I didn’t forget the paragraph

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My (adult) children still remember that when they they were schoolchildren, if they left the house in the morning but ran back a minute later crying “I forgot my lunch!” I would always say, “You didn’t FORGET your lunch, you REMEMBERED your lunch”. This undoubtedly got old after a while.

Anyway, today I realized that I forgot to include a vital paragraph in yesterday’s post, about the ways that words in Spanish changed once they entered the lexicon. I have now added the paragraph; you can find it easily if you search down for the phrase “Once each word.”

So…I didn’t forget the paragraph, I remembered it. Enjoy!

Crystal Clear

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After more months than I ever would have imagined, I have finally finished taking notes on David Crystal’s The Story of English in 100 Words. As I had expected, this book was an invaluable first step in my research for the analogous book about Spanish that I plan to write. Now I will move on to the American Heritage Dictionaries’ Spanish Word Histories and Mysteries, into which I dipped my toe (and my pen) some days ago, when I had temporarily misplaced The Story of English.

When I sat down to scope out my new book I wrote out a list of several dozen words that I wanted to include. This list contained specific words like yugo and canoa as well as placeholders like “a word from Galician/Portuguese” or “a name of a Latin American country.” As I worked through Crystal’s book this list mushroomed to 172 words. This isn’t a problem: although each entry in the book will focus on one word, it will also discuss other words that are relevant in some way. In fact, I expect that the list will continue to grow as I do more research. The real challenge will be extracting the ideal 100 words to include, with a supporting cast for each one.

My main goal in choosing those words is still to capture the entire history of the Spanish language. This organization will lend itself naturally to covering the full range of languages that have contributed to Spanish, from its Latin core to modern borrowings from Asian languages and technology.

While a canonical borrowing adds a new word for a new concept, such as canoa, the Arawak word for a kind of boat that the Spaniards encountered in the New World, my list includes borrowings that are more complex, such as:

  • calques: words that translate a foreign term part-by-part into Spanish (e.g. tranvía, modeled on English tramway)
  • words that passed through multiple languages en route to Spanish, such as adobe (see previous post);
  • doublets: borrowings that co-exist with older words from the same source, e.g. limpio ‘clean’ and límpido ‘clear, limpid’, which both came from the Latin word limpidus. Limpio is an older word that came from Vulgar Latin, whereas límpido is a 19th-century learned borrowing from the same Latin root.
  • borrowings that were adapted to Spanish pronunciation (biftek), that are pronounced according to the rules of Spanish spelling (club, pronounced with a Spanish /u/), or that expanded the horizons of Spanish pronunciation (the tl- in chipotle, or the Mexican Spanish tlapalería ‘hardware store’).

I’d like to address, if possible, the general question of why Spanish, like English and in contrast to French, has been so accepting of borrowings. But I wonder: how can I even pose this question without anthromorphizing “Spanish”?

Many Spanish words are neither from Latin nor borrowed from another source. My list includes examples from a myriad of other sources and processes, such as:

  • names of people (biro), places (jerez), or commercial brands (celo), both real and fictional (quijotesco)
  • onomotapoeia (chirriar)
  • truncation (moto)
  • texting (jajaja)
  • compounding (lavaplatos)
  • affixation (desencadenar)
  • back-formation (debate, from debatir)
  • phrases (usted, pordiosero)
  • blends (agridulce)
  • acronyms (sida)

Once each word entered the Spanish lexicon, it was not frozen in form and meaning, but rather was vulnerable to the normal currents of language evolution. My list includes words that changed their form. For example, harina ‘flour’, which began with an f- in Latin (farina), dropped the initial /h/ sound between Old (medieval) Spanish and Modern Spanish, although the letter /h/ was maintained in spelling. The same happened to other words of this type such as hierro ‘iron’ (from Latin ferrus) and higo ‘fig’, from Latin ficus. I also include words that changed their meaning in a variety of ways. Some:

  • became more negative or positive, such as siniestra ‘sinister’ and choza ‘house’, which originally meant ‘left’ (the direction) and ‘hut’;
  • became more general or narrow in meaning, such as pariente ‘relative’ and infante ‘prince’, which originally meant ‘parent’ and ‘child’.
  • acquired new meanings as the culture changed, such as pavo, whose meaning changed from ‘peacock’ to ‘turkey’ when the latter was encountered in the New World;
  • absorbed meanings from other languages, such as ratón ‘mouse’, which absorbed the meaning of the English computer ‘mouse’;

Most words on the list are nouns and verbs, but there are also adjectives, prepositions, pronouns, adverbs, and exclamations. The list includes examples of dialectal variation in meaning (tortilla) and pronunciation (cerveza).

