Monthly Archives: June 2016

On my way home

I’ve just arrived back in Madrid, by train from Barcelona, and have a little time on my hands before leaving for the airport. It felt odd to so quickly unwind the overall trajectory of the last two weeks, and to be on my own again after sharing this experience with my friend Sue. Odder still to think that in a few hours I’ll be home and picking up the threads of my normal life. I have some leftover posts to write about the trip, which should help soften the transition, and of course my normal life involves lots of Spanish!

Right now I’m sitting in a small patch of green grass just outside the Real Jardín Botánico, and feeling profoundly relieved to be back in a city that abounds in parks. So many spaces that appear green on a map of Barcelona turn out to be paved or graveled. It’s also a relief to be away from the hordes of tourists that seemed to be everywhere we went in Barcelona, like Times Square blown up to the scale of a full city. Barcelona has many wonderful things to see but I always feel more at home in Madrid.

I must now take advantage of my Left Luggage fee to stroll through the park before heading back to the station. If you’ve been following my blog while I’ve been traveling, I thank you for your time and interest, and hope you’ll continue to read once I’m home.

 

Where Latin came to Spain

When I planned my linguistic tour of northern Spain, I hoped that today’s itinerary would be the best conceivable combination of intellectual engagement and touristic pleasure. In fact, it exceeded my expectations.

The intellectual part of our day (“we” being my friend Sue and I) was a visit to the Greco-Roman ruins at Empúries on the Costa Brava. This site made it onto our itinerary because, as referenced in this post’s title, Empúries is where Latin came to the Iberian Peninsula. The Greek ruins at the site date from the sixth century B.C.E. They memorialize a thriving settlement devoted to trade: in fact, the Greek name for the settlement, Emporion, means ‘market’. The Greeks traded actively with the native Iberian tribes, including the Indikites, whose capital city of Ullastret Sue and I visited yesterday. The Roman ruins at the site date from the beginning of the first century B.C.E.

The touristic part of the day was swimming at the fantastic beach located JUST YARDS AWAY from the ruins. How great is Spain?!?

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I enjoyed the the Greek ruins at Empúries more than the Roman ruins. This was partly because I hadn’t expected them — I had assumed that the Romans overbuilt the existing Greek city, whereas in fact they co-existed (see explanation below). Also, these were the first Greek ruins I’ve ever seen, whereas I’ve seen Roman ruins elsewhere in Spain and also in France, Italy, and Israel.

The Greek ruins include houses, temples, factories for smelting metal and salting fish, an agora, or public plaza (a frequent crossword puzzle word!), and a water system. Their water cisterns were noticeably deeper than the ones we saw at Ullastret yesterday (sorry, Indikites). My two favorite Greek sights from Empúries are illustrated below. The first is a mosaic-tiled banquet hall, whose inscription translates as ‘how sweet it is to be reclined.’ The second is a statue of Asklepíeion, the Greek god of medicine. These two features struck my both for their beauty, and for personal reasons: the “reclining” mention reminded me of the fourth question of the Passover seder, while the statue of Asklepíeion reminded me of my daughter, who is a doctor. (Once you’re a mom, you see the world a little differently.)

Greek tiled banquet hall. The inscription translates as ‘how sweet it is to be reclined’.

Statue of Asklepíeion, the Greek god of medicine

Statue of Asklepíeion, the Greek god of medicine

Our main mission at Empúries, however, was to see the Roman ruins, and thus learn more about how Latin came to Spain. A wall panel at the museum at the ruins offered this helpful summary of how the Second Punic War against Carthage led to this fundamental and irrevocable change in the Iberian Peninsula and its languages:

In the year 218 B.C., the Roman army landed at the port of Emporion, an allied city, with a view to cutting off the Carthaginian rear-guard on their way to Rome. Once the war was over, the Romans wanted to control and exploit the adjoining territory, a process which initiated the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. This process, known as Romanization, included two stages. The first, of conquest and military domination, did not lead to changes in native culture and organization. The opposition of the natives to the new power resulted in the establishment, in the year 195 B.C., of a Roman military camp, on the upper part of the hill of Empúries, so that the country could be controlled and peace maintained. The second stage, which started at the beginning of the first century B.C., entailed the absorption of the various existing societies into Roman culture. New cities were created, such as Empúries itself, Gerunda [Girona] or Tarraco [Tarragona]; a major road network was developed, whose main axis was the Via Augusta; development of the land was carried out according to the Italic models based on the creation of country houses of villae and, lastly, the progressive use of Latin was promoted and new religious cults were introduced. Assistance given to the Romans by the Emporitan Greeks meant that they could enjoy a status of independence within the newly built Roman city.

