else write, he employed a secretary. The fifth form, takattaba, might mean he wrote repeatedly for his own advantage, he was a writer by profession; while other subtle shades of meaning might be deduced from the sixth form takat aba, the seventh ink at ab a , or the eighth iktataba. But the tenth form istaktaba would mean that he wanted to be a writer, that he had literary ambitions, or failures. So with the verb of which the simple, naked form is ‘aruba . The tenth form is ista'raba, he wanted to be an Arab, he was “arabized”; and the passive participle, musta‘rab , is one who wished to become an Arab, or had been 54 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN influenced by Arabic speech or an Arab way of life. Alfonso VI, in 1101, refers to the Christians of Toledo as muztdrahes\ that is the first mention of the word. But on the lips of those who had not mastered the language, or only learnt it by ear, the word — like other words containing the group ST — became muzdrabes or Mozarabes. It is already spelt in that way in 1118.^ The Arabic-speaking peoples have always had a legitimate pride in their language. It is said to be the one real creation of the Arab genius; but it is certainly a very great achieve- ment. Among the conquerors of Spain were men who spoke that language in its purest and most classical form; and they soon developed a feeling, not so much of contempt as of amusement, at the extraordinary collection of indistinct sounds made by the “natives” of Spain: the Romance-speaking Hispano-Romans who had now become Mozarabes. The Arabic speakers called that language by the name they gave to every foreign language with which they came in contact — Greek, Syriac, Persian and others — al-‘ajamiya, the foreign or indistinct speech. The Spanish, the Mozarabes, adopted the word, too, but in a rather different sense ; and it eventually came to mean Spanish or Romance, though written in Arabic characters instead of Roman, aljamia] and the literature of that kind, which is considerable, is now called literatura aljamiada. In the same way there is a Spanish literature in which the words are Spanish but the characters Hebrew. From the beginning — or at any rate from the destruction of the temple at Jerusalem in a.d. 70 to the expulsion from Spain in 1492 — there had always been a large, industrious and often well- educated Jewish community in the Peninsula; and it was perfectly natural for them to use Hebrew characters, not only for Hebrew and even for Arabic, but also for Spanish. It is necessary to bear these considerations in mind in order to appreciate the range of the recent discovery of the earliest Spanish literature: poems in Mozarabic Spanish, preserved in Hebrew and Arabic characters as tail-pieces (in the local dialect) to learned, cultivated poems in the Hebrew and Arabic languages. These, however, do not appear until the eleventh century; before that we have only primitive Mozarabic Spanish words and an occasional phrase. The earliest dates from 884. mozArabes 55 Some years before, about forty Mozarabes had been con- demned to death at Cordoba for blaspheming against the Prophet. This can hardly be called persecution; “the Moslem state often — and in the Omayyad period always — showed a surprising tolerance to Christians and Jews”.^ The Mozarabes themselves admitted how tolerant that rule was. INTER IPSOS SINE MOLESTIA EIDEI DEGIMUS, St. Eulogius remarked; “Among them we lived without hindrance to the faith”; while a Mozarab living in the next century, under the khalif ‘Abd-ar-Rahman III, admits that IN REGNO EIUS LIBERE DIVINIS SUISQUE REBUS UTEBANTUR: “In his reign they freely made use of Church property and their own”. Christians in Moslem Spain were not obliged — though Moslems and Jews were later, under the Christians — ^to wear distinctive dress or badges. They frequently occupied high positions in the palace, (i.e. the administration),^ or the army. Monks wearing the habit of their order, could move freely in public. New churches were built; St. Eulogius himself refers to ECCLESIAS NUPER STRUCTAS. No religious minority could ask for more; and if some Mozarabes courted martyrdom by profaning mosques and insulting the name of the Prophet, it was sheer bad manners. In 884, Omar ibn Hafsun, a Christian in spite of his Arabic name, rose in revolt in the mountains round Ronda. For some years the authorities in Cordoba took no notice of him; and when they did so, he described the forces sent against him as a boyata, a drove of oxen. The word is reported by an Arabic historian, and is actually one of the earliest Romance words to be recorded in Spain. Its interest, and the accuracy of the Arabic transcription, are shown by the preservation of the emphatic intervocalic T which later might have become D, though it is still voiceless (that is, not D) in some present-day forms of Spanish. The boyata was too much for Ibn Hafsun, however, and his rebellion was crushed. Yet Omar was something more than a Romance-speaking brigand chief. Many Mozarabic Christians were suspected of being in league with him and migrated northwards to Christian territory, taking with them their “arabized” manners, their architecture, their preference for names that were Moslem rather than Christian. (See 56 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN Chapter VIII.) Sorae of those who stayed behind in Moslem territory fell into apostasy, though that was not encouraged: Christians, so long as they remained Christians, were liable to a special tax. Romance names begin to appear in Arabic historians, ill-concealed by transliteration into Arabic char- acters ; and this is one of the things which gives its habitual look to Moslem Spain, a look which modern research has been able to discern “under the uniform whitewash with which, at first sight, Islam had covered everything”. The Moslems had brought no women with them; and the mothers of the first generation, and many succeeding genera- tions, were fhir Spanish slaves who taught their children their mother tongue, though if they went to school they learnt Arabic. That meant that the inhabitants of Moslem Spain were bilingual. Simonet^ and Ribera^ produced evidence to show that many people, including emirs and judges, spoke Romance as well as Arabic. There is the delightful story of the expert witness, a holy and humble man of heart, and a devout Moslem though he spoke no Arabic. Asked on one occasion whether he was acquainted with the accused, he replied: “I do not know him personally, but I have heard people say that he is a bad man (ins an sau’)”. “And”, the Arabic author continues, “he made it small in the foreign language” (wa saghghara-hu bil-lafti-l-‘ajmi), he used a Romance diminutive or, perhaps, “toned it down”. The Emir was delighted with the phrase, and exclaimed: “Verily a holy man like this would not have said that, if truth had not dictated it”, and he gave judgement accordingly.® There are other records of Spanish Moslems who did not speak Arabic. In Toledo, an austere Moslem missionary was consulted on the subject and replied: “If your works are well pronounced, the language you speak will not affect your spiritual salvation”. The Spanish Primer a Cronica General describes a Moslem sage as being so “Latin” that he seemed a Christian: era tan ladino que semeiaba cristiano; though if a modern gipsy had said this, it would be taken in another sense. During the civil wars at the end of the ninth century, the Moslems of Murcia came out crying for peace “in the dialect of that country”. Another Murcian, author of a great dictionary MOZARABES 57 published in Cairo in the following century, apologized for his errors: “And how can I not make mistakes, if I write in times so far from those in which the Arabic language was spoken with purity, having to live familiarly with persons who speak a ' native language”. Unfortunately his dictionary was entirely in Arabic, and did not include equivalents in Romance. In Aragon, the Moslems never seem to have spoken anything else. Yet the words used by the natives of Spain were of great interest to many writers in Arabic. It was particularly important, for instance, for doctors to know the local names of the plants used in their materia medica.® So in the Arabic botanical books written in Spain the authors are careful to give, besides the scientific name in Arabic, tl}e popular, country names which were still more or less Latin or showed once more how, in the dark Visigothic ages, Latin had been moving in the direction of Spanish. Thus we find that by 982 a species of broom,^^/^ GENISTA, had become yeneshta\ (or yenesta, with a thick “back” S, between the Arabic shin and sad). It is now usually known to Spanish people by a name from the Arabic: retama, though hiniesta, the Spanish descendant of GENISTA, is still in use. The plant now known as milk-wort, cuaja-leche, was called lakhtaira and lakhtairola in 982. The Latin was LACTARIA. The laurel was orhaco, a word which has dis- appeared from Spanish but is found in the Italian orbacco. The sunflower was tornasole, now girasol. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, the walnut NUX was pronounced nuch or nuche\ the olive oUya, and oil oU. An Arabic writer particularly refers to the emphasis on the I and Y. Rosemary, romero, and other words now ending in -ero and -era were pronounced -airo and -aira. Thyme was tomiello or tomello, a diminutive of the Greek and Latin THYMUM — now tomillo. “Marjoram”, an eleventh-century Spanish botanist wrote, in Arabic, “is called by the natives shurjido (or surjido with an English J probably from the Latin SURGERE to sprout), but in the Arabic of Andalucia, al-mardadush”. This word has survived in almoradux or almoradu, the subject of a memorable poem by Juan Ramon Jimenez. Plants with double names (like the English crowfoot, fox- glove, hart’s tongue, maidenhair, monkshood, shepherd’s 58 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN purse, Solomon’s seal, traveller’s joy) give a large vocabulary of what common things were called in Mozarabic times. Abre- uelyo (open-eye) represents a stage of dialectal development at which OCULUS had become uelyo, with its diphthong — UE. This prickly plant is now called ahrojo. Barba de conilyo (rabbit’s beard) shows the late Latin CUNICULUS becoming conejo. Sine ditosh (five fingers), for chicory, is a “caique” of the Greek pentadactylon, QUINQUE DIGITOS, cinco dedos. Chinchipensa or chinchipedes was the hart’s tongue fern (lengua de ciervo in Spanish) and also the animal, hundred-legs, centipede, centopies. Chinto-aurea (golden belt) was a popular etymology for Centaurea, one of the cornflowers. Franne jirrino (breaks the iron ... of the ploughshare) was a name for the common thistle was the Latin FRANGIT, still used in the Asturian and Leonese dialects, while ^m'no is a develop- ment of FERRUM, iron. Many plants were called “ear”, orelya, from the^late Latin AURICULA: orelya de lebre, hare’s ear, plaintain; orelya de franco, sempervivum, house-leek. “The name franco"'. Padre Asin notes® “is derived from Frank and had the signification of ‘free’, that is, from taxes — and should no doubt be identified with priest, monk, religious, for that reason.” CAUDA, tail, had already become coda {caudillo is from another root altogether, late Latin CAPITELLUM, head); the horse-tail was coda de caballo, and there was also a wolf’s tail, codaloba, mullein. Bedstraw, or something like it, was lekhtaira or leitaira, “for the natives call bed lekhto and leito" . The Castilians when they came called it lecho', but the usual Spanish for a bed is now cama. Lecho is more formal: a death-bed, for instance, is lecho de muerte', a marriage-bed is officially tdlamo (THALAMU-); but a double bed, matri- monio. Sleep, among the Mozarabes, was shono', there was a nut with that name which was used to put children to sleep. As often happened, the Mozarabic word was nearer the Portuguese sono sleep, sonho dream, than the Castilian siieho. Torna-marito (mint, or some sweet-smelling, aromatic herb) had the magical property of bringing home a wayward husbartd; the modern Spanish might be vuelve-marido. Trebole (clover), to which Lope de Vega gave much the same magical power — in magical verse — was already known by that name among the Mozarabes; MOZARABES 59 its origin is TRIBULUM rather than TRIFOLIUM. This magical property was shared by a thistle, ERYNGIUM, called chento capita, hundred-heads. Some herbs were put to very intimate uses which Padre Asm duly explains, while some of the “native”, Mozarabic names are unmentionable; indeed the good padre thought that the Spanish Moslems must often have had cleaner minds than the Spanish Christians. Plantain, following a phonetic change which became normal in Castilian — PL going to LL — has now become llanten\ but Spanish botan- ists, writing in Arabic in Cordoba, Seville and Saragossa, spelt it as in English, showing that in Spanish plantain was an inter- mediate stage between the Latin PLANTAGINEM and the modern Castilian llanten of today. Mozarabic Spanish was not a written language ; and the evi- dence for it has to be pieced together from words taken down phonetically by learned Spanish Moslems writing in Arabic, or from the phrases which Arabic and Jewish poets — and occasion- ally, perhaps, a Mozarab too — sometimes employed at the end of their poetical pieces. (See Chapter V.) When Arabic was spoken in Spain it was pronounced in an odd way, with unusual values given to the vowels (cf. the approximation in south-eastern English of “late” to “light”). An oriental geographer at the end of the tenth century relates that, at Mecca, he once met several pilgrims from Spain who used two languages: an Arabic which he understood with difficulty, since it was pronounced very differeiatly from the way to which he was accustomed, and another language which he took to be Greek but which was in fact Mozarabic Spanish. Arabic was the official language, the language of religion and learning; but familiar speech was “Latin” — or what Latin had become; and a study of the Mozarabic Spanish words for which there is evidence in Arabic literature and Spanish place-names has progressed enormously since the pioneer work of Simonet, who thought that the Romance dialect was only spoken by Mozarabic Christians. In the latest edition of Menendez Pidal’s great book on the origins of Spanish the Romance spoken in “Arabic” Spain occupies a prominent place. 60 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OE SPAIN Yet the list of actual Arabic words which passed into Spanish through the Mozarabes is very long. It is an index to what Spain owes to Moslem civilization.® The words are all “hear-say”, learnt by word of mouth and not from books; but they include most of the aspects of a busy and active medieval community; in fact, the word for a task, occupation, or job in Spanish (tarea) is really Arabic, as if the need for such a word had never occurred to people in Spain before, though they were active and busy under the Romans. The names of many plants, wild and cultivated; fruit and vegetables and ways of watering the garden; mills, the amount one paid the miller and the money in which one paid him, were Arabic. So was the market, and the clerk of the market who saw to the position of the stall, fair trading, weights and measures — nearly all of which again were Arabic and kept their Arabic names, approxim- ately, in Spanish. So did the clothing and soft stuffs from the Near East (Christian underclothing was impossible, from its coarseness) ; the leather- work and slippers ; jewellery, pottery, perfumes, pins. The different parts of a house, from the front door and the tiled passage which led from it, to the sleeping apartments and the flat roof, the knocker on the door and the long bolt which closed the window; pillows, mats, carpets, basins. The men who built the houses: masons, carpenters, tilers ; the drains — and in fact the system of having any drains at all; police, la^vyers, tax-collectors, executors, and the important occupations of tailors and barbers (who have now lost their Arabic names in Spain), carriers, muleteers. Sometimes the idea behind the Arabic word got into Spanish, though not the Arabic word itself. It is a case of the phenomenon which the German and American philologists call “translation loan-words”, and the French caiques. An “eye” of water, for instance, makes no more sense in Spanish than in English, but becomes clear from the double meaning of the Arabic ‘ain, which, besides being the name of a letter, is also an eye and a spring.® It depends on what Professor Lapesa has called the “mental presence” of the Arabic word, with its various meanings ; and the geographical term Ojos del Guadiana becomes intelligible for the river’s source. The same explanation applies to the word infante: the son of a noble or MOZARABES 61 king. It is the Arabic walad. Again hidalgo (shortened from hijodalgo) did not mean the son of somebody, but the son of something; algo was property, wealth. Direct Arabic importations, or borrowings, into Spanish were very numerous; and affected the whole of life. Besides the things already mentioned, there were sports, like hunting with falcons ; games, like chess and dice ; music and musical instru- ments; learning, mathematics, astronomy, alchemy. And although some of them were originally Greek or Persian, they have all passed into Spanish as they were heard, often with the Arabic definite article, al-, prefixed to them, and have become the regular Spanish words for things, and men who did things, which either had had no names before, or which became so familiar a sight under the Moslems that their Arabic names have remained with them ever since. Some words have gone straight from one language to the other: noria (Arabic na'ura) the waterwheel with pots fastened to the rim and worked by an ox or an ass; cifra, figure, originally naught, (Arabic sifr, empty or a space); azar, hazard (Arabic az-zahr, dice); zoco, market (Arabic suq, the “souks” in Algeria and Morocco). This was sometimes used, especially in place names, with the definite article joined to it: azogue, as-suq; for in Arabic, from the earliest times, the -1 of the article, when it comes before certain consonants (“sun-letters”) has been assimilated to the consonant following it. The Arabic al-‘ud, is the Spanish laiid as well as the English lute; as-saqia, the conduit, acequia\ as-sud, the sluice, azud\ as-sotaiha, the flat roof, azotea\ al- mukhaddi, the cushion or pillow, almohada. Al-kubba, has become alcoba, bedroom (now being replaced by cuarto, apartamiento or dormitorio)] al-kuhl, kohl for the eyes, alcohol-, ad-diwan, the council, aduana (“douane”) customs. With a normal phonetic change: al-wazir, the “vizier” or minister, has become alguacil, constable (now only on the stage) ; al-khilal, the pin, alfiler-, at-tabut, the coffin, ataud. With an “intrusive consonant” developed in pronunciation: al- khumra, the carpet or mat, has given alfombra; al-kaid, the “kaid”, alcalde, formerly judge and still mayor, in Spain, though in Spanish-speaking America the word has dropped out. A famous instance of the intrusive consonant, B, is 62 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN al-hamra’, the Alhambra (hamra’, feminine of ahmar, red). The Alhambra was originally the red (palace) of the red (King), Ibn al-Ahmar “Son of the red” the name of the dynasty known to Spanish ballads as Abenamar. Like many Spanish words taken over from the Arabic with the definite article, Alhambra was given a Spanish definite article as well: el Alhambra; so also el alcohol, el alcalde, el laud; but now we hear la Alhambra, la alcoba, la alfombra, la almohada, la azotea, la aduana. Words from Sanskrit, Persian, Greek and Latin which reached Spanish through Arabic have usually arrived with an Arabic article: camphor alcanfor; chess ash-shatranj. Old Spanish axadrex, modern ajedrez; coloured tile, az-zulaij, Spanish azulejo. Other Eastern importations through Arabic are azul blue, escarlata scarlet, naranja orange. Judia; bean, is the Arabic judiy a, synonymous with al-lubiy a, a Persian word arabized, which also gave the Spanish alubia. Rice was a plant with a name that was Greek, oryza; but it seemed to be an Arabic word with an article ar-ruz, the Spanish arroz. Alchemy alquimia is a genuine Greek word (chymeid) with an Arabic article. So is the piece of apparatus called an alembic, Greek ambix, Spanish alambique. Greek and Latin too are PERSICUM, the peach which reached Spanish as alberchigo, and PRAECOQUUS, albaricoque, apricot. Shakespeare still had a form more like the original word: “Go, bind thou up yon dangling apricocks” the gardener says in Richard II. The Latin weight MODUS became almud, and seemed as Arabic as the other measures, azumbre, literally an eighth, and arroba, a quarter (which are genuine Arabic words: ath-thumn, and ar-rub‘). Most unexpectedly, the familiar, “arabized” word alcazar, the fort or castle, turns out to be the Arabic article al plus the Latin CASTRUM. It has been pointed out that many Spanish forms are the result of a double adaptation. Besides the addition of the Arabic article, the consonant P (which does not exist in Arabic) was replaced by B. We have seen this in PERSICUM, alberchigo, and PRAECOQUUS, albaricoque. The Arabic consonant kha was also replaced by F: al-khilal alfiler, al-khumra alfombra. But there were further complications. The Arabic MOZARABES 63 words had to be learnt by ear. But since, to a Mozarabic Spanish ear, many of the sounds were entirely new they were rendered by something of the speaker’s own, or as near to the new sound as he or she could get. The sibilants were particularly trying; the Arabic letters shin and jim were replaced by TS and Z.^ But Arabic also has a variety of palatal and glottal sounds — “that pronunciation with the throat which the Moors make”, Juan de Valdes put it: aquel pronunciar con la garganta que los moros hazen^ — including the sound which the English teachers compare to a baby camel, and the French to the son de vomissement: the ‘ain. In Spain there was nothing nearer than the Castilian H, which in those days was still aspirated; the modern Spanish J, jota, only appeared late in the sixteenth century as a phonetic development of the Spanish X (SH). So the Arabic ha and kha, ‘ain and ghain, kaf and qaf were rendered by H or F, or sometimes by G and K. Henna, al-hinna’, became alhena\ saddle-bags, al-khorj, alforjas\ shaikh, xeque, and the Arabic language, al-‘arabiya, algarabia. Another case for adaptation was that of Arabic masculines, which often end in a bunch of consonants im- possible in Spanish. This difficulty was sjolved by adding a vowel in support, e.g. as-suq, the market, becoming azogue. (Azogue also signifies mercury, from a different Arabic root.) Once they had got into Spanish, the Arabic words under- went the phonetic changes normal in a Romance language. The diphthongs AI, AU, gave E and O in Castilian, e.g. al-dai’a, the village, aldea. Many of the oldest Arabic importations turned T into D, K (or Q) into G: al-qotn, cotton, algodon. The group ST was reduced to Z; besides the example of musta'rab becoming mozdrabe, there are ostawan, entry, zagudn, and place-names which were not Arabic but only transmitted by Arabic, like CAESARAUGUSTA, becoming Saraqosta and Zaragoza: Saragossa. It is often affirmed that the change from S to SH (formerly written X) — SAPONEM, xabon, jabon (soap), SUCCUM, xugo, jugo (juice) — ^was the result of later mispronunciation by the Moriscos, the Moslems who eventually submitted to the Christians, were forcibly converted and then expelled. Arabic had no S equivalent to the Castilian S, and transformed it into SH; and the Morisco 64 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN pronunciation (e.g. moxca for mosca) is well attested down to the seventeenth century. Yet that “thick” or “Spanish” S normally tends to acquire a sound resembling SH, and this is enough to explain the fact that SH is frequently substituted for it; and Morisco influence is only probable in some Andalusian place-names, or in some obvious arabisms like xarahe, jarabe (syrup) from the Arabic verb sharaba, he drank. The story of Arabic influence might be continued with examples of syntax and style in the Spanish language, which can only have an Arabic explanation. Again, the number of Spanish place-names due to Moslems is very large; it might be said, indeed, that the best-known Spanish names, all the world over, are wholly or partly Arabic.^® Don Quixote’s La Mancha (al-manja, the plateau). La Rabida from which Columbus sailed (ar-rabitat, a military hermit’s cell, or a garrison, on the coast or frontier), Alcala (al-qal’at, the castle), Alhama (al-hammat, the hot spring, “Bath”), Medina (madinat, town) in Medina Sidonia, the town of Sidonia, and Medinaceli, the town of Salim; Guadalquivir, the great river, Guadalajara, the stony river (also in Mexico), Guadalupe, the wolf’s river (mixed Arabic and Latin, in Mexico and South America), Trafalgar (tarfal-aghar, the white cape) Algeciras (al-jazirat, the island) and Gibraltar (jabal-Tariq, the mountain of Tariq, the Moslem conqueror of Spain in 711). These names of places, like the Spanish-Arabic names for things, are not accurate Arabic; they are Arabic as the Christian Spanish Mozarabes pronounced it. Christian Spain in the tenth century was poor and modest; and the revived power and culture of Cordoba led Christian Spaniards to accept everything that was transmissible in institutions, administration and mer- chandise, including the language of culture and the number of oriental words which Latin documents of the time reveal. Gomez Moreno’^^ has endeavoured to sort them out. They include country pursuits, and certain urban institutions as well. There are personal and family relations; collective, social and administrative ideas: peace, war, defence, money. In contrast to the grinding poverty of many of the inhabitants of the king- dom of Leon, there was ostentation and a certain refinement MOZARABES 65 in the ruling classes, importing strange exotic products and fine stuffs, often imported from Byzantium, or, their names show, from territory that was Moslem. The words include not only cloths, but bedclothes, table-linen, vessels and cooking-utensils; rare words for colours and embroideries, cushions and curtains. In Toledo, again, the documents and the coinage show how the Arabic language was used officially among Spanish Christians right down to the fourteenth century, when hardly anyone still understood it. Andalucfa had preserved a tradition of writing in Latin; but in spite of that, distinguished Mozarabes wrote in Arabic, even translating doctrinal works and portions of the scriptures for those clerics who had forgotten their Latin or never learnt any. In Catalonia there was a stimulus from across the Pyrenees which gave a certain air of distinction to those who wrote in Latin, but they too translated books from Arabic. “This surrender”, Gomez Moreno adds, “of Christian to Moslem need not be surprising. Europe in the tenth century was in no condition to transmit anything except war and barbarism; and the Christian states in the Peninsula, without exception, ended by accepting the sovereignty of the khalif of Cordoba.” In the eleventh century the values changed. Once the khalif- ate was destroyed, Spain lost its predominance in the world. The influence which Moslem ways had exercised on Christian life and thought were relaxed, and the first result was a general impoverishment, mental and material. The barbarous organiza- tions of northern Spain had to fend for themselves; the aristo- cracy and slavery of Leon gave way to a people whieh was making a country by its own efforts and its own firmness — partly military, but partly political, and partly also linguistic; Castille. E 66 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN ^Amado Alonso, Correspondencias ardbigo-espanolas . . . Rev. de Fil. Hispanica, VIII, 12 ff., Mexico, 1946; and Estudios lingiiisticos, Madrid, 1951, 128 ff. ^E. Garcia Gomez, Introduction to Vol. IV, Historia de Espana dirigida par R. Menendez Pidah Espana musulmana, por E. Levi-Provenpal, Madrid, 1951. ^Americo Castro, Espana en su historia: cristianos, moros, judios, Buenos Aires, 1948. *F. J. Simonet, Glosario de voces ibericas y latinas usadas entre los mozdrabes, Madrid, 1889. See also A. Steiger, Zur Sprache der Mozaraber. Festschr. Jud., 624-714. ®J. Ribera, Disertaciones y opdsculos, Vol. I, Madrid, 1928; Aljoxani (Al-Khushani), Historia de los jueces de Cordoba, Madrid, 1914: Arabic text, p. 96, Spanish translation, p. 118. ®M. Asin Palacios, Glosario de voces romances registradas por un botdnico andmino hispano-musulmdn, Madrid- Granada, 1943. ’R. Menendez Pidal, Ortgenes del espahol, 3rd ed., Madrid, 1950. ^The Legacy of Islam, edited by Sir Thomas Arnold, Oxford, 1931. The list of Spanish words from the Arabic given in that work only includes, the commonest still in use ; otherwise it might have been greatly extended. “Juan de Valdes, Didlogo de la lengua. See chapter IX. i®M. Asin Palacios, Contribucion a la toponimia drabe de Espana, 2nd ed., Madrid-Granada, 1944. ^^M. G6mez Moreno, Iglesias mozdrabes: arte espanol de los siglos IX a XI Madrid, 1919. CHAPTER V THE LANGUAGE OF THE OLDEST POETRY The linguistic consequences of the Moslem occupation of Spain have been examined in some detail; but the examples were confined to single words — either Romance words quoted out of curiosity by Spanish writers in Arabic, or Arabic words undergoing certain modifications when people whose mother tongue was Romance endeavoured to pronounce them. In Christian Spain, too, the earliest examples in the history of the language are isolated words; and it is some centuries before anything like a complete phrase appears. That is in a MS. of the late tenth century, the Glosas Emilianenses (see Chapter VI). Before leaving Moslem Spain, however, it is essential to give some account of the language of the earliest Spanish poems. They have not so far been included in any book on the Spanish language, and in fact only began to be made known (by Dr. E. M. Stern, of Oxford) in 1948.