Adapted from Sagredo 2007 under the GNU Free Documentation License
My blogging guru, Tris Hussey, warns that a blog’s first post is always terrible. Nevertheless, I can’t resist devoting this post to the most interesting tidbit I know about the history of Spanish: the relationship between piracy during the Spanish colonial period and today’s Latin American dialect patterns. The following is based on Ralph Penny‘s discussion of the topic in his Variation and Change in Spanish (Cambridge University Press, 2000).