The Roman ruins were much larger than the Greek section, and included a stunning private house with a different mosaic pattern in each room.

"Domus 1" at Empúries

“Domus 1” at Empúries

The Iberian ruins of Ullastret

When I began to plan my linguistic tour of northern Spain, I knew that visiting Ullastret would be a top priority. One of the 101 questions in my book is “What other languages were spoken in pre-Roman Spain?” (this comes after two questions about Basque), and I illustrated it with a reproduction of this Iberian lead plaque, found in Ullastret. I was dying to see it in person.

Iberian lead plaque, from Ullastret, Spain

I’m using “Iberian” here to refer not to the Iberian Peninsula itself, but to a community, with a distinct language and culture, that populated the eastern part of the Peninsula in pre-Roman days. They shared the Peninsula with Greeks (on the northeast coast), Phonecians (in the south), Celts (in the north and center), and Tartassians (in the southwest). Ullastret was the capital of a specific group of Iberians called the Indiketes (see map below). They were known for their extensive contact with the nearby Greek settlements. To quote the wall text from the Museum of Archaeology of Catalonia at Ullastret, Fou una zona intensament hel·lenizada, per la presència de les colònies gregues d’Emporion (fundad cap a 600 a.C.) i de Rhode (fundada molt probablement a finals del s. Vè a.C.).

[The middle dot in hel·lenizada shows that the double ll is pronounced as a long l and not like a Spanish ll — which Catalan also has.]

Map of Iberian settlements in Spain (from Museum of Archaeology of Catalonia at Ullastret)

Map of Iberian settlements in Spain (from Museum of Archaeology of Catalonia at Ullastret)

According to our guidebook, one sign of the Indiketes’s Hellenization is the purely decorative groove they added to the main gate of the city:

One side of Ullastret's main gate, with a decorative groove, a sign of Greek influence.

One side of Ullastret’s main gate. Its decorative groove is believed to show Greek influence.

Ullastret was a full-fledged city, with protective walls, streets and houses, temples, water cisterns, and grain silos. The silos were reused as garbage receptacles once the grain had been consumed (or sold to other settlements). This makes them a gold mine for the archaeologists who have studied Ullastret, since garbage is always a prime source of information about a culture.

“My” lead plaque was easy to find. It is part of a display of artifacts showing Iberian writing. Please see the presentation below. You can click on the double-headed diagonal arrow to the left of the LinkedIn “in” logo to see the presentation in full-screen mode.

In conclusion, I have to say that as much as my friend Sue and I enjoyed Ullastret, we both strongly preferred our previous visit to the Castro of Ulaca. The latter ruins are harder to get to, but are more impressive, and the location itself is more beautiful and magical.

 

The -se imperfect subjunctive is alive and kicking

My friend Sue and I didn’t visit any language-related destinations today, making it an exception in our linguistic tour of northern Spain. I’d like to take advantage of this “day off” to share with you some uses of the -se imperfect subjunctive that I unexpectedly observed yesterday.

The -se imperfect subjunctive is one of my favorite phenomena in Spanish: not only does the language have both present and past tense subjunctives, but also, the past tense subjunctive has two different forms. This is an unusual and possibly unique type of grammatical redundancy.