^ The unrest in Moslem Spain has often been exaggerated. The most serious disturbance was caused by invasion, and mili- tary occupation, by Berber fanatics from South Morocco, including negroid tribes from the Sahara. Like their relations today, the Touaregs of Southern Algeria, they veiled the lower part of their faces; we can see two of them, veiled but peace- fully playing chess, in one of the miniatures in Alfonso X’s “Book of Games”. Their name, al-mur abitun, “the marabouts” — ^warrior monks stationed in a fortified, monastic frontier post or rib at — sounded to Spanish ears like Almord- vides. They came in 1086 and 1090 with a new, secret weapon — the terrifying roll of their drums — and no Christians (except the Cid) could stand against them. In 1 145 they were supplanted by other theologically minded Berbers, al-muwwahidun, the “Unitarians” (from the Arabic wahid, one), known in Spain as Almohades. The intolerance of these Berber sects led to large emigrations of Christians and Jews. In the end these bellicose 67 68 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN puritans settled down, seduced by the well-being and luxury of Andalucia after the life of the desert; and to country people not living too near the Christian border, out of reach of raiders and crusaders, life in Moslem Spain was peaceful enough. A man could go on being a Christian; he could even become a bishop. The Emir or Khalif, legal heir to the Visigothic kin gs and protector of the Christians who had submitted, had the right of appointing bishops and summoning Church councils. A Christian or a Jew could rise to high position in the Moslem civil service. It was no uncommon thing for the different Moslem states — for Moslem Spain became a collection of city- states (taifas) after the break-up of the khalifate of Cordoba in 1010 — to choose their diplomatic representatives from members of old Spanish Jewish families, who naturally understood one another very well and could settle the most difficult pieces of negotiation to the satisfaction of both sides. Religious liberty in Moslem Spain was something that really deserved the name, until intolerance (on both sides) destroyed it. Christians could live in the country on their fathers’ land, growing what their fathers had grown, provided that they paid their taxes ; or they could live in one of the small country towns or sea-ports with people from all over the Near East, talking and doing their business in Arabic or in that kind of basic Latin which was always picking up new words from Arabic and was one day to be included in modern Spanish. It now appears that in Spain, before the end of the eleventh century — about the time of, or just before, William of Poitiers (1071-1127) the first of the troubadours, the Chanson de Roland (about 1120) and the Poema de mio Cid (about 1140) — - there was among the Moslems, Jews and Mozarabic Christians a flourishing poetic tradition. The languages used were not only Arabic and Hebrew, but also primitive Mozarabic Romance— a language which, if it cannot yet be said to be either Spanish or Portuguese, is definitely Peninsular. There was a form of poetry in Arabic Spain, sophisticated and strophic, the muwashshah (also imitated in Hebrew), in which the last few lines were in the common language of the streets. The word is a passive participle, “cross-belted”; wishah (plural wushh) was a sash worn by women and studded with pearls. THE LANGUAGE OF THE OLDEST POETRY 69 It was learned poetry, not folksong; there were rules for writing it. One of them was this: “The last stanza serves as an introduction to the persons who speak at the ‘end’, and joins it with the principal part of the poem”. It was con- structed on a support, or basis, which had to be in the vulgar tongue (i.e. in Romance), and the poet had to think of that first. “The author of a muwashshah”, it was said, “will compose the end first, before tying himself up with any other rhyme or metre”. In Arabic, this support or basis had various names; the one most favoured by modern scholars is kharja, literally “a going out”, an “explicit” or “here endeth”. The kharja, it is said further, should be in the vulgar tongue, “or even in spoken Spanish, that is to say, in the language usual to the persons who speak it in the poem”. It has been assumed that the origin of these Hebrew and Arabic Spanish poems was popular; but it is difficult to admit that the particulars just mentioned are explained by that hypo- thesis. In fact, the opposite seems to be indicated, though at first the verses of the kharja may have been suggested by a popular song, or a street-song, in Romance, and it is a fact that the same kharja is found at the end of different poems, both in Hebrew and in Arabic. It is as if the poet wished to echo or confirm his own thoughts and feelings by the voice of someone singing outside. He is not merely preserving some- thing that he has heard; he is writing something new, though in the same style, to sharpen the point of his own poem. “The fact of the same kharja being found at the end of one muwashshah in Arabic and at the end of another in Hebrew — in two different poems by different poets, or even in three — seems to strengthen the idea . . . that the kharjas were little songs, or coplas, in Romance, already existing; and that it was upon these that the poets based their muwashshahs.” (Garcia Gomez). This indeed is in accordance with the statements of Arabic authors. Like the rest of the poem the last few lines are also written in Arabic or Hebrew characters. There is, in fact, a consider- able Spanish literature (already mentioned) written with Spanish words but using the Hebrew alphabet,^ and a still larger literature, in Spanish, using the Arabic alphabet: 70 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN literatura aljamiada. Most of it, however — most of what is known — is later, and dates from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Hebrew poetry of Mozarabic times in Spain, from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries, was also read in Jewish communities in places outside the Iberian Peninsula; and this accounts for the fact that the first mu wash shah poems to be discovered with the last few lines in Romance were in Hebrew. There are also mu wash shah poems of this kind in Arabic, though only known so far in one or two MSS. All the rest are in Hebrew, one of the chief communities which knew them being in Egypt ; and since Jewish communities in those days had an admirably civilized prohibition against throwing away waste paper (in case the name of God should be written on it), the community in question buried its waste paper in the sand. It is partly from these Genizeh fragments that it has been possible to decipher the poetry of the eleventh and twelfth century Spanish Mozarabes. Among the many curious things about this poetry, one is especially remarkable and especially western, belonging to that part of the Peninsula which afterwards became Portugal and Galicia. The poems are given to women, like the dance-songs in Galician-Portuguese which began just before 1200 with the Portuguese king Sancho I, and ended with Dom Denis in 1325. The MSS. of these Galician Portuguese poems, difficult as they are to read and doubtful as they often are to decipher, are written in Latin characters, in western cursive hands like other western MSS. of the time; but the eleventh-century Mozarabic poems (as already said) are not written in Latin characters but in Hebrew or Arabic, including the few final verses in Romance and in the poetic manner of the later Galician Portuguese poets: a girl singing about her lover. The chief difference is that, in the Galician Portuguese poetry, one stanza is answered by another, using a different rhyme; while the terms of endearment (friend, lover) are in Romance: amigo, amado, the regular Peninsular forms of AMICU- and AMATU- which often furnish the rhymes of the two parallel stanzas. But in the newly discovered Romance poems preserved in Hebrew and Arabic characters,- and dating (some of them) THE LANGUAGE OF THE OLDEST POETRY 71 from a hundred and fifty years earlier, there is no answering of one stanza by another; while the terms of endearment are neither Hebrew nor Romance, but Arabic. Instead of amigo or amado, the word is habib or habibi: darling, lover, and my lover — words still intelligible (to say the least) in all countries where Arabic is spoken today. It is curious, also, that in the poems in Hebrew there is no trace of parallelism between one stanza and another, in spite of the device being so frequent in the Hebrew poetry of the Bible; in fact these poems are, on the whole, so remote from Hebrew poetic thought — even from the Song of Songs — that the inspiration, like the form, may not be Hebrew at all but Spanish Arabic. Any system of transliteration from Hebrew character into Roman must rely on the acceptance of certain conventions. To quote once more from Professor Garcia Gomez: “We are working without vowels — a most difficult thing in any language not Semitic, where the absence of vowels is habitual — working on a corrupt text transcribed by copyists who did not under- stand it, and therefore disfigured it with involuntary emenda- tions and erroneous readings of Arabic words which they thought they recognized but had mistaken”. With a primitive Romance language of which relatively little is known, the values given to the Hebrew and Arabic characters must be partly conjectural. There will be many alternative readings, all equally plausible; and it is impossible at present to achieve an accuracy comparable with that of Professor Gonzalez Llubera in his transliterations of the later Jewish-Spanish poets, who also wrote with Spanish words in Hebrew charac- ters.® With these reservations, however, an attempt may be made, based on the readings of Stern and Cantera, Garcia Gomez and Damaso Alonso, to write the Hebrew characters of the poems in Roman capitals. One of the earlier fragments at Oxford is this; (the author was a Jewish-Spanish poet, Yehuda Ha-Levi, born about 1075). VYS MU CRACHON D MIB YA RAB S S ME TORNRD TN MAL MU DLER LHBIB ENFRMO YED CUND SNRA 72 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN The Hebrew is “unpointed”; the vowel-signs are not shown, and most of the vowels have to be supplied from know- ledge of Mozarabic Spanish obtained elsewhere — ^particularly from the anonymous eleventh-century botanist referred to in the last chapter. He writes in Arabic, but as one knowing the Mozarabic dialects extremely well, and is careful to “point” the vowels accurately whenever he uses a local, Mozarabic word. Applying these principles in the present instance, we get: Vayse meu corachon de mib ya rab, si se me tornarad? Tan mal meu doler li-l-habib! Enfermo yed, cuand sanarad? There it goes, my heart from me! Oh God, will it come back again? So great my grief is for my love! Will he be well? He lies in pain. These lines are thoroughly in the Peninsular tradition. Damaso Alonso is able to quote later parallels from both Spain and Portugal ; but the language is full of interest. The spelling corachon, heart, is confirmed by the anony- mous botanist; it was the Mozarabic name (or one of the Mozarabic names) for the plant called Hypericum, St. John’s Wort. In one of the Arabic fragments it is transcribed korajun. The modern Spanish is corazon, both being derived from the Latin COR, through a hypothetical late Latin form CORA- TUM or CORATICUM, which has also given the French, English and Italian “courage”. The word mib, or mibi, which appears in many of these poems, is derived by analogy from the classical Latin MIHI. Speakers of late or vulgar Latin could not see why the dative of the pronoun should be MIHI in the first person and TIBI in the second; so they made them both alike. MIBI, MEBE, MEVE, TIVI, are all found in northern Spanish documents in the barbarous Latin of the eleventh century.* It is characteristic, also, of late Latin that MIBI (where the first I should be short and the second doubtful) should have lost all sense of quantity. THE LANGUAGE OF THE OLDEST POETRY 73 and rhyme with habibi, where both I’s are definitely long. Li-l-habib is the regular Arabic construction: to the lover, or on account of the lover ; the final -i is the pronoun in the first person, in the enclitic form in which it is affixed to the genitive or accusative (habibi, lover of me, i.e. my lover). Ya (line 2) is the Arabic vocative particle; but we find it constantly in the Poem of the Cid; Ya mio Cid was the correct form of address. Rab is allied to the Biblical Hebrew word we call “Rabbi”: lord or master. Yed is equivalent to EST. The forms ies and iet (or yet), for ES and EST, are found among the notes made by a Basque monk of La Rioja (at the other end of Spain) in the tenth- century Glosas Emilianenses (Chapter VI). The D, the voiced ending of the third person singular, is also found in the Mozarabic Fuero (charter) of Madrid, of about 1200, and in the surviving fragments of the first Spanish play, the Auto de los Magos (a mystery of the Magian Kings) of about the same date. One of the puzzles of these Mozarabic fragments was the word gar. It proves to be the Latin GARRIRE — chatter, chirrup, croak (cf. the English “garrulous”) — a word with a respectable classical ancestry, though always belonging to the familiar language: Plautus, Cicero, Horace, Petronius, Martial and Sidonius Apollinaris. In Horace it is used of someone babbling old wives’ tales, and among the Mozarabes it was employed in the sense of speaking: gar que fare5ru . . . tell {me), what shall I do. garme d’on venis . . . tell me whence you come garme cand me vernad . . . tell me when to me he'll come garyd vos, ay yermanelas . . . Oh, tell you, oh little sisters These examples are from muwashshahs written in Hebrew characters ; garme and the infinitive gair occur again in those written in Arabic. 74 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN One of the more interesting of the poems in Arabic character is the following: Mio Sidi Ibrahim ya nuemne dolje, fente mib de nokhte. In non, si non keris, ireme tib: garme a ob legarte. (My master Ibrahim — oh, name so sweet — come to me — by night. If not, if you’ve no wish— I’ll go to you — Oh, tell me where — to find you.) The strange form nuemne, for NOMINE, is analogous to uamne for HOMINE (see page 89). For dolje, cf. Italian dolce\ the form is found in the eleventh century anonymous botanist: yerha dolji, a name like meadow-sweet. Fente is the Arabic spelling of vente, come you; in, the Arabic conditional particle; keris, QUAERIS, Spanish quieres\ oh, Latin UBI. Yehuda Ha-Levi was the author of a poem on a well- known Jewish character at the court of Alfonso VI of Castille. He was nicknamed “El Cidello”, but there need be nothing ironical in the name; a Portuguese document of 1023 is drawn up in the names of EGO CITELLO ET UXOR MEA ERMEGODO.® The poem is in Hebrew; but the tail-piece in Romance is as follows: DS CND MU CDILO VNID TN BNA ALB XARA CM RYO D SOL EXID EN UAD AL HJARA.® Des cuand’ meu Cidillo venid, tan bona albixara! com’ rayo de sol exid en Guad-al-hajara. From (that time) when my little Cid came. (Oh) what good news (for me)! Like a ray of the sun he is coming out In Guadalajara. THE LANGUAGE OF THE OLDEST POETRY 75 Des cuand' has survived in the Galician-Portuguese poems, and is not far from the desque naci (since I was born) of a famous Castilian poem by the fifteenth-century Marques de Santillana. Vmid . . . exid* are third person singular, present indicative, and not (though they might seem so at first sight) second person plural, imperative. The Latin T became D and then dis- appeared; but both are still found in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Albixdra is the plural of an Arabic word meaning joy, contentment, and so good news. It still exists in Catalan, alhixeres\ but in Castilian it has become alhricias. So the Cid exclaimed to his faithful retainer, Alvar Fanez, at the news — though he ironically called it good news — of his banishment: Al- bricia, Alvar Fdnez, ca e- chados somos Here's news, now, Alvar Fdnez, for we're banished out of de tierra. the country. In Portugal, alvissaras are glad tidings — more particularly at Easter — and the reward given for bringing them; they also apply to the return of an object which has been lost. Some of the other Mozarabic fragments are more intimate. Non me tangas, ya, habibi fine ad y en esu. Do not touch me, oh my lover. Stay there, where you are. Another fragment, by Yosef ben Saddiq (d. 1149) runs: Que fare, mamma? Meu al-habib est’ ad yana. What shall I do, mother? My friend is here, he’s at the door. *It should be remembered that Old Spanish, like Portuguese and Catalan, and frequently Mexican Spanish, pronounces X like SH. 76 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN Many later Spanish songs, down to the sixteenth-century music-books, are addressed to mi madre, whether they are sung by a man or a woman. They are generally the prelude — or postlude — to amorous adventure, or a confession of it; and this fragment is thoroughly in the tradition already. Yana is connected with the Portuguese yane/a, window, a diminutive of the classical, Virgilian JANUA, door. The following is the end of a poem by Abraham ben Ezra, the “Rabbi ben Ezra” of Browning’s poem, born about 1092: Est’ al-habib espero; por el morrayu. This is the friend I wait for; He’s the one I’ll die for. Morrayu is probably to be explained as an early Romance future derived from MORI HABEO, though Vulgar Latin would have said MORIRE. {ci.fareyu, in an earlier quotation.) The latest poet of these fragments is Todros Abu-l-'Afia (d. about 1285), repeating a form that was already old, and consciously making use of archaistic language: Que fare yo, o que serad de mibi, Habibi, Non te tolgas de mibi! What shall I do, or what will become of me. You love me! Don’t take yourself away from me. The language of these Romance tail-pieces to learned Hebrew poems corresponds, phonetically and morphologically, with the language of the Mozarabes in eleventh and twelfth century Spain; while the conditions in which Jews and Christians lived together under Moslem^ government agree with those in the Spanish-Jewish biographies of Millas Vallicrosa.’ The poets took, or adapted, snatches of street-songs sung by Mozarabes, songs which were “de amigo”, i.e. sung by girls about their lovers; but the theme might then be treated in different ways. In one type it might be made into a song for THE LANGUAGE OF THE OLDEST POETRY 77 dancing — for two groups of dancers — and arranged in two parallel stanzas with the words practically repeating one another and only changing slowly from stanza to stanza. That was the arrangement, later, in Galicia and Northern Portugal, the arrangement of some of the Psalms and of some of the songs of courtship in Arthur Waley’s Chinese Poems. The theme, however, might be treated in another way: in what a musician would call “rondo form”. The theme is stated and followed by a number of stanzas connected with it, either variations, or a story periodically interrupted when the theme returns. This was the arrangement generally favoured in the Spanish part of the Peninsula, and by the troubadours in Provence, and their followers in other countries, in praise of courtly love and the lady in the castle. Alfonso the Sage, King of Castille and Leon from 1252 to 1284, used it for his poetic stories of miracles by the Virgin Mary and the carols about her which he wrote not in Castilian but in Galician Portuguese. This arrangement was also used by poets writing in Spanish, and lasted longer than it did in any other language: from the fourteenth century until far into the seventeenth. It was also used for poems in two languages, chiefly by an eleventh- or twelfth-century Spanish poet who wrote in Arabic — Ibn Quzman, or Guzman — an Arabic that was vulgar in every sense, mixed with words in Romance. Sometimes the theme is in Romance and the variations in Arabic. His subjects are neither courtly love nor miracles, but wine, women and song treated with a cynicism which would have surprised his con- temporaries, the Goliards or wandering scholars; they have greatly shocked some Spanish and Portuguese scholars of today, for they seem to be nothing but the work of a crapulous frequenter of brothels and hottes de nuit. Bilingualism need not lead us only there, however. There are poems in the same form in English: carols with a refrain in Latin, Norman French, or Middle High German. In some of the lyrics of the Portuguese dramatic poet, Gil Vicente, the refrain is in Spanish while the rest is in Portuguese. A third treatment is possible: one in which only the ending, the tail-piece, is in a different language from the rest, and i in which only the ending states the theme and crystallizes the 78 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN thought. This is the earliest arrangement, the form of the newly discovered Mozarabic fragments. It is noticeable that in these poems there is a “frame”, while in the western Galician and Portuguese dance-songs there is none. It was only in countries where the language of sophisticated literature was Arabic or Hebrew that a Romance poem needed a frame or introduction in the literary language. So we can see why the southern Spanish poems have an introduction, even when the language has become entirely Spanish: it was a literary convention linger- ing on from the Moslem period. The western poems needed no introduction, being written in a region accustomed to speak Romance. From this ancient source, now discovered for the first time, arose two streams of poetry which, through the beauty and simplicity of their language, can still give pleasure to sensitive readers of Spanish and Portuguese, whatever the country of their origin: the cantigas de amigo in Galician Portuguese, and those treasures of Castilian poetry, the villancicos. Many of these, too, are the songs of a love-sick maiden; but the authentic cantigas de amigo are of another character and, above all, are formed on a different plan from the Castilian villancicos. The oldest Galician Portuguese poems date from about 1200; the oldest Castilian lyrics from somewhat later. For some time scholars had felt certain that there must have been earlier Romance songs in the latter half of the twelfth century, which had been lost. Here they are, however, preserved in the tail-pieces of poems in Hebrew and Arabic, and a century earlier than had been expected, some of them even dating from before 1100: “songs (to quote a recent description) existing at that time and collected by cultivated poets from oral tradition”. Whether that is altogether an accurate des- cription may be doubted. To make a cultivated poet of the eleventh century consciously collect fragments of folklore and encrust them in his own work is, one may think, regarding the matter too much from the standpoint of the present. But Damaso Alonso is on firm ground when he states that the Mozarabic and Hebrew kharjas postulate a Romance poetical literature in the region ; that it was in full swing in the THE LANGUAGE OF THE OLDEST POETRY 79 eleventh century, and is a popular Mozarabic literature, presumably the origin and source of all Spanish villancicos, if not of the Portuguese cantigas de amigo as well. The vital moment in any literature or music of popular origin is the moment when the artist begins to handle it, and turn it into a genuine form of art. Yehuda Ha-Levi and the others were certainly cultivated poets; and we must beware of the tendency to speak of them as if they were merely preserving folk-poems which they had found or heard. That is impossible. They were writing poems that were new, in a form which they had found, and that is a very different matter. The poem about “El Cidello” was composed by a Jewish poet, and not merely copied by him from some Mozarabic source. There are also poems that are not Jewish: kharjas with an introduction in Arabic and the whole written in Arabic characters: poems which may have been written by Mozarabic Christians who belonged to polite literary circles. The fashion for writing kharjas cannot be merely a way of preserving villancicos like the recent fashion for collecting folksongs; writers at that time did not think in such terms. They have been inspired by popular villancicos to write new villancicos, which are thereby turned into an artistic literary genre. What we have in these kharjas are not folk-poems but culto poems inspired by them. They tell us what the folk- or street-poetry was like; but actually they were written by cultivated poets of high technical skill, in the Mozarabic manner. The manner, of course, must have existed before; but Ha-Levi is its Lope de Vega. Along with other Spanish poets, some Jewish, some Arabic and some Mozarabic Christian, he was practising the tipo popular as a conscious literary art, to round off his own poems with the voice of someone singing in the street. For the first time we can hear the authentic voices of Mozarabic Christians. 80 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN ^The crucial studies on these Mozarabic fragments are: E. M. Stern, Les vers finaux en espagnol dans les muwassahs hispano-hebraiques , in Al- Andalus, XIII, 1948, 299-346, XIV, 1949 and XVI, 1951; F. Cantera, Versos espanoles en las muwassahas hispano-hebreas, in Sefarad, IX, 1949, 197-234; Damaso Alonso, Cancioncillas “de amigo” mozdrabes, in Rev. de Filol. Esp., XXXIII, 1949, 247-394. To these may be added E. Garcia G6mez, in AI-Andalus, XIV, 1949, 409^17, and XV, 1950, 157-177, and Menendez Pidal, Bol. R. Acad. Esp., XL, 1951. These only refer to the fragments written in Hebrew characters. The kharjas in Arabic characters were first published by Garcia Gomez in Al-Andalus, XVII, 1952, 57-127. Work is still in progress. See also Gerald Brenan, The Literature of the Spanish People, Cambridge, 1951. On the modern Spanish system of transliterating Arabic, the name for these fragments of verse appears jar y a (with a circumflex accent over the y). We have preferred, in this chapter and in the last, to transliterate the Arabic characters on the system universally employed in English-speaking countries: kharja, the kh being equivalent to a countrified Spanish yofa, and the j pronounced as dj in English or French. ^I. Gonzalez Llubera, Coplas de Yofef, Cambridge, 1935, and Santob de Carridn: Proverbios morales, Cambridge, 1947. ®Dr. Stem’s exact, palaeographical transcription of the Hebrew char- acters is as follows: bys mw qrgwn dmyb y’ rb ss mtrnrd tn m’ 1 mtwlyd llhbyb ’nfrmw y’ d kwnd snrd. ^R. Menendez Pidal, Origenes, 3 ed., Madrid, 1950. ^Portugallia Monumenta Historica: Diplomata et Chartae, 252. “The palaeographical transcription is: ds knd mw sdylh bnyd tn bwnh ’lbs’ rh km r’yh dswl ’syd ’ n w ’ d ’ 1 h g ’ r h. ’J. Millas Vallicrosa, La poesia sagrada hebraico-espahola, Madrid, 1940. CHAPTER VI PRIMITIVE CASTILIAN There is a conventional view of Spanish history which, though it becomes more and more improbable as the years go on, is still held in some places to be decisive. It is that the whole of the medieval period was filled by the struggle against the “Moors”: a war of liberation and reconquest which lasted for seven hundred years. The prospect is terrifying. Yet to Spanish people in general it seems true because they have always been taught it; to politicos it is true because (as Gibbon said) it is useful; while only an occasional savant— in our time, Ortega y Gasset — has ventured to suggest that it cannot be true at all. The ideals for which a people enter on a war, and not merely a government, may keep fresh for three or four years. Bonaparte was a bugbear for twenty. But the “wars of religion”, or the Thirty Years War? The war of Reconquista in Spain is claimed to have been a war of religion; but it is difficult to believe that the Christian raids in the eighth century and the siege of Granada in the fifteenth, were part of a religious campaign. The main reasons were economic. Circumstances changed, but not motives. We should not forget that the early Asturian raids were often caused by famine, while the capture of Granada was a reply to the loss of Constantinople and trade with the Levant, to say nothing of fear of the increasing sea-power of Portugal. The real motive for such an unhistorical simplification is to stimulate patriotic passions by presenting a Christian Spanish people valiantly reconquering a lost land; when, in fact, that loss had only been felt by fugitive Gothic chiefs betrayed by other Gothic chiefs. Coolly and impartially observed, the concept of Spanish national unity seems merely a formula for exploitation, to facilitate the operations of the tax-collector and the profiteer. A Spanish historian has said as much.^ “Spain, as a collective ideal, has probably never existed; for behind the men who forged Spanish political history and extended 81 P . 82 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN its range and scope may always be perceived, from region to . region, the rebellious and elusive demos, disorganized but firmly going its own way, with no deviation from the course set in the earliest times according to the genius of the race.” A map showing the distribution of the anarcho-syndicalist j vote in 1936 might have been that of the Iberian settlements i in the first century. A neutral view of events would be something like this: ; Among the peoples in the north of the Peninsula, the most quick-witted were the Asturians who were probably of Celtic stock. They took in fugitives from the defeated Visigothic army as an addition to the number of their fighting men, rewarding them with Asturian wives; and so began the Gothic legend of ; Asturias, with no pretensions to tradition or reconquest. Galicians joined them from the west, but not the Basques on | the east ; the Basque territory formed a definite barrier. In what was afterwards to be the Catalan country, other Goths, after maintaining a shadow kingdom for a short time, crossed the Pyrenees and submitted to the Franks. When they returned, the country became the “Marca Hispanica” — ^not Spain, but ; the land bordering on Spain and held for the empire of Charle- | magne. Even for the Castilian or Mozarabic author of the i Poema de mio Cid, in the twelfth century, the Count of Bar- I celona is a “Frank”; while in the eyes of the Count and his ' cavaliers, the Cid’s men are not dressed as Christian fighting i men should be: their boots and leggings are too practical to be chivalrous. When the first Moslem punitive expeditions began to arrive to crush Christian revolts, the southern borders were abandoned and left desolate. Recent research has shown that the amount of desolation, then and later, may have been exaggerated by the chroniclers in order to exalt the reputation of the mountain kings by whom it was supposed to have been carried out. This would account for the recurrence of famine, at any rate. Yet it is certain that, from east to north, Carolingian influences were beginning to penetrate, with some typical institutions like the “Mayor of the Palace”. Architecture and sculpture of a contemporary European type appeared at both ends of Spain, at Oviedo and at Barcelona; but the builders had little idea PRIMITIVE CASTILIAN 83 of what was being done at Cdrdoba or Toledo until it was reported by the emigrant Mozarabes. The history of art, expounded by Gomez Moreno, follows and confirms the history of the language described by Menendez Pidal. There was originally a continuous connexion and gradual transition between Asturias and the Pyrenees; but it was afterwards broken in the middle — first by the art and language of the Mozarabes, preserved all through the Moslem occupa- tion, and then interrupted by the descent of the Castilians, who drove in a wedge cutting off the western half of the Peninsula from the eastern. At first the Moslem occupation seemed complete, and the “balkanized” Christian states in the north were on the defensive. The second half of the ninth century brought a change. The rule of Cordoba had for a time become weak and in- effective: Merida, Coimbra, Badajoz, Toledo, Saragossa and other places in Moslem territory were ruling themselves on their own account; and these rebellious centres sympathized with the free Christian principalities in the north. It became the fashion to wage war on the lands of the Emir of Cordoba, though such operations were not yet described as reconquest. Asturias followed the general movement of the Peninsula, and the political mistakes of the Emir encouraged a general desire for expansion southwards at the Emir’s expense. Leon and Astorga were repopulated; but the rulers took care to fortify the passes leading to Oviedo, and also defended the eastern border zone (Castilla) with castles, on the way by which invaders from Cordoba or the Basque country might be expected to arrive. (This may be a popular etymology for the origin of Castille; yet it seems more satisfactory than those explanations drawn from prehistory or archaeology, which are apt to land an inquirer in serious contradictions.) It was then that the various Christian assaults against the Moslem power became so successful that prophets (e.g. the author of the Chronica Albeldensis) were heard proclaiming the “reconquest” and restoration of the Visigothic kingdom. In regard to the language of the north, there are no botanists or other expert witnesses to help us. The earliest local words are found in Latin documents: wills, bequests. 84 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN conveyances, from the ninth century onwards. Though the language is Latin — and formal, legal Latin at that — a sur- prising number of words occur which are no longer Latin or not Latin at all. It is easy to blame the clerks for their ignorance ; but they had excuses. Sometimes they had to name things for which there was no Latin equivalent, or for which neither they nor their clients knew what the Latin equivalent was. Still, it was necessary to give the thing its proper name, to call a spade a spade; and so we get a strange local word — a geo- graphical term defining a boundary, for instance — usually Latin in origin but on its way to Romance. The late Latin ALTARIUM was a high-lying meadow, on its way to the modern word otero, through auteiro, outeiro, oteiro, and other forms as well. MAMMULA (breast) was used metaphorically for a rounded hill; a later Spanish form (with the “intrusive” B) was Mamblas. CAPITUM, which Isidore of Seville used equally with CAPUT for head, appears geographically as cabeza and cahezo. Sometimes the clerk gives the word a Latin dress, a Latin spelling, but one which recalls his own pronuncia- tion. He writes abelia, ovelia, conelium (for bee, sheep, rabbit), not knowing that the real, if late, Latin words were APICULA, OVICULA, CUNICULUM. He may use a case-ending; but when he does so, he shows that he does not know the real Latin word, and is declining a Romance word which he has invented for it. His grammar is not that of Classical Latin, or of Vulgar Latin either. As a rule he dispenses with all case-endings except one: an objective case something like the ablative, and makes all prepositions govern it, regardless of whether they express “state” or “motion” or other complications of the schools. The clerks may sometimes have been writing Latin as it was actually spoken when the language was falling to pieces under the Visigoths. That has been suggested; but on the whole it is unlikely, though ancient vulgarisms may be reflected or echoed. As a rule, the language actually spoken by the lawyer’s clients only shows through the “barbarous” Latin of the docu- ment, which, from its very nature, must be formal, con- ventional and traditional. In 822, in the document from San Salvador de Ona already mentioned, we find the phrase AD face DE VILLA; in 967, it PRIMITIVE CASTILIAN 85 is IN alfoce DE Onie VILLA (the al- perhaps through Mozarabic influence). A document from the monastery of Silos (919) refers to the fosce ANGUSTA UNDE VENIT AQUA DE Caraco. Foz, hoz, is equivalent to FAUCES, jaws; and so to a narrow valley. The document of 822 also mentions ILLA BUSTILLA (the little garden, with ILLA as definite article) XX ET III airas (for eras), and the donation is made PRO REMEDIO ANIME MEE VEL DE MEOS gasalianes, Latinized Gothic (?) for “retainers”. A better example comes from Carrion de los Condes in Old Castille. The date is 980. It should be particularly noticed that though the donors are evidently devout Christians, both the man and his brother and all the witnesses have names that are Arabic. Only the wife has a Christian name: Speciosa. The Latin is typical. HEC EST MEMORIA QUI FACIMUS EGO Abo- hamor UNA PARITER CUM UXOR MEA NOMINE Speciosa ET jermano MEO Zalama PRESBITER . . . NOSTRA ECCLESIA VOCABULO SANCTA MARIA QUI EST SIT A IN NOSTRO TERMING VEL CENSUI NOSTRO . . . CUM sernas PRENOMINATAS . . . una serna que EST SUB kareira que vadi de Kastrela a Fonte Pudela CUM SUO pozo ET SUO prado ET FIET SE IN ILLA LACONA ET JNILLO aroio . . . kareira que veni de ILLAS eiras . . . ADILLO pradol We notice first the use oi jermano {germano, and the modern Spanish hermand) instead of FRATER; this last word already meant a monk. There are local words: serna sown field, kareira {carrerd) road, pozo well, LACONA {lagmia) lake, aroio (arroyo) ditch, eira (era) threshing-floor. ILLO and ILLA are already definite articles. In spite of the syntax, MEMORIA QUI . . . QUI EST SIT A IN . . . qui vadi de . . . qui veni de . . . ET FIET SE . . . have already become conventional legal phraseology. The use of Arabic names in Christian Spain by both principals and witnesses need not be surprising; it had begun (we saw) in the time of the revolt of Omar ibn Hafsun 86 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN (Chapter IV) and went on for nearly two hundred years. There , is a pastoral epistle from the Bishop of Leon (874) witnessed in this manner ; and a judgement of the king in council delivered at Astorga in 878 is confirmed by ten persons all with Arabic names. Several more occur in documents before 900, and in the tenth century such instances are numerous; most docu- ments are witnessed in that way. Arabic names are used by priests, deacons, abbots and abbesses. None of them apparently can read or write, or even sign their names ; but they make their marks in the appropriate place opposite their names written by the lawyer’s clerk: The names include Abeiza 926, Domno Melic 929, Zanom 937, Abogalebh PRESBYTER 940, Domno Hiccam de Valcavato 962. Among the abbesses are Hamama and Habba cognomento Leokadia, Le6n 982; monks Johannes cognomento Zaide, Le6n 1000, PRATER Abdela, Mutarraf, Montakem, Cazeme, Abol- balite, Pelagius cognomento Zulaiman, 990. Official persons have names of the same kind, e.g. judges. Vistremirus is Gothic, but the cognomen, Hateo is Arabic, Leon 915; Ebrahem iben Zeilen, Ziubar, Abaiub lUDEX arbicier, 941-958; Froila (a man’s name. Gothic) Abaiubiz (Arabic, with a Gothic suffix) 967-970; Gutinus Zelimiz, , 970-977. The alguaciles (constables) include Datnun FILIUS Arbori, 878; Eben Abdella, 972, and Abaiub iben Alkama, citario (commissary) 942; Munius Aiub CUBICULARIUS testis (treasurer) 945 ; Abolazan Hanniz COMES (count) 957. In the eleventh century we find Theodomiro cognomento Muza, 1014. Many of these Arabic names used by Christians can be found in documents concerning landowners and cattle-breeders and their witnesses in Leon and Castille. Between 902 and 1000 many people had family names, Latin or Gothic, followed by a cognomen which was Arabic: Recemirus cognomento Abolfeta 902, Vermudo Aboleza 940, Hoba et Telle 954, Speraindeo Algalebe 954, Gomez Abdella 960, Fortunius iben Garseani 962, Cixila Abubabze, 960 and 970, Joannes Alatar 970, Vassalle el Haliffa 976.