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.