Of the two past subjunctives, the version that ends in -ra is much more common than the one that ends in -se. One sees the -se subjunctive in literature, but I’d never heard anyone use it in conversation, or seen it in any casually written text. (It does shows up in literature.) I was thrilled, then, to run into the -se subjunctive twice yesterday. First, our tour guide at the Monasterio de Suso used it once or twice in his explanations. Later, during our lunch stop in Zaragoza, I spotted it on a poster for an anti-aging treatment. This text on the poster asks ¿Qué edad tendrías si no supieses la que tienes? ‘How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?’; I’ve underlined the subjunctive. The newer, and more frequently used, form would be supieras.se subjunctiveSeeing the subjunctive in action, after spending so much time researching and writing about it, was a real thrill. Plus, I love the poster — and I’m glad to say that Dra. Montserrat Salvador López, whose services it advertises, is listed as one of Spain’s Top Doctors!

A pilgrimage to the Monasterio de Suso

Most pilgrims who visit the Monasterio de Suso are drawn by its religious significance. The monastery is built around, and still incorporates, the hillside cave where the Visigothic hermit San Millán retreated from the world, gathering acolytes over the decades until he died in 574 C.E. at the age of 101. His sarcophagus is still in Suso, though his remains have been transferred to the Monasterio de Yuso, the larger monastery later built at the base of the hill to support his increased following.

Our peregrination, though, was linguistic (“we” being I and my friend Sue, who’s joined me on a linguistic tour of northern Spain). Suso originally included a “scriptorium” — a room devoted to the copying of manuscripts. Here, some unknown scribe made annotations, in an early form of Spanish (and also in Basque) in the margin of a Latin text. These annotations, known as the Glosas Emilianenses, are among the earliest examples of written Spanish. The volume containing the glosas is now in the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid. The scriptorium no longer exists.

A sampling from the Glosas Emilianenses, from a presentation by Magda Liliana Barrero Vàsquez

Just getting to the Monasterio de Suso was an adventure. My GPS blanked out briefly as we approached a key intersection, then directed us along a series of bumpy local roads through the vineyards of La Rioja for about fifteen minutes. It was a beautiful detour and we ended up safely at the Monasterio de Yuso, where we boarded the bus to Suso with a few dozen German tourists. Our guide was an elderly gentleman who has obviously been giving the same tour for years. He pointed out the monastery’s key features:

  • the cave where San Millán fasted and secluded himself
  • San Millán’s now-empty sarcophagus
  • a shelf containing bones from donors to the Monastery, housed there as a condition of their donations
  • the doorway that used to lead to the scriptorium
  • a series of archways that encapsulated Suso’s history: one Visigothic, some Moorish-style, and some Gothic (see picture below)
Arches at Suso: Visigothic (left), Moorish (middle), Gothic (right)

Arches at Suso: Visigothic (left), Moorish (middle), Gothic (right)

Back down at Yuso, we were tempted to stop for a snack at the “Mesón Las Glosas” but had to push on to Girona.

Glosas

Passing the centuries in Burgos

My friend Sue and I are now in the second week of our linguistic tour of northern Spain. Yesterday we hiked up to the fortress overlooking the city of Burgos and its Arlanzón River, and thus back in time to the early centuries of the Reconquista (details here). Today’s two excursions, to the Catedral de Burgos and the Monasterio de las Huelgas, carried us forward several centuries, through the era of El Cid, the political consolidation of most of Spain, and the successful pursuit of the Reconquista.

The Cathedral is built on a site of great linguistic interest: in 1080, the Council of Burgos took place in an earlier church at the same site. As described in this previous post, the purpose of the Council was to enforce the use of the Latin Mass in place of the vernacular that had sprung up in Spain. While touring the Cathedral today, I learned that just one year later, in 1081, the city of Burgos became the official seat (sede) for the province’s bishopric, or diocese. Clearly the Council had increased the city’s prestige: language matters! The first Cathedral of Burgos was built over the next fifteen years.

Informative sign from Catedral de Burgos, showing establishment of Burgos as religious seat one year after the Council of Burgos.

Another informative sign, dating the original Cathedral to within fifteen years of the Council of Burgos.

Today’s Cathedral is of further linguistic interest because it houses the tomb of El Cid, the Reconquista hero of the epic poem that is the first known work of Spanish literature. The tomb’s inscription includes the Latin version of El Cid’s name (Rodrigo > Rodericus) and that of his wife, buried with him (Jimena > Eximena). Above the cross you can also see a key line from the poem: a todos alcanza honra por el que en buen hora nació: very roughly, ‘everyone gained in honor because this good man lived’.