^ Some of these names of persons live on in place-names today: Villa Hatteme, mentioned in 1078, has become Villatima; PRIMITIVE CASTILIAN 87 Villa de Ziti (Cid) Halhaire, Villacidalar; Puteo Abdurama 946, Pozadurama 1096, is now Pozo de Urama; Villa de Motarrafe 943, Castro Mutarraf 1073, has become Castro Mudarra.® It should be clearly understood that these people with Arabic names were not Moslems, or even necessarily Mozarabic Christians from the south. They were “free” Christians of the north, subjects of the King of Leon; for the fact was that the Moslem way of life, or some aspects of it, held considerable attractions, even to men living in a Christian country. Another tenth-century Latin document, with local words in it, is a list of cheeses, kesos (in modern spelling it would be quesos) given out by a monk in a monastery in return for work done by the brothers. The place is Leon; the date 980. NODICIA DE kesos que ESPICIT PRATER Semeno IN LABORE DE FRATRES: jnilo BACELARE DE CIRKA SANCT JUSTE, kesos.y.; jnilo ALIO DE APATE, ii. kesos] en que puseron organo, kesos. iiii . . . jnila VINE A MAJORE . . . ila mesa. . . .^ NODICIA is NOTICIA as pronounced at the time, the T becoming voiced and sounding D in ordinary speech. In APATE the opposite has happened; he is referring with ultra- correction to the abate, the abbot. Inilo and ila are definite articles, from ILLE; ALIO is “property”, as in hidalgo (or hijodalgo): son of something, not somebody; VINE A is on the way to viha', MENS A has become mesa. The brother’s name Semeno, is equivalent to Jimeno. Besides the early private documents and the later public charters there is another site for excavating the old language: vocabularies and glosses. The glosses, in this instance, are words, generally in Romance, written over Latin words in a MS., or else in the margin. Though as a rule, glossaries are little more than lists of words, they occasionally give a complete sentence. The following prayer from the Glosas Emilianenses contains the earliest complete sentences in Spanish Romance. The date is about 992. 88 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN (Text) Cono- ajutorio de nuestro dueno, (Modern Spanish) Con el ayuda de nuestro dueno (Translation) With the help of our Lord, dueno Christo, dueno Salbatore, qual dueno yet* ena don Cristo, don Salvador, el cual dueno es en la Lord Christ, Lord Saviour, the which Lord is in (the) honore, e qual duenno tienet ela mandatione honra, y el cual dueno tiene el poder honour, and the which Lord hath (the) power cono Patre, cono Spiritu Sancto, enos sieculos delos con el Padre, con el Espiritu Santo en los sighs de los with the Father, with the Holy Ghost, for ever . and sieculos. Facanos, Deus omnipotes, tal serbitio fere, sighs. Hdganos, Dios omnipotente, tal servicio hacer, ever. Do unto us, God Almighty, such service (to do), ke denante ela sua face gaudioso seyamos.-j- Amen. que delante la su faz gozosos seamos. Amen. that before thy face joyous we may be. Amen. The author of this, the first written text in Spanish, was a Basque; two of his glosses are in his own language. He was a native of the wine-growing district of La Rioja; but the school of writing to which he belonged was the Monastery of San Millan at Berceo, that of another contemporary “glossary”, the Ghsas Silenses (now in the British Museum) and birthplace of the first Castilian poet whose name is known: Gonzalo de Berceo, born about 1200. We notice how the ILLO and ILLA of the definite article derived from ILLE have been reduced, not merely to el and la as in modern Spanish, but to o, a and os as in modern Portuguese: con-o, en-a, en-os\ but ela when not in combination. The third person singular of the verb “to be” is yet', it occurs elsewhere as iet, with the second person ies, an *MS. get, tMS. segamos. PRIMITIVE CASTILIAN 89 example of the tendency to form accented diphthongs from Latin short vowels, also seen in dueno for DOMINU-, tienet for TENET. Other glosses in this collection show forms which are even more primitive: uamne and uemne for HOMINE, for instance. The Latin text has QUI TALIS EST and the monk has written elo uamne ensiui {Illo homine in sibi) Again, when the Latin has NON SE CIRCUMVENIAT he explains it by nonse cuempetet and for the Latin NON PER SPECIEM NEC QUE PER VELAMEN he puts non quemo eno spillu noke non quemo eno uello {no como en el espejo ni que {no) como en el velo). For TU IPSE he gives tueleisco: TU ILLE IPSE, like the phrase in Plautus, IN ILLISCE HABITAT AEDIBUS, though the comparison is not perhaps a fair one. But with a disguised Latin word like INCOLOMES, he is ready with a plain Castilian phrase, sanos et salbos (safe and sound) ; and he translates INTELLIGITE like the translators of the Bible into Basic English: intelligentja abete, “have knowledge”. The language of the Glosas, Menendez Pidal observes, is not the same as that of the legal documents of the tenth century. The notaries preserve a number of archaisms, some of which may have come from the time of Vulgar Latin ; but the monkish glossatores show a much more decided intention to write in Romance. It is only at the end of the twelfth century that some notaries begin to use a later Romance to the same extent ; and by that time the Castilians had arrived, and the Cid had even reached Valencia on the Mediterranean. Originally the “county” of Castille had been the east end of the Kingdom of Oviedo up against the Basque country. The traveller of today in the train which climbs painfully through the pass of Pancorbo and roars down the other side should 90 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN think of the early Castilians, precariously defending their little corner, their pequeno rincon, against Basques and Moslems and Leonese. While other Christian points of resistance were rising like so many Balkan states against Islam, the Castilians had the whole world against them; and when Ordono III (914 — 924) moved his court from Oviedo to Leon, and the Castilian counts protested, they were seized and murdered. It was not only the danger and expense of having to go so far for justice ; Leon and Asturias still used the Visigothic Code which Castille had abandoned. The old Germanic customs were often barbarous; but as a basis for the administration of customary law they gave more scope to judges than the hard and fast rules of the Visi- gothic Forum Judicum, or Fuero Juzgo.* Outside Castille, the Visigothic Code was still the law, not only in Leon, but also in Aragon, the Catalan “Marca Hispanica” and among the Mozarabes; by breaking with it the Castilians showed for the first time their fearless and anarchic independence. The moving spirit of Castilian separatism was the restless and by no means entirely legendary Count Fernan Gonzalez, who, having united various smaller counties in his person, found himself between the millstones of Leon and Navarre, and then had to bear the full force of the Moslem attacks in the latter part of the tenth century. One of his successors. Count Sancho Garcia (995-1017) was more effective against the Moslem power, now weakened and divided. He even reached Cordoba in a raid; while at home he was known as el de los buenos fueros, from the encouragement he gave to local custom- ary legislation. Yet he seemed, to those who knew him, typic- ally “arabized”; and is described, by an Arabic historian, seated on a pile of cushions in his tent, dressed in the Moorish fashion, and using his persuasive eloquence on a deputation of notables from a Moslem town. “And he was,” the writer continues, “distinguished among all the princes of the Christians for the clearness of his understanding, the width of his knowledge and the effectiveness of his spoken word.” Even to Moslem ears his Castilian seemed clearer and more decided than the indistinct ‘ajamiya of other Christians. The speech which served to grace the eloquence of Count Sancho Garcia was a later development of the rough language PRIMITIVE CASTILIAN 91 of the Glosas Silenses of the time of Fern an Gonzalez; but by that time (Menendez Pidal thinks) poetry and history were already being written in it and smoothing some of the rough- nesses away. There are no real examples of how this primitive Castilian had progressed; only its Latinized variety, used by the notaries, is to be read in the archives of the monastery of Ona, founded by Sancho Garcia himself in 1011. To the words already mentioned may be added: fossateira (“call-up”) alongside the newer fossadera, lomba and portiello instead of the later loma and portillo. One of the striking things about Castilian is the loss of the Latin F, replaced — ^through the influence of Basque, or Iberian — by an H, formerly aspirated-hmt now rntrtev-This- change was l{miteBraf~&st tO" the smaH Castilian region in the Cantabrian mountains, which gradually imposed its way of speaking on its neighbours. FABULARE became hahlar, FACTUM hecho. F was preserved, however, before the diphthong UE: FORTE fuerte, and for different reasons in fondo, fine, fiel. But the change is still going on. The substitution of H for F happens irregularly, in territories assimilated afterwards, where, in proportions changing from village to village, words are still preserved with the initial F. This applies particularly in Upper Aragon, and shows that the penetration of Castilian is not regular or consis- tent, but happens word by word. In one place the change has affected one word and in another place another. The word ferrada, for instance — a bucket of a particular shape — is dying out as buckets of that shape disappear; but in another village the old word is applied to a new form of bucket which has replaced the original one. In general, the words which have preserved the F are those most bound up with country ways. The F also turned into H in Gascony, where a native language of Basque or Iberian type was once spoken, and the change may have been due to the substratum of the older language.® Yet a curious fact from inscriptions in Italy may indicate that the change from F to H was a phonetic tendency, independent of the substratum, and may also have taken place in the opposite direction. At Praeneste (Palestrina) the Roman name HORATIA was pronounced FORATIA, HELENA FELENA. Again, the Faliscan dialect had FIRCUS for HIRCUS, 92 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN FOSTIS for HOSTIS; though on the other hand it had HABA (like the Spanish) for the Latin FABA. Other changes of consonants from Latin to Castilian are no less striking. J and G are lost before unaccented E and I: GERMANU(M) hermano, JANUARIU(M) enero, JUNGERE uncir. The I remains in other words, but with the sound of Y, not the aspirated jota. Groups of initial consonants are usually preserved ; but P or C followed by L give rise to the character- istic LL: PLANU(M) llano, CLAMARE llamar. T and C between vowels are affected: VITA vida, SECURU(M) seguro, PROFECTU(M) provecho\ while D and G between vowels tend to disappear: LAUD AT loa (but VADU(M) vado, NIDU(M) nid6)\ LIGARE liar, LEGALE(M) leal (but NEGARE negar and PLAGA llaga). MAGISTRU(M) has become maestro, SIGILLU(M) sello, AESTIVU(M) Groups of consonants have complex reactions, though sometimes there is no change: SERPENTE(M) serpiente, but URSU(M) oso, SENSU(M) LUMBU(M) lomo, PALUMBU(M) palomo. CT became first YT and then CH: FACTU(M) feyto hecho, DIRECTU(M) direyto derecho, LECTU(M) lecho, CULTELLU(M) cuchillo, SALTU(M) soto, ALTERU(M) otro. FILIU(M) changes first to fillo-, then yiyo, with the J as in French; hijo, with an aspirated H and change of the French J to French CH or English SH; and at length to the modern hijo, with no audible H (except in Andalucia) and the Scotch CH for the J. MULIERE(M) led to muller, muger to mujer', MULTU(M) from muito to mucho', HISPANIA became Espaha, SENIORE(M) sehor, RADIO rayo, though the word radio has returned to Spanish for broadcasting. A metathesis (consonants changing places) explains CAPITULU(M) cabildo; an intrusive B, HUMERU(M) homhro. The Z proceeding from the Latin -SCI in the agricultural implement, ASCIATUM, a heavy hoe, became azada', and (mentioned before) the diphthong disappears from the Mozarabic iielyo (OCULUM), noite (NOCTEM) to give the eminently Castilian ojo and noche. These pronunciations are nowadays among the features which most clearly separate Spanish from the other Romance languages; but in the beginning they were confined to a corner PRIMITIVE CASTILIAN 93 of Old Castille. The characteristic jota (the Scottish CH) and the lisped S, Z and C before a vowel hardly appear before the seventeenth century. Some ancient Castilian pronunciations — like the F converted into H or dropped, and the suffix -illo for -iello — did not spread far afield until much later. They sounded too rustic for polite ears. But in the eleventh century and even in the twelfth, Castilian had not achieved that clarity in the vowels which now distinguishes it from otherwise richer languages like French and Portuguese. It had not, Menendez Pidal considers, reached the full balance of syllables in the regular alternation of vowels and consonants, nor the smooth- ness and simplicity of its consonantal groups ; while even in the first half of the thirteenth century, speakers were not always sure which vowels to use in the final syllables. The trumpet sonority, which now echoes in a Castilian phrase, only came to it gradually. The open E and O of Vulgar Latin (short E, AE and short 0 of the classical language) became the Castilian diphthongs IE and UE: TERRA tierra, BONU(M) hueno. Then the diph- thong IE (with the accent on the second vowel) was reduced to I, while UE generally became E: CASTELLU(M) castiello Castillo. Closed E and O of Vulgar Latin (the long E, short I, OE, long O and short U of classical) remained E and O: ALIENU(M) gave ajeno, PILU(M) pelo, FOEDU(M) feo, NOMINE nomhre. A, I and U remain: MATRE(M) madre, SCRIPTU(M) escrito, ACUTU(M) agudo. A, followed by 1 or E, closed to E: LAICU(M) lego, BASIU(M) heso, LACTE leche. In the same way. A, followed by U, closed to O: CAUSA cosa, TAURU(M) toro. Unaccented vowels frequently dropped: LEGALITATE(M) lealtad, ELEEMOSYNE limosna, RE- CUPERARE recohrar, DOMINICU(M) Domingo, SEMITA semda sejida, CIVITATE(M) cibdad ciudad. The progress of Castille in the last third of the eleventh century, by the advance to Toledo and into Andalucia, brought a great extension of the area in which Castilian was spoken. Before, it had been confined to the country round Burgos; but now, as it spread to the south, it dislodged the softer and more Portuguese-sounding Mozarabic dialects, and interrupted the gradual transition which there had been before, between the 94 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN west of the Peninsula and the east, between Leonese and Aragonese. Spanish dialects are now isolated and impoverished; they have nothing to be compared to the vivid and continued existence of the various dialects in Italy, nor have they a dialect literature of their own. It should be unnecessary at this time of day to remark that Catalan is not a dialect of “Spanish”. Nor, in view of the research and controversy of the last thirty years, can it be up- held that Catalan belongs on the contrary to an entirely different branch of the western Romance languages. That view first took concrete, provocative shape in 1922 with Griera’s ' hypothesis that there were two “cultural currents” which, from the beginning, had brought different forms of Vulgar Latin to the Peninsula; one of these came from Southern Italy via } Sicily and North Africa (with South Italic dialects) and con- stituted the basis of Spanish and Portuguese, while the other j (with North Italic dialects) came through Southern Gaul and laid the foundations of Catalan. Catalan therefore was to be placed with the Gallo-Romanic languages, with French and Provencal, and not with the Ibero- (or Afro-) Romanic Spanish and Portuguese. Griera was dividing the Romance languages into North and South, instead of East and West. This theory received some hard knocks from Menendez Pidal’s Origenes and the work of Amado Alonso; but there is still something to be said for the idea of Romanization reaching the Peninsula in two separate streams of culture.® Beside the old centre of Romanization in the south-west, there may have been a second centre in the Valley of the Ebro, in close con- nexion with Gaul and Northern Italy. From the beginning there were different routes for the diffusion of Roman ideas in the Peninsula; and while the cultural centre in Baetica, remote and yet better educated, had spread a form of Latin inclined to archaism over the west and centre of the country, the Province of Tarraco, more often crossed by travellers and inclined to new turns of speech, carried Romanization up the Ebro to part of the Northern Meseta until it met the obstinate resistance of Cantabrians and Basques. Romanization was late in coming to Cantabria and practically nil in the Basque country; and this explains why, in the north of the Peninsula as PRIMITIVE CASTILIAN 95 in Gaul, the activity of the older languages of the substratum lasted longer than they did elsewhere, and also why Castilian and French are languages full of originality and innovation while Provenfal, Catalan and Valencian — ^which shows character- istics of both Catalan and Castilian — are so much more alike though the substrata are very different.'^ So great an authority as Meyer-Liibke thought part of Griera’s material perfectly sound; for naturally there must have been linguistic relations between Southern Italy, Sicily, Roman North Africa and Spain. But there were none the less relations between the whole of Spain and the South of France. There are points of agreement between the Romance of Languedoc and Gascony and that of the Peninsula ; and there is also a curious likeness between the vocabularies of modern South Italian dialects, Sardinian, Catalan, Spanish and Portuguese. There is also the use of tengo and its equivalents as an auxiliary, an amusing reminder of which was given by a Neapolitan, protesting the excellence of his Italian: Tengo un asento completamente toscano. At any rate, the accurate new methods of the Swiss philologists, especially the com- parative vocabularies, are opposed entirely to the idea of a distinct form of “Afro-Romanic”.® To make a division, a linguistic frontier, right across Spain between a southern, an eastern and a north-western “Romania” is hardly possible. All the neighbouring languages in the Pyrenees have features in common; Gascon, Proven9al, Aragonese, and Catalan have a special relationship. The position of Catalan, however, intermediate between “Gallo- Romania” and “Ibero- Romania”, is still not clear. Already in the eighth and ninth centuries, Catalan was beginning to appear in the attempts to unify the reconquest-movements in the Pyrenees among those Ibero-Romans who had been driven out by the Moslems, and were living under Carolingian influence to the north of the Pyrenees.® Catalan, from medieval times, has had a characteristic literature of its own, which has survived all attempts — even those of the present dictatorial regime — to suppress it. In the eighteenth century, after the war of the Spanish Succession, Catalan “went underground” in ballads and folk-songs; at 96 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN present, its supporters are theoretically underground, but they publish luxurious and beautifully printed Catalan translations of Shakespeare, Milton and the classics, while the Catalan- speaking monks of Montserrat, when cautioned by the authorities, blandly reply that they are speaking in Latin. The origin of the spoken and literary language of the rest ' of Spain and the Spanish-speaking world is due to the Cas- tilian wedge, driven down from the north and splitting the common heritage of Peninsular speech all the way from the Douro to the Straits of Gibraltar. Spanish, all the world over, continues the way of speaking of a far corner of Cantabria. ; Meanwhile, rivalry and revenge in the northern Christian states produced the stuff of epic; and if the story told among the Mozarabes of Roderick, the la^ of the Goths, failed as an epic (though it led to some good late ballads), the north had ! the Seven Infantes of Lara, Fernan Gonzalez, and the Infante Don Garcia who met his death at Leon on his wedding-day. These epics are lost ; but, to judge by indications in the prose chronicles and ballads, they were full of exact historical details, showing — like the Poema de mio Cid a hundred years after — that they must have arisen when the events were still fresh in people’s memory. The County of Castille became a kingdom in 1032, the first king (Ferdinand, or Fernando I) afterwards inheriting the Kingdom of Leon as well, while there were complex dynastic relationships with the Kingdom of Navarre. Ferdinand’s reforming energy was continued by his son, Alfonso VI (1072-1109), the Cid’s king, memorable not only for his capture of Toledo but for his statesmanship in proclaiming himself “Sovereign of the two religions”. If only his tolerant and far-sighted example had been followed by his successors! PRIMITIVE CASTILIAN 97 ^M. Gomez Moreno, Iglesias mozdrabes : arte espanol de los sighs IX a XI, Madrid, 1919, pp. 105-110. . -R. Menendez Pidal, Origenes, 3rd. ed., Madrid, 1950. 5J. Hubschmid, Studien zur iberoromanischen Wortgeschichte und Ortsna- menkunde. Bol. de Filologia, XII, 127-130, Lisbon, 1951. The Arabic mutarrafis thus the origin of the name Mudarra: both the character in Spanish ballads and the author of a sixteenth-century book of lute-music. ■•Unamuno observed, more than fifty years ago, that although FORUM JUDICUM is equivalent to “Fuero of the Judges”, its title was not trans- lated into Spanish but transformed phonetically. “Passing into Romance, the genitive plural JUDICUM became juzgo, the word representing a Latin case which has not got into Castilian. This fact, this humble little fact, how full of history it is! For it shows us that the title of the code was not translated, but went in Latin from mouth to mouth when Latin was no longer spoken, like something that was popular and well known among those who did not speak it, among humble people; ior juzgo from JUDICUM is a derivation that is popular.” En tomo al casticismo, Obras completas, Vol. I, p. 64; Ed. Residencia de Estudiantes, Madrid, 191'^-% ®The work of Professor Elcock is a notable contribution to this T subject. ®H. Meier, Ensaios de filologia romdnica, Lisbon, 1948, p. 18. ’M. Sanchis Guamer, Introduccion a la historia lingutstica de Valencia. Valencia, 1948, pp. 54-55. ®A. Alonso, Estudios linguisticos, 1951, p. 58. See also G. Rohlfs, Scavi linguistici nella Magna Grecia. Halle-Roma, 1933; and M. L. Wagner, La lingua sarda, Bern, 1951. *H. Meier, Die Entstehung der romanischen Sprachen und Nationen. Frankfurt am Main, 1941, p. 87. G I PART TWO CHAPTER VII MEDIEVAL SPANISH Spanish philology has sometimes been made to look like a mathematical science, though no one who had really studied science, would be deceived by the symbols. For the true scholar — Menendez Pidal, for instance, or Amado Alonso — philology stands, in relation to language, like harmony or counterpoint to music: an essential technique but an artistic one. Music has been defined as the art of thinking with sounds ; laiiguag.q the art of think ing \yit h^ords . The history of the Spanish language sKould enable u's^ Tollow the thought of its writers from the earliest times by a study of their words, forms and con- structions, beginning with the medieval notary drawing up a document in barbarous Latin and helping himself out with country expressions. Next we have the minstrel poet of Mio Cid, consciously choosing his words to make the audience feel both the Cid’s nobility of character and firmness, and the ridiculous vanity of the Infantes who think they have been hard-headed realists by marrying the Cid’s daughters for their money. The Cid ?^ere a fit subject for medieval epic. Then came Alfonso el Sabiq, Alfonso the Sage, who cam justly be called the inventoc-of Spanish prose, because he made it talk history, law, astronomy, precious stones, religion, games, and other things ; not (as the poet Berceo put it) “in the language which a man usually speaks to his neighbour”, but in the, language a man ought to speak to his neighbour^ "'fb' xnaEe' it quite clear what he was sayingT AIfoi^o’s^rqsej;;3?gishaU see, was largely based on translation flout ft stood for the model 99 100 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN of Castilian down to the sixteenth century, when (beginning once more from translation) Renaissance Spanish prose was invented, and has been among the greatest instruments of literary expression there have ever been. Returning, however, to the Middle Ages, we must note, first, that with medieval prose-style went medieval pronuncia- tion. It, too, lasted down to the sixteenth century, and the language was richerj^theivin sounds than it is today. There were •jio less than five sibilants which have sinceHisappeared: SH, the French and English J’s, TS and DZ (spelt x, g or j, 9 and z). An English Z was still to be heard (the S in “rose”, “rays” or “rise”), though now it only exists, in Spanish, in combinations like mismo and Unamuno’s desnacer: to be “un-born” or “de-born”, instead of to die. But originally the S sounded in this way between any two Spanish vowels; the modern Spanish “sharp” S was spelt SS. Fazer, to do, and vezino neighbour, seem to have been pronounced “fadzer'’ and “vedzino”. B was as in English; but U and V were probably “bilabial”, like the Spanish B and V between vowels today. Ir is sometimes said that medieval literat-'.re shows no RftHRp of inHjyjfliial ^tyle . Castilians, the rnomehF^ffi^'Tegin to write anything down, prove this to be untrue. The lost epic poems which have left their shadows on the prose of the Chronica Najerensis, and even the lines of their verse embedded in the “Third General Chronicle”, are told not only from a Castilian point of view but in a manner which experience shows to be peculiarly Castilian. The tenth-century story of the Seven Infantes of Lara, betrayed to the Moors through the jealousy of an aunt; the death of the Infante Don Garcia at Leon; the imprisonment and escape of Count Fernan Gonzalez, with Dona Sancha carrying him on her back; the “traitorous countess” who starved her husband’s war-horse so that it fell under him and he was killed, but who was after all the mother of the great Sancho Garcia; the death of King Sancho II before the walls of Zamora in 1072. Guarte, guarte, rey don Sancho . . . the ballad begins: “Guard you, guard you. King Don Sancho.” All t hese stories are told, with notable touches of poetry, in the jpmse o fthe Chronica Naiere nsi^ of about 116Q >-Thev are taken from the MEDIEVAL SPANISH 101 minstrel tradition of earlier times, and go echoing down the later ballads. In the eleventh century they may have existed as short historical poems, “spreading the news of great events and prompting the political ideals which impassioned Castilians”, Menendez Pidal had said. They are lost epics, which now and then can be excavated from prose chronicles; and they made possible, half a century later, the Poema de mio Cid, a work which, in its development and perfect adequacy of style, postulates not only a previous epoch in which epic poetry had been practised in Spain, but a writer with a personal style of his own. The likeness to Carolingian epic has probably been exaggerated. We find, it is true, gallicisms in the language of Mio Cid\ but many of the same gallicisms have become ordinary words in English: mensaje message, omenaje homage, usaje usage, palafre palfrey, vergel garden, cosiment pleasure, ardiment ardour, xdmed Samite. Even among the Mozarabes some gallicisms had appeared: amilon (later almidon, as if from the Arabic) starch, manjar food, and — a doubtful case — J forma] e cheese. In the century after the Cid (whose very name is Arabic: sid, for sayyid, lord; sidi my lord) Mozarabic and Oriental ways began to be replaced by new ways from western Europe. The twelfth century saw the suppression of the Mozarabic rite in church, with its traditional music and by now indecipherable i ^notation; the restoration of classical T.,atifr^by the Ciuj-iiaT®^ (in spite of St. Odo, who thought Virgil a vase full of vermin), and the arrival of cavaliers and cultivators from France. There is a certain likeness between the manner of early Castilian poetry and French; but that does not indicate imitation so much as “a vague community of Romance phraseology”. The epic style had its cliches: the pennons on the lances which rose in the air and then fell, the riderless horses, the blood up to the elbow . . . for these sights were the commonplaces of a medieval battle- field, and were not unnaturally described in the same way. They do not necessarily prove Carolingian influence. In feeling, too, this primitive Castilian poetry has much that is purely indigenous ; and that, regarded in its stylistic and linguistic aspects, today looks very curious. There is the word huehos, for instance: 102 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN huehos me serie/por toda mi compana . . . nos huebos avemos en todo/de ganar algo . . . ca huehos me lo ho pora estos . . . mucho es huebos . . . fata dentro en Medina/denies quanto huebos les for. The word obviously means “need” — ^not “eggs” (huevos) as the unwary reader might be tempted to think — and is in fact a normal Castilian phonetic change from the Latin OPUS. Huehos me serie and huehos me lo he are equivalent to OPUS EST MIHI. In the same way, Italian has uopo. The poetry comes out in the most ordinary expressions, most naturally used; the Cid and Jimena part “like the nail from the quick” {comma la uha de la came)', and when, suspecting no treachery, he hands his daughters over to the Infantes of Carrion (to whom the King has given them in marriage), he can only say that they are taking away the very stuff of his heart, alia me levades/las telas del corazon. Again, llorando de los ojos, “weeping from (both) his eyes”, must have been a natural and normal expression before it became a conventional one. It is used by Berceo, too, several times in his “Miracles”. The emotion is truly felt. The author’s exact eye for description makes us actually see those grim, mail-clad warriors in an attack; clutching their shields over their hearts,' lowering their long lances with the fluttering pennons, bending down with their faces close to the saddle bow, and driving their horses ruthlessly on with their sharp pointed spurs. To them it was drill; to us it is poetry, for a poet makes us see it happen before our eyes. The author shows himself a poet, too, in his description of a fine morning. Th^ Cid and his men are waiting in ambush outside a small town, ready to rush it the moment the gates are opened. This what they see. (The translation tries to preserve, and indicate, the rhythm of the Spanish.) Ya quie-bran los al-bo- res, y vi-nie la ma- And now the dawn is crdck-ing, and at last came the fia- na. m6rn-ing. MEDIEVAL SPANISH 103 i- xie el sol: Dios que fer-mo- so a- pun-ta- va! Out came the sun: Lord! and how I6ve-ly in his ris-ing ! En Cas-te-j6n to- dos se le- van-ta- van, In Cds-te-jon leav-ing their beds he- hind them, a- bren las puer-tas, de fue- ra sal- to (they) fling wide the front-doors, and leap a- cross the da- van, thresh-old, por ver sus la- vo- res y to- das sus he- re- to see to their sown fields and dll of their own pos- dan- 9 as. ses- sions. To dos son e- xi- dos, las puer- tas a- bier-tas All have gone out now, with the house-doors left 6- pen an de-xa- das. zoide behind them. Scholars have not been very ready to notice that the language of the Poema de mio Cid is sometimes alliterative. To an English or Welsh ear the fact is obvious, not only in a simple case like vinie la mahana, but in todos se levan-tavan t V n t V n por ver sus lavores V r s V r s exidos . . . dexadas X d s X d s These are combined alliterations worthy of Welsh engly- nionl Occasionally the poet achieves a triple alliteration on accented syllables, in the Old English, Norse or Saxon manner: Tres reyes de Arabia te vinieron adorare . . . r r r fust a los infiernos, commo fo tu voluntade. f f f 104 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN What most strikes a Latin reader in the Poema de mio Cid is not only the anarchy in the use of tenses (which, as in the ballads, is often due to the need for assonance), but also “the spontaneous and disorderly vivacity. . . . The words can be put in any order, according to the impulse of imagination or feeling”. These are qualities which have not yet been lost in modern English, though we carmot use them to the same extent as the Mozarabic minstrel of Medinaceli. His poem, being an epic, is well provided with epic “tags” ; but critics when calling attention to them have seldom noticed how effective they can be. It was not merely that the audience liked to hear something it had heard before. There was the delightful and original idea of making the villains of the piece into comic characters, and making them become villains because they had been made ridiculous. The minstrel knew it, and so did the audience; and the man who wrote the poem down provided language to fit the occasion. There is the elder brother of the Infantes, Asur Gonzales, who came into the Cortes flushed with wine; Ver-me- jo vie- ne, ca e- ra al- mor- za- do. Red-faced he rolled in, for he had had his din-ner. trailing his ermine on the ground, and insulting the Cid for being a miller and making the usual charge for grinding his neighbours’ corn. Better still is the tongue-tied retainer. Per Vermudez — they nicknamed him Per Mudo, “dumb Peter” — ^who, when at last he can get a word out, splutters a long and incoherent speech, in language which is almost unintelligible; his u’s become o’s, and for huhe “I had” he says \of. He lets the cat out of the bag about a horse which one of the ^Infantes was supposed to have taken from a Moor; r ' Did el ca- va- llo, to- ved- lo en po- ri-dad. I gave you the horse, I kept that a-houtyou a secret. and finally flings at him; Lengua sin manos! — quomo o- sas fablar? You tongue without hands ! — How do you dare to speak? MEDIEVAL SPANISH 105 The language of the speakers is seldom typical Castilian, either of Medinaceli or the court of Alfonso VI. The minstrel knew it; but the phrases were often good in themselves, and expressed very well what he wanted to say at the particular moment of the story. When, to insult the Cid, the unnatural husbands have beaten their wives with their belts, kicked