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496 pages, Hardcover
First published April 16, 2013
The Spanish words hablar (to speak) and preguntar (to ask) also have their roots in this Vulgar Latin spoken when Hispania was conquered. They come from fabulari and percontari (in Rome, these would later change to loqui and postulare). And Spaniards say mas (more) instead of plus or più like the French and the Italians because the custom in 200 BC was still to say magis instead of plus.The Spanish words hablar (to speak) and preguntar (to ask) also have their roots in this Vulgar Latin spoken when Hispania was conquered, They come from fabulari and percontari (in Rome, these would later change to loqui and postulare). And Spaniards say mas (more) instead of plus or più like the French and the Italians because the custom in 200 BC was still to say magis instead of plus.This is a neat fact about Spanish. If you studied Spanish, Latin, and French in school, it would still be an immense stretch to put this together on your own; the Latin you were taught wasn’t Vulgar Latin, it was Classical Latin—the one with the declensions: amo amas amat. I’m not sure where else you might stumble upon this fact, unless you were a bilingual Spanish/French archaeologist excavating—or at least intensely studying—Pompeii, the site containing most of the world’s written Vulgar Latin.
Columbus, while searching for names for the new things he saw, constantly vacillated between native and Castilian terms. Where Castilian words seemed sufficient, he used them. Otherwise, he and his men adopted a native term. Rope beds were so different from regular beds that Columbus quickly recorded the new word hamaca (hammock) for them and never used cama (bed). On the other hand, he persisted in calling the locals Indios for two months after he had recorded the name Caribe (Caribbean). Although Columbus dropped the term Indios before returning to Spain, for some reason the label stuck.Now you not only know the Spanish word for bed, but the origin of the hammock, the origin of the word “hammock,” and that Columbus was making it up as he went along. And that he dropped “Indios” pretty quickly, all things considered, but it stuck anyway. How embarrassing for Columbus!
Spain created the first permanent European settlement in the continental United States at St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565 and half a dozen more in the following decades. It established Jesuit orders in Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay in 1570. The first Thanksgiving was celebrated in St. Augustine in 1565, fifty-six years before the Pilgrims celebrated in 1621.Technically true, provided you ignore that the sixteenth-century Thanksgiving was a series of Catholic religious services that had little overlap on the Puritanical Plymouth immigrants that brought their Calvinist (non-Catholic) ideology to North America. Contemporary American Thanksgiving is based solely off the New England tradition—the overlap ends at the name. “The date of the first Thanksgiving is actually 1565,” is cumbersome; its the kind of precocious fact that requires too much explanation to disseminate adroitly—like the way to pronounce forte. You’re going to have to throw in the caveats, unless you’re willing to vaguely mislead some strangers at your spouse’s office party or other tedious social function.
In fact, there never has been anything exactly “Mexican” about Cinco de Mayo, at least the way it is celebrated in the United States. In Mexico, Cinco de Mayo is a minor celebration in the state of Puebla commemorating the victory of the Mexican army over the French in a battle fought there on May 5, 1862. California Mexicans began celebrating it at the end of the 1860s to commemorate the victory of an army of mestizos and Indians over powerful, well-equipped European forces. In the 1940s, the Chicano movement gave Cinco de Mayo political significance in the United States. But it remained an obscure Mexican American holiday for decades.This is itself an interesting series of facts, but is a savvier choice than just “interesting”; it’s a subtle reminder of the disparate countries and panethnic cultures that create the American Hispanic identity—often portrayed from the outside as monolithic. Spanish is pulled in a lot of different directions: the linguistic term is “highly entropic” (that’s covered in the book somewhere, too).
That changed in the 1970s, when the Latin American community in San Francisco turned Cinco de Mayo into a panethnic U.S. celebration for Hispanic immigrants of all national origins. It was a savvy choice: most Latin Americans, even Mexicans, had never heard of it, so it didn’t pit different nationalities against one another. In the long run, the popularity of Cinco de Mayo was also secured by the fact that it has no religious association, a handy feature since 15 percent of Hispanics in the United States today are evangelical Christians, not Catholics.