Tomb of El Cid and his wife Jimena in the Catedral de Burgos

Our second touristic destination of the day, Burgos’s Monasterio de las Huelgas, fast-forwarded us less than a century to the year 1187. The Monastery was founded by Queen Leonor, the British-born wife of Alfonso VIII of Castilla, and serves as a pantheon, or royal burial place, for this couple and their descendants. By Alfonso’s reign the Reconquista was going full blast, carrying the Castilian language with it. The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, a turning point in the Reconquista,  took place in 1212; a spectacular door hanging from the tent of Alfonso’s Moorish opponent, Muhámmad al-Násir, hangs in the Monastery’s Museo de Ricas Telas Medievales. It is a harbinger of the eventual fall of Granada at the hands of Alfonso and Leonor’s descendants, Ferdinand and Isabella, and thus the final victory of Castilian Spanish.

Pendón de Las Navas de Tolosa

 

In the cradle of castellano

Today my friend Sue and I got to know Burgos better. Our day involved two walks: the first to the Cartuja de Miraflores, a monastery whose location is marked with a red arrow in the picture below, and the second to the hilltop fortress Castillo de Burgos, from which this picture was taken. Near the center of the photograph is Burgos’s Plaza Mayor, marked by the colorful row of pink, yellow, blue, and white buildings. We found this a welcome change from the more uniform (though more ornate) plazas of Madrid, Valladolid, and especially Salamanca. You can see the spires of the cathedral to the right, almost hidden by the trees.

We reached the Cartuja de Miraflores by walking along the Arlanzón River, marked by the ribbon of green running diagonally through the middle of the photograph. (We followed these walking directions, posted on TripAdvisor.) This monastery belongs to the contemplative Carthusian order. We spent over two hours studying the famous altar and other works of art and architecture in the building.

The pathway along the Arlanzón is part of the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. We spotted several pilgrims, easily identified by their heavy backpacks and scallop shell insignia. Scallop shell markers embedded in the pavement also mark the portion of the trail that runs through Burgos itself. As I described in an earlier post, Burgos’s position along the Camino de Santiago helped bring the city into prominence.

Our afternoon excursion to the Castillo de Burgos was a deep dive into the history of Burgos — and Spain. Castillo in this case means ‘fortress’ rather than ‘castle’, and this particular fortress was constructed in the late 9th century, during the Reconquista, or the Catholic reconquest of Spain from the Moors. Its construction was part of a deliberate effort to rebuild a Catholic population in the area as the Moors were being driven south. The city of Burgos thus began on the slopes of the hill, protected by the castle above, and slowly spread downhill toward the Arlanzón. This meant that its growth followed the opposite pattern of London, New York, and Paris, which began with riverside settlements, then spread outwards.

Ironically, as the Reconquista progressed Burgos spread so widely that the Castillo became irrelevant. A series of unfortunate events, culminating in the French occupation of the fortress during the Napoleonic War, then severely damaged it. It has only recently been excavated and partially rebuilt.

Sue and I heartily recommend both these excursions to anyone who comes to Burgos.

 

Another day, another Cervantes museum

I titled this post last week, before leaving for my linguistic tour of northern Spain with my friend Sue. As it turned out, our visit to the Museo Casa de Cervantes in Valladolid was not the high point of the day, though we did appreciate its peaceful garden, and the reliefs depicting scenes from Don Quixote, such as this one. The museum is located in the building where Cervantes lived from 1604 to 1606; the first volume of Don Quijote was published in 1605.
IMG_20160619_115108Valladolid was our stopover en route from Salamanca to Burgos, and well worth a visit. Its star attraction is the Museo National de Escultura, an extraordinary collection of medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque religious sculpture housed in a magnificent convent. My favorite sculpture depicted Saint Anne and her three husbands (!!!) with the Madonna and Child. The husbands were carved with great individuality and detail.

Close-up of the three husbands of Saint Anne. On my screen, WordPress is showing them vertically elongated. You can click through to see the museum's own reproduction, and can select the same detail.

Sculptural detail: the three husbands of Saint Anne.