them with their spurs, and left them half naked in the oak wood of Corpes, the minstrel exclaims: Qual ven- tu- ra se- rie, si as- so- mas, ess- What, oh what would {not) be, if now he came, this ora el Cid Roy Di- az! moment, the Cid Roy Di- az ! The Poema de mio Cid may be less grandiose than the Chanson de Roland', but it is law-abiding, and at the same time more real, more human, with an emotion more directly accessible to people of all times. An image like las telas del corazon (already mentioned) was in the language of every man and every woman. The Poem shows, too, that medieval Spanish tolerance, personified in the “Sovereign of the men of the two religions”, and so different in that way from the fanatics of later ages. The Cid himself has the direct simplicity of the very great. The nearest to him in our time has been General Smuts. Berceo, writing a hundred years later between 1220 and 1250, is definitely Castilian in spite of the quantities of Latin words which he has imported, and the corrupt readings introduced into the text by non-Castilian scribes. He has no French polish. The source of his “Miracles” is an anonymous Latin collection, now at Copenhagen. For the lives of his saints he used local, written documents. He claims to have invented nothing; when he cannot decipher the Latin, he says so. But his Stories have an inimitable freshness, and his highly developed sense of allegory is interesting for being two generations before Dante. Not only do we find the type of allegory suggested by the performance of a mystery play, but also the type derived from the account of a journey: Santa Oria (i.e. Aurea) taken up 106 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN into heaven in a dream and shown a chair, her own chair waiting for her — and a mysterious other self, “Voxmea”; and it is all described in the simplest language, entirely free from allegorical or theological cliches. He is at his best in what might be called “scenes from clerical life”. The discussion between St. Peter, St. Mary and “Don Cristo”, about what is to be done with the soul of a devout but lecherous monk, might have taken place in Berceo’s own village; and when St. Mary tells the story of the Passion, she is a Castilian countrywoman telling the story as it might have happened to her own son. Berceo’s freshness and charm are due mainly to his lan- guage ; his characters are real because of their natural, unashamed country speech of the early thirteenth century. A bishop refers to an illiterate priest as a “whoreson knave” {fijo de la mala putanna), and even the Virgin Mary herself can be pretty abusive at times — ^when, for instance, she whisked away one of her devotees from the very arms of his bride. “So you wanted whiter, wheaten bread, did you?” Berceo evidently imagined “La Gloriosa” to be one of those dark wooden images (from the workshop of St. Luke) at Mont- serrat, El Pilar or Guadalupe. The comparisons, in other respects, are taken from village life: a paralytic woman, a “palsied crone”, lay “mewing like a mangy cat” yazie ella ganiendo como gato sarnoso. Devils, scared by the magic words AVE GRATIA PLENA, vanish like a mist, leaving behind them a soul ready for hell, like a sheep which lies all trussed up: como oveia que iaze ensarzada. The devil himself appeared to a priest who had been drinking; he took the form of a raging bull, but La Gloriosa made passes at him with her cloak, menazoli la duenna con la falda del manto. The bull was tame at once. The twenty-first miracle describes how La Gloriosa came down with two angels and performed an operation on the abbess of a convent the night before an episcopal visitation. In the twenty-fourth miracle, Teofilo, having sold his soul to the devil (that he may go on being chap- lain to the bishop and au fait with all the intrigues of the diocese), is taken to see the huest antigua, HOSTIS ANTIQUA, the host of departed spirits; estantiguas, scarecrows or frights MEDIEVAL SPANISH 107 is the modern word. Janet, in the Border Ballad of “Tam Lin”, had much the same experience, Berceo, like his contemporary St. Francis of Assisi, is “a minstrel of the Lord”, and in the end he thinks his poem (like a minstrel’s) may well be worth a glass of good wine. Bien valdra, como creo, un vaso de bon vino. In the Rioja country, to which Berceo belonged, they know what good wine is. With the anonymous minstrel of Medinaceli who wrote the Poema de mio Cid, and Gonzalo de Berceo, the minstrel of the Lord, telling stories out of Latin books for the edification of the village, the Castilian tongue is already a language with a personality of its own. Another side to that personality appears in the voluminous prose-works written or edited by King Al- fonso the Sage in the latter half of the thirteenth century. They are learned works, not popular; yet the King’s object (Americo Castro holds) was not to latinize, but to raise the level of the living speech of his people, a thing which interested him far more than a word newly imported from Latin. That was done only when it was necessary to give new things new names; and by this means he achieved an extension of the meaning of Castilian words and the introduction of new words into popular speech. “Don Alfonso derived his linguistic impulse from the life around him, which was vigorous and immediate, and not from the idea of a solenrn and infallible past. Later, the age of humanism had a different ideal: the greatest pleasure consisted in doing things which seemed like those of the ancients. The learned monarch, however, did not wish to live or think like Greeks or Romans; he used their knowledge to increase what he knew in his own day, and the languages of the past were transmuted into the lenguaje de Castiella.” His latinisms include correct transferences such as accident, septentrion, animalias, miraglo, signo, canicula the dog-star. 108 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN pritnicia, estivo (AESTIVUS) ; danger, insula, provincia, vicario, regnado, pestilencia. By popular etymology he produced emperio and avangelios gospels ; while estrolomia is a cross between estrella star and astronomia. Some of his neologisms have a distinctly popular air: cueral (for cordial), aforrados (an arabism for libertos), planeta (“estrella andante”, a wandering star in contrast to a fixed one), cavernas (for cavas or cuevas). Occasion- ally he has a picturesque popular etymology, e.g. feudo fief as coming from/e faith. Though the calligraphy and illumination are generally French — the miniatures in The Book of Games are the most conspicuous exception — the literary style is fundamentally Eastern, Arabic or Hebrew, because those were still the languages of learning. Alfonso was not afraid of learning, how- ever heretical its source. He had no scruples about appointing » Jews or Moslems to be his assistants, or to having their char- t acteristic dress or features represented in the exquisite, life-like j miniatures with which some of his MSS are adorned. The Oriental origin of his contributors often shows in the language. ) At first, all the sentences begin with “and” or “but” {et or ca, t the wa and fa of Arabic). The paragraphs are not built up i architecturally as in Latin but added on to one another, like |l the pavilions in a Moorish garden. Some of his books, the I, Lapidario, the Book of Games and Chess, and long passages j from others were translated straight from the Arabic; his i biblical translations, either from the Hebrew or from the j Vulgate in sight of the Hebrew, will be considered in the next ! chapter. Gradually we notice a change. In the prologues which Alfonso wrote himself we can see that his own Castilian is more modern, more settled, than that of his assistants. He even rewrote an earlier version they had made of the Book of the Eighth Sphere, for which tollo las razones que entendio eran he took away the expressions which he thought were sobejanas et dobladas, et que non eran en superfluous and repetitive, and whicfi were not in MEDIEVAL SPANISH 109 Castellano drecho, et puso las otras que entendio que good Castilian, and put in others which he thought compHan, et cuanto en el lenguage, endre^olo, el por complied, and as for the language, he polished it, {he) by sise. himself. This Castellano drecho (DIRECTO) is generally the language of Burgos, with slight concessions to Toledo and Leon. Some expressions from Burgos seemed at first too countrified; the change from F to H {fijo — hijo) or the diminutive in -iello becoming -illo (e.g. Castiella — Castilla). They were still outside the literary language, and only slipped in surreptitiously; but in the end it was the language of Toledo, without the exclusiveness of Burgos, which served as a model for the whole kingdom of Castille. According to a tradition, repeated for centuries after, Alfonso commanded that, on points of law, the meaning of ambiguous words should be determined by the usage of Toledo. Works inspired by Alfonso the Sage went on being produced long after his death, and form the greatest achievement of medieval Spanish. His spelling, his representation of the medieval Castilian sounds, lasted down to the sixteenth century; his prose style and his choice of words are inimitable, and for certain purposes — such as translations from the Bible — the estilo alfonsino, the style of king Alfonso, has never been sur- passed. Even its limitations in vocabulary and the simplicity of its syntax, have been used to advantage. His nephew, Don Juan Manuel, was also a good writer, with a considerable feeling for language and a great sense of style. It was his boast that he had put everything “in the fewest words in which it could be put” {pusolo todo ... en las menos palabras que se podia poner)', and that, in itself, is a definition of style. In this and every other way he was the opposite of his contempor- ary, the Archpriest of Hita, who glories in making people talk — talk without ceasing, as the people of his time in a small country town obviously did talk — ^whether it is the desirable little widow Dona Endrina, the amorous Don Melon, the astute go-between 110 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN Trotaconventos (a character with an immortal name); or Dona Venus, Dona Quaresma (Lady Lent), or the animals in the Oriental fables with which the characters answer each other back. Instead of the fewest possible words, the Archpriest gives the longest lists — of musical instruments, or fish at the maigre banquet of Lady Lent — and if they have Oriental instead of European names, so much the better! Don Juan Manuel quotes two Arabic sayings, and the framework of his stories is Oriental, but it is doubtful whether he spoke any Arabic himself; while the Archpriest reports a conversation — in Arabic — between himself and a Moorish dancer. In the end, she tells him to go away: amshi! (Spanish Arabic for imshi.) In the next century, experiments were made with Spanish prose as well as verse. Writers took up such Latin as they had learnt in order to raise the “meek and lowly Castilian”, La humilde y haxa romance, to something that might be more worthy. Numbers of new words were brought in from Latin; but comparatively few became acclimatized, or kept their place in Spanish. Early Renaissance reading of Latin authors caused writers to try the effect of imitating the most superficial qualities of the classics. There were the inevitable attempts at separating nouns and adjectives, and putting the verb at the end; and — a more interesting experiment — ^the introduction of pairs of words to express what formerly would have been ex- pressed by one. This practice is not in itself reprehensible. As the authors of the English Book of Common Prayer found in the next century, it can be used with great emotional effect; the only rule for employing it is that the second word of the pair must add something to the meaning and effect of the first. The greatest “practitioners of this art” in the fifteenth century were the Marques de Santillana — an amateur — and Juan de Mena, a writer who was almost too professional to be true, and one who, being apparently a convert to Christianity, was only too anxious to show how good a Spanish Christian he was. A recent and admirable study of his language^ compares him to Ennius, a Roman by adoption but full of old Roman feeling, though at the same time a reckless innovator. If the works of Juan de Mena only existed in fragments, like those of Ennius, he might seem a greater poet than he is. Probably his MEDIEVAL SPANISH 111 prose is of more interest than his verse ; and the same would be true of Santillana, if it were not for his enchanting lyrics. Santillana, in his letters, is writing, not perhaps as he actually talked, but as he would have liked to talk; Mena is attempting to ennoble the language by, as it were, melting it down with Latin. He shows a Spenserian affection for the older forms. For instance, by Latinizing the meaning of Spanish words, he turns them back to their original etymological meaning — ^the meaning of the Latin word from which the Spanish was derived. Thus, he calls the Archangel Michael a duke, duque ghrioso, because he was the commander, DUX, of the heavenly host; while Ethics is a duchess, duquesa, because she is the moral leader who guides us. The Spanish igual is the Latin AEQUUS ; therefore, since the Latin AEQUUS also means “benevolent”, the Spanish may be used in that sense too, and the poet beseeches his guide — ^for like all authors of Dantesque allegory he has a guide — ^to look upon him con ojos yguales. The large proportion of archaisms in Juan de Mena, compared with Santillana who was thirteen years older, shows that Mena used archaism deliberately. It is a pleasant surprise, a breath of fresh air, to find him using the familiar chico, for little ; but for him it was an archaism, like ditar to compose or “dictate” verses. From that, however, he goes on to make dictador equivalent to poet, in spite of the fact that the word just before is trihuno\ and it never seems to have occurred to him that anyone would take the word dictador in its ancient — or modern — sense, instead of his own private sense of one who made verses. Prosa, again, he uses like Berceo — and like Ruben Dario — in its medieval, musical sense of a “sequence” and the words which were fitted to it; not in the modern sense of “prose” and not verse. The Latinisms and cultismos of Juan de Mena and Santil- lana have not held their place in the language; while those in the Coplas of Jorge Manrique have done so. “He uses”, someone once said, “the words which never grow old”; and his language has a sense of perpetual youth and modernity because the emotional stresses are all on words which can still bear an emotional stress today: contemplando, presente, con- sumir; invocaciones, ficciones', corporal, temporal, mortal, eternal. 112 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN angelical (in Spanish the accented syllable is the -al)\ mun- danales, infernales, senectud, diligencia, edificios, excelente, infinitos, potentes, innumerables, clemencia, elocuencia, dis- ciplina\ abilidad, dignidad, prosperidad, liber alidad, honor, perdurable (everlasting), oraciones, aflicciones, resistencia, humanos, divinidad . . . words which, by and large, express more of the Castilian, Spanish attitude to life than any others. Spanish prose is at its best when it records the speaking voice. The Archpriest of Talavera, like his poetical fore- runner the Archpriest of Hita, and the best parts of the Celestina, are wonderful demonstrations of what the Spanish speaking voice can accomplish, and how it can be put on paper. The best of Cervantes, too, is a speaking voice. ^Englynion, plural of englyn, a Welsh poetic form. The alliterative structure and rhyme pattern were once imitated for me by a Welsh bard. (There had been a competition on the subject in the Saturday Westminster Gazette.) With jangles of jingles vain — editors j ngl j ngl d t Do tear their hearts in twain d t With an englyn, no English refrain ngl ngl A cymry competes again, cm cm ^Maria Rosa Lida de Malkiel, Juan de Mena, Mexico, 1950. See also I. I. Macdonald, The Coronacidn of Juan de Mena, Hispanic Review, III, 1939; Florence Street, La paternidad del tratado del amor. Bulletin His- panique, LIV, No. 1, 1952. CHAPTER VIII QUEEN ISABEL AND THE SCHOLARS The Renaissance in Spain sometimes took forms which were different from those in other countries, and a medieval disguise was often preserved. We see this in architecture. The plan of the beautiful rose-coloured cathedral at Segovia is “a set of Renais- sance boxes’’;^ but the style and decoration are Gothic. Only the wide, empty spaces on the walls warn us that new ideas are in the air. Sometimes the opposite has happened: Renaissance decoration, in the most beautiful “silversmith’s” tradition (plateresco), seems to have been added afterwards. In poetry, the Italian forms and Petrarchan subjects of sonnet and canzona were acclimatized by Garcilaso de la Vega ; but he made them speak the everyday, conrt language of Toledo. There are nymphs, but they bathe in the Tagus; and the shep- herds are more occupied with modern problems than with sheep. For a time, the traditional Spanish forms provide the most poetical refinements. Much the same is true of political and social institutions. Their spirit began to be infused with the new age ; but they kept their medieval names, and their appearance deceived the states- men in some other countries, so much so, that the question is still asked — particularly in Central Europe — ^whether Spain ever had a Renaissance at all. The apparently united kingdoms of Castille and Aragon seemed, to some statesmen who had hardly been aware of their existence, to burst suddenly on to the stage of European politics ; and the intrusion was resented. Castille and Aragon, however, were well known in the west. The kings of England and France had, for centuries, intervened in Spanish civil wars and taken opposite sides in dynastic quarrels, Chaucer’s knight had fought the heathen at “Algezir” (Algeciras) and been at an early siege of “Gernade” (Granada). The wife of Bath had been on pilgrimage to “Galice at Seint Jame” (Santiago de Compostela); London apprentices drank a 113 H 114 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN sherry called “wine of Lepe”. Shipmen sailed the Spanish coasts: “every cryke in Britayne and in Spayne”. Merchants knew the Spanish markets; a list of imports into the Province of Mino in 1252 includes stuffs named after half the towns in Flanders: ahonville (Abbeville), hrugia (Bruges), chartres, gam (Ghent), gamelin, grisay, ipli and ipri (Ypres), lila (Lille), ruans (Rouen), tornay (Tournai), trinquintane (St. Quintin) and valencina (Valenciennes), along with stamforte from England and palentiana (Palencia) and segohiano (Segovia) from Spain. There were also trade-relations with Aragon: the Catalan merchants of Barcelona and the Aragonese possessions over- seas, Sicily and Naples. That was what Spain had meant in medieval times. It was all altered by one determined woman, Isabel of Castille. Finding herself heir to a kingdom distracted by the civil wars of large landowners and the masters of quasi-religious orders of chivalry, she secretly married Ferdinand of Aragon, one of the best horse- men of the time and reputed to be Macchiavelli’s ideal Prince. Ferdinand and Isabel were known as “the Catholic Kings”, or sovereigns: los reyes catolicos. Though the names given to their institutions were still medieval and theological, their plans and methods were ruthlessly Renaissance. Having founded a well-armed police-force, the “Holy Brotherhood” {Santa Hermandad), they began to recruit a new civil service from the smaller gentry {hidalgos) and men trained at the universities in Roman law {letrados). As the masterships of the Military Orders fell vacant, they appointed themselves to those offices. Then they proclaimed a “Holy war” on the last Moslem stronghold in the Peninsula: Granada; and when the Moslems surrendered (1st January, 1492) — on terms which, whatever the rulers may have intended, the Church did not keep — all the unconverted Spanish Jews from both kingdoms were suddenly rounded up and deported, in circumstances of great hardship and suffering. The expulsion did not lessen the popularity of the “Catholic Kings” in Spain, and a song about it was still remembered eighty years afterwards: Eia, judfos, a enfardelar . . . time to pack up your “fardels”, the Provencal word for the miserable bundle of the homeless refugee. The only QUEEN ISABEL AND THE SCHOLARS 115 Jews allowed to remain were those who had accepted bap- tism — a conversion which was sometimes nominal, although for a time it surprisingly produced some of the great leaders of the Spanish Church, The Jewish converts knew what theology was, and the exquisite agonies of mysticism. Even St. Teresa herself is said to have been descended on both sides, from families of converted Castilian Jews. The conversos were in fact the best brains in the country, and large numbers of these “new Christians” {cristianos nuevos) held positions in the administrative councils. In this, Ferdinand continued the policy of his father, John II of Aragon, finding from experience that wealthy and influential conversos always served him with absolute loyalty. “The success of the crafty old king’s schemes to secure the hand of Isabel for his son Ferdinand was largely due to the skill and support of this group in the courts of Aragon and Castille.”^ The new Christians, however, quickly roused the jealousy of the old. The conversos became the special charge of the Holy Inquisition, introduced into Castille in 1477 as a counter- espionage service. By 1501 it had secured legal exclusion from government employment of the descendants of any person con- demned by its tribunal ; but its main function was the collection and filing of all evidence of relapses from Catholicism, and bringing the offenders to trial. In due course its activities were widened to include moriscos (converted Moslems), Reformers and Protestants. There was no Habecis corpus \ suspects were treated as if charged with high treason and kept in gaol while their dossiers were being prepared, a process which often took several years. Comparatively few ever regained their liberty. Those who were condemned were first exposed to a degrading public ceremony, and then “relaxed to the secular arm” — of the law — ^which arranged for their execution. Of late years attempts have been made to whitewash the Spanish Inquisition. It is pointed out that the procedure, including torture, was normal at the time; and .that, with^a great show of humanity, many of the victims were strangled before they were burnt. Such special pleading deserves only contempt and ridicule. The Spanish Inquisition was not an institution which did credit to the country or its religious 116 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN feelings. All that can be said is that the tribunal operated in other Catholic countries as well; and that Miguel Servet, a Catalan heretic who discovered the pulmonary circulation of the blood long before Harvey, was burnt for his theological views by Protestants at Geneva. For more than two centuries the Spanish Inquisition func- tioned with the deadly efficiency of an international political police, acting on denunciations of witnesses whose identity was generally unknown to the prisoner and confiscating his property when it secured a conviction. The word inquisicion and its derivatives have passed into many languages; though the Spanish /amf/far (in this connexion, a secret agent or informer) has remained in the country of its origin, while “the secular arm” has been exported as a translated loan. It is unlikely that Isabel realized the full use that might be made of the institution which she had been persuaded to introduce. She was superstitious and surrounded by enemies, while in Ferdinand’s kingdom of Aragon the Inquisition had existed already for many years, though in a milder form. Her mind was narrow, but of great courage and determination. She was prepared to take a chance, even if it did not seem a very good one; but having made up her mind, she did everything possible to make the chance succeed, and this happened in the case of Columbus. Isabel was the pupil of one of the first women-humanists, Beatriz Galindo. Even before she knew any Latin, she greatly enjoyed listening to Latin speeches and sermons, “for it seemed to her”, Marineo Siculo wrote, ^ “a most excellent thing, Latin speech well pronounced”. So, once the wars in Spain were over, she began to take lessons and made such progress that she could understand ambassadors and others who made Latin speeches, and could construe Latin books. ^ The Genoese trader, Columbus or Colon, presented the Queen with linguistic problems of another kind. He had an ambition — -not unnatural in a sailor — to become an admiral; but his practical knowledge of seamanship was greater than his theoretical grounding in cosmography. He had lived in Portugal ; and the Portuguese, with their knowledge and experience of navigation, realized that there was a flaw in his calculations. QUEEN ISABEL AND THE SCHOLARS 117 Isabel and her adviser, Bishop Hernando de Talavera, listening to the queer Castilian that the man had learnt in Portugal on the top of his Genoese dialect of Italian,® saw that he was an adven- turer but thought the chance worth taking. Columbus was made an admiral, and gave Isabel and Castille a new world. Spanish became a great nautical language. From ancient times the Mediterranean had had a seamen’s language of its own — the parla marinera — which, without being exactly a lingua franca, was understood in all Mediterranean ports. It included words from Greek, low Latin, Arabic, Venetian, Genoese and particularly Catalan ; for in the Middle Ages Catalan sailors knew the Mediterranean from end to end. On the Spanish east coast (the Levante), from Barcelona to Valencia, a way of speaking developed in the sixteenth century which was known as that of the galleys {de las galeras). Cervantes used it; for though not a sailor he was a marine, and knew what he was talking about. The oared galleys, however, seldom went outside the Mediterranean, and knew nothing of the Portuguese and Basque nautical terms which formed part of the vocabulary of the Atlantic. The language of oared ships, therefore, differed from that of sail; but sometimes the two languages {parlas) were used together. The Portuguese roda, the Basque hranque, and the Catalan albitana (from the Arabic) — a naval historian assures us® — all originally meant the same thing; but in the end they served to distinguish separate pieces in the construction of the bows of ocean-going craft. There were sea-shanties, too. A specimen is given by Eugenio de Salazar in his grim account of an Atlantic crossing in 1573, and reproduced by Professor S. E. Morrison in his life of Columbus.'^ “Nautical Castilian, like nautical English of the last century, had a word for every- thing in a ship’s gear and a verb for every action: good strong expressive words that could not be misunderstood when bawled out in a gale ; (while) for any lengthy operation, like winding in the anchor cable or hoisting a yard, the seamen had an appro- priate saloma, or shanty.” Castilian became a language of empire. One day at Sala- manca, in that same year great 1492, a scholar begged leave to present the Queen with a book, a grammar of the Spanish language.® He was an Andalucian, Elio Antonio de Nebrija, who 118 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN had been discovered in the Spanish college at the University of Bologna by Cardinal Fonseca, and brought back to Spain. For several years he lived in the palace of the Master of Alcantara, teaching Latin to the daughters of the house with the Master often there to listen. Like all men of the Renaissance, he had worked at a number of different “disciplines” in order to gain the widest vision of the universe ; but it was Latin that took up most of his time, and his interest in the Roman Empire — and the idea that Spain might be doing the same thing — led him to study it not only in books but also among the ruins of Merida where, probably for the first time in Spain, he made some excavations. It was apparently the first time that the grammar of a modern language had ever been constructed. There had been grammars of Latin and Greek, and there were grammars in Arabic and Turkish, and introductions to Anglo-Norman and Provengal. But there had never been a grammar of a vulgar tongue; children were supposed to absorb that with their mothers’ milk. “What is it for?” the Queen asked, (pregunto que para que podia aprovechar). Nebrija, the author, had thought of that, and the answer was already in his preface. “Language was always the companion of rule”: (Siempre la lenguafue companera del imperio). But the Bishop was too quick for him, and like an accomplished courtier he answered: “When Your Highness shall have brought under her yoke many foreign peoples and nations with strange tongues, then with their conquest they will need to receive the laws which the conqueror lays upon the conquered, and with them our own language.” “And then”, Nebrija adds in his preface — and he may well have said so at the time — “by this method {arte) of mine they may come to the knowledge of that language, as now we learn Latin grammar in order to know Latin.” So Spanish became the language of empire, and (we shall see) that thought was always present to the apologists of the language throughout the sixteenth century. Isabel disliked frivolous and excitable talkers. She herself spoke with calm and gravity; but she had what seemed in Toledo and Andalucia a north-country accent, and she dropped her H’s. In that and in her peculiar gravedad reposada, she showed future generations the way, and all Spanish-speaking QUEEN ISABEL AND THE SCHOLARS 119 people have followed her, except the enthusiasts for Conte Hondo (or Jondo) and the Juerga, and the picturesque, scatter- brained type known as a “Viva la Virgen”. She admitted that she felt uncomfortable in Toledo. Ferdinand copied her. His o^vn language would have been Aragonese, and when he spoke Castilian, it had a strong Aragonese accent ; where Castilian used H, he used F. But as time went on he lost the F and never acquired the H — his own spelling shows it — and when Isabel was dead he so far forgot himself as to write to his second wife, Germaine de Foix (or Foch), in Isabel’s spelling, leaving out all the H’s and not putting back the F’s which Germaine used herself. Menendez Pidal reminds us that Isabel used an expression unknown before her time: buen gusto, which meant rather more than “good taste” in modern English, or at least had not the limitations which it has with us now. The Queen used to say, “The man who has huen gusto carries a letter of recommenda- tion”, and in this saying of hers we find something new in Spanish. By a fortunate transference of meaning — one of the five senses used to indicate something which had not yet been learnt — the faculty of choice was able to exercise something like good manners, both in speech and action; something which left a pleasant taste in the mouth. The expression was at once adopted in Italy — it is in Ariosto — and eventually reached France. Italian writers, however, attribute it to the Spanish, who, “more perspicuous than any’others in the use of metaphor, express it with this laconic, fruitful phrase: huon gosto”. The word cortesano, too, had been used in medieval Castille before it made its fortune in the splendid Italian dialogue of Baldassare Castiglione, II Cortigiano, which, admirably translated into Spanish by Bose an, is the real foundation of Renaissance Spanish prose. Garcilaso the poet said that the Courtier did not speak better in Italy, where he was born, than in Spain; it was difficult to believe that it had been written in any other language. Isabel, la catolica, died in her early forties. Africa (her will shows) loomed larger in her mind than America. She could hardly have dreamed that her grandson, Charles V, would succeed to an empire which was not merely “Holy” or 120 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN “Roman”, but one which made him the effective ruler of Flanders, Franche-Compte and Milan, as well as Ferdinand’s inheritance of Aragon, Catalonia, the Balearic Isles, Naples and Sicily, with her own kingdom of Castille (and Leon) which soon stretched all the way to Mexico and Peru. Charles V’s native languages were Flemish and French. He only learnt Spanish when he was grown-up ; and it was the military kind, full of strange oaths, even when he was criticizing a piece of music performed in his chapel, though he once made an effective speech in Spanish before the Pope. Isabel might have been sur- prised at the language, but she would have been horrified at the expense and the thought that Castille had to pay the bill; to i waste American treasure in fighting in Europe, and the lives of j so many of those Castilians with whom she herself was so closely identified. For she was born, in all probability, at a bedraggled ' little town in Old Castille with the superb name of Madrigal de ' las Altas Torres; and we should think of the austerity of the , landscape no less than the beauty of the name, “Madrigal of f the High Towers”, remembering that the word madrigal, here, j is not a song for several voices in the mother tongue {MATRI- \ CALE) but a tangle of bushes and briars. As a girl she lived at Segovia, with its Arabic-named market place (Plaza del A^oquejo) and the immense Roman j aqueduct towering above it, a perpetual reminder of what j Roman IMPERIUM had really meant. The town, in Isabel’s , time, had a busy population of cloth-workers who all dropped j their H’s like Isabel herself, and were ready to resist even the Emperor, in the revolt of the Comuneros. She would have understood the invincible Spanish infantry and the devotion of ^ the officers who led them, but not the Hapsburg entanglement which sent them to fight and freeze in the Low Countries; and she little thought that the language which both she and they talked would be preserved, with approximately her own pronunciation, by the descendants of those same Spanish Jews whom she had got rid of in 1492. This survival is one of the most extraordinary facts in the history of Spanish or any other language. The exiled “Sephardic” (Western) Jews, who had been in Spain for cen- turies and included some of the oldest Spanish families, were QUEEN ISABEL AND THE SCHOLARS 121 received in many parts of the Near East and North Africa. The most fortunate have been those who emigrated to Turkey, where some still live the civilized, aristocratic life of Renaissance merchant princes, speaking most languages in public, but in the privacy of their own homes, Spanish; and when