Spanish spelling is fairly straightforward, but I have included words that illustrate

  • the use of accent marks
  • the ñ
  • spelling changes in conjugated forms (busqué ‘I looked for’, from buscar ‘to look for’)
  • spelling adaptations for casual language (pa’ for para)
  • texting abbreviations (q or k for que)
  • gender-neutral language (amig@s)
  • words whose place in alphabetical order changed when the Real Academia eliminated ll and ch as digraphs in 1994. (The change was promulgated in its 2010 revision of its Ortografía, or spelling manual.)

As I converge on a definitive list I hope to represent most of the two dozen semantic categories in the anthropology-based World Loan Database (WOLD), such as kinship terms, food and drink, motion, and spatial relations. Based on Crystal’s book I’ve added other categories such as swear words, politeness expressions, words for unknown people or things (fulano, chisme), and titles (señor).

Finally, my ideal final set of words will illustrate fundamental properties of Spanish grammar and its evolution, such as verb forms based on haber, verbs with irregular conjugations and nouns with irregular gender, reflexive verbs, the various origins and pronunciations of ll, and pluralia tantum (like tijeras).

It will be interesting to see how my list continues to grow and change as I work through additional sources.

A detour into a new resource

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[Note to the reader: I wrote this post two weeks ago but apparently forgot to publish it! So here you go — better late than never.]

It’s been so long since I’ve worked on my new book (my current excuse is excessive travel) that when I finally sat down yesterday to get back to work, I couldn’t find my copy of David Crystal’s The Story of English of 100 Words, which I’ve been taking notes on for ages. I found it later in the day, but in the meantime spent my allotted work time taking notes on the first several pages of Spanish Word Histories and Mysteries, which I have in mind as my next resource. While this book is really about English, it also serves as an approachable and well-written introduction to Spanish word origins. It discusses 150 Spanish words, from A to Z, that have made their way into English.

Yesterday I only worked through the book’s Introduction, and the beginning of the section devoted to the letter “A”, but this short detour immediately bore fruit. For one thing, what I read broadened my thinking about the origin of Spanish words for indigenous American flora, fauna, and so on. I knew that Spanish borrowed many words from the languages of South American, Central America, and Mexico, but I hadn’t given much thought to the languages spoken in what is today the United States. Yesterday I learned that the English word abalone comes from the Spanish word abulón, itself derived from aulun, the word for abalone in Rumsen, a now-extinct Ohlone language spoken in today’s Monterey County. Abalone was an important part of the Rumsen diet.

Spanish Word Histories and Mysteries dates this borrowing to the middle of the 1700s, when Spain became an active presence in the San Francisco Bay Area, building Franciscan missions and civilian settlements. I already knew that Spain successively borrowed words from each region of the Americas as they conquered it: first the Caribbean, then Mexico and the Pacific Coast of South America, and finally the South American interior. (See Table 4.1 from my first book, copied below). Learning about abalone/abulón/aulun reminded me to include Ohlone and other languages spoken in today’s United States in the latter group.

Not all Spanish words for American flora and fauna (etc.) come from indigenous American languages. The Introduction to Spanish Word Histories and Mysteries uses a fun pair of words to illustrate this point. While chocolate comes from Nahuatl (see again Table 4.1), vainilla is pure Spanish, the diminutive of vaina ‘sheath’. Spaniards used this word to name this unfamiliar plant because of the shape of the vanilla pod or vanilla bean.

Many words in the book’s “A” section are nouns borrowed from Arabic with the article al ‘the’ prefixed to the noun root. Adobe, from Arabic at-tûba ‘brick’ (here the l of al assimilated to the following t), is an example of an Arabic word that itself was borrowed from another language. Tûba comes from Coptic, a late form of the Egyptian language, which is only distantly related to Arabic. (It’s an Afro-Asiatic language, but not in the Semitic branch of the family). I’m familiar with other examples of Arabic borrowings that come from other languages, such as alambique ‘still for making alcohol’, from Greek, and aduana ‘customs officer’, from Persian.

