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 included 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, which described a new 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)

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.