they write it, sometimes using Hebrew characters. The poorer members of the community also speak Spanish; but a Spanish mixed with words and constructions from other languages. Until the last war, Spanish-speaking Jews were to be found in numbers at Salonica and many other places; but now, except for Turkey, they have generally been destroyed or driven out and Judeo- Spanish has become nearly a dead language. Some com- munities, however, with the shrewd historical sense that would be expected of them, saw in the 1930s that it was time to move once more. It is related that the community on the island of Rhodes, debating where to go, hit upon Rhodesia, which (they thought) must evidently at one time have been a colony of Rhodes itself; and Judeo-Spanish has been heard lately in the streets of Salisbury, the Southern Rhodesian capital. The great interest of Judeo-Spanish lies not only in the fact that mothers, putting children to sleep, have preserved entire ballads which had been forgotten or only partly remem- bered among other Spanish-speaking peoples. The ballad of Conde Arnaldos, recovered complete from Morocco, is the great outstanding example; but the language itself has been miraculously preserved with many of the historical features of its pronunciation, grammar and syntax of 1492. It is as if we had a set of gramophone-records — some of them rather scratched — of the language spoken in the time of Ferdinand and Isabel. The phonetics are essentially those of Nebrija, with the ancient sibilants which have now been lost (p. 100), and the F which in certain combinations, is sometimes aspirated like an H. There are the groups with fue~’. fue itself, fuente, fuerte; and the Spanish suegro has become eshuegro and esfuegro. The B has remained in groups of consonants from which in Spain and Spanish-speaking America it has disap- peared, e.g. dubda, bibda, sibdad, for duda, viuda and ciudad. (These “B’s” are in fact V’s: duvda, bivda, civdad, etc.) Some Judeo-Spanish speakers still have the sixteenth-century 122 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN metathesis (“Spoonerism”) quitalde (for qmtadle, “take it away from him”) familiar in the plays of Lope de Vega. An interesting development is that the palatal double LL has become Y, as in Southern Spain and the River Plate, while between two vowels it is silent. A few Hebraic expressions are heard, e.g. meldar, to read the Bible aloud; though meldar is not really Hebrew, but ultimately through the “Judaeo-Latin”, from the Greek /xeAlnr). Like the Judeo-Spanish translators in the sixteenth century, the exiles substitute Dio for Dios, the very idea of “God” in the plural being against the letter and spirit of the First Commandment. Since the deviation of Spanish studies towards mysticism, in the second quarter of the present century® it has been assumed that it was the mystical writers who determined the direction of the Spanish language. That, however, is no more a fact in Spanish than it is in other languages ; such a view excludes the work of the Renaissance humanists and translators, particularly the translators of the Bible. St. John of the Cross might be intoxicated with the erotic imagery of the Song of Solomon, and his efforts to explain it away. The coarse-grained Fray Juan de los Angeles might refer to the devout “belching forth the fumes of the wine of God”. Mal6n de Chaide might treat the whole Renaissance as a Museum’^® and make his “Tears of the Magdalen” the negation of all the new values. It should not be forgotten that they were all three active propagandists of the Counter-reformation against the Protestants — ^that contra- rreforma or Catholic Reaction so strongly supported by the Spanish members of the Council of Trent. Nebrija, we have seen, belonged to an age of clearer ideals, an age of pure scholarship in which the scholar could still be a patriot, and realize the practical importance of recommending his work to the great. His whole life was a struggle against what he justly called the harharia of the anarchy in Castille before Isabel came to the throne. Arias Montano, a later humanist, wished to extend the greatness of Spain through the study of Greek and Latin, while Spanish, now a universal language, should be a symbol of uni- versal monarchy. That, his reading told him, had been one of the things which the Romans chiefly sought, in order to estab- QUEEN ISABEL AND THE SCHOLARS 123 lish their IMPERIUM in the world; men of all nations would agree, when in all parts of the empire, the practice of the Latin language was ordained for speech or reading, and with Spanish it would be the same. For Luis de Leon the value of the vulgar tongue did not depend on the idea of empire, but on the theories of Italian scholars of the Renaissance, coloured perhaps by the conscious- ness of his own religious problems and by the influence of the Reformation, in most countries outside Spain. “I do not know”, he writes, “why some stand so badly with their mother tongue; for neither does she deserve it, nor do they know as much Latin as they know of their own language, however little they really know, and in fact many know very little.” (This is clearly aimed not only at those who would not read his otvn books in Spanish, but at those who would not read the Bible in Spanish, either.) “They think that speaking Romance (Spanish) is speaking like the uneducated, and do not realize that speaking well is not common but is an affair of particular judgement and discretion {un negocio de particular juizid), both in what is said and in the manner of saying it ; an affair in which, from the words which all speak, he (the writer) selects those which suit him (best). He looks to the sound of them, and even at times counts the letters, weighing and measuring them and putting them together, so that not only do they express what he is trying to say with clarity, but also with harmony and sweetness. And if it is objected that this is no style for the humble and meek, they should understand that just as the meek have their pre- ferences, so have the grave and learned. . . . This is particularly so in the scriptures which”, he hastens to add, “are for the learned alone, just as this is.” That was something new; “a road not used by those who write our language”. But the language might be lifted from the ordinary rut; and that was the road which he wished to open for himself. Ambrosio de Morales, the scholar and antiquary who travel- led all over Spain looking for the bones of St. Lawrence, for Philip II to put in the Escurial, wrote in 1585 a Discurso sobre la lengua castellana. Like Luis de Leon, he pointed to the difference between speaking well and speaking with affectation. 124 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN In all languages, to speak well was to speak differently from the common speech; yet even Cicero, when he said anything, used words common among the citizens of Rome. With that persuasive friendliness which seems to have been natural to him. Morales urged gentleness and speaking well, dulzura y Men decir. The right ideas were always improved by gentleness; and the problem was to know the words, choose them and com- bine them in a graceful order, with a variety of figures of speech, “in the comportment {huen aire) of the clauses, in the appropri- ate conjunction of the parts, in the melody and sweetness of sound when the words are mingled together gently and without roughness ; in the fury with which some words break in and enter as if by force on the ears and mind, and in the smoothness with which others penetrate, fair and softly {sesgas y sossegadas), so that it seems that they were not put there but entered in unobserved. “I do not say that you should use cosmetics on our language,” he adds, “but that you should wash her face {Yo no digo que af cites nuestra lengua castellana, sino que le laves la card)”. ^Roger Fry, A Sampler of Castile, Richmond, 1923. ®J. M. Batista i Roca, Introduction to H. Koenigsberger, The Govern- ment of Sicily under Philip II, 1951 . ^Caro Lynn, A college professor of the Renaissance: Lucio Marineo Siculo among the Spanish Humanists, Chicago, 1937. *]. Oliver Asm, Historia de la lengua espahola, 6th ed., Madrid, 1941, pp. 70-71. ®R. Menendez Pidal, La lengua de Cristdbal Colon, Buenos Aires-Mexico, 1942. ®J. F. Guillen Tato, La parla marinera en el primer viaje de Cristdbal Colon, Madrid, 1950. ’S. E. Morison, Christopher Columbus . . . Harvard and Oxford, 1942, pp. 175-176. ®The orginal edition has been edited by I. Gonzalez Llubera, 1926. ®See notes which appeared in La Lectura during the 1914-18 war. These writers were already well-known in Spain, cf. Unamuno, En torno al casticismo, 1895. ^“J. F. Pastor, Las apologias de la lengua castellana en el siglo de oro. (Los clasicos olvidados, VIII), Madrid, 1929. ^^The most important studies on Judaeo-Spanish are the following; Baruch, K., El judeo-espahol de Bosnia, Rev. de Filol. Esp. XVII, 1930, 113-151; Benoliel, J., El dialecto judeo-hispano-marroqui o Hakitia, Bob de la R. Acad. Esp., XIII, XIV, XV, 1926-28; Luria, M., A Study of the Monastir dialect of Judeo- Spanish, Rev. Hisp., LXXIX, 1930, 328-383; Wagner, M. L., Caracteres generales del judeo-espahol de Oriente, Rev. de Filol. Esp., Anejo XII; Madrid, 1930; Besso, H. V., Bibliografla sobre el judeo-espahol, in Tribuna Israelita, No. 93, Agosto, Mexico, 1952, and various papers by Dr. C. M. Crews. CHAPTER IX VALDfiS AND THE REFORMERS The best and most convincing apologist of the Spanish language was Juan de Valdes. He was suspected— not without reason — of Erasmian and reformist tendencies, and found it convenient to live out of Spain ; but from the fact that he chose the dialogue form, like Bembo and Castiglione and numerous others — including his own brother Alfonso who was one of the secretaries of the Emperor Charles V — shows the Renaissance passion for reason rather than the reformer’s individualist conscience. He was certainly opposed to excessive orthodoxy, and poked healthy Erasmian fun at the friars. His later works and his whole life at Naples show that he cared enough about religion to protest, but his praise of Spanish as a vulgar tongue had less to do with his mildly Protestant position than with the fundamental ideas of the Renaissance.^ A vulgar tongue is natural; supreme beauty is natural beauty. He is with Cicero and Plato, Castiglione and Montaigne. To a modern scientific linguist the Didlogo de la lengua (1536) may seem primitive, with theories which are fantastic and conclusions which are not always valid. The surprising thing is not that the author is often wrong, but that he is more often right, and he provides invaluable evidence for the views and pronunciation of his time. Moreover, the dialogue is a piece of literature, as well as a classic of Renaissance philology. The scene is a villa near Naples, after the midday meal. The speakers are two Italians, Marcio and Coriolano, Juan de Valdes and a Spanish soldier, Pacheco. There is an air of gentle banter in the Italians, veiling a conscious superiority in good manners: “Well, if you have no books in Spanish with whose authority you can satisfy us. . . .” They had Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Valdes knew of nothing in Spanish more important than Juan de Mena and the Celestina. The former he thought more like bad Latin than good Castilian 125 126 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN {a mi ver es mas scrivir mal latin que huen castellano), while the ' latter seemed a piling-up of words which were sometimes as out of place as a Magnificat at mattins {en el amontonar de vocablos algunas vezes tanfuera de prop osito como Magnificat a maitines), ! though he admitted later that there was no book in Castilian in which the language was more natural, more appropriate or more elegant. In the poetry of the Cancionero General he thought the best were the Coplas of Jorge Manrique, Recuerde el alma dormida, “which in my opinion are worthy to be read and pondered both for their judgement and for their style” — an opinion which modern criticism would certainly uphold. None of the prose-works contented him; neither Amadis de - Gaula and the books of chivalry, nor the Cdrcel de amor. There was a “cold affectation” about them which he did not like; and he could not bear the latinizing tendency — which he also found in the Celestina — to put the verb at the end of the sentence. There was no prose-writer of his time with the authority of Garcilaso in verse ; and he fell back on the Spanish ^ proverbs to find the language in its purest form (en aquellos j refranes se vee mucho bien la puridad de la lengua castellano), having a supply of them in his memory as large and varied as Sancho Panza’s. His views on spelling are sensible. He would like to spell phonetically. Nebrija had adopted the more culto forms: significar, digno, aceptar, which were restored by the Academy in the eighteenth century; but Valdes preferred to write them as they were pronounced, or as he pronounced them himself: sinificar, dino, acetar, inorancia. He also writes digos, viendos (for digo os and viendo os), sobresto, sobrello (sobre esto, ello), nuestrdma {nuestra ama), destdgua {de esta agua) stdca {estd acd). He spells estar in the Italian manner whenever a vowel precedes it: a star {a estar), no std {no estd), and even bien std {bien estd, for sta bene). He treats escrivir and Espana in the same way: de scrivir de Spana. This was very Renaissance of him; for the Renaissance was at first an age of simplified spelling. “And in words which you have taken from Latin and Greek and which have the Greek Y (i.e. the Latin equivalent of upsilon) like mysterio and syllaba, do you use the Greek Y still?” “No.” VALDES AND THE REFORMERS 127 “Why?” “So as not to oblige one who knows neither Latin nor Greek to write like one who does. Then we can all spell in the same way, putting misterio and silaba. And even here I take away one of the L’s; for people who are not Latin (Italian) do not pronounce the two L’s together.” Yaldes -thus demolished the “philological” spelling which _^ill holds in English and French. The gentileza of the Castilian tongue did not depend upon picturesque spelling, but among other things, on the words being “full and round”. It was “outside all convenience” (fuera de proposito) that, in a vulgar tongue, one should pronounce in one way and write in another. “So that to know how to write well it is necessary to know first how to pronounce well?” “Evidently. iQuien no sabe esso? (who does not know that?)” Valdes was born at Cuenca in New Castille, and had the accent of Toledo. Yet he was unorthodox in his H’s. In words beginning with U followed by E, he put an H in front, like the spelling of today; and he seems to have aspirated it. (Today, HU before a vowel is equivalent to W.) “So I say huevo (egg), huerto (garden), huesso (bone). There are some who put a G where I put an H, and say giievo, giierto, gUeso\ but to me the sound is offensive, and so I prefer the H.” “But why do you spell with H almost all the words which Latin spells with F?” “Words which have F in Latin, when converted to Castilian turn F into H; so for FABA we say haba” And again: “From the Arabic pronunciation (today we should say Basque or Iberian) it has fallen to Castilian to convert the Latin F into H, and since the pronunciation is with H, I do not know why the writing should be with F.” “I have always noticed”, he goes on, “that those who use the H pride themselves on writing Castilian ‘in purity and chastity’, pur a y castamente. Those who put F are the ones who, not being very (good at) Latin, are struggling to seem so.” “What you say does not displease me; but I see, too, that in words which are not Latin you do the same.” “And in these I particularly want to keep to my rule of writing as I pronounce.” 128 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN Pacheco bursts in. “I don’t know if you would dare to say that in the Chancery at Valladolid!” (There, presumably, they ' all dropped their H’s, like Isabel la catolica.) “Why not?” “Because those lawyers and clerks would stone you. They think they are ten cloth-yards higher than the common herd {el vulgo) from knowing three maravedis’ worth of Latin, and do just what you object to.” “But why,” Marcio asks later (after a digression on the distinction between pleheyo and vulgar) “do you make so much ‘soup’, tantos potages, of the H? No one can ever tell when it is right or wrong.” i “In that, you are perfectly reasonable; for the fact is that j some put it in where it is not needed, and others drop it out ' when it is all right. Some put it in hera (he was), havia (he had) and han (they have), and other words of the same kind; but this is done by those who pride themselves on knowing Latin. I, who would rather know Latin than pride myself on it, do not put in the H because, in reading, I do not pronounce it.” Valdes is unfair to Nebrija, saying that he was an Anduluz, and not a Castilian. He knew Latin, of course; that must be ; granted; but he had compiled his dictionary so carelessly — he gives examples — that it might have been done as a joke. The i Italians, however, to chaff Valdes, are always quoting Nebrija as an authority. The dialogue is full of fine philological points; but it is particularly interesting from the author’s views on style. “The style I have,” he says, “is natural to me; and with no affectation whatever, I write as I speak. Only I take care to use words which really mean {sinifiquen bien) what I want to say, and I say it as plainly as possible. . . . The whole art of speaking well in Castilian is to say what you want to say in the fewest words you can” — a saying which brings us back to Don Juan Manuel in the fourteenth century. Selection is the important thing, rather than invention. “Genius {el ingenio) finds what to say, and judgement {juyzio) chooses the best of what genius finds.” “Some things (he adds) can be said well in one language, but not so well in another; yet in that other language other VALDES AND THE REFORMERS 129 things can be said, better perhaps than in any other language at. all.” He often mentions the gentileza of Castilian. It was generally admitted to have more “grace” than other languages; but “the greater part of the grace and gentileza of the Castilian tongue consists in speaking in metaphors”. Metaphor was not, as some recent writers have claimed, the invention or perquisite of erotic mystics. It is older, and goes back to the healthier and more hopeful time of Valdes and Castiglione, author of II Cortigiano. The Italians, we saw, thought the Spaniards “more perspicuous” in the use of metaphor than any other people. The writer who established metaphor in Spanish was Garcilaso, and his expressions were treasured by later poets. But, in verse, part of the gentileza of Castilian depended on the fact that it could be in metre and yet appear to be prose. This is curious, and had unexpected results. In the translation of Boethius which Valdes praises, even the prose passages of the Latin are translated into what is, in fact, 8-syllable verse; and this accounts, perhaps, for Valdes’ opinion that verse should be spoken as one spoke prose. The 8-syllable verse was ballad- metre; and he thought that many of the romances (ballads) of the Cancionero General were good. “I like the thread of the story, the hilo de dezir, going on continuously and evenly; so much so that I think they must call them romances because they are so pure in their Romance (Spanish) language. The new Spanish of the imperial age of Charles V was due chiefly to Valdes, Garcilaso and Boscan. These three give the same solutions to the problems of language, and show the same preferences ; but they are always guided in the end by the advice of Castiglione, and this, in spite of Valdes declaring that he had never read the Cortesano — meaning in all probability Boscan’s translation. The ideas, even the very words, are often the same, on such subjects as genius, good judgement, natural- ness, affectation, selection, good order, and the preference for words which Valdes calls llanos y enteros (simple and full), following the recommendation of Castiglione that they should be propias, escogidas, llenas. Yet though “appropriate, select, full and round”, no one should be surprised to find a poet like Garcilaso using now and I 130 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN then popular or even rough expressions, in his polished, Italianate verses,® or even those popular expressions which gave most character to Spanish style, refranes — “short sentences that come of long experience”, Cervantes said of them — those acute, laconic, sententious, proverbial phrases, the great treasure-house of popular language. In them scholars thought they could catch an echo of the natural wisdom of the Golden Age so adored by the Renaissance, and incidentally a type of expression which seemed exclusively Spanish. The Italians conversing with Valdes do not know what refranes are. “Are they like the Latin and Greek?” “They have not much in common”, Valdes replies; for they were born among old wives sitting round the fire with their distaffs; while the Greek and Latin adagia arose among the learned. Garcilaso, too, used them in his poetry. It was believed in Spain that the purity of their language made them authorities for linguistic usage, while their natural beauty of form and expression would serve for the foundation of a new literary style, which in fact was afterwards evolved by Gracian. They were certainly greatly admired by Erasmus; and Valdes constantly invokes the authority of refranes, as his Italian friends invoke Petrarch and Boccaccio. From the refranes he deduced the principles of a good style. “All good Castilian speech consists in saying what you want to say in the fewest words you can, as the refrdn says: Al buen entendedor breve hablador (for good wits — or for the expert lover — few words).” But conciseness must not offend the pleasant harmony or elegance of the phrase. He quotes the refrdn: “Quien guarda y condesa, dos veces pone mesa.'' The words guardar and condesar both mean the same thing (to put by or save; condesar “condense”; he who saves can have two meals for one) but if we take one of the two words away, the balance and harmony of the phrase will be lost. Even the refranes, in spite of their conciseness, use words in pairs, like Garcilaso in his poems, or the Emperor in his speech before the Pope.^ One thing, however, could not be learnt from the refranes, though it was characteristic of the age of Charles V: clarity; their very conciseness led to that estilo conceptuoso which prevailed to such an extent in the next century. What is important in Valdes, in his philological dialogue and VALDES AND THE REFORMERS 131 his religious works, is that he is not bound by orthodoxy. There were certain things about which (to use a modern phrase) the agents of the Inquisition would have liked him to help them; but though Naples was Aragonese territory, he could not yet be extradited to Castille. His clear, honest mind, in which glowed something like an “inner light”, was leading him inevitably in the direction of reform — not necessarily to Luther, but to a more gentle nonconformity, with that amusement at the behaviour of friars, and other “popish practices”, so vivid in Erasmus. There are examples of it in his letters, as well as in the Didlogo de la lengua. Later, he formed a group of sym- pathizers who a hundred and fifty years later, would have been happy in the Society of Friends. The Reformation was really a set of Renaissance solutions to problems posed long before in the Middle Ages: the Francis- can quest for true piety, a popular Christianity not based on ecclesiastical authority, libre examen. We saw glimmerings of them in Berceo. All of these, particularly the last, were related to the problem of the vulgar tongue. Even in Spain, like the countries which accepted the Reformation, the problem was a consequence of the religious position. It depended on free and individual interpretation of the Bible, particularly the New Testament; and this led to an increase in the value of the spoken language in preference to Latin, which was presented as the language of authority: an unintelligible hocus-pocus to prevent worshippers from knowing what they were saying. The Biblical texts had to be translated into the spoken language, so that men could form an idea of God for themselves, without external authority or guidance. In Reformation countries the translation of the Bible was of great importance in the develop- ment of the literary language, though that language might be a generation or two behind the language actually spoken by the time the translation was “authorized”. The Spanish Reformers and translators, being unable to work in their own country, were always becoming further separated from the spoken language of Spain, and this, combined with their desire to be “understanded of the people”, led to a certain deadness or flatness in their renderings. They never catch fire, like passages in the English Authorized Version, or Luis de Leon. 132 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN Translation of the Bible into Spanish did not begin with the Reformation; it goes back to the time of Alfonso el Sabio who (as we saw) had no scruples about inviting learned Jews to help him. The result is that, from the beginning, Spanish biblical MSS. depend on the Hebrew as well as the Vulgate. In the table below, the text of the Vulgate (1) is followed by an “Alfonsine” version (2) from a thirteenth century MS. in the Escurial, I, j, 4; (3) the fifteenth-century version made from the Hebrew by Rablji Moses of Guadalajara for the Dukes of Alba; (4) the sixteenth century Ferrara Bible, translated by Spanish Jewish exiles; (5) the version of Casiodoro de Reina, followed (and sometimes revised) by Cipriano de Valera, and eventually adopted by the British and Foreign Bible Society; (6) the Authorized Version. 1. SED FT SERPENS ERAT CALLIDIOR 2. Et la serpiente era mas artera que 3. la serpiente era mas artera ensi que 4. Y el culebro era artera mas que 5. Empero la serpiente era astuta mas que 6. Now the serpent was more subtle than CUNCTIS todas todas todo todos any ANIMANTIBUS TERRAE las bestias las animalias animal los animales beast del canpo del canpo del campo del campo of the field QUAE FECERAT DOMINUS DEUS. que fizo Dios. que fizo el Senor Dios. que hizo A. Dio. que Jehoua Dios which the Lord God auia hecho. had made. The most curious thing about this is the choice of words for “serpent”. The usual word in Latin would have been COLUBER; but this only appears, in the Spanish form culebro, in the Bible of Ferrara, though later on, in the Escurial MS. the word is the feminine culebra. There are Spanish- VALDES AND THE REFORMERS 133 Speaking people (not only or necessarily Jewish) among whom the word serpiente is taboo ; even if they hear the word culebra they exclaim Lagarto, lagarto, lagarto (lizard), making a sign with their fingers against the evil eye. Casiodoro de Reina declares in a note that the word has a signification different from that intended, and adds that one edition of the Ferrara Bible has quite a different word: removilla. When the Serpent speaks to the Woman, it uses a Hebrew idiom for “Ye shall not surely die”. It says: no morir moriredes, which has been carried over into the Vulgate as NEQUAQUAM MORTE MORIEMINI. It should be noticed, too, how the Ferrara version made by Jewish translators for Jewish communities represents the sacred name by A., standing for Adonai, which is not the real name but, as it were, a code-word for it. Another form is el Dio. It has already been pointed out that the Spanish word Dios (DEUS) has a suggestion of the plural incompatible with the strict monotheism of the Jewish people. We may take another example, this time from the Book of Judith; (1) Vulgate, (2) Alfonso X, General Historia, (3) Casio- doro de Reina and Cipriano de Valera, (4) A.V. 1. DOMINUS AUTEM OMNIPOTENS 2. Mas Dios que es poderoso en todas cosas. . . . 3. Mas el Dios omniponte. . . . 4. But the Almighty Lord. . . . Alfonso the Sage, rather than introduce into Spanish the I word omnipotente, prefers the effective paraphrase que es poderoso ! en todas cosas, “who is mighty in all things”, (remembering perhaps the Magnificat). Casiodoro de Reina and Valera have j no difficulty over the word omnipotente', but they have the ! Jewish- Spanish form for God: el Dios — el Dio in the Bible of Ferrara. The Hebrew word which the Authorized Version translates “hath disappointed them” appears in the Vulgate NOCUIT “he hurt”, for which Alfonso has a Spanish word nucio. “Judith, the daughter of Merari”, we read later on, “weakened him”. Alfonso says lo degollo, “beheaded him” or 134 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN “cut his throat”; Cassiodoro and Valera lo descoyunto, literally “dismembered him”. The Vulgate has merely DISSOLVIT BUM: 1. IN SPECIE FACIEI SUAE. 2. con la fermosura de la faz. 3. con la hermosura de su rostro. 4. with the beauty of her countenance. Alfonso has the advantage here with the alliteration, and the force of the word faz. His Spanish (like English) delights in such an expression as la faz del enemigo “the face of the enemy”, while Casiodoro and even Luis de Le6n have the weaker delante, “before”. SANDALIA EJUS RAPUERUNT OCULOS EJUS. Her sandals ravished his eyes. Alfonso paraphrases “sandals”: los guarnimientos de los pies della (the adornments of the feet of her); Casiodoro and Valera translate pantufos (for pantuflos) “slippers”, a word which they have imported from France, pantoufle. 1. PULCHRITUDO EJUS CAPTIVAM FECIT ANIMAM 2. fermosura fizo cativa 3. Su hermosura captivo 4. Her beauty took EJUS, AMPUTAVIT PUGIONE del, taj6 y el punal corto all alma su anima, his mind la su prisoner, and the fauchion passed through his CERVICEM EJUS. cerviz del con puno. cerviz. neck. The Song of Songs offers endless variations, not only through | the allegorical value given to its interpretation but also to the 1 sheer difficulty and uncertainty of many of the Hebrew words, which are found nowhere else. “The rose of Sharon”, for | VALDES AND THE REFORMERS 135 instance, is called by the “Hebraizing” medieval MSS. in the Escurial, albahaca de lo llano (I, j, 3 and 5) or de la llanesa (I, j, 4) “of the plain”. Rabbi Moses of Guadalajara, like the thirteenth-century Escurial MS. I, j, 6, gives flor del campo like the Vulgate’s FLOS CAMPI. Ferrara has Yo, lilio de la llan lira, rosa de los voiles (lily of the plain, rose of the valleys); Casiodoro: Yo soy el lyrio del campo y la rosa de los valles; Luis de Leon: Yo, rosa del campo y azucena de los valles. NIGRA SUM SED FORMOSA appears in the Hebraizing trans- lations made for Alfonso el Sabio, Negro so e donosa (I, j, 3) and ba^a (lowly) so e donosa (I, j, 4). Rabbi Moses has Negra so efermosa] Luis de Leon, Morena yo pero amable. The poetry of Isaiah — or the Isaiahs — offered even greater difficulties, though some of the translators rose to the occasion magnificently. In the following verse from Ch. HI, (1) is Moses Arragel, (2) Luis de Leon, (3) Casiodoro de Reina, (4) the A.V. 1. En aquel dfa tirard el Senor 2. En aquel dfa quitara al redropelo el Senor a las hijas de 3. Aquel dfa quitara el Senor 4. In that day the Lord will take away la fermosura de las cascaueles e las listas de Sion el chapfn que cruxe en el atavfo de the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about las lunas. los pies, los cal^ados. their feet. The prize would obviously be divided between the Rabbi and the Authorized Version. The Vulgate’s ORNAMENTUM CALCEAMENTORUM falls as fiat as MENTE CORDIS SUAE in the Magnificat, for “the imagination of their hearts”. Al redropelo, in the version of Luis de Leon {redopelo today) is a homely expression for “against the grain”, literally “the wrong way of the hair”: AD RETRO PILU(M). 136 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN The Sephardic difficulty over the Spanish Dios looking like a plural has already been mentioned. There was a passage in Isaiah which gave rise to another difficulty, and doubt: “Behold a Virgin shall conceive”. The oldest Escurial versions mistranslate what they find in the Hebrew, turning the word meaning “young woman” into “virgin”: Ahe, que la virgen con- cebird (I, j, 4), or Ahe, la virgen prennada (I, j, 3); or else in the Vulgate, Evad que concebird virgen (I, j, 6). But Rabbi Moses, followed approximately by the translators of Ferrara, has Ahe que la alma concebird, “Behold, the mind shall conceive”. Valdes made a plain translation of the Psalms, one which was praised by the orthodox Menendez y Pelayo. He is not afraid to depart from tradition, however. The Escurial versions. Rabbi Moses, Ferrara, Casiodoro and Valera, all render the man “that hath not walked in the way of the ungodly” by que non anduvo en consejo de malos] Valdes has que no sigue el parecer de impios. In “By the waters of Babylon” he is followed by Casiodoro and Valera. The oldest Escorial version is Sobre los rrios de Bavilonia alii soviemos y lloramos (I, j, 8): the Hebraizing I, j, 3 and Rabbi Moses have nos assentamos e aun lloremos (or e lloremos). Ferrara has alii estuvimos, tambien lloramos', but Valdes Junto a los rios de Babilonia alii nos sentamos, tambien lloramos. Juan de Valdes was also among the earlier translators of parts of the New Testament in Greek. His version of St. Matthew (1) makes interesting comparison, in regard to language, with those of Francisco de Enzinas (2), Casiodoro de Reina (3), Cipriano de Valera (4), and the Authorized Version (5). 1. Le convendria mas que le fuese atada al 2. Seria mejor para el que atada 3. Mejor le fuera que le fuera colgada del 4. Mejore le fuera que se le colgase al 5. It were better for him that (there) were hanged about his cuello una muela asnal en su cuello, y una rueda de molino de asno, cuello una piedra de molino de asno, y que VALDES AND THE REFORMERS 137 cuello una piedra de molino de asno, neck a millstone, y que and that fuese chapuzado en lo hondo del mar. sea ahogado en lo profundo del mar. fuera anegado en el profundo del mar. se le anegase en el profundo del mar. he were drowned in the depth of the sea. The reference in the Spanish versions to the mill worked by an ass might seem at first sight a piece of Spanish local colour: the familiar noria, the Near-Eastern water-wheel, raising water in pots tied to the rim and worked by an ox or an ass moving in a circle. But the phrase occurs both in the Vulgate, MOLA ASINARIA, and the original Greek, /zuAo? ovikos’, and it must have been left out of the English because mills in England are not worked by asses. Some of the differences between the various translators are due more to theology than to language. We have seen some Jewish instances; but the first verse of St. John’s Gospel also offers points for comparison. The medieval version in the Escurial (I, j, 6, which is a MS. of the thirteenth century) has En el compefamiento era vierho; but in later times the Vulgate’s IN PRINCIPIO held the field, the only doubt being whether the “word” which was in the beginning, and all that it implied, would be better rendered verbo or palahra (PARABOLA). Juan de Valdes has verbo; but all other translators were faithful to palabra until the Bible Society’s edition of Cipriano de Valera, in which the translation has been altered to verbo. The Beatitude “Blessed are the peacemakers” was originally Bienaventiirados los pacificos, “the peaceful”. It appeared thus I in the Epistolas y evangelios of 1506, Enzinas (1543), Perez i (1556), Casiodoro (1569) and Scio (1821). Valdes however, ; with his active and practical religious mind, translated it los que apaziguan, “those who pacify”. The version known as the Nuevo Facto (1858) has los que procuran la paz, “those who seek peace”; while a curious version printed at Corfu in 1829 has byen aventurados az yentes de paz, “the people of peace”. 