Finally, spending time with yesterday’s words reminded me that vocabulary is as interesting as the world it describes. Despite living in the Bay Area for several years, I hadn’t heard of the Ohlone people. Nor did I know that the orange color of cheddar cheese normally comes from annatto, a pigment derived from achiote (originally a Nahuatl word). On a personal level, because I am Jewish it was satisfying to learn that adobe has Egyptian roots; every year at the Passover seder we remember that the Egyptians forced their Jewish slaves to build cities for Pharaoh “with harsh labor at mortar and bricks”. (However, the Hebrew word for brick used in the Book of Exodus (le’vey’nah) doesn’t appear to be related to tûba.)

Reading about the word albatross, from Spanish alcatraz, inspired me to learn about these amazing birds, long-lived and monogamous, who normally live in the air, where they can soar for hours on end, and on the water, where they find their food. They only land on the ground to mate, which happens annually or less often — every other year for the Great (or “wandering”) albatross. It was also interesting to learn that the negative meanings of albatross (the bird) and Alcatraz (the prison) are confined to English. (The former is attributable to Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner.) For this reason English albatross is more interesting than Spanish alcatraz, which is unlikely to make the cut for my book.

I will continue with Crystal’s book, now that I’ve relocated it, but will look forward to returning to Mysteries and Histories next — hopefully, not too long from now.

Spelling pronunciation in Spanish

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I’ve given up on often.

When I was growing up I was taught that the t in often is silent, and that pronouncing the word as ‘off-ten’ was a mark of a poor education. Merriam-Webster relates the silent t in often to those in soften, hasten, and fasten. Apparently the t in often was originally pronounced, but dropped out of vogue in the 1500s, so that Queen Elizabeth, for example, avoided it. M-W writes that “phonetically spelled lists made in the 17th century indicate that ‘the pronunciation without [t] seems to have been avoided in careful speech'”, and that “three hundred years later, the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary” said that the off-ten pronunciation was “not recognized in dictionaries.”

However, the 1934 unabridged Webster’s Second reported that the off-ten pronuncation, “until recently generally considered as more or less illiterate, is not uncommon among the educated in some sections,” and the current M-W dictionary “reports both pronunciations as equally accepted.”

Indeed, in my lifetime I have observed more and more people using the off-ten pronunciation regardless of education. It is certainly much more common today than the pronunciation with a silent t. I still grit my teeth when I hear off-ten, but smother the impulse to think less of the speaker.

What does this have to do with Spanish? In an effort to get back to work on my new book, after taking some time off due to a death in the family, I have returned to my previous task of gleaning inspiration from David Crystal’s The Story of English in 100 Words, and in fact have hit the halfway point (50 words). Crystal’s word #40 is debt, which of course has a silent b. Crystal explains that debt, which was borrowed from French dette, was originally spelled det or dett in English. In the 16th century aspirational English speakers added a b in imitation of the Latin root debitum, with support from the related English word debit. Cyrstal provides several other examples of this hyper-correct “spelling reform”, such as the b in doubt and subtle and the p in receipt.

Crystal also points out that although the added letters in debt, doubt, subtle, and receipt are still silent, English speakers came to pronounce some letters added in the 1600s, such as the s in baptism and the l in fault. Although Crystal didn’t use the term, linguists describe pronunciations like these as “spelling pronunciation”, i.e. pronouncing words the way they are spelled. Off-ten is another example of spelling pronunciation.

Crystal’s examples of spelling pronunciation caught my eye because I’m hyper-aware of how people pronounce often. However, I assumed that spelling pronunciation would be irrelevant to Spanish because Spanish spelling is phonetic: that is, the pronunciation of any written Spanish word is obvious and unambiguous.

Nevertheless I googled “Spelling pronunciation in Spanish” just to be thorough. To my surprise I ran into several examples, all of which involve words borrowed from other languages. Usually Spanish changes foreign spelling to conform to Spanish principles, using different letters, as in bistec ‘beefsteak’, and/or adding accent marks as in mánager and esplín ‘spleen’. But some borrowings go the opposite direction, with Spanish speakers keeping the original spelling but pronouncing the foreign word according to Spanish rules. Some examples are:

  • clóset, with the English /z/ sound changed to /s/;
  • Mach (the scientific term, borrowed from German), with the final consonant pronounced with the ch of chorizo instead of the /x/ of ajo;
  • folclor, from English folklore, with the l in folk pronounced;
  • élite, from French élite, pronounced with three syllables (é-li-te), and with the French acute accent on the first /e/ interpreted as an indication of penultimate stress [I love this!];
  • iceberg, pronounced with three syllables (i-ce-berg) in Spain.

