The Story of Spanish

by Jean-Benoît Nadeau, Julie Barlow

Just how did a dialect spoken by a handful of shepherds in Northern Spain become the world's second most spoken language, the official language of twenty-one countries on two continents, and the unofficial second language of the United States? Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow, the husband-and-wife team who chronicled the history of the French language in The Story of French, now look at the roots and spread of modern Spanish. Full of surprises and honed in Nadeau and Barlow's trademark style, combining personal anecdote, reflections, and deep research, The Story of Spanish is the first full biography of a language that shaped the world we know, and the only global language with two names—Spanish and Castilian.

The story starts when the ancient Phoenicians set their sights on "The Land of the Rabbits," Spain's original name, which the Romans pronounced as Hispania. The Spanish language would pick up bits of Germanic culture, a lot of Arabic, and even some French on its way to taking modern form just as it was about to colonize a New World. Through characters like Queen Isabella, Christopher Columbus, Cervantes, and Goya, The Story of Spanish shows how Spain's Golden Age, the Mexican Miracle, and the Latin American Boom helped shape the destiny of the language. Other, more somber episodes, also contributed, like the Spanish Inquisition, the expulsion of Spain's Jews, the destruction of native cultures, the political instability in Latin America, and the dictatorship of Franco.

The Story of Spanish shows there is much more to Spanish than tacos, flamenco, and bullfighting. It explains how the United States developed its Hispanic personality from the time of the Spanish conquistadors to Latin American immigration and telenovelas. It also makes clear how fundamentally Spanish many American cultural artifacts and customs actually are, including the dollar sign, barbecues, ranching, and cowboy culture. The authors give us a passionate and intriguing chronicle of a vibrant language that thrived through conquests and setbacks to become the tongue of Pedro Almodóvar and Gabriel García Márquez, of tango and ballroom dancing, of millions of Americans and hundreds of millions of people throughout the world.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Language, Linguistics, Spanish Literature, Spain, Cultural

496 pages, Hardcover

First published April 16, 2013

About the author

Author, journalist and conference speaker, Jean-Benoît Nadeau has published seven books, over 900 magazine articles, won over 40 awards in journalism and literature, and given more than 80 lectures on language, culture and writing. His books include Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong, The Story of French and The Story of Spanish, which he co-authored with his wife, Julie Barlow. He currently resides in Paris, France, with his wife and their twin daughters.

Reviews

[Ricardo Salvador · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a good read, though ultimately too ambitious for these authors who admit to being recent learners of the language and its history. It is inevitable that a brief treatment of a subject so large and complex will suffer from giving short shrift to just about everything, of necessity, but this is riddled with several serious historical misinterpretations and, most embarrassingly, feeble translations and consistent misspellings of the language that is their exemplar of simplicity and phoneticism! This is not just poor or rushed editing, since the English doesn't suffer from the same deficiencies. I give you, for example, that Cuba had "South America's" first railroad, that Bartolomé de Las Casas first came to the island of "Hispanionala," that Vasconcelos' celebrated "por mi raza hablará el espíritu" is rendered in English as "the spirit will speak for my kind" (!), and unholy unintentional chimeras such as "Congresos International de la...). I'll spare you the tortured etymologies of Nahuatl and various other "americanisms." For these reasons, the book is best read by folks with sufficient background to glean the grand historical plot line, whilst separating the amateurish chaff. The language and its history are indeed an enthralling and challenging narrative. These French-Canadian authors of a similar treatment of French deserve a sympathetic pass for their earnest attempt and courage for taking on this topic.

[John Caviglia · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Story of Spanish is more an olla podrida (a potpourri, or, “rotten pot” into which everything is tossed) than what it purports to be, namely, a book focused on the Spanish language. Granted, no language exists in a vacuum isolated from history and culture, but in this case the asides head off helter-skelter in every conceivable direction, leaving the topic behind. Some of the factoids I came across were fascinating: for example, Phoenicians named Spain after the rabbits they encountered there, and Romans transformed that into Hispania; also, Quechua has more speakers now than at the time of the Inca empire…. But mostly I ended up underwhelmed, and—frankly—bored, as the authors hugely summarized everything within the reach of language, which is to say, pretty much everything. Cervantes gets two pages. The Latin American “boom” gets more (but strangely devotes more prose to Carmen Balcells, the literary editor for many of these authors, than to the authors themselves). Etc, etc. The Story of Spanish lacks the focus that its title should have given it.