138 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN When we come to Luis de Leon, we find him, in his trans- lations from the Bible, deliberately using archaic spelling and outmoded expressions to give his renderings greater solemnity. There are many examples of the Latin F preserved or restored, in his versions of The Song of Solomon and The Book of Job, along with other archaisms which had disappeared in the six- teenth century. He endeavoured, he tells us in his introduction to the Song of Solomon, to come as close as possible to the original Hebrew, not only in the words and sentences, but the whole make-up and appearance of them, el concierto y aire de ellas, imitating the figures and manner of speech as closely as possible. Some readers might not be contented: they might think that in some places la razon queda corta y dicha may a la vizcaina y muy a lo viejo: that the phrase was often left in the air, and said as a Basque would say it, and in a very old-fashioned manner. “He who translates”, he says again, “needs be faithful and complete ; and if possible count the number of words, to render them by others, neither less nor more, of the same quality and condition and variety of meaning which the originals have, without limiting them to their own apparent meaning, so that those who read the translation might understand the variety of meaning to which the original gives occasion.” There is no doubt that the reformist Spanish translations of the Bible fall flat. The message might be inspiring, but not the language which clothed it; and translators like Juan de Valdes were too honest, both as men and as linguists, to resort to archaism like Luis de Leon. The Jewish translators, however, still have fire in their language; and their language had been Spanish for so long and they felt it so deeply, that they knew exactly what to do with the Hebrew imagery and ways of thought without exaggerating them. A final example might be taken from the phrase “the Lord of Hosts”. The medieval translators were carried away by the music of the Hebrew feminine plural: El Sehor Sahaod or Adonay Sabbaoth. Casio- doro, influenced possibly by the plain statement of the Vulgate, DOMINUS EXERCITUUM, can do no better than Jehouah de los exercitos] but Rabbi Moses Arragel of Guadalajara, whose Spanish is the Spanish of Toledo, can be more Castilian than all: El Sehor de las cauallerias. VALDES AND THE REFORMERS 139 ^Unamuno, En torno al casticismo, IV, v, shocked Spanish readers by reminding them how much religious revivalists (Franciscans in Italy, Lutherans in Germany) had stimulated the growth of the vulgar tongues against Latin. Most of the impulse given to linguistics, he says, came from the Protestants. ^J. Oliver Asin, Historia de la lengua espanola, 6th ed., Madrid, 1941, pp. 82 ff. quotes parallel passages from Valdes and Boscan’s translation of Castiglione. ^Examples daca, dizque and cargar la mano. ^The Emperor was described by a Spanish listener as speaking con muclio sosiego (with great cakn) and con aquella gravedad quepedia su grandeza (with that gravity which his greatness demanded). But an Italian who was present could not help remarking on the effect of his projecting Hapsburg lower jaw which prevented him from closing his teeth, so that the ends of his words were not clearly heard. (Quoted by Oliver Asin, t.c., p. 216.) CHAPTER X THE TWO VOICES In the sixteenth century there were two voices in Spain: the speaking voice, the voice in which- — to quote Berceo once more — a man spoke to his neighbour, and the voice in which he heard solemn exhortations and sermons. These voices spoke in poetry as well as in prose. Garcilaso la Vega had both. He was responsible, more than any other poet for naturalizing the formal Italian manner in verse, while his Catalan friend Boscan, by translating Castiglione, introduced it in prose; but what he said in his Italian forms was often in the language of every day — the everyday language of the Court of Toledo, at any rate — and he never once mentions religion. Once anything had been said by Garcilaso, it became a poetical cliche. Manso ruido, when he wrote it, was the most exact description he could give of the sound of the Danube at Ratisbon. That certainly is manso, gentle ; but it is also a con- tinuously audible sound, for in early summer at Ratisbon the Danube is deep and fast. Garcilaso was exiled there for some months, for acting as witness to a wedding of which the Emperor disapproved; and his description of the sound of the river is additional evidence that the place of exile was Ratisbon, and not lower down the river where the sound is different. The Spanish words manso ruido are beautiful in themselves; they proved irresistible to other poets. Yet Garcilaso’s lines were sometimes touched up by later editors — by Herrera, for in- stance. The reason was not only to make them run better, but to make them look more moral and less pagan. Garcilaso had written: con clara luz la tempested serena {and with clear light make stormy skies serene) But Herrera printed: enciende el corazon y lo refrena {can set the heart afire, then rein it in). which implies a different attitude. 140 THE TWO VOICES 141 A distinguished scholar in the United States considered that Garcilaso often wrote lines which were bad, and had to be corrected. By this, however, he meant that some of Garcilaso’s lines were “clumsy” in the sense that they were nearer the spoken language ; and if some of them were smoothed out after- wards that was because Garcilaso’s good lines had become the model of poetical speech, not only for the professional poets but for soldiers and others who carried his poems in their pockets. For that is what happened to Garcilaso. His poems — with those of Boscan, at first, and then by themselves — were reprinted in 12mo pocket editions, many of them obligingly and beautifully produced at Antwerp for the army of occupation. The “brutal and licentious” Spanish soldiery carried Garcilaso about with them in the Low Countries. Garcilaso’s reluctance to refer to religion is very curious. Religion had no place in his poetical world. That defect was remedied by one Sebastian de Cordoba who in 1575 printed a collection of pious but often absurd parodies a lo divino — poems which were a travesty of what Garcilaso had really written. They would be of no importance now and might well have been forgotten; the book is of extreme rarity, being in the Bodleian though not in the British Museum. But some of those versions were used when sonnets and stanzas from the longer poems were set to music by Guerrero in the form of madrigals. There is also the fact that it seems to have been this perverted edition, and not Garcilaso’s own, which first inspired St. John of the Cross and was the model of many of his own poems; and though afterwards no doubt he read Garcilaso in the original, he quoted him in the spiritual parody.^ If some of the Spanish infantry had Garcilaso in their pockets, they all had the Romancero in their heads; ballads learnt on their mothers’ knees and then from other pocket editions printed at Antwerp. Everybody knew the ballads; it was enough to quote a line or two, for the context to be recog- nized and the implication understood. This happened at a moment of crisis with Cortes in Mexico ; for Cortes and his men knew many of the ballads by heart, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. There is an “interlude”, an entremes, attributed to Cervantes, in which a countryman goes out of his mind, not 142 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN through reading too many books of chivalry but from knowing too many ballads; the interlude may in fact be one of the ancestors of the story of Don Quixote himself. The ballads were everybody’s language. There are archaisms of course; peculiarities of vocabulary and syntax; tenses used for metrical reasons and in order to give the right assonance rather than a sense of time. The tenses in Arabic had no sense of time, either; but that was for a different reason: past, present and future were all the same in the sight of Allah. The Spanish ballads, however, delight in periphrastic constructions: fue tornado (for torno, he returned), fue muerto {murid, he died), cartas le fueron venidas {le vinieron, came to him), fue, a llegar {llego, he arrived), fuera a dar {did, he gave), para haberla de tomar {tomarla, to take her), para haberselo de dar {ddrselo, to give it to him). There are also forms with querer (lit. to wish) for an auxiliary: los gallos quieren cantar {cantan, the cocks are crowing), or querian cantar {cantaban, were crowing), los gritos que al cielo quieren llegar {llegan, the cries which reached as far as heaven), cuando vino la manana que queria alborear {al- boreaba, when morning came and it was dawn). The imperfect is often used for the present to provide an assonance in -ia or -aba. These survivals, or departures from common usage, may be regarded as poetic licenses which help to give character to some of the most characteristic Castilian poetry.^ The two rules for composing a romance are to have the same assonance at the end of every even line, and an accent on the seventh syllable. The use of assonance instead of rhyme was, technically, a stroke of genius. Rhymes, especially double rhymes, are too easy in Spanish; while the change of consonant which distinguishes rhyme from assonance, gave a sense of freedom and naturalness which strict rhyming could never have given. Again, the variable accent, the “hovering stress”, enables the lines to follow the run of the spoken language and keep within speaking distance of people themselves. From the fifteenth century to the seventeenth the ballad form, the romance, was the most Spanish form of poetry. The romances were not only old ballads; new ones were written by Lope de Vega, Gongora, Quevedo — ballads which were not pastiche but new, modern poems, in the way that the romances of Garcia THE TWO VOICES 143 Lorca were new and modern poems in the twenties and thirties of the present century. The ballad verse was also the making of the Spanish theatre. Various metres had been tried, and Juan de la Cueva had made plots of ballad subjects; but it was Lope de Vega who first saw clearly that the theatre, if it was to be a theatre for everybody, must be in everybody’s verse: the 8-syllable verso de romance, varied, according to the dramatic situation, by other metres. Among the 450 extant plays of Lope de Vega many diflFerent proportions and arrangements of metre can be found, it is possible, even, to work out some sort of chronological order of the plays from the way in which the various metres are used and combined. Then there is his use of sonnets. A sonnet in a play was a soliloquy, like an aria in an opera; a moment of sheer beauty in which the action stopped, and public and players could pause to contemplate the situation of the persons in the story. Even Shakespeare occasionally used a sonnet for a soliloquy — in Love’s Labour's Lost, for instance; and then, curiously, it is spoken by a Spaniard and includes the memorable line: Tawny Spain, lost in the world’s debate. For it is true, throughout Spanish history, that whatever the world’s debate at any given moment Spain is always lost in it, apart from any particular meaning Shakespeare may have intended at the time. In prose, the spoken voice dominates some of the greatest works of Spanish literature: La Celestina (1499), Lazarillo de Tormes (before 1554) and Don Quixote (1605). The first time that pqpular speech was treated in a deliberately artistic manner \ was (we have seen) is the work of the two Archpriests: the poetry of the Archpriest of Hita (about 1330) and the prose of the Archpriest of Talavera, a hundred years later. The main quality they catch from the speech of the market is loquacity; and this is raised to a supreme degree by the author of the Celestina, who has also discovered the art of making men and j women speak in character. So far as Lazarillo is concerned, a j great deal of nonsense has been talked about its “picaresque” I quality, a word which never once occurs in the whole course of I the story and the origins of which are still in doubt. In language 144 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN we find popular speech once more; although the anonymous author was clearly a man of letters. Lazarillo himself is made to call the style grosero\ it is speaking the language of ordinary life; the life of the unsuccessful, the down-and-out. It lacks the exuberant verbosity of the Celestina; but has instead what Menendez Pidal has called a “masterly sobriety”; every word goes straight to the mark and makes its full satirical effect. Cervantes learnt from it, and used it to deflate the style of the books of chivalry. Verbosity is not the word to use for Santa Teresa, although she wrote as she talked — endlessly. One may wonder whether like Unamuno, she did not go away after talking and write down all she could remember of what she had said. The fascination of her style — her personal style, not her theological cliches — is that it gives the very accent and manner of the conversq family of Avila, to which she belonged. One can almost hear her voice, and it is a compelling voice, with a particularly marked intona- tion and rapid musical phrases; country words and characteristic diminutives; odd expressions, proverbs, refranes. She used the article with a possessive pronoun {la mi Isabela, instead of mi . . .). She said cuantimds {cuanto mas), enriedos (enredos), anque {aunque), naide {nadie). These were not faults of educa- tion; they were her own Old Castilian, as she and her family spoke it; and dignitaries of the Church who found her a nuisance described her in blunt Castilian, too. There was no getting away from her. The Apostolic Nuncio referred to her as esa mujer inquietay andariega (that restless and perambulating woman); but he too had to listen to what she said. jSiempre, siempre, siempre! she would exclaim; it must always be like that! In her desire to express what Menendez PidaP has called lo inefable de la mistica she used palabras sin concierto que solo Dios concierta, words without harmony which only God can harmonize; her prose seemed to Luis de Leon to be “dictated by God himself”. Many of the devotional books which she had read in youth were afterwards (1559) placed on the Index; the compiler, the Grand Inquisitor Valdes (not the author of the Didlogo de la lengua) contemptuously dismissed them as being para mujeres de carpinteros, books for the wives of rude mechanicals. Seven years before that, the Council of Trent had THE TWO VOICES 145 forbidden the Bible in the vulgar tongue. St. Teresa had little to read; and the country words and forms which now came to her were the most effective she could find. She deliberately extended the use of diminutives; and if a heaven-sent phrase like alma desalmada could become poetry three hundred years later, when Antonio Machado used it for the “unsouled soul” of the Spain attacked by Unamuno, forms like ilesia (for iglesia) and relision {religion) are mere baby-language: she must have heard, and used, the normal pronunciation every day of her life. But her language is inimitable. Lazarillo used to be attributed to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, author (or supposed author) of Laguerra de Granada, the appalling civil war against the revolted Moriscos in the time of Philip II. It is beyond the point to wonder whether the author was concealing information; he belongs to the history of the Spanish language through his style. At the age of 66 he had been banished from Madrid, and reached Granada in 1569 a few months after the war had begun. Having nothing to do, no effective part to play, although related to some of the chief Spanish figures in the history of Granada since its capture in 1492 — ^to those, in fact, who were largely responsible for the state of affairs which had led to the war — he set to work to write an exercise in the manner of Sallust and Tacitus, with the extreme concision, the telling phrases and the moral reflexions of his models. This is his importance in the history of the Spanish language; he represents the first reaction from ver- bosity, afterwards followed by Quevedo and Gracian: Senecan rather than Ciceronian. The highest point of Spanish prose before Cervantes was Luis de Leon. One cannot hear a spoken voice, however, in his marvellous Ciceronian dialogue on the names of Christ. The language is a joy, but it is (he admitted) most carefully planned, the words weighed, the syllables counted. As a poet, he worked equally hard; the MSS. show it. He could pack more words into a line than any Spanish poet, then or since, and his vision is Miltonic. He is not a mystic; he has no longing to lose himself I in the Divinity, but wants to know how the universe works and is kept going. Instead of seeking the mystic vision, he is Platonic, and above all musical; his poem to Salinas, the K 146 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN blind professor of music in the University of Salamanca, stands with Milton’s greatest musical utterances; music alone, he agreed, could “Dissolve me into extasies And bring all Heav’n before mine eyes”. Cervantes had both of the two voices, to a supreme degree; the carefully considered piece of writing, and the writing whieh is the speaking voice — or voices; for Don Quixote, Sancho and the rest are always distinguishable though always Cervantes himself. The considered style, however, is at its best when it is plainest. The beginning of the “exemplary novel” La Fuerza de la sangre is a perfectly factual account of the circumstances. It might have been a model for Stendhal, instead of the Code ' Napoleon. Every word tells, and there is not a word too much. Yet when it is examined and dissected, we find paragraph weighed with paragraph and rhythm answering to rhythm, like the strophe and antistrophe of a Greek chorus. It is the culmi- nation of both styles, the spoken and the written, a voice reading from a carefully prepared statement ; yet both voice and words have the inimitable ring of Cervantes himself. It is necessary at this point to say something of the language i of San Juan de la Cruz, though the fashion of today would treat his writings as private property. There is no critical edition which a scholar can respect; we often do not know what words the Saint wrote or how he spelt them and commentators incline to follow Menendez y Pelayo, that it would be irreverent to judge the poetry of San Juan de la Cruz by the criteria applied to other poets. In his language, San Juan de la Cruz is the only Spanish poet to have that “undiluted imaginative richness” which we find in the great poets of English. The source of this language which he shares with the English poets is the Old Testament. It is shown fully in only four poems; the Cdntico espiritual, the Noche obscura, the Llama de amor viva and the first five stanzas of Que Men se yo and is highly imaginative, sensually vivid and intense: erotic and anthropomorphic. No doubt the language of the Song of Songs had mystical associations in his mind. He borrows also from Renaissance platonism. The amada en el amado transformada was already there in a sonnet of Camoes, i Transforma-se o amador na cdusa amada, which in turn derives THE TWO VOICES 147 from Petrarch, Uamante nelV amato si trasforma, and in his prose commentaries the Saint employs a highly technical vocabulary.^ But it is the vivid, concentrated, telescoped phrases which have fixed him in the minds of all Spanish poets; leche de siiavidad, las profundus cavernas del sentido, el silho de los aires amorosos, la noche sosegada, la musica callada, la soledad sonora, al aire de tu vuelo, insulas estranas, Idmparas de fuego, el gitano del sentido and miedos de la noche veladores. It has remained for our own time or the present century to rediscover the greatness of Gongora. Yet he puzzled even his contemporaries. Lope de Vega confessed that “some study and not a few years of reading the stuff” — he used the word material, but meant poetry — to say nothing of “a good many verses I have written myself”, did not help him much with the poetry of Gongora. Yet he admitted that some of it gave him pleasure, not through fear of Gongora’s tongue — ^the usual explanation of his generosity — but through the sincerity of one great artist before the genius of another. He proposed “to take from him what he understood, with humility, and admire what he did not understand, with veneration.” Part of the pleasure of reading Gongora may be the excite- ment of something which is not altogether understood. Gongora is not obscure, but he is difficult. Obscurity comes from dis- order or confused thinking, and Gongora’s thought is never disordered or confused. The difficulty is due to the way in which he telescopes words and phrases, and moves too rapidly for the reader whose mind is set to the slower pace of ordinary poetry. A hardened opponent, like the poet and translator of Lucan, Jauregui, condemned him roundly for his obscurity. Obscurity was a vice, of the most insufferable nature. But as early as 1628, the year after his death, Gongora’s obscurity was denied. It was not really obscurity but light: a blinding glare like the sun, fusing and unifying the abundant ornamentation of his verse — as it does with the dazzling array of carved figures on a Spanish or Mexican fa 9 ade. This is the modern view, the view of Damaso Alonso and Guillermo de Torre. Roger Fry said the same about Baroque Spanish decoration.^ Gongora’s own defence — it was the Mexican poet and scholar Alfonso Reyes who first called attention to it — was that 148 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN he had worked on the vulgar tongue until it had the perfection and complexity of Latin, converting it into something quite different from ordinary Spanish. Obscurity can be valuable, if it keeps genius alive ; it may even be pleasurable in itself. The object of the understanding is to catch truths on the wing {hacer presa de verdades). Meanwhile the poem will be more enjoyable because its obscurity demands thought ; and there will gradually appear in the shadows of obscurity some glimmerings of light. What is new in this is the idea that obscurity may promote speculation; it does not lead to discoveries in the world of thought, but in that of imagination. Gongora prided himself on having latinized the speech of Spanish poetry, not in the simple manner of Herrera but by converting it into a magnificent private language with a style as intricate as that of some of the Latin poets. Besides the number of Latin words in his vocabu- lary, and the deliberate “hyperbaton” — the separation or spac- ing of nouns and adjectives — he adopts an indirect expression continually hovering between metaphor and allusion; and he does so, never losing sight of the value of obscurity to an artistic method which gives pleasure to the intellect and acts as a stimulus and a suggestion. It demands of the reader not merely the passive reception of beauty made poetry, but active co- operation with the poet in the search among the shadows of the ornamental relief for unsuspected, hidden beauties. The poet’s own statement of his views shows that he had isolated one of the chief elements of the baroque style: the rejection of clarity. The extent to which he did so shows the originality of the language of gongorism. Gongora knew per- fectly well what he was doing. His later poetry is perpetually skipping sideways to avoid direct expression, covering up what he was going to say and veiling it with all kinds of transferred meaning and verbal complication. There is nothing new in indirect expression; it belongs to poetry of all times. But its continuous application by Gongora was what Lope meant when he said that it was like a woman’s make-up: not limited to her cheeks but spread all over her face, with powder on her ears and forehead as well as her nose. Quevedo was against obscurity, and accused Gongora of drenching everything with jargon. He did not want obscurity. THE TWO VOICES 149 but ingenuity. Though not in favour of dissembled or cloaked expression, like Gongora, he had no use for perpetual plain- speaking and intelligibility, like Lope. When the opportunity offered, he too could give the reader that pleasure of puzzling things out for himself which Gongora professed to stimulate; but Quevedo did it not through obscurity of form but through subtlety of idea. He did not avoid jargon, either; only it was a different jargon from Gongora: cant and slang, the language of queer characters and crooks, mixed with scatological expressions which would surprise the most impossible schoolboy. When he wished, however, he could be an admirable stylist in the manner of Tacitus; his short phrases often contain more ideas than words. Gracian, again, did not favour obscurity, though he had a decided aversion to clarity. You should never make yourself too plain in what you say — “My lord, a woman’s answer Never should be too plain”, Susanna sings in Mozart’s Figaro — nor should you declare yourself completely; “playing a game openly is neither useful nor amusing”, el jugar a juego descu- bierto ni es de utilidad ni de gusto. Gracian was a Jesuit. He must have been one of the most brilliant talkers of his time ; but the tertulia which heard him was in a remote village in Aragon. Gracian accepts two of the points of view taken by Gongora to justify obscurity: the intellectual pleasure in seeing through it yourself, and not being understood by everybody. The relations of his style to the refranes has already been suggested (page 130). “Truth, the more difficult it is, the more agreeable. . . . Legal decisions reached by round-about means are achieved with more enjoyment than those which are merely accepted. On this, speech founds its conquests and genius its trophies.” Gracian advocates the difficult, not the obscure. He does not regard it as a problem to be solved, but litigation which one has to win by astuteness. One of Gracian’s precepts, more moderate than Gongora’s theory of obscurity, might serve for a motto for the baroque style in general: “Study to preserve mystery in all things. . . . Secrecy provokes veneration; even in explaining yourself you should avoid plainness.” 150 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN ‘^Amaga misterio en todo. ... La arcanidad provoca veneracion; aun en el dorse a entender se ha de hiiir la llaneza.” A mystery is pregnant, a hidden or recondite truth. Every piece of information which is difficult to come by is the more esteemed and enjoyable. In language, Gracian does not search for the words which are most exquisite, like the culteranos. He does not regard their polished surface but their inner meaning. The nerve of style consists in the profundity of the word itself. The word must be pregnant, not merely swollen; it must mean something, not merely resound (que signifique, no que resuene). Words should have depth in them, in which the attention is immersed and the | understanding nourished. The first effect of his phrases is to hold the attention through lack of clarity, and the hold is maintained. “The good, if brief, twice good.” {Lo hueno, si breve dos veces bueno.) “Quintessences do more than farragos.” {Mas obran quintas esencias que farragos.) “You should speak as in a will: the fewer the words, the fewer the law-suits.” {Hase de hablar como en testamento, i que a menos palabras, menos pleitos.) “Many”, he adds, “do I not value what they understand, and venerate what they do not ! see. But you must not give them an opportunity for censure. : Keepjhc m occup ied^jy ryingJ xi-und&Estand what you say.”® I It is not surprising that the next century, the eighteenth is known in Spain not as the age of reason, but the age of light: el siglo de las luces. The course of the language between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries might be shown in a set of comic sonnets. There is one by Barahona de Soto, consisting entirely of the favourite words of the poet Herrera, who died in 1597. Esplendores, celajes, vigoroso, selvaje, llama, liquido, candor es, ! vagueza, faz, purpdrea, Cintia, adores, otra vez esplendores, caloroso. . . . THE TWO VOICES 151 — all, except vagueza (Italian vaghezza) common today. Quevedo (d. 1645) has one beginning: “He who’d become a Gongora in a day, The proper jar- (he’ll learn) -gon is as follows:” Quien quisiera ser Gongora en un dia la jeri- (aprendera) -gonza siguiente: fulgores, arrogar, joven, presiente, candor, construye, metrica, armonia. . . . — and so on, through a long list of words including neutralidad, adolescente, petiilante, no{c)turno, caverna, all of which seemed strange, new and unnecessary. Nocturno and nocturnal seemed particularly odious. Yet something strange had happened to the language. Lope de Vega (d. 1635) has a sonnet, printed in many anthologies, in which the ghosts of Garcilaso and Bose an arrive at an inn after a hundred years. “Boscan, we’ve got here late. Will it be full?” “Call to them from the postern, Garcilaso.” “Who’s there?” “Two gentlemen from Mount Parnaso.” “No site to nocturnate armed protocol.” “I can’t make out a word the wench has said. Darling! What’s that?” “Let them assume a gate, till sunset’s limbos no more ostentate, and Sol depict no more his rosier red.” “Are you out of your mind?” “Faulty technique for an ambulant guest!” “In so few years, how sad to change the language of a Christian host!” “Boscan, we must have missed the road we seek. Ask the way to Castille! Either I’m mad, or else we’ve come down by the Biscay coast.” 152 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN ^Damaso Alonso, La poesia de San Juan de la Cruz, Madrid, 2nd ed., 1946. The study by M. Carmichael, Dublin Review, 1931, 40-43, forestalls Alonso’s chapter on Sebastian de Cordoba and the parodies a lo divino of Garcilaso. ^Study of the language of Spanish ballads offers considerable difficulty because sounds, forms and syntax may belong to different ages and different strata of the history of the language. Only a microscopic examination of a ballad in its verbal expression can determine how much belonged to the unknown poet who first composed it, how much to those who repeated it from memory, or to those who first collected it and printed it. Dialect is also involved, and the language of the fields and streets. The definite article, masculine, for example, sometimes appears with a palatal double LL, if an accented vowel follows, e.g., ell alma, a Leonese form which seems to have existed in Castille down to the sixteenth century. What is apparently the masculine form (though in reality the archaic feminine ela, from ILLA) occurs before words accentuated like el Alhambra, del Alhama, el espada, where modem Spanish would expect la. Again, the definite article is used before possessive adjectives, as in Italian and Portuguese — an archaism used unconsciously by modem Spaniards who still say their prayers: sanctificado sea el tu nombre (Hallowed be thy name), Venga el tu reino (Thy kingdom come). The article is also used with the vocative: digasme tu, el caballero (tell me, tell me, gentle sir), but is omitted sometimes when it would be used today: sobre las aguas de mar (over the waves of the sea), and before a proper name with a title: Conde Claras (for el Conde Claros). The indefinite article before a feminine substantive is nearly always una\ qiie vi una dguila volar (for I saw an eagle fly), even when modern usage would require un. It is sometimes used before a noun describing the substance of which a thing is made: la exercia de un cendal (the rigging all of silk). Certain substantives take a feminine article, when today they would be masculine: la favor, la color, a la fin. These are still heard in the streets of Madrid. See J. Ducamin in the “Observations grammaticales” to his Romances escogidos, Paris, n.d. (1896?), and the brief notes by S. Griswold Morley in Spanish Ballads, New York, 1929. ®R. Menendez Pidal, La lengua de Cristobal Colon, el estilo de Santa Teresa y otros estudios, Buenos Aires-Mexico, 1942. ^Jean Bamzi, Saint-Jean de la Cruz et le probleme de 1’ experience mystique, Paris, 1924. “Roger Fry, Visioii and Design. “L. B. Walton, Baltazar Gracidn, The Oracle . . . The Spanish text and \ a new English translation, 1953. I CHAPTER XI THE LANGUAGE OF REASON AND OF UNREASON The eighteenth century in Spain has seldom been properly or sympathetically studied. Even Menendez y Pelayo who, in his Ideas esteticas en Espana, indicated so many of the sources and even provided so much of the material, described it as epoca sin gloria ; when, if the truth were told, that would apply more to the nineteenth century than to the eighteenth. He meant that people in eighteenth-century Spain no longer believed in the Spanish ideals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and did not write as if they did so. The eighteenth century wanted to begin again. Spain had been slipping down the hill ever since Philip H, some would say ever since Isabel la Catolica. It had been ruined financially by the wars of the Emperor Charles V, and fell further into debt with the Catholic imperialism of Philip H. The silver of Mexico and Peru was mostly pledged to foreign bankers. The Spanish infantry at last proved to be no longer invincible, and in 1640 simultaneous rebellions in Portugal (annexed by Philip H in 1580) and Catalonia (brought in with Ferdinand of Aragon in 1474) threatened the unity of the Peninsula. It had never been a real unity, any more than unity under the Visigoths had been real; and it was in no sense a confederation, because the west and the east, Portugal and Catalonia with their own languages, laws and customs, had never been more than paper-partners of Castille. Spain, too, had its Scottish Border and its Offa’s Dyke. At one time there was a separatist movement even in Andalucia. In 1640 the government in Madrid, fearing intervention from France, turned most of its forces against the Catalans and succeeded ruthlessly in re-establishing its power in that quarter, though not in Portugal. The rest of the century petered out in mysticism and 153 154 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN absurdity; and in 1700 the death of Charles II — known as “the bewitched”, el hechizado — -brought on the war of the Spanish Succession in which Spain and Flanders were the sufferers while the other European powers disputed the Spanish crown. At the Peace of Utrecht in 1714, the Succession went to the French Bourbons, and Spain for a time was governed by Italian adventurers. The _Bourbons, however, proved to be administrators, and developed a flair for discovering competent and able ministers in Spain itself. The country took forty years to recover from the practical and mental con- sequences of war and invasion coming after so many years of corruption and misgovernment ; the leading spirits wanted a new Spain and a new language. By the time of Charles III (1759-1788) Spain was once more a great power. Even in the later seventeenth century some Spanish minds had begun to see that the cure for the country’s condition was not only spiritual but economic. The ideas of these arbitristas were often childish, and always — in the modern sense — arbitrary; but occasionally they hit the nail on the head. Not even the wildest arbitrista would have thought of suggesting a thing which was actually carried out by Charles III: the I expulsion of the Jesuits (1767). Yet one minister of Charles II proposed to revoke the edict of 1492 expelling the Spanish Jews, and to open Spanish America to all Jews and Protestants. Spanish minds were not all asleep, even in the latter half of the seventeenth century; but the regular arrival of the treasure- fleet was a powerful argument against those who held that not all was well with the Empire, and it is a fact that, in spite of the efforts of the British and the Dutch, the treasure-fleet only failed twice in two hundred years to reach its destination. By 1750 and the accession of Charles III Spain was on its feet again. There was a movement of opinion to forget the “traditionalism” of the seventeenth century — ^the “traditional obstacles” they were called later. Spain should begin over again, even at the cost of sacrificing some of its most cherished institutions, including the language of the si^lo de oro, the “golden age” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which had given so many words to other languages, but had now become a classic. LANGUAGE OF REASON AND OF UNREASON 155 Spanish institutions, including the language, had decayed and rather invited ridicule, even in Spain itself. Padre Isla, in Fray Gerundio de Campazas, parodied the grotesque language of contemporary sermons. They had such titles as Exaltacion magnifica de la Betlemitica rosa de la mejor americana Jerico y accion gratulatoria por su plausible plantacion dichosa (1697), or Ecos de las concavas grutas del Monte Carmel y resonantes halidos de las ranqueles ovejas del aprisco de Elias carmelitano: Echoes from the hollow caves of Mount Carmel and resonant bleatings from the flock of Elias the Carmelite (1717). A later collection was entitled Trompeta evangelica, alfange apostolico y martillo de pecadores: Evangelical trumpet, apostolic scimitar and hammer of siimers. Padre Isla also made fun of his Frenchified character, Don Carlos, furiosamente frames, using French words in Spanish dress like domaje (dommage) and villaje (village) along with gallicisms which today have become commonplace : libertinaje and libertino (Spanish disoluto), satisfacciones (gustos), senti- mientos (maximas), coqueta, inspeccion, departamento, irreproch- able, uncion, asamblea and Bellas letras (letras humanas).