By the way, “spelling pronunciation” has always been one of my favorite bits of linguistic jargon because its meaning isn’t obvious from its two component words. (One might think it refers to phonetic transcription, i.e. a way of spelling words the way they are pronounced.) Perhaps the semantic relation between the two words is unusual.

¡Yamnaya!

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After taking some weeks off for summertime fun with my family I am now back to research for my third book. I’ve continued to work my way through David Crystal’s The Story of English in 100 Words — still inspirational and intimidating. But I’ve also taken a detour to devour Laura Spinney’s book Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, about the pre-history of the Indo-European languages. I will definitely want to touch on this topic in my book, since it’s part of the history of Spanish.

For those of you who may be unaware, the Indo-European language family includes thousands of languages spoken today: Romance languages like Spanish, Germanic languages like English, Slavic languages like Russian, Baltic languages like Lithuanian, and Celtic languages like Welsh; Greek, Albanian, and Armenian; Hindi and other languages of northern India; and languages of Central and Western Asia including Pashtun (Afghanistan) and Persian (Iran). It also includes languages that are no longer spoken and (unlike Latin) have no spoken descendents. These include Oscan and Umbrian ( “Italic” languages related to Latin), languages of ancient Turkey including Hittite and Phyrgian (“Anatolian” languages), and Tocharian A and B, once spoken in the Tarim Basin of northwestern China.

I learned about the Indo-European language family as an undergraduate and graduate linguistics student. However, my knowledge of the family’s origins was vague: I knew only that it arose somewhere north of the Black Sea. (Or was it the Caspian Sea???) Although I was aware that in the years — decades, really 😉 — since I completed my PhD, there had been substantial new research on this topic, I hadn’t followed the field.

Proto has brought me up to date — and can I say “Wow?” Spinney’s book combines recent research from linguistics, archaeology, and genetics (DNA analysis) to illuminate what is known today about the origin of the Indo-European languages. Essentially, Proto-Indo-European — the common ancestor of the language family — spread east and west through the Eurasian steppe (grasslands), conveyed by cattle herders equipped with horses and wagons. The steppe was a natural environment in which such people could thrive and spread. Researchers call these steppe herders the Yamnaya, which means ‘pit grave’ in Russian, because of their burial practices.

The illustration below, from pp. 60-61 of Spinney’s book, shows the progression of Indo-European (black arrows) through the steppe (shaded area) and beyond. My vague memory wasn’t that far off, since the arrows show a specific point of origin in the steppe north of the Black Sea.

Genetic analysis of DNA from Yamnaya remains suggests an exciting possibility:

“The earliest Yamnaya males … carried a very narrow cluster of Y chromosomes. Later on, after the population had grown, other Y chromosomes entered the mix, but the first of their kind may have been closely related to each other on their father’s side. One way to interpret the evidence is to think of the Yamnaya as a single clan or brotherhood who distinguished themselves by their burial rite. They may have left a larger group, or been expelled from it, and having moved out of their ancestral valley became increasingly nomadic unril they vanished into the grasslands for good. If that is who they were it prompts an extraordinary reflection: fewer than a hundred people may have spoken the dialect that gave rise to all extant Indo-European languages.” (p. 69)

While Proto doesn’t have anything to say about Spanish specifically, it does include interesting speculation about the connection among Italic, Germanic, and Celtic languages:

Germanic, Celtic and Italic are related by common descent. This is evident from their grammar, their pronunciation and their core vocabulary (English – – father mother brother; Old Irish athir – máthir – bráthir ; Latin pater – mter – frter). But the relationships between them aren’t equal. Celtic and Italic are generally considered to be closer to each other than either is to Germanic, like twins with a third sibling.…Some linguists suspect that Italic and Celtic arose as a single, possibly short-lived language, Italo-Celtic, while Germanic arose separately.

As I had hoped, Proto provided me with the information I need to write about Indo-European origins. On other counts, as a linguist I especially enjoyed learning about Anatolian and Tocharian, two branches of the Indo-European family that had always flown under my cognitive radar. I think that many people interested in languages or history would find the book to be an informative and accessible read. It provides a dizzying overview of the early history of humanity around the Black Sea: a region that, like the Fertile Crescent, would be a springboard for widespread advances in civilization for millenia to come. I recommend it highly.