And then, as one in love with language, I was distressed by the sloppiness of the whole, suggesting to me the fact that here we have a potboiler sequel to a previous “Story” of French (which I have not read … and now, will not). There is this interesting sentence, referring to a classic of Spanish Literature: “La Celestina, better known by its nickname, La Celestina.” OK, so this might just be a “typo” of sentence-wide proportions, but what disturbs me far, far more is that in this tome about Spanish, which is, say, 99% English, there are errors in the few “examples” of Spanish sprinkled into the text. I’ll cite one--“¡Termine tu té!—a sentence no Spanish speaker would ever conceivably produce.

Finally—as epitome of the sloppiness of the summaries in this book—here is the sentence in which the authors provide the quintessence of Pablo Neruda, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, and one of my favorite poets: “He was a dogged writer who held many topics.”

I do not know what to say about a sentence that bad (on every conceivable level). So I will simply recommend that you avoid this book. Scattered factoids bring the stars up to two.

[John Gurney · Rating 3 out of 5]

A unique and fascinating survey of the history and present state of the Spanish language. Unfortunately, the book has a disconcerting number of factual errors and typos. The authors are French Canadians, giving them outside perspective, but also allowing them to make some mistakes that, say, a Mexican, might not.

On the good side, the reader is immersed in the history of how Vulgar Latin became the foundation of Spanish. The Castilian variant beat the odds to dominate the Iberian Peninsula. Once considered so low it was only spoken and not even used for business, much less poetry, Castilian would eventually become the language of Cervantes and Vargas-Llosa. We learn how largely forgotten characters like King Alfonso X steered Spanish towards its current, unusual level of grammatical and spelling consistency. Spanish is an “easy” language due to its comparable lack of linguistic exceptions. I really enjoyed this information.

But, be forewarned, this 2013 first edition has an unusually large number of typos and errors. It slowed my reading pace because there were so many 'whoa' moments that required rereading. I trust future editions will fix typos, but some factual errors caught my eye.

For example, on pg. 211, the authors write France invaded Mexico, "in 1861, attempting to install Maximilian I of Austria as Emperor. This move failed when French troops were badly defeated in Puebla on May 5, 1862 - the famous Cinco de Mayo." That is wrong; the move did not fail. The French lost the battle on May 5, but won the war, installing Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico. The ill-fated monarch ruled Mexico for three years until he was captured and executed in 1867 by rebelling Mexican patriots. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximili...

Another head scratcher was the pg. 322 statement about undocumented workers in the United States, "a prolific job market that has been profoundly deregulated. The wave of labor deregulations since Ronald Reagan nearly matches the exponential growth of Hispanic immigration." The opposite is true. Since 1981, the US enacted numerous laws and regulations, such as the 1986 immigration reform act's employer sanctions, stepped up I-9 requirements, and e-Verify, aimed at stemming illegal immigration. Myriad other laws, such as 1985's COBRA and the 2010 health reform act, have been a wave of regulation, not deregulation. The book lacks notes or footnotes and the 'deregulated' statement was made completely void of any evidence.

On pg. 330, the authors state, "In the United States, Guatemalans and Salvadorans don't get along well with Mexicans." This assertion was just stated, without any evidence. I've heard that some Mexicans look down on Guatemalans; in fact, the Mexican-American satirist Gus Arellano jokes about Guatemalans, deliberately mirroring the language nativist Anglo Americans use against Mexicans. But, do Guatemalans and Mexicans really not get along? Are there fights or discrimination between the two communities? The book has a lot of statements of opinion like that. I suspect the statement was based in anecdotal evidence; for what it's worth, I recently read an online article about the explosion of Guatemalan-Mexican intermarriage in Arizona. http://www.azcentral.com/news/article... A few months ago, I visited a Guatemalan bakery with a Mexican-American friend who wanted to see what Guatemalan pastries were like. The Guatemalan-Americans and Mexican-American spoke of their homelands and got along just fine.

I didn't attempt to track every mistake in this 400-page book, but my recollection is some dates changed (e.g. 1816 might become 1817 a few paragraphs later), several statements struck me as too bold given the evidence at hand, and there were a few other inconsistencies like an early statement about people in Mexico really celebrating Cinco de Mayo (largely incorrect as it's no more than a small regional holiday in Puebla); later the authors get it right, but contradict the earlier statement, saying Cinco de Mayo is essentially an American holiday, heavily promoted by Corona beer. A few of their Spanish translations to English appeared wrong to my admittedly intermediate Spanish level eyes. Since I am neither linguist nor historian, the handful of errors I caught make me suspicious an expert will find a lot more.

[Andi · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF at page 35. I was really looking forward to this after a friend mentioned it, and I'm very disappointed to have to put it down, but I honestly don't think it's going to be worth the read. If I'm reading non-fiction, I have to be able to trust that the authors know what they're talking