^ Eximeno, in Don Lazarillo Vizcardi, described the adventures of a village organist driven out of his mind, not by books of chivalry but by the rules of counterpoint. It was an age of clarity and modernity. Feijoo, a Voltairean Benedictine, pricked the bubbles of many illusions and super- stitions and false beliefs in his Theatro critico which ran into numerous editions and is to be found, in its row of vellum- covered volumes, in nearly every library in Spain or Spanish collection elsewhere. A pleasant feature was the loyal and de- voted help he received from a clerical friend. Padre Sarmiento, who was one of the first to re-read the older Spanish poetry. Meanwhile Masdeu began to puncture the illusions of Spanish history, and others published works on subjects which began to look something like economics. If Sarmiento was interested in the old poetry, others, particularly Tomas Antonio Sanchez, began to print it. Masdeu had refused to believe that the Cid ever existed, because the monks of San Pedro de Cardena had refused to show him their papers. Sanchez, being a cleric, was allowed to copy the poem and 156 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN print it, along with Berceo, the Archpriest of Hita and the medieval Spanish poem of Alexander (1779). The Spanish had their medieval poetry made available to them about the same time that the English had their Anglo-Saxon poetry and Chaucer. Other printed collections include the Parnaso of Lopez de Sedano, the Retorica and Origenes de la lengiia castellana (1737) of Mayans y Siscar; while the Teatro ... de la eloquencia of Capmany included Spanish poetry and prose of the great period which were now read as classics. Mayans was the first to print the Didlogo de la lengua of Juan de Valdes, while Flores, in Espana Sagrada, published a quantity of early Latin documents important in medieval Spanish history. At the end of the century, the Abbe Marchena translated Lucretius and was a good enough scholar to fake some of the lost episodes in Petronius, and to succeed — for a time — in his deception. One of the most sympathetic figures of the age was Count Fernan Nunez, author of a full-dress biography of Charles III. He lives, however, through his lively correspondence with Salm-Salm, a brother officer in the Guards. On his own estates he built a school in which no priest might give instruction, and — unusually for Spain — seems to have done something for his tenants. In other ways, he recalls Count Almaviva in Figaro, one reason for his estrangement from the Countess (not thought of by Beaumarchais) being her execrable French, quite unfitted for the wife of a Spanish Ambassador in Paris. Another attractive personality, who should not be despised because he was an amateur, was Cadalso, one of the best Spanish writers of the century. By profession he was a regular officer in the army, killed at the siege of Gibraltar in 1782; but under the title of “Moroccan Letters”, Cartas marruecas — a title intended to remind readers of Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes — he gave literary and diverting form to some of the problems of Spain and Spanish history. He did not despair of Spain, or feel an inferior like the romantic writers later. He thought the house, though in need of repair, had good founda- tions and was solidly built. One of the greatest mistakes was that they had been too often at war; and he spoke, as a profes- sional soldier, not only of the horrors of war but of its wastage and destruction. LANGUAGE OF REASON AND OF UNREASON 157 The language of these writers shows a break with the past ; it is in the spirit of the Age of Reason. There are gallicisms, of course, in vocabulary and syntax, like those ridiculed by Padre Isla; but gallicisms had been coming into Spanish ever since the thirteenth century. In the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth the rate of admission greatly in- creased. The chief cause of their entry was the inability of Spain to produce the objects or ideas required, and latterly the low level of the teaching of Spanish in Spain itself. Administration, political thought, industry, architecture, music and the drama: all of these, from the Peace of Utrecht in 1714 to the fall of Isabel II in 1868, had, in Spain, to be pro- vided by a species of NIL OBSTAT — not necessarily from the ecclesiastical authorities, but from France. “When France sneezes”, a wit remarked in the days of Isabel II, “Spain answers ‘Jesus’ ”. {Cuando Francia estorniida Espana dice i Jesus!) Yet the eighteenth century in Spain had a character of its own, one that was different from what it had been before; and it is a short-sighted view of history which sees in all this nothing but imitation of France. Spanish thinkers followed the only path which their intelligence showed them to be possible. “The idea that the coming of Philip V and his court merely imposed Gallic customs on the Spanish nation is as inexact as making Philip II exclusively responsible for the disastrous consequences of Catholic imperialism. In France, too, the material situation of the country was calamitous ; and the chosen spirits aspired not only to shake off the tyranny of theocracy, but also to achieve more well-being and social justice.” In Spain, they wished to destroy prejudice, but also to re-populate; to clean and light the towns; to be teachers, even though (Charles III said) the Spanish people cried when you tried to wash its face. The object of science and morals in eighteenth- century Spain was to attain a reasonable perfection, not only to serve God.^ Jovellanos, an able writer whose main concern was to reform education and agriculture, is interesting for being the first in whom influences may be detected from England. He had a flair for local, country words, and the customs of Asturias. If you had gone for a walk with him he would (unlike most of his 158 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN countrymen) have been able to tell you the names — local as well as Linnaean — of the trees and flowers. Quintana, too, was anglophil, and interesting for his language. Beginning, a neo- classic poet with odes on the beneficent introduction of vaccina- tion into the Spanish Empire and other philanthropic projects, he became in the Peninsular War the inspired poet of the resis- tance-movement against the French; while the proclamations which he drafted in his official capacity differ little in language from his odes. He was one of the first in Spain to re-discover the old Spanish ballads; and he compiled an anthology which was the forerunner of The Oxford Book of Spanish Verse. When it came to drafting an education bill for the Cortes of Cadiz, however, he was honest enough to turn to the enemy — France — and base it on the best he knew: Napoleon’s. French influence was certainly powerful. It had created such institutions as the Academy, founded libraries, and intro- duced new literary manners. French culture was international culture; and the Spanish eighteenth century was an attempt to get back into the main stream. Modern English (we are told) under the skilled hands of Dryden, Defoe and Swift, was created in a quarter of a century ; modern Spanish was created between 1740 and 1808. It was an important sign of the tone of intellectual life in eighteenth-century Spain that people were ready to listen to historical reasons intead of the legendary explanations usually given in the centuries before. The Real Academia Espanola, founded in 1713, published its great dictionary between 1726 and 1739 — the one known as the Diccionario de autoridades, because it is on historical principles and quotes authorities to show the use of words at different dates. The authorities are seldom earlier than the renaissance, and the quotations have been omitted from all later editions. Yet it is still the only dictionary of its kind in Spanish; its successor (with quotations), two hundred years later, was interrupted by the civil war of 1936 at the letter C, and the reader of old Spanish (unless his text is provided with'b modern glossary) has to ask himself, or herself, when confronted by a word which is new and strange: “Where have I, so far as my reading has carried me, come across a word in any way connected with this?” LANGUAGE OF REASON AND OF UNREASON 159 In the end, the word, or something like it, may be tracked down in a dictionary of medieval Latin, Portuguese or Arabic; the only hope in Spanish would be the Tesoro de la lengua castellana by Covarrubias, published in 1611. The proper title of the Spanish Academy’s “Dictionary of authorities” was Diccionario de la lengua castellana — ^''castellana" and not “espanola" because (the introduction says) “it was in Castille that the language was first formed and where it is spoken best”. This, we have seen, is historically correct. The old name was revived for historical reasons, and fitted the uniform, centralizing policy of the Bourbon kings ; the Spanish Empire had always been legally under the crown of Castille, and since the war of the Spanish Succession the other regions of Spain were regarded in practice as being so too. Historical reasons, again, were decisive in the question of spelling. From the time of Valdes the idea had been to spell as you pronounced; and the different systems of spelling had tried to be phonetic. The Academy, however, stood for a spelling which was etymological; it was their rule “to preserve the orthography of words so that their primitive origin may not be obscured”. So the present system of spelling became general, which decides according to Latin etymology whether to use B or V, G or J, and whether to retain the H; restores the groups of Latin consonants in signo, accion, rector, though they were no longer heard in pronunciation. In the eighteenth century, then, admiration for France was universal; only a few men in Spain, like Quintana and Jovella- nos, had any idea of England as well, though Cadalso had been here and seemed able to read the language. Otherwise the best brains were all gallicized: afrancesados, full of a very natural sympathy for France and French civilization. But France, under Napoleon, had become once more the greatest military power in the world; and, to the military mind, the Peninsula seemed the one position from which Europe might be defended against the universal enemy, England. It was essential that the French army should have bases in Spain and Portugal; therefore these countries must be occupied by French troops, given economic aid and an honest administration under Napoleon’s capable brother, Joseph. The childishness of Charles IV was correctly 160 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN judged, the turpitude of Ferdinand VII, adroitly turned to account. . . . We know what happened. The Spanish people, particularly in the towns, said no. They put up unorganized resistance against regular troops in Madrid on el dos de Mayo (the 2nd May, 1808). Saragossa underwent two fearful sieges. Far away, in Weimar, Goethe studied a plan of the Spanish city, knowing all too well what was going on. Goya’s drawings and etchings show what happened to individual French soldiers when the resistance-movement got hold of them. Wellington brought organization and method as well as disciplined British regiments which accomplished what the bravest Spanish guerrillas could never have done for themselves. After six years the French were pushed back across the Pyrenees. War had once more destroyed the promise of Spain. In 1808 the hopes of an age of reason or light or prosperity were dashed. When it was over, Spain became a police-state, the Inquisition was restored, liberal-minded Spaniards became exiles, and literature was reduced to a cheap imitation of romanticism from elsewhere. Yet to other countries, Spain seemed the most romantic country in the world, and many writers staged their romanticism in Spain. Researchers on Spanish romanticism have not realized that the background to people’s lives in romantic Madrid — apart from high prices, bad food, insanitary conditions and the ubiquitous presence of plain-clothes police — was opera. Opera filled the place in people’s minds which today is taken by the cinema. Larra, the satirist, was also a musical critic, and referred to singers as if they were film-stars. How many operas have a Spanish setting! Even Beethoven’s Fidelio, the story of which is French and took place in France, was transferred to Spain for reasons of “security”. The only Spanish plays of the period 'I, which are not entirely forgotten are those which were after- wards used for libretti in some of Verdi’s most famous operas: El Trovador became II Trovatore; Simon Bocanegra, Simone Boccanegra; Lafuerza del sino, Laforza del destino. Larra’s operatic criticism is forgotten, though his satires survive. But, for the language, a more fruitful field is provided by the so-called Cuadros de CQStumbres (pictures of popular LANGUAGE OF REASON AND OF UNREASON 161 customs), by “Fernan Caballero” (whose real name was Bohl de Faber), Estevanez Calderon and others, full of strange new words generally of Andalucian origin. The same thing was done later, with more genius but with distinct political bias, by Pereda in the country round Santander on the north coast; but it was Andalucia which became the type of romantic Spain, though actually it was, and is, the region which is most tragic, never having recovered from the destruction of its whole agricultural and commercial economy brought about by the reconquista. The chief product of Andalucian romanticism was music. In Cadiz in the eighteenth century there was civilized music like that of Domenico Scarlatti in Madrid. Touring Italian opera companies gave performances, and a canon of the cathedral was important enough to commission Haydn to write music for the traditional ceremony of the “Seven Words from the Cross”. After the war, music of this kind gave way to a development of eighteenth-century street-music, performed in a strange semi-oriental or gipsy manner which is of considerable interest to anthropologists, and even to musicians. As the romantic age proceeded, this became a cult, particularly among the aficionados of the bull-ring, and the young men of fashion who aped the manners and customs — and language — of the gipsies, and still do so today. The passionately erotic or devotional words of the cante are in a language full of Andalucian provincialisms; the words cante (for canto) and jondo (an aspirated form of hondo, deep) are examples. Words in calo, the dialect of the Spanish gipsies, are sometimes introduced as well. Flamenco, the other word used to describe the cante and the way of life which patronizes it, is probably derived from a Cafe Flamenco at Puerto de Santa Maria near Cadiz; it signified “flamingo”, not “Flemish”. Both words and music offered considerable difficulties to those who tried to write them down. For fifty years the Cante remained an unwritten literature; while drawing-room pieces founded on the music were an artificial reproduction of conditions more remote from a drawing-room than anything in Europe. The first collection of Cantes flamencos was published in 1881, by A. Machado y Alvarez, father of the poets Antonio and Manual Machado ; and L 162 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN it was Manuel who wrote a magically evocative poem Cantaora (i.e. Cantadora, singer), a linguistic tour-de-force consisting entirely of names of singers and the different kinds of cante, each of which would require a page of footnotes to explain. Sevillanas, chuflas, tientos, marianas, tarantas, tonas, livianas . . . Peteneras, soleares, soleariyas, polos, canas, seguiriyas, martinetes, carceleras . . . Serranas, cartageneras. Malaguenas, granadinas. Todo el cante de Levante todo el cante de las minas, todo el cante . . . Spain has never recovered from the disasters of the Napoleonic war, or the moral effects of invasion, occupation and liberation. Even the economic consequences of the loss of Spanish America were less damaging than the presence of the contending forces of Europe. Spain had become a Korea. The government since then has been in the hands of various generals, or men ruling with dictatorial powers. Ferdinand VII returned to the kingdom he so little deserved; but romantic “Carlism”, a movement in favour of another and more theocratic branch of the Bourbons, led to two long civil wars with all their inevitable barbarities. The revolution of 1868 drove Isabel II into exile; but her camarilla of handsome generals and intriguing clerics remained behind, with Father Claret, the Queen’s con- fessor, and Sor Patrocinio, “the bleeding nun”, whose stigmata were proved to be self-inflicted. The first Republic was not strong enough to cope with these “traditional obstacles”. On the historic site of Saguntum, General Martinez Campos staged a pronunciamiento in favour of Alfonso XII and the monarchy was restored. The Restoration of 1876 provided a lucid interval of con- stitutional and parliamentary government in which conserva- | tive-liberal and liberal-conservative ministries followed one • LANGUAGE OF REASON AND OF UNREASON 163 another (it was said) with the clockwork regularity of the changing of the guard. But in 1898 another war, the Spanish- American war, deprived Spain of her last remaining colonies; Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippine Islands. That war was fortunately brief, but it produced one action on the part of a Spanish admiral which was worthy of Don Quixote. The defeat acted as a stimulus to Spanish life and thought. Now at last they were alone, and must depend on their own country; and a generation of scholars, poets, painters and composers began to show them how wonderful that country was. “The day when Spain is on the high level of her scenery. . . !” Don Francisco Giner remarked, and left the sentence unfinished {El dia que Espana este a la altura de su paisaje . . .). He was the educator of a new Spain, the inspirer of all that was good in Spain from 1868 to 1938.® That is over. The poets are dead or in exile; the philologists, many of whom went into exile too, are trying to save the traditions of scholarship. Every effort has been made to expunge the name and memory of Don Francisco Giner; but Father Claret has been canonized. The linguistic legacy of the nineteenth century includes the word liberal, in the political sense ; but it also includes guerrilla, junta, camarilla, incomuni- cado, pronunciamiento, which have been adopted into most European languages. The twentieth century has provided enchufe, an electric plug, but used in the sense of a man being plugged into a job ; and estraperlo, originally a gambling game allied to roulette, but now used for every kind of black market activity and corruption. The latest civil war produced the expression “fifth column” (of supporters on the other side) which as a caique or “translated loan-word”, has now become common property in all languages. The true memorial of the period 1868-1939 is the prose of Valera, Galdos, Unamuno and “Azorm”, the poetry of Juan Ramon Jimenez, Antonio Machado, Garcia Lorca and Jorge : Guillen. The future of the Spanish language lies with the twenty Spanish-speaking countries in America. ^J. Oliver Asin, Historia de la lengua espanola, 6th ed., Madrid, 1941, I pp. 128-129. i ^Americo Castro, Lengua, ensenanza y literatura, Madrid, 1924, p. 106. ^J. B. Trend, The Origins of Modern Spain, Cambridge, 1934. CHAPTER XII SPANISH-SPEAKING AMERICA Much has been made in England of “South American Spanish”. In some centres of information and publicity it is regarded as almost a separate language, and “Castilian pro- nunciation” is taboo. The pronunciation which should be taboo is one which gives a wrong colour to the vowels and makes the clear, steady Spanish sounds like sliding English diphthongs. There are vowels, and consonants too, which are practically identical in every variety of Spanish ; though it is also true that there is practically no sound in Spanish which is phonetically the same as the corresponding sound in English. English speakers of “South American Spanish” are seldom aware how ugly and uneducated they often sound, unless they take care of the vowels and employ the. consonants with dis- cretion. They are like Polish of Italian workers in England, who have picked up a provincial or dialectal pronunciation, but use it with none of the natural grace which belongs to it. I, for instance, have a certain affection for the West-country “burr”; but I find it intolerable in a foreigner, unless he is a trained phonetician and can imitate the sound exactly, with the appro- priate vowels as well. So the Briton (who, in any case, will nearly always sound like a foreigner speaking Spanish, because of his vowels) had better try to sound like an educated foreigner, or at least an intelligent one. An English speaker of “South American Spanish” who does not do so, is like a man who, at a friendly gathering in shirt-sleeves, appears in a rather dirty vest. There are, of course, born speakers of Spanish (as there are born speakers of other languages) who sound as if they could i hardly care for their language less. On the other hand many I “Spanish Americans”, like many people in Peninsular Spain, | speak the language as if they loved it, or were creating it as they ! 164 SPANISH-SPEAKING AMERICA 165 went along. It is not for nothing that Spanish is the national language of all those free and independent countries between the Mexican border and Tierra del Fuego. English-speaking people, however, are apt to form their impression of “South American Spanish” from the consonants which they have heard — often very imperfectly — in the River Plate countries ; and the official view is that South American Spanish is a separate language which, unlike the Spanish of Spain, has no TH and pronounces LL like Y or French J. That is not so. The language to which, they refer is only one of the several different varieties of Spanish in Europe and America. To begin with, nearly half the South American continent speaks Portuguese; while the Spanish-speaking countries — including Central America, Mexico and parts of New Mexico and elsewhere in the United States, together with the Philippine Islands and the Caribbean islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico — show many varieties of Spanish which can be heard in Spain too. A cocktail-party with a number of lively, sociable and friendly Spanish-speakers from across the Atlantic, is a linguistic experience as well as a social occasion. Mexicans, Cubans, Venezuelans, Colombians, Peruvians, Chileans, Uruguayans and Argentines all speak Spanish — or Castilian they prefer to call it — though they all speak it differently; and while a Guatemaltecan may sound like a Mexican, and an Ecuadorean not unlike a Peruvian, there are differences, even between the most polished speakers ; though the varieties are less noticeable to a Spanish ear than the provincialisms of Peninsular European Spanish. A pleasant feature of real transatlantic Spanish is that many of the voices are softer than the voices in Spain. They do not so often shout or dictate; and a Spanish philologist, after nearly twenty years in Buenos Aires, was still struck by a certain indirectness of expression which he could only attribute to courtesy, or consideration for the man who was talking to him.^ Be that as it may, one gets an impression from American Spanish very different from that of, say, San Vicente de la Barquera on the Bay of Biscay (admirably articulated but intolerably harsh) or Gibraltar where the mixed Mediterranean and often un-Spanish population speaks a language described as 166 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN tin andaluz cerrado, though with none of the grace or imagina- tion or creative sense of Andalucian from Seville or Cadiz. The question is complicated and bristles with difficulties; but the differences may be due to three causes: (1) the parts of Spain from which the original colonists came, (2) the influence of the aboriginal Indian languages, and (3) the proportion of immigrants from other parts of Europe than Spain. The first is difficult to determine. The names of a large number of sixteenth-century passengers to the “Indies” have been preserved, and something may be learnt from these lists about their origins. It is quite vffitrue to say that most of them came from Andalucia, though they all embarked at Seville. There were many Extremenos and Basques; and an Asturian ballad, heard in a mountain village in Chile, proved quite clearly where some of the original inhabitants of that village had come from.^ The influence of the native Indian languages has been dis- counted — too hastily, perhaps; the influence of Arabic in Spain was discounted before the arrival of a great Spanish Arabic scholar like Asm. It is true that in Chile, for instance, many of the facts alleged to prove a survival of the phonetics of the Araucanian language correspond to effects of the same kind in Spain, or other parts of Spanish America; so it is logical to suppose that there were parallel developments in the Spanish of chile without recourse to the Indian substratum. Racially, the substratum exists; but linguistically its existence has been denied. In other Spanish-speaking American countries it is impossible to deny the influence of the indigenous languages. In Mexico there are still about forty Indian languages, several have over a hundred thousand speakers. Some were reduced to writing, or transliterated from the original picture- writing, by Spanish missionary scholars in the sixteenth century. The chief are Nahuatl (the modern form of Aztec), Maya, Zapotec, Mixtec, Otomi; while Tarascan, though small in the number of its speakers, belongs to a vigorous race and shows no signs of dying out. Some of these languages are agglutinative and polysyllabic; others (e.g. Otomi) tend to monosyllables, or (like Zapotec and Mixtec) are “tone-languages”. Mexicans speaking Spanish — eighteen out of twenty millions — have a SPANISH-SPEAKING AMERICA 167 peculiar “high tension” S derived from Nahuatl. They also pronounce the TL as no other Spanish speaker can. The Mayas in Yucatan pronounce Spanish consonants in a way that makes one think of Germans ; they are using emphatic Maya sounds in Spanish. The Quechua (Ketchwa) language of Peru, derived from the ancient language of the Inca Empire, also has some formidable consonants, such as the one with which the name of the language begins. The other modern Peruvian language, Aimara is heard also in Ecuador and Bolivia. Guarani, in Para- guay, is a language which most people talk equally with Spanish ; columns of it are printed in the newspapers. It is the only Indian language in a Spanish-American country which may one day oust Spanish, part of its vitality being due to the fact that (like Tarascan in Mexico) it is quite ready to take in Spanish words and Spanish sounds which are alien to it. Mexican Spanish has an individual and attractive intonation which may come from pre- Spanish times. The intonation of Spanish-speaking Americans is often more varied than that of Spanish-speakers in Spain; there are sharper rises and falls in the melodic line of their speech, while a Castilian tends to keep his inflexions within narrower limits, and closer to his normal “reciting-note”. There are variations, too, in the rhythm: a Mexican will abbreviate unaccented vowels or leave them out, while an Argentine will linger before the accented syllable and on the syllable itself. I have conversed with an Argentine whose intonation made his Spanish sound I like Italian. The words were Spanish, but the rhythm and melody of his voice were like a recitative of Puccini. Spanish-speaking America offers an exceptionally favour- able field for examining the linguistic concepts of substratum and superstratum.^ The superstratum is Spanish, over all the surviving indigenous languages; and the character, depth and quantity of “super-stratification” differ for the Guarani of , Paraguay and the Argentine border, the Araucano of Southern t Chile, the Amdean languages of Ecuador and Peru, and the Nahuatl of Mexico. In Guarani, the presence of Spanish is ' felt not only in the vocabulary, syntax and morphology, but in the phonetic system as well. On the contrary, the Spanish of Paraguay has, in its turn, been influenced by Guarani phonetics. 