Recent gleanings from David Crystal

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As a first step in research for my new book I have continued to work my way through David Crystal’s inspirational The Story of English in 100 Words. I hit the 25-word mark yesterday, and thought this would be a good time to blog about what I’ve learned since my previous post, which covered Crystal’s Introduction and his first few words.

To begin with, I’ve learned lots of fun facts about my own language! Here are a few:

  • The word out serves as a verb, adverb, exclamation, preposition, adjective, and noun. Wow!
  • The word street was one of the first borrowings into English from Latin. It was applied to the paved, straight roads that the Romans built, while the earlier Anglo-Saxon word weg (now ‘way’) was relegated to older paths.
  • The groom of bridegroom was originally guma, a somewhat poetic Old English word for ‘man’. Speakers substituted the similar-sounding groom when guma dropped out of normal usage. Groom originally meant ‘boy’ but had acquired its current equestrian meaning by the time of this substitution.
  • The only cookery words that come from Old English, not French, are grind and dough. Who knew?
  • Many legal expressions like goods and chattels, fit and proper, and will and testament, originally combined Germanic and Latin words so that they would be widely understood.
  • The game of Monopoly caused American jail (apparently descended from Parisian French) to overtake the (apparently Norman) gaol outside of the U.S.
  • Middle English didn’t have separate words for ‘spring’ and ‘summer’, but merged them both into sumer, as in the famous English round (song) Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu.
  • We think of wee as Scottish, but it originated in Northern England, not over the border in Scotland.

—————–

As I’d hoped, Crystal’s book is giving me interesting ideas for my own book about Spanish, or at least questions:

  • Does Spanish have phrases with deliberately bilingual origins, like goods and chattels in English?
  • What word can I discuss that is only found in legal Spanish? (Maybe the future subjunctive…)
  • Crystal includes the title dame. What Spanish title should I discuss?
  • I should definitely include some Spanish word pairs that consist of a newer word and an earlier one from a different source (as in street and way). Some possibilities are abarca/sandalia, simiente/semilla, vianda/comida, and/or hostal/hotel. Of course, sometimes a new borrowing completely overwrites an earlier word, for example French té, which ousted Portuguese cha (itself borrowed from Mandarin).
  • Apparently pork meant ‘penis’ in American slang of the 1930s. Are any Spanish slang words for body parts worth discussing?
  • Speaking of slang words for body parts, Crystal points out that cunt is taboo enough to sometimes be referred to as “the c-word”, which can also mean ‘cancer’. English also has the “f-word” and the “n-word”. Does Spanish have any such words that, like Voldemort, must not be named? I will include some taboo words in any case.
  • The lack of separate words for ‘spring’ and ‘summer’ in early English reminds me of the lack of modern Spanish words for ‘evening’ and ‘night’. Were there earlier Spanish uber-terms that eventually split into two words? (And what can I call them instead of “uber-terms”, which I just invented? Portmanteau means something else, doesn’t it?) Did this happen, in recorded history, with color terms, which tend to proliferate as languages evolve? (See e.g. Guy Deutcher’s Through the Language Glass, one of my favorite linguistics books written for a general audience.)
  • English slang frequently uses negative words as positives, e.g. wicked, mad, insane, crazy, and of course bad. Is there anything like this in Spanish?
  • Crystal’s discussion of phrasal verbs like take out and take away, which are distinctively English (perhaps Germanic, more generally?) reminded me that I should definitely discuss pronominal verbs (reflexive and otherwise), which are distinctively Spanish.
  • Crystal says out that the word count, as opposed to countess, was initially avoided because its earlier pronunciation was similar to that of cunt. This reminded me of Tom Lathrop’s assertion that the verb jugar, originally jogar, ‘evolved’ its u to make the verb sound less like joder. Is this assertion taken seriously? Are there other examples of this avoidance process in the history of Spanish?

Unrelated to Crystal’s book, I’ve also made notes to myself to include

  • Words that illustrate spelling changes, like saqué or empecemos. Maybe the best way to do this is with a word like cero or cebra.
  • Diminutives, aggrandatives, and so on. Spanish has a wealth of derivational suffixes! Likewise I should include interesting prefixes such as re- prefix, which can be an intensifier (rebueno) or a repeater (rehacer).
  • The full range of parts of speech.
  • Words from a broad range of semantic categories such as the 24 used in the WOLD project.

On a final note, the New York Times “Connections” game, which I play every morning — my current streak is 69! — recently included the word loanword. Many commenters on the Connections blog complained that this word was too obscure. So did my husband. NOT ME!!!