While in Valladolid i noticed this nice example of the arroba neutra: the contemporary and controversial use of the @ sign in Spanish to create suffixes that are neither masculine nor feminine suffixes. (The sign translates as “Welcome refugees”.) Anybody know how something like this is pronounced out loud?

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After leaving Valladolid it was exciting to arrive in Burgos, since this was the city that inspired my trip: Burgos is the cradle of the Castilian language (though in Salamanca we were told it was Salamanca!). Our hotel directly overlooks the city’s cathedral. Five minutes’ walk away is the famous statue of El Cid, Burgos’s hometown hero, which turns out to be in the middle of a busy traffic circle! I found this rather undignified. All the photographs I’ve seen of it show the Cid silhouetted against the sky, perhaps with a bit of building. Now I know they were carefully composed.

view from our window

View from Spanishlinguist.us’s hotel window in Burgos

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El Cid and his horse in Burgos, juxtaposed with more modern transportation.

While out walking we unexpectedly came across a status of San Millán de la Cogolla, the saint whose linguistically significant monastery we will be visiting in a few days. Although San Millán was a cave-dwelling hermit, the statue depicts him as a conqueror, standing boldly atop a collection of severed heads. Wikipedia helpfully explains that “Because of the monastery’s role on the traditional pilgrimage route, representations of Emilianus can be mixed with that of Saint James the Moor-slayer.”

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Statue of San Millán de la Cogolla, in park along Río Arlanzón between Puente de San Pablo and Puente de Santa María

 

In Salamanca

Today was for the most part a day off from my linguistic tour of northern Spain. My friend Sue and I spent the day touring the standard sights of Salamanca, such as the Casa de las Conchas and the Convento de San Esteban. As I had hoped, we came across a good used book store (La Galatea), where I picked up three novels for my bookshelf, all by women: Laura Restrepo’s Delerio, Almudena Grandes’s Estaciones de Paso (actually a collection of novellas), and Soledad Puértolas’s Si al atardecer llegara el mensajero.

Today’s most linguistically relevant destination was the Universidad de Salamanca lecture hall named after King Alfonso X, known as Alfonso el Sabio (‘the wise’). Alfonso, who reigned from 1252-1284, was not only a scholar, and an early supporter of the Universidad, as described in the informative sign below, but also played a key role in standardizing the Spanish language. The prologue to El libro de la ochava esphera, a scientific treatise from a group of scholars in Alfonso’s court, states that he “removed the expressions that he felt were superfluous or duplicated and that were not written in correct Castilian (castellano drecho), and he added others that were more appropriate; and regarding the language, he himself corrected it” (translation from D. Pharies). The use of the term castellano as a language name is itself noteworthy.

Alfonso

However, my lasting impression of Salamanca will be of the architectural details that both Sue and I fell in love with. Here are our two favorites.

Escalera de Soto at Convento de San Esteban. The artisan managed to fit a sculpture of Mary Magdalene into the triangle formed between the railings above and the arch below. Mary is taking a break from reading in bed, where she is tucked in with a skull and her favorite jar of unguent.

Interior of Casa de las Conchas, showing stone carved into honeycomb (left) and basketweaving (right) railings.

The ghost of Celtic Spain

Today was without question the most exciting day so far of my linguistic tour of northern Spain with my friend Sue. We picked up a rental car in Madrid and drove west by northwest to Ávila, then southwest to Ulaca, the ruins of a fortified Celtic hill-town, or castro. Ulaca was on our itinerary because the Celts were one of the most important pre-Roman peoples in the Iberian Peninsula. They left their linguistic imprint on both Spanish vocabulary and toponymy (place-names). Spanish words of Celtic origins include álamo ‘poplar’ and serna ‘plowed field’; Celtic place-names include Segovia and Lugo.

I can’t recommend Ulaca highly enough. You need a car to get there, and you need to be in decent shape for the climb, but the ruins are fascinating, the views are beautiful, and the combination of granite rocks and purple and yellow wildflowers is unbeatable. The slideshow below tries to share some of the excitement that Sue and I felt today. It also has practical information about how to get to Ulaca and where to learn more.