168 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN In the Andes the native languages appear as a phonetic sub- stratum of Spanish, both in Bolivia and in the Sierras of Ecuador. In central Chile the traces of indigenous pronuncia- tion are being smoothed out by the levelling action of Santiago and Valparaiso ; but in the south, where there is still a bilingual population, the substratum of Araucano may have led to a few innovations. In Mexico, the “high-tension” S, already referred to, is an effect of the substratum. It is undoubtedly due to indigenous influence “and must be considered an innovation, since in Nahuatl also, the modern S is a novelty resulting from the weakness with which the ancient Indian fricatives were articulated.” Other new developments in the Spanish of South America, hitherto unexplained, are a pronunciation of double RR in such a way as to sound something between the English R in “rude” and the French J; while the group TR is coming to be pro- nounced like the English “tree”. These sounds seem to arise in all parts, whether there is a neighbouring indigenous language or not. Where the influence of Indian languages is undoubted is in the vocabulary. If the discoverers began by calling the puma a lion and the jaguar a tiger, they soon picked up the right words from the Indians. From the dead Caribbean language, Arawak, they took canoa canoe, cacique chief (now often used for a political boss), maiz maize, canibal, sabana savannah plain, hamaca hammock, and above all tabaco. The Arawak word naguas skirt became the Spanish enaguas (perhaps through popular etymology from en aguas); Mexican Spanish, however, keeps the original form: las naguas. These indigenous words were adopted by the Spanish without loss of time: canoa is already in Nebrija’s Dictionary of 1493. The Aztec language, Nahuatl, gave the Spaniards cacao, chocolate, tomate, jicara (cup) and petaca, (now a cigarette-case) and many other words. The Tarascan huarache sandal, is used all over Mexico. Quechua added alpaca, vicuna, condor, guano, pampa; Guarani tapioca, Araucano gaucho. There are also words which have not been exported to Europe: china (Quechua) for an Indian girl. The word reached Mexico, where the china poblana is a popular type (in song) from Puebla. Another SPANISH-SPEAKING AMERICA 169 Quechua word, chacra farm, is found in many parts of South America; in Brasil, it is usually a country house not far from a town. Chamaco (Nahuatl?) is familiar Mexican Spanish for a boy; few mothers (except on the most formal occasions) would refer to a young son as anything but mi chamaco. Mucama (Guarani) is usual in Chile and the Argentine for a nurse or maid; while poncho, the blanket with a hole in the middle to slip over the head as a cloak, is Araucano. The traveller in Mexico, even if his Spanish vocabulary is reasonably large, may be baffled by the menu; many dishes have names that are Nahuatl or belong to some other Indian language, especially the hot sauces (including the one with, so to speak, delayed action after swallowing) and sweet cakes. There are also the plants which the Indians collected for materia medica; and the flowers which they put into little vases made like the head of a god and still use in all kinds of ceremonies, with their strange and beautiful names derived from Nahuatl, and often connected with the flower goddess Xochipilli. (The X here is SH.) It is generally considered that the Spanish which first went to America with the conquistadores was not unlike that which went to the Near East with the exiled Jews. But while Judaeo- Spanish had no further connexion with the Spanish of Spain and was influenced by the other languages surrounding it, Spanish in America underwent the same kind of changes as the Spanish in the Peninsula. B and V were confused: Q, SS and X came to be pronounced like Z, S and J. Then J and X lost the French sounds of J and SH (CH in French), and became the aspirated jota of today. In Mexico the letter X represents four sounds: (1) the X in English; (2) the Spanishyofa — one writes “Mexico” but says “Mejico” — (3) SH, in Xochimilco, Xochipilli, and (4) S, in Taxco. The important point here is that “the Spanish of America separated from that of Castille in ways which corresponded with those of other regions in Spain, especially in the south. The sibilants were all fused in S. Its articulation was variable, but was closer, as a rule, to the Andalucian sound than the Castilian and northern”. It is emphatically not the S of Euro- pean or American English, any more than the Castilian lisp is 170 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN the English TH. At the end of a word it was reduced to a simple aspiration: loh ojoh, for los ojos. I have been told that when, in 1898, the American expeditionary force reached Manila in the Philippine Islands, and surprised the Spanish Governor at dinner, his orderly rushed in, exclaiming: “Seiio, loh Americanoh ehtdn aqui. In Argentina, Uruguay and some other places including one state in Mexico, the double LL underwent an evolution which it has undergone, too, in parts of Spain: from -illo, through -iyo to -ijo (with something very like a French J). This is not an exclusive characteristic of the Spanish of the River Plate; it is to be heard at Granada, for instance (in Spain) from small children; and cannot be explained away as being due to people who have returned from the Argentine. Not all the LL’s have changed in Spanish-speaking America. It persists with the Castilian pronunciation (as in “million”) in a small district in Mexico, in parts of Colombia, Ecuador and Peru; in almost the whole of Bolivia, in Paraguay, in the Argentine state of Corrien- tes, in the district of Mendoza near the Andes, and in the north and south of Chile. The statement frequently made in England that, in South America, LL is pronounced Y, is therefore inaccurate. Many of the peculiarities of American Spanish are not neologisms but archaisms, and have their roots in the past of the language. There is the question of the form of address: the right rendering of “you”. About 1500, inferiors in rank were addressed equals vos. When the polite form vuesa merced (your grace) became general, the td was reserved for intimates. But this innovation was not followed by the whole of Spanish America. The River Plate provinces. Central America and the district of Chiapas in Southern Mexico went on with vos\ while in Mexico and the greater part of Peru, where the capitals had viceregal courts and an important social life and were more in contact with Spanish customs, td and usted were adopted, (the latter contracted from vuesa merced) ; and the second person plural in most parts of Spanish-speaking America is still ustedes, as in Spain. The oscillation between td and vos — the use of vos is called voseo — has given rise to much confusion. It is common SPANISH-SPEAKING AMERICA 171 to hear vos used with a singular verb, which grates on a Spanish or Mexican ear like “you was” in English. But one should be careful to avoid criticism of South American Spanish from an English standpoint; what an English speaker of Spanish should remember is that he has no right to use this mixture of forms himself. It will pass with one to the manner born, but is unbearable in a stranger. There are other pitfalls. Some words which are innocent of any improper suggestion in Spain cannot on any account be used in polite conversation in Argentina. They may have had that suggestion in Spain once, but have lost it. On the other hand, civilized and cultivated women in the Argentine sometimes use words in private conversation — in a purely figurative sense — which come with a considerable shock to a woman brought up in Madrid. In the Spanish Empire^ there was the same tendency as in Spain to look for inspiration to France, and this increased with the new life which seemed to dawn with the abolition of the ancieiTfegime. Before that, books had had to pass through the customs, or be smuggled in by other means ; and the contra- band books were nearly always French. Bompland and De la Condamine, and the physicists who measured the meridian, brought something new: French science; and even Humboldt seemed to belong to French culture rather than German because his books were read in French. Narino in Colombia got into trouble with the Spanish authorities for making and printing a translation of “The Rights of Man”; Miranda had been a general in the Napoleonic armies; Bolivar’s admiration for France was unbounded; Andres Bello studied the Code Napoleon to create a Spanish American civil law. All the alert minds in the new Spanish-speaking republics drew their inspiration from French sources: doctors, lawyers and teachers learnt from French books. As the nineteenth century drew on there was a reaction against “gallicism”. Baralt published a Diccionario de galicismos', Cuervo’s Apuntadones criticas sobre el lenguaje bogotano made an example of the “solecisms and barbarisms” in the Spanish of all countries; Bello’s Gramdtica attacked the foreign expres- sions which deformed Spanish syntax. It is largely due to their labours that French words and phrases are less frequent in 172 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN South America now than they were a century ago, while the standard of translation from French books has greatly improved. Unfortunately a new disease has appeared: anglo-american- ism. Gallicism had had only the printed book for a vehicle; anglo-americanism has periodicals, press-agencies, industry, commerce and science, together with means which are more powerful than any: the cinema, radio and sport. Syntax is affected as well as vocabulary: one can now read estd siendo for “is being”, cien por cien de acuerdo for “a hundred per cent in agreement”, though not all South American editors would approve of it. Neither would they think that a good writer should talk of extender cortesias for “extending- courtesies”, render servicios for “rendering services” ; or call the “provisions of the law” provisiones de la ley, “playing a part” jugar papel, “fighting a battle” pelear una batalla, or “running a business” operar un negocio. Vocabulary, however, is a worse sufferer than syntax; for often there is a perfectly good Spanish word available, which would have made the importation unnecessary, if only the writer or translator had known of it, while the importation frequently clashes with and confuses an already existing Spanish word. A film-star has a romance', not a Spanish ballad written about her, but a love affair which has got into all the papers. Film-captions, hurriedly and carelessly thrown into Spanish, have equally damaging effects on Spanish-speaking audiences. The personage described as villano is no longer a countryman, but the “villain” of the piece. In the same way, topico is no longer a commonplace, but a “topic”; carton, not a cardboard covering but a caricature, a “cartoon”. Legal language, too, is being confused by Anglo-American terminology; ofensa is used for the Spanish delito, felonia for crimen, conviccion for condena, acta for ley. Reports of inter-American congresses are full of confusions of this kind; and frank importations seem preferable, like el dumping, or el self-government of G. de Azcarate’s book published sixty years ago. Architectural importations include porchos (or porches), and bongalos. Other recent admissions into transatlantic Spanish include boicotear, bonche, crucial, champu, chequeo (check-up), envelope, financiar , grosero (grocer), guachimdn (watchman), giiinche (which). SPANISH-SPEAKING AMERICA 173 implemento, vistalamento, interferir, Uder, lonche (lunch), norsa (nurse, for the standard Spanish enfermerd), overol (overall), parquear (to park a car), querosin (kerosene), sandwich, siiiche (switch), supervigilar or even supervisar. Baralt in the nineteenth century knew of 851 gallicisms. Alfaro, in a dictionary of Anglo-americanisms now in progress, claims 1,200, most of which he considers inacceptable. He approves, however, amongst others: hoicotear, with camujiaje, factual, radar, mecanizar and motorizar, with insatisfactorio (unsatisfactory) and inamistoso (unfriendly). The pleasant, friendly atmosphere of transatlantic Spanish is maintained by the number of diminutives — or so-called diminutives; for one function of the diminutive is to bring the object prominently and personally before the mind, and it does this by an affectionate, imaginative description of the object itself.® Diminutives in Spanish are not generally, or not often, diminutives at all; their most obvious meaning is emotional, or representational. Despacito and deprisita do not imply any less haste, or more, than despacio and de prisa. They sound more courteous to the person to whom we are speaking, or allow a more persuasive tone of voice ; they have little to do with more haste or less speed. They are like adding “please” or “could you”. Yet affection is involved, too, and the explanation that the diminutive was originally a sign of affection is still valid. The Roman grammarian Priscian states that it was CAUSA URBANITATIS; and Hofmann, in his attractive book on colloquial Latin, associates them with what he calls CAPTATIO BENEVOLENTIAE. The authors of some of the earliest Spanish grammars saw this too. Juan de Miranda whose Spanish grammar was printed at Venice in 1565 considered that the difference in shade of meaning between the endings -ico and -ito, on the one hand, and -illo on the other, was that -ico was always used per modo di carezza as if accompanied by caresses, while -illo was a real diminutive, for calling a thing little with no thought of affection or caress. Gonzalo Correas (1626) was of opinion that -ito signified amor y Men querer, while -illo was less affectionate. There is also a geographical consideration in the use of a diminutive; the actual form varies in different regions. Con- 174 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN sequently a diminutive has a power of evocation of its own, when used away from the region to which it naturally belongs. In Spain, some of the regions evoked by the different diminutive endings are -ino Galicia, -in Asturias, -uco Santander, -iyo (for -illo) Seville. The ending -ico, while evoking Granada, and also Aragon and Navarre in Spain, calls to mind Colombia, South America, Costa Rica and some of the islands in the Caribbean; while -ito brings a suggestion not only of Cuba, Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico and Colombia, but also of Mexico and the countries of the River Plate. The use of the diminutive is connected with that process which Amado Alonso once called ensor dinar la expresion por cortesia’. toning down an expression through good manners. It is one of the characteristics of the speech of Buenos Aires. Adiosito is an affectionate softening of adios, ahorita (Mexico and elsewhere) “in a minute, my dear”, en seguidita “I’ll do it for you at once”, cerquita “quite close to where you are now”, prontito “all ready for you”. This is the note on which an account of the language and history of Spain should end. There are unfortunately some speakers of Spanish whose treatment of the language can only be described as sadistic — even in Spain; there are some recent immigrants into Spanish-speaking America who talk as if they “couldn’t care less”. The same is true of some speakers of English, whether born to it or not. The concern of all those who are interested in the history of a language is primarily — though not exclusively — with those speakers who care; and they are found in all walks of life. The following fine example of modern Spanish is deliber- ately taken from a translation, so that it may be compared with a beautifully modelled piece of English prose. It comes from the Mexican version, by Alfonso Reyes, of the short story by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Ebb Tide, La Resaca. . . . and the Virgil, which he could not exchange Mas de una vez, el 'Virgilio' , que no eraposible trocar against a meal, had often consoled him in his hunger. por una comida, lo habia consolado del hambre. SPANISH-SPEAKING AMERICA 17S He would study it, as he lay with tightened belt, Lo repasaba tendido a lo largo y con el cinturon bien on the floor of the old calaboose, apretado, en el suelo de la antigua prision que le hacia de seeking favourite passages and finding refugio, buscando en el libro pasajes predilectos o descubriendo new ones only less beautiful because nuevos encantos que solo le parecian menos bellos porque they lacked the consecration of remembrance, or he les faltaba la consagracion del recuerdo, o se would pause on random country walks, detenia en sus vagabundeos inacabables por el campo, sit on the path side, gazing over the sea, se sentaba junto a una senda, mirando el otro lado del mar, on the mountains of Eimeo and dip into the Aeneid las montanas de Eimeo y luego abria la Eneida al azar seeking sortes. And if the oracle (as is the way of . buscando suertes. Y si el ordculo, como es costunibre de los oracles) replied with no very certain or encouraging ordculos, respondia con palabras no muy precisas ni muy voice, visions of England at least would throng upon alentadoras, al menos sugeria un tropel de visiones de the exile’s memory, the busy schoolroom . . . the perennial Inglaterra, la bulliciosa sala del colegio y el perenne roar of London and the fire-side, and the white head rumor de Londres, la chimenea familiar, la blanca cabeza 176 THE LANGUAGE AND HISTORY OF SPAIN of his father. For it is the destiny of those grave, restrained del padre. Que es el sino de esos grandes, sohrios and classic writers, with whom we make enforced and often aiitores cldsicos, con los que entablamos for zado y a veces painful acquaintanceship at school, to pass into the blood penoso conocimiento en las aulas, diluirse en nuestra sangre and become native in the memory ; so that y penetrar en la sustancia misma de la memoria. Y asi a phrase of Virgil speaks not so much of acontece que una frase de Virgilio no nos hable tanto de Mantua or Augustus but of English places Mantua y de Augusto como de rincones de la tierra natal and the student’s own irrevocable youth. 0 memorias de la propia juventud ya irrevocablemente perdida. ^The late Amado Alonso. ^R. Menendez Pidal, El lenguaje del sigh XVI, in La lengua de Cristdbal Colon. Buenos Aires-Mexico, 1942, pp. 62 ff. ^R. Lapesa, Historia de la lengua espanola, 3rd ed., Madrid, 1950. ^Ricardo J. Alfaro, El anglicismo, in Bol. Inst. Caro y Cuervo, IV, pp. 102-128, Bogota, 1948. ®Damaso Alonso, notes to W. von Wartburg, Problemas y metodos de la linguistica anotado para lectores hispanicos, Madrid, 1951. See also, passim: L. C. Harmer and F. J. Norton, A Manual of Modern Spanish, London, 1935. Charles E. Kany, American- Spanish Syntax, University of Chicago, 1945. B. Malmberg, L’espagnol dans le Nouveau Monde. Lund, Studia Linguis- tica, 1947-48. M. L. Wagner, Lingua e dialetti dell’ America Spagnuola, Florence, 1949. LIST OF SPANISH WORDS MENTIONED abadengo, 40 abate, 87 abedtil, 20, 21 abrojo, 58 aceituna, 22 acequia, 61 adiosito, 174 aduana, 61 aficionados, 161 afrancesados, 159 agasajar, 40 agudo, 93 ahorita, 174 ajedrez, 62 ajeno, 93 alambique, 62 albaricoque, 62 alberchigo, 62 albergue, 40 alcalde, 61 alcanfor, 62 aldea, 63 alfiler, 61, 62 alfombra, 61 alforjas, 63 algarabia, 60 algodon, 63 alhena, 63 aljamta, 54, 70 desalmada, 145 almidon, 101 almohada, 61 almoradu, 57 alodio, 40 alpaca, 168 alquimia, 62 M alubia, 62 amancebado, 33 andaluz cerrado, 166 arpa, 40 arroyo, 16, 19, 85 arroz, 62 asamblea, 155 ascua, 19 atar, 27 ataud, 61 ataviar, 40 atocha, 21 avena, 22 azada, 92 61 azogue, 61, 63 azotea, 61 azud, 61 azul, 62 azulejo, 62 barbecho, 22 15 iew, 93 boca, 28 bodega, 49 boicotear, 172, 173 boina, 19 bonche, 172 bongalo, 172 bosque, 21 boyata, 55 brio, 17 brotar, 40 buen gusto, 119 bueno, 93 177 178 LIST OF SPANISH WORDS MENTIONED Caballero, 28 cahallo, 28 cabana, 17 cabeza, 84 cabildo, 92 cacao, 168 cacique, 168 cama, 16 , 58 camarilla, 162 , 163 camisa, 16 camuflaje, 173 canibal, 168 canoa, 168 canicula, 107 cante jondo, 119 , 161 , 162 capa, 14 carrera, 85 castano, 20 , 21 Castillo, 93 catar, 27 caudillo, 58 cebada, 22 Centeno, 22 centopies, 58 cerquita, 174 cerveza, 17 cifra, 61 ciudad, 93 , 121 coda, 58 comer, 28 condor, 168 conejo, 16 , 58 contrarreforma, 122 conversos, 115 , 144 coqueta, 155 corazon, 72 cordillera, 11 cortesano, 119 cosa, 93 cristianos nuevos, 115 crucial, 172 cuadros de costumbres, 160 cuaja-leche, 57 cuchillo, 92 culebra, 132 ailto, 79 , 111 , 126 , 149 chacra, 169 chamaco, 169 champu, 172 chequeo, Yll chico. 111 china, 168 chocolate, 168 chopo, 21 dardo, 40 deprisita, 173 derecho, 92 desnacer, 100 despacito, 173 dictador. 111 domingo, 93 don, 33 duda, 121 dueho, 33 , 88 duque. 111 el, 34 , 88 embajada, 40 enaguas, 168 encina, 21 enchufe, 163 enero, 47 , 49 , 92 enseguidita, 174 era, 85 escanciano, 40 escarlata, 62 escrito, 93 Espana, 92 esparto, 21 , 42 especie, 27 espectador, 27 espejo, 27 , 89 espeto, 40 espia, 40 espliego, 21 LIST OF SPANISH WORDS MENTIONED 179 espuela, 40 estantigua, 106 estilo alfonsino, 109 estio, 92 estraperlo, 163 estribo, 40 familiar, 116 >,108 febrero, 33 feo, 93 ferrada, 91 feudo, 40, 108 fiel, 91 financear, 172 fine, 91 flamenco, 161 fondo, 91 franco, 58 fresno, 20 fuente, 121 fuero, 29, 39 fuerte, 91, 121 gamuza, 19 gana, 40 ganado, 40 ganso, 40 garbanzos, 22 garbo, 40 gardingo, 40, 41 gaucho, 168 gentileza, 127, 129 girasol, 57 gordo, 16 gravedad espanola, 118 grosero (grocer), 172 guachimdn, 172 guano, 168 guardar, 40 guerra, 40 guerrilla, 160, 163 guijarro, 19 guinche, 172 haba, 91, 127 haber, 26 habitar, 26 hablar, 91 hacer, 49 hada, 33 hamaca, 168 hato, 40 haya, 20 hecho, 48, 91, 92 heraldo, 40 hermano, 85, 92 hidalgo, 61, 87 hijo, 47, 92, 109 hiniesta, 37 hoja, 33 hombro, 92 honor, 112 huarache, 168 hube, 104 huebos, 101 huevos, 101 igual. 111 incomunicado, 163 infante, 60 inquisicion, 116 izquierdo, 19 jabon, 63 jar a, 21 jarabe, 64 jicara, 168 jota, 93 juerga, 119 jugo, 63 junta, 163 lagarto, 133 laguna, 85 la, 88; las, 34 lasta, 40 laud, 61 180 LIST OF SPANISH WORDS MENTIONED leal, 92 leche, 48 , 93 lecho, 58 , 92 lego, 93 lengua de ciervo, 58 letrados, 114 liar, 92 liberal, 163 lider, 173 limosna, 93 loa, 92 loma, 91 lonche, 173 los, 34 losa, 19 luva, 40 llaga, 92 llamar, 92 liana, 92 llanten, 59 maestre, 92 matz, 168 manceho, manceba, 33 manjar, 101 manso ruido, 140 mantilla, 17 manton de Manila, 16 , 17 matrimonio, 58 mensaje, 101 merendar, merienda, 17 mesa, 87 mismo, 100 mucama, 169 mucho, 92 mujer, 34 , 92 naguas, 168 naranja, 62 nava, 15 negar, 92 nido, 92 noche, 48 , 49 , 92 nombre, 93 noria, 61 , 137 norsa, 173 nuemne, 73 ojo, 34 , 48 , 92 oreja, 28 , 34 orgullo, 39 oso, 92 Otero, 33 , 84 otro, 92 overol, 172 palabra, 137 paloma, 47 , 92 paramo, 15 pampa, 168 parquear, 173 pelo, 93 petaca, 168 pizarra, 19 poncho, 169 portillo, 91 pozo, 85 pradera, 21 prontito, 174 pronunciamiento, 162 , 163 prosa. 111 provecho, 92 quedo, 33 querosin, 173 quien, 32 rayo, 92 realengo, 40 recobrar, 93 redopelo, 135 removilla, 133 retama, 21 , 55 robar, 40 roble, 20 romero, 21 , 57 rueca, 40 LIST OF SPANISH WORDS MENTIONED 181 sabana, 168 sala, 40 saloma, 117 salvia, 21 say on, 40 seguro, 92 sdlo, 92 senor, 92 serna, 85 serpiente, 92, 132 seso, 92 siniestro, 19 soto, 92 suegro, 121 sueno, 58 siiiche, 173 supervigilar, 173 supervisar, 173 tabaco, 168 tapioca, 168 taifas, 68 tdiamo, 58 talar, 40 tarea, 60 teja, 27 tengo, 95 tierra, 93 tipo popular, 79 ; visigodo, 40 tomate, 168 tomillo, 21 , 57 toro, 93 trebole, 58 tregua, 40 trigo, 22 uamne, 73 , 88 , 89 ufano, 40 uncir, 91 listed, 170 vado, 91 vega, 15 vergel, 101 vicuna, 168 vida, 92 viejo, 27 , 28 , 34 viva la Virgen, 119 voseo, 171 zagudn, 63 zoco, 61 INDEX A Abenamar, 61 Academy, The Spanish, 126, 158-9 Accent, 30, 31, 42 Aetheria, 25, 34 Aimara, 167 Alani, 37 Alba, Bible, 132 Alcala de Henares, 64 Alexander, Spanish poem of, 156 Alfonso VI, de las dos rehgiones, 54, 74, 96, 105 X, el Sabio, 13, 67, 77, 99, 107, 132 XII, 162 Afrancesados, 159 Algeciras, 64, 113 Atharna, 64 Alliteration, 101, 134 AJmeria, 13 Almohades, 67 Almoravides, 67 Alonso, Amado, ix, 23, 63, 94, 97, 99 Damaso, 35, 36, 71, 72, 78, 80, 147, 152 Amadis de Gaula, 126 Amalaric, 44 Andalucfa, 11, 13, 15, 48, 65, 93, 153, 166 Andalus, 38 Anglo-americanisms, 172 flf. Appendix Probi, 17, 34 Arabic, 15, 21, 22, 46-8, 53 ff., 67, 86, 90, 108, 110, 117, 118, 142, 166 Aragon, 48, 49, 57, 91, 94, 95, 113, 120, 131, 149, 174 Araucano, 166, 167 Arawak, 168 Arbitristas, 154 Arcipreste de Hita, 109-10, 143 de Talavera, 18, 112, 143 Argentina, 49, 167, 170, 171 Arian heresy, 41, 43-5 Ariosto, 119 Article, 34, 152 Asturias, 12, 20, 40, 48, 49, 81-3, 90, 157, 174 Asm Palacios, M., 66, 166 Assonance, 104, 142 Astorga, 15, 83 Auxiliary verb, 95 Azoquejo, Plaza del, 120 “Azorin”, 163 Aztec, 166, 168 B Baetica, 38, 94 Baetis, 12 Balearic Isles, 11, 120 Balkanized states, 83, 90 BaUads, 121, 129, 141, 142, 152, 158 Barahona de Soto, 150 Baralt, 171 Barcelona, 22, 38, 84, 117 Basque, 18, 19, 23, 24, 82, 83, 88-91, 94, 117, 127, 166 Batista i Roca, J. M., 52, 124 Beethoven, 160 BeUo, 171 Bembo, 125 Berber, 15, 19, 67 Berceo, 43, 88, 99, 101, 105-7, 131, 140, 156 Bible, The, 109, 122, 131 ff. Bilabials, 100 Bilbilis, 18 Bilingualism, 46, 77 Biscay, Bay of, 1 1 Blood-groups and language, 23 Boethius, 42, 129 Bolivar, 15, 171 Bolivia, 167, 168, 170 Book of Job, 138 Boscan, 119, 129, 140, 141, 151 Bourbons, 154 ff., 162 BrauHo, San, 43 Brenan, G., 80 Buenos Aires, 35, 165, 174 Burgos, 22, 38, 49, 93 Byzantium, 44, 49, 65 183 184 INDEX C Cadalso, 156, 159 Cadiz, 15, 29, 158, 166 Calatayud, 18 Calo, 161 Caiques, 58, 60, 163 Camoes, 146 Cancionero general, 126, 129 Cantejondo, 119, 161, 162 Cantera, F., 71, 80 Cantigas de amigo, 78, 79 Capmany, 156 Carlism, 162 Camoy, A., 36 Caro Baroja, J., 23 Carols, 77 Carrion de los Condes, 85, 101 Case-endings, 34, 84 Casiodoro de Reina, 132 Cassiodorus, 42 Castiglione, 119, 125, 129, 140 Castilian, 19, 22, 48, 81 ff., 100 ff., 142 Castilians, 22, 39 Castille, 13, 14, 20-2, 41, 65, 77, 96, 113, 120, 131, 159 Castro, Americo, 49, 52, 66, 107 Catalan, 48, 75, 82, 90, 94-6, 114, 140 Catalans, 22, 153 Catalonia, 14, 65, 120, 153 Catholic Reaction, see Counter- Reformation Celtic, 17-19, 24 Celts, 15, 18,40 Centralism, 50 Cervantes, 112, 130, 141, 144-6 Charles II, 154 Ill, 154 IV, 159 V, 14, 119, 120, 125, 129, 130, 139 153 157 Charlesworth, M. P. H., 23 Childebert, 44 Chile, 166-8, 170 Chlotchilde, 44 Chronica Albeldensis, 83 ; Najerensis, 100 Cicero, 25, 28, 73, 123, 125, 145 Cid, 67, 68, 73, 89, 99, 155 Cidello, 74, 79 Cipriano de Valera, 132 Cluniacs, 101 Code Napoleon, 164, 171 Coimbra, 83 Colombia, 15, 170, 174 Columbus, 116, 117 Comuneros, 120 Conde Arnaldos, 121 Conjugations, 35 Conversos, 115, 144 Coplas, 69 Cordoba, 13, 55, 59, 64, 65, 68, 83, 90 Correas, Gonzalo, 173 Cortes, 28, 141 Cortigiano, II, 119, 129 Costa Rica, 174 Counter-Reformation, 122 Courcelle, P., 37 Cousin, J., 36 Cristianos nuevos, 115 Crotiquilda, 44 Cuadros de costumbres, 160 Cuba, 163, 165, 174 Cuenca, 21, 127 Cuervo, 171 Culto, 79, 111, 126, 149 Customary Law, 39, 90 D Dario, Ruben, 111 Darlington, Prof. C.D., 23 De La Condamine, 171 Denis, Dom, 70 Dialects, 94 Dialogo de la lengua, see Valdes, J, de Diana, 16 Diccionario de autoridades, 158 Diminutives, 28, 55, 144, 145, 173 Diphthongs, 31, 33 Don Lazarillo Vizcardi, 155 Don Quixote, 11, 141-3, 146, 163 Dona Sancha, 100 Dos de Mayo, El, 160 Ducamin, J., 152 Duero (Douro), 13, 96 E Ebro, 13, 94 Ecuador, 167, 168, 170 Egypt, 42, 70 Elcock, Prof. W. D., 97 INDEX 185 Emilianus, St., 43 Empire, Language of, 117, 118, 122; Holy Roman, 119, 120 Englynion, 103, 112 Ennius, 18, 110 Enzinas, F. de 136 Epic, 96 Erasmus, 125, 130, 131 Erwig, 42 Escurial, 14, 123, 132, 136 Espana Sagrada, 156 Estevanez Calderon, 161 Estilo alfonsino, 109 Eulogius, St., 55 Euric, 39, 41, 46 Eximeno, 155 Extremadura, 14; extremenos, 166 F F into H, 91, 121, 127, 137 Fables, 110 Feijoo, 155 Ferdinand of Aragon, 13, 114, 119, 153 Ferdinand VII, 160, 162 “Feman Caballero”, 161 Gonzalez, 90, 91, 96, 100 Nunez, 156 Ferrara Bible, 132, 133, 136 Fifth column, 163 Flamenco, 161 Flanders, 119, 154 Fontes Hispaniae Antiquae, 37 Forum Judicum, 90, 97 Franks, 37, 39, 43-5, 82 Frequentative verbs, 26, 27 Fueros, 29, 39, 90 Future, 35 G Galdos, see Perez Galdos Galicia, 14, 20, 38, 42, 47-9, 70, 75, 77, 78, 82, 174 Galindo, Beatriz, 116 Gallantry, Language of, 28, 34 Gallicisms, 155, 157, 171, 173 GaUo-Romanic languages, 94 GamiUscheg, E., 23, 52 Garcia Gomez, E., 66, 69, 71, 80 Lorca, F., 142-3, 163 Garcilaso de la Vega, 113, 119, 126, 129, 130, 140, 141, 151 Gascon, 91, 95 Gaul, 38, 41, 42, 94, 95 Genetics and language, 23 Genizeh fragments, 70 Genoese dialect, 117 Gibbon, 81 Gibraltar, 11, 64, 96, 156, 165 Giner, Don Francisco, 163 Glosas Emilianenses, 67, 87, 88 Silenses, 88, 91 Goliards, 77 Gomez Moreno, M., 23, 64-6, 83, 97 Gongora, 142, 147-9, 151 Gonzalez Llubera, I., 80, 124 Gothic chiefs, 81 ; language, 39, 40, 43, 52, 85, 86; place-names, 43; architecture, 113 Goya, 160 Gracian, 130, 145, 149, 152 graffiti, 30 grammar, 118 Granada, 15, 48, 81, 113, 114, 145, 170, 174 Gredos, 12, 21 Greek, Greeks, 15, 19, 24, 26, 49, 50 Gregory the Great, 41, 42; of Tours, 42 Griera, 94, 95 Guadalajara, 64 Guadalquivir, 12, 64 Guadalupe, 64, 105 Guadarrama, 14, 21 Guadiana, 12 Guarani, 167 Guarte, guarte, rey don Sancho, 100 Guerra de Granada, La, 145 Guerrero, F., 141 Guillen, Jorge, 163 H H dropped, 118, 120 Hadrian, 29 Hamitic, 19 Hannibal, 24 Haydn, 161 Hebrew, 48, 54, 68, 108, 121, 132, 133 Hendiadys, 110, 130 Hermenegild, 44 Herrera, 140, 148, 150 INDEX 186 Hidalgos, 114 Hita, Arcipreste de, 109, 110 Hofmann, J. B., 36, 173 Holy Grail, 42 Homophones, 35 Horace, 26, 51, 74 Hovering stress, 142 Hurtado de Mendoza, D., 145 Hydatius, 42 Hyperbaton, 25, 148 I Iberians, 15, 16, 23, 24, 38, 82, 91, 127 Ibn Quzman, 48, 77 Ildefonso, St., 43, 46 Infante don Garcia, 96, 100 Ingunda (Inguntis), 44 Inquisition, 115, 116, 131, 160 Inscriptions, 29 Intonation, 25, 144, 167 Isabel la catdhca, 13, 113 ff., 153 H, 157 Isidore of Seville, 16, 17, 43, 46, 84 Isla, P., 155, 157 ItaUca, 29 J James, Montague, 52 Jarya, see Khaija Jauregui, 147 Jews, 50, 55, 67, 74, 79, 108, 114, 115, 120-2, 132 ff., 169 Jimenez, Juan Ram6n, 163 Jorge Manrique, 111-12 Jovellanos, 157, 159 Juan de la Cruz, San, 146, 152 de la Cueva, 143 • — — - Manuel, Don, 109, 110, 128 Judeo-Spanish, 121, 124, 169 Julius Caesar, 25 Justinian, 49, 50 Justus, Bishop of Urgell, 43 Juvenal, 29 K Khaijas, 48, 69 ff. L La Celestina, 26, 125, 126, 143, 144 La fuerza de la sangre, 146 La Mancha, 64 La Rabida, 64 Lapesa, R., 36, 60 Languedoc, 95 Larra, 160 Latin, 15, 18-22, 24 ff., 84 Latinizing, 111 Lazarillo de Tonnes, 143-5 Le6n, 15, 41, 47, 49, 64, 65, 77, 86, 87, 90, 94, 96, 100, 109, 120 Leovigild, 44 Lex Romana Visigothorum, 39 Lida de Malkiel, Maria Rosa, 112 Lisbon, 13, 22 Livy, 25 Local autonomy 50 Lope de Vega, 79, 122, 142, 143, 147, 149, 151 Lot, F., 52 Lucan, 147 LuciUus, 28 Lucretius, 33, 35, 156 Luis de Le6n, 122, 123, 131, 134, 138, 144-6 M Macdonald, I. L, 112 Machado, Antonio, 145, 161 Manuel, 161, 162 Madrid, 29, 38, 153, 160, 161, 171; Fuero de, 29 Madrigal de las Altas Torres, 120 Mamhlas, 84 Manrique, Jorge, 111-12, 126 Marca Hispanica, 82, 90 Marchena, Abbe, 156 Marineo Siculo, 116 Martial, 18, 28, 29, 35, 73 Masdeu, 155 Martin of Braga, St., 42, 52 Echeverria, L., 23 Maya, 166 Mayans y Siscar, 156 Mecca, 59 Medinaceli, 64, 104 Medina Sidonia, 64 MeiUet, A., 36 Mena, Juan de, 110-12, 125, 126 INDEX 187 Men^ndez Pidal, R., 23, 45, 47, 52, 59, 66, 80, 83, 89, 91, 93, 94, 97, . 99, 101, 119, 124, 144, 152 y Pelayo, M., 136, 146, 153 Merida (Emerita), 41, 49, 83 Meseta, 11, 12, 22, 37, 38, 94 Metaphor, 119, 129 Metathesis, 122 Mexico, 28, 75, 120, 141, 147, 153, 165-70, 174 Meyer-Liibke, 95 Military Orders, 114, 118 MiUan, San, 43-88 Millas Vallicrosa, J., 76, 80 Mdton, 18, 96, 145, 146 Mino, 13, 114 Miranda, 171 Mixed marriages, 44 Mixtec, 166 Montaigne, 125 Montano, Arias, 122 Montesquieu, 156 Montserrat, 96, 106 Moors, see Moslems Morales, Ambrosio de, 123, 124 Moriscos, 63, 145 Morrison, Prof. S. E., 117, 124 Morley, Prof. S. Griswold, 152 Moslems, 40-2, 46, 47, 50 ff., 67, 83, 87, 90, 95, 108, 114 Mozarabes, 48, 49, 53 ff., 83, 87, 90, 93, 96, 101, 104 Mozart, 149 Murcia, 56 Musical accent, 30 Muwashshah, 68 ff. Mysticism, 115, 122, 129, 144, 145, 152 N Nahuatl, 166-8 Names, personal, 85-7 Naples, 125, 131 Napoleon, 81, 158, 159 Narino, 171 Nasal resonance, 32 Nautical language, 117 Navarre, 90, 96, 174 Nebrija, 117, 118, 122, 128, 168 Newman, Cardinal, 43, 52 Numantia, 24, 51 Nymphs, 113 O Obscurity, 147-9 Obstacles, The traditional, 154, 162 Odo, St., 101 Ojos del Guadiana, 60 Oliver Asin, J., 30, 124, 139, 163 Omar ibn Hafsun, 55 Ona, 29, 84, 91 Opera, 160 Order of words, 25, 26, 110 Ordono III, 90 Oria, Santa, 105 Orosius, 42 Ortega y Gasset, J., 81 Otomi, 166 Oviedo, 82, 89, 90 P Palencia, 37, 48 Pancorbo, 89 Paraguay, 167, 170 Parallelism, 70 Parla marinera, 117 Paulus Diaconus, 43 Pejorative, 28 Peninsular war, 158, 162 Pereda, 161 Perez Galdds, 163 Pericot, L., 52 Persian, 52 Periphrastic constructions, 142 Peru, 120, 153, 167 Petrarch, 113, 130 Petronius, 25, 30, 73, 156 Philip II, 14, 44, 123, 145, 153, 157 V, 157 Phihppine Islands, 163, 165, 170 Phoenicians, 15, 19, 24 Picasso, 11 Picaresque, 143 Picos de Europa, 12 Pidgin English, 24 Pitch accent, 30 Place names, 48, 52, 64 Plato, 145, 146 Plautus, 17, 25, 27-9, 34, 73 Poema de mio Cid, 68, 73, 96, 101-5 Pompeian inscriptions, 28, 29, 33 Portugal, 14, 16, 20, 38, 42, 48, 70, 77, 81, 116, 117, 153, 159 188 INDEX Portugaliae Monumenta Historica, 80 Portuguese, 21, 29, 31, 32, 40, 46, 47, 58, 68, 74-6, 78, 93, 94, 165 Prefixes, 27 Prepositions, 34 Prim, 32 Primera cronica general, 56 Pronouns, demonstrative, 34 Pronunciation, 100, 125 Proven 9 al, 31, 94, 95, 114, 118 Proverbs, see Refranes Prudentius, 42 Psalms, 77 Puebla (Mexico), 168 Puerto Rico, 163, 165, 174 Pyrenees, 11, 18, 21, 37, 45, 48, 65, 83, 95, 160 Q Quantity, 26, 30 Quechua, 167-9 Quevedo, 142, 145, 148, 150 Quintana, 158, 159 Quintilian, 16 R Rabbi ben Ezra, 76; Moses of Guadalajara, 132, 136, 138 Rabelais, 19 Ravenna, 46 Recared, 43-5, 49 Reciting note, 167 Reconquista, 40, 81, 83 Reformation, The, 122, 131 Reformers, 125 ff. Refranes, 126, 130, 144 Regionalism, 50 Religious liberty, 67 Renaissance, 110, 113 ff. Restoration (1876), 162 Revolution (1868), 32 Reyes, Alfonso, 147, 174 Catblicos, 114 Rhaeto-Roman, 31 Rhyme, 142 Ribera, Julidn, 55, 66 Riguntis, 44—5 Rioja, 88, 107 Rise and fall of voice, see Intonation Roderick (Rodrigo), 41, 50, 96 Roman administration, 45 ; bureau- cracy, 37; inscriptions, 19, 20; legionaries, 1 7 ; municipium, 41 ; roads, 38 Romance languages, 25, 27, 36, 46, 47, 67 ff. Romancero, 141 Romanization, 94 Romans, 15, 17, 37, 38, 49, 50 Romanticism, 60 Rome, 25 Rondo-form, 77 Roumanian, 31 Rutilius Namatianus, 42 S Sa Noguera, R. de, 23 Salamanca, 117, 146 Salazar, Eugenio de, 117 Salinas, F. de, 145, 146 Sallust, 145 Salvian, 37 Sanchez, T. A., 155 Sanchez Albornoz, C., 52 Sancho I (Portugal), 70 Garcia, 90, 91 Panza, 126, 141, 146 San Salvador de Oiia, 29, 84, 91 Santa Hermandad, 114 Santander, 12, 14, 20, 161, 174 Santiago de Compostela, 113 de Chile, 168 Santillana, Marques de, 75, 110 Santo Domingo, 174 Saragossa, 59, 63, 83, 160 Sardinian, 30, 95 Sarmiento, P., 155 Scarlatti, D., 161 Schulten, A., 52 Scriptores Historiae Augustae, 29 Sea-shanties, 117 Sebastian de Cdrdoba, 141, 152 Secular arm, 115 Segovia, 38, 113, 120 Seneca, 145 Sephardic Jews, 120 Servet, Miguel, 116 Seville, 15, 29, 44, 59, 166, 174 Shakespeare, 96, 143 Sibilants, 63 Sidonius Apollinaris, 42, 73 INDEX 189 Siete Infantes de Lara, 96, 100 Silent reading, 25 Silos, 85 Simonet, F. J., 55, 66 Simplified spelling, 126 Slang, 28 Smuts, 104 Song of Songs, 43, 71, 122, 134, 138, 146 Sonnets in plays, 143 Sonority, 12, 25 Soria, 38 South-American Spanish, 164ff. Spanish-American War, 163 Succession, War of the, 95, 154 Spelling, 109, 126, 127, 159 Spiritual parodies, 141 Stendhal, 146 Stem, Dr. E. M., 67, 71, 80 Stone-cutters, 29 Strabo, 15, 18 Street, F., 112 Stress accent, 30, 33 Style, 109, 128, 130, 146, 149 Substratum, 166-8 Suevi, 15, 37, 38 Suevic kingdom, 42; language, 40 Sweden, 38 Syllables, length of, 25 T Tacitus, 25, 145 Tagus, Tajo, Tejo, 13, 25, 46, 113 Talavera, 18; Arcipreste de, 122; Hernando de, 117 Tarascan, 166, 177 Tarifa, 11 Tariq, 64 Tarraco, 94 Tartessos, 15, 19 Tengo, as auxiliary, 95 Tenses, 142 Teresa de Avila, Santa, 144, 145 Tesoro de la lengua castellana, 159 Theatre, 143 Theatro critico, 155 Theodoric, 38 Theodulphus, 43 Tierra del Fuego, 165 Toledo, 15, 38, 46, 49, 65, 83, 93, 109, 113, 118, 127, 140 Trafalgar, 64 Trajan, 29 Translation: Luis de Leon on, 138 Transliteration, 55, 56, 71, 80 Trent, Council of, 122, 144 U Unamuno, 11, 23, 97, 124, 139, 145 163 Utrecht, 154, 157 V Valdes, Juan de, 63, 66, 125 ff., 156, 159 Valencia, 89, 95, 117 Valparaiso, l68 Vandals, 37, 38 Venetian dialect, 117 Venezuela, 15, 165 Verb, position of, 25, 110, 126 Verrall, A. W., 25, 36 Vicente, Gil, 77 Villancicos, 78, 79 Virgil, 25, 101 Appendix, 29 Visigothic Code, 39, 90 Visigoths, 15, 37 ff., 68, 81, 82, 84, 153 Vives, J., 36, 52 Vossler, K., 35, 36 Vowels, 26, 30, 31 Vulgar Latin, 27, 34, 35, 38, 45, 46, 84, 89, 93, 94, 117 Vulgate, 34, 132 ff. Z Zamora, 100 Zapotec, 166 I