A shout-out to David Crystal

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As I explained in my first blog post about my planned third book, David Crystal’s book The Story of English in 100 Words inspired me to tackle this project, and studying his book is the first item on my research to-do list. Since then, I’ve gotten to work.

So far, reading The Story of English has been both discouraging and encouraging. Discouraging, because David Crystal knows more about English than I will ever know about Spanish. Each entry in the book is rich with information and presented in a most engaging manner. For example, the entry for the word and:

  • quotes the first written example of the word;
  • talks about the importance of “little words”;
  • explains the origin of the ampersand (&);
  • reveals an earlier abbreviation for and: a symbol that resembles the number 7 but that dips below the line of writing (like a j, q, or p) — this came as a complete surprise to me!
  • thoroughly debunks the shibboleth against beginning sentences with and and other conjunctions, quoting grammarians both past and present and citing a host of authors who followed this practice.

I doubt that I’ll be able to do as good a job for Spanish as Crystal did for English, but I’ll try. In the meantime, I recommend The Story of English to any of my readers who are interested in languages in general, not just Spanish.

At the same time, reading The Story of English is encouraging. For one thing, I see how good a book of this type can be. Additionally, while I am still in the book’s early pages, it has already given me several ideas for my own book. For example, Crystal’s discussion of and suggests the following:

  • I should include early written examples of the words when they are available and interesting. (See canoa in my earlier post.)
  • I should include “little words”. Conmigo is on my list for sure — it’s a fascinating double compound, since both con- and -go came from Latin cum ‘with’, but centuries apart. I will probably mention mas when I talk about accent marks. Accented más, which means ‘more’, has eclipsed it in the last century and a half, as shown by the Google ngrams graph below. Por and para are also likely: para began as por + a ‘to’, which is why so many of its uses have a directional meaning.
Más overtakes mas (generated using books.google.com/ngrams). Y axis shows how often each word has occurred in Google’s corpus of Spanish books.
  • Regarding abbreviations, I’ll definitely cover the tilde’s origin as a shorthand for n (perhaps in an entry for año?), and the sexual politics of the arroba (@), an English abbreviation borrowed into politically correct Spanish. You can see the former in the letter from Christopher Columbus in my June 23 post, for example corazõ for corazón (two lines above canoas) and bãcos for bancos (one line below).
  • The most obvious Spanish shibboleth is the shifting guidance either in favor of or against leísmo. Le is sure to be one of my 100 words.

As I mentioned above I’m still at the beginning of Cyrstal’s book, which is why this post is mostly about and. The book’s Introduction, besides providing a broad chronology of English and its principal lexical contributors, raises other useful points, all of which I will hope to cover in Spanish:

  • Besides native words and borrowings, Crystal mentions several other sources of English words: de novo invention, slang and vulgar vocabulary, onomatopoeia, idioms, criminal jargon, and regionalisms.
  • He also touches on vocabulary topics including standardization, the impact of printing, specific authors, biblical translations (including shibboleth, which is probably why it was on my mind), prescriptive grammar, and spelling reform — each topic grounded by one or words on his list.
  • He covers different mechanisms of word formation that have come into play in the history of English, such as reduplication (dilly-dally), shortening, compounding, and proper nouns like valentine or Watergate becoming common nouns, for which the obvious Spanish example is biro.

Overall, Crystal characterizes English as “a playful and innovative language, whose speakers love to use their imaginations in creating new vocabulary.” I’m not ready to provide any parallel insight for Spanish, but I hope that soon I will be.

Plans for a third book

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Now that I’m not planning to teach this fall, my longstanding idea for a third book about Hispanic linguistics has jumped off the back burner and into the front of my brain. My inspiration for this project is David Crystal’s The Story of English in 100 Words (St. Martin’s Press, 2011). Crystal’s book is 256 pages long, so you can do the math — he devotes two or three pages to each of one hundred words carefully chosen to represent the history of the English language.

I’m planning to do the same for Spanish — and to write the book simultaneously in English and Spanish, to reach a wider audience! The English title will probably be The Story of Spanish in 100 Words and the Spanish title either La historia del castellano en 100 palabras or La historia del español en 100 palabras.