Spain was the spiritual center of the Counterreformation during the violent Wars of Religions that pitting Catholic and Protestant Europe against each other from 1524 to 1648. So, not surprisingly, British and Dutch history has tended to vilify and demonize characters like Charles V and especially his son Felipe II, and then project that interpretation onto all Spaniards.I never noticed this before. And it’s true, there aren’t a lot of flattering nouns that end in -ard. Except for wizard, which straight-up derives from wise in late Middle English. Warlock is much more insulting, in case you were curious. See how easy it is to digress when discussing word origins?
As a matter of fact, the persistent use of the word Spaniard, with the strong negative undertone all English words ending in -ard carry, attests to this age-old discrimination. Spaniard comes from Old French Espaignart, yet the French have long since adopted the neutral Espagnol. The Italians, the Germans, and the Portuguese use neutral terms in the languages, but in English, the noun Spanish applies to a group or the nationality while a Spanish individual is a Spaniard. A number of Protestant countries maintain the same distinction, including the Dutch, who use the Spanjaarden rather than Spaanse, and the Swedes, who use Spanjorer.
The Visigoths had another flaw, which adds a curious twist to the Christian Golden Age associated with their rule: although Christian, the Goths were actually heretics. Most of the inhabitants of the peninsula were Catholic by this point, but the Visigoths belonged to the Arian sect of Christianity, characterized by the belief, originating in Egypt, that Christ is subordinate to God. This rejection of the Trinity of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit made the Visigoths heretics in the eyes of their own Christian subjects.Take that, Gothic architecture, you deviant, non-classical style, you. All those beautiful cathedrals, spawned from heresy; well I never would have guessed.
Curiously, the Spanish term for the Visigoths, godos, would go on to have reactionary associations in Hispanic culture. In Colombia and Paraguay, it is a nickname for the Conservative Party. In Chile, it refers to someone from Spain. (Renaissance architects in Europe dubbed the architecture of the twelfth to fifteenth century “Gothic,” a pejorative name for a style they looked down upon in favor of classical models.)
“One million” in American English is the same as un millón in Spanish. After that, the numbers don’t match: a billion in American English has nine zeros, but a billón in Spanish has twelve zeros. A trillion in the United States has twelve zeros; a trillón in Spanish has eighteen zeros.That’s probably useful to know. Monetarily. Reading maps. Planning travels. That type of thing. It's a neat fact, but since there is no discussion of the whys and wherefores, it ends up being little more than a prime example of a chronicle that cries out for more detail.
The Spanish explorer Francisco Vazquez de Coronado was partly responsible for letting the secret out of the bag and turning the natives into effective horsemen. Coronado brought hundreds of horses with him in this 1540 expedition in search of the Seven Cities of Gold, which took him as far as Kansas. Many of the horses broke loose on the return trip, later multiplying into millions of animals that went on to change the lives of hundreds of Indian bands and tribes. The Apaches, in particular, became excellent horsemen, which would soon spell trouble for the Spaniards.Basically, everything we think of as frontier American from the Mississippi westward—cowboys, horses, ranching, rodeos, lassos—was brought there by the Spanish first. Up to and including any number of state names: “California was a reference to an obscure novel of chivalry written around 1500 about a Queen Calafia, ruler of a kingdom of black Amazons. La Florida is a reference to the Spanish name for Easter, la Pascua florida (literally, flowery Easter).”:
Americans today automatically associate Hispanics with immigration. That reflex omits one fact: part of the reason Hispanic culture remains so influential in the United States is that America absorbed large sections of the former Spanish colonial empire and, by doing so, effectively entered the Spanish-speaking world, not the other way around. Until the 1910s, the border with Mexico was a vague concept and people circulated freely—to work in Arizona’s mines, to dig in Texas’s oils wells, or to pick California’s fruit.Even gum comes from the Spanish, via the Native Americans:
In 1862, Thomas Adams, secretary to General Santa Anna, who was a U.S. refugee at the time, tried to find an industrial use for the gum from the chicle tree, native to Mexico (chicle means “gum” in Nahuatl). His attempts to commercialize chicle as a substitute for rubber failed. Then he recalled seeing his boss chewing chicle without swallowing, for hours on end. Adams went on to manufacture the product under the brand Chiclets.Now you know the brand name derivation. And the origin of gum itself. Score another one for The Story of Spanish and its savvy double-duty pedagogy.