“My” hundred words will include:

  • words that entered the language in every relevant century;
  • words from the many sources that Spanish vocabulary draws on, from Proto-Indo-European to American English;
  • words that reflect different aspects of Spanish and Latin American culture, and the cultures that they have interacted with;
  • words that illustrate the evolution of distinctive aspects of the Spanish language, such as the formal pronoun usted;
  • words that illustrate common linguistic processes, such as a word’s taking on a negative connotation over time, as in bárbaro ‘barbarian’, which in Latin had the more neutral meaning ‘foreigner’.

I already have a preliminary list of almost 100 words, many of which are placeholders like “something from Quechua.” My first task will be to flesh out this list with words from sources including:

  • David Crystal’s book, with the expectation that some of his 100 English words will suggest Spanish equivalents;
  • this blog;
  • my first two books;
  • The American Heritage Dictionary’s Spanish Word Histories and Mysteries, which focuses on Spanish words that English has borrowed;
  • Antonio Tello Argüello’s Historia particular de 100 palabras, in which this Argentinian poet traces the origins of his favorite words;
  • suggestions from you, my readers. Fire away in the comments!

Without a doubt the first word in the book will be yugo ‘yoke.’ I will start there because yugo so perfectly illustrates the Indo-European language family of which Spanish is an important member. Indeed, the Proto-Indo-European root of yugo, *yugóm, has descendants in every branch of the Indo-European language family! Besides yugo itself and English yoke, some examples are Greek ζυγός, Cornish yew, Hindi युग, and Czech jho. This wide dissemination is culturally significant because it shows that the original Indo-European people, who most likely lived in or near today’s Ukraine, had already learned to tame cattle and plow fields before they spread out to conquer most of Europe and South Asia. Yugo also has a fun connection with the word yoga; just as a yoke connects two oxen, the practice of yoga is supposed to forge a spiritual connection with a higher power or one’s better nature.

Another must-include word is canoa ‘canoe’, the first indigenous American word to enter the Spanish language. Christopher Columbus used this Taíno word in a letter to Luis de Santangel, dated 15 February 1493, about his first voyage to the New World. You can see it on the second page of this copy of the letter in the Rare Books collection of the New York Public Library, about two-thirds of the way down. (Click on the thumbnail of the second page, then one of the viewing options, preferably “2560 px.”) I’ve circled it in this screen clip:

Columbus wrote: Ellos tienen en todas las islas muy muchas canoas, a manera de fustas de remo, de ellas mayores, de ellas menores ‘On all the islands they have very many canoas, a kind of rowboat, some larger and some smaller.’ Note that Columbus took care to explain what a canoa was because he knew it was a new word.

I hope to reach a wide audience with this book, and so will seek a non-academic publisher, either directly or with the help of an agent. Any ideas for likely publishers or agents will be most welcome as I pursue this project.

I’ve cleaned up my act

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Since I’ve neglected my blog in recent months and even years, a number of links on my Teaching page had become broken. All links on that page are now functioning! If you teach or study Spanish, you should have a look. Please contact me if you ever encounter other broken links on the blog.

A favorite preterite/imperfect exercise

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This isn’t the post I promised about my next book project. However, it is otherwise related to my “hanging up my sombrero” as a classroom Spanish teacher (same link).

I am now gleefully clearing out Spanish textbooks, and books about teaching Spanish, from my bookshelf. Before discarding Imágenes, a 2007 textbook from Houghton Mifflin by Debbie Rusch, Marcela Domínguez, and Lucía Caycedo Garner, I scanned one of my favorite activities, a retelling of “Jack and the Beanstalk” that helps students acquire the distinction between the preterite and imperfect. Like most English speakers I struggled with this concept, and it wasn’t until I used this specific activity in my own classroom that I finally “got it” myself. Perhaps some of my readers will find it useful as well, for themselves and/or their students.

Many Spanish teachers use familiar stories to teach and practice preterite and imperfect, such as Barbara Kuczun Nelson‘s Superhombre and Ricitos de Oro stories. What I like about this “Jack and the Beanstalk” exercise is that its columnar organization graphically divides the plot elements into those that naturally take the preterite and those that take the imperfect.

By the way, two other Ah-ha!!! preterite/imperfect moments for me were:

  • When the professor in a summer class I took at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid told us to use the preterite to express an overall evaluation, e.g. thumbs-up or thumbs-down. I later generalized this to an open vs. closed box metaphor.
  • When an exercise in the same Imágenes textbook showed me that bounded time trumps repetition, so that (for instance) you use the preterite to say that you played golf every day during your vacation. This is an example I’ve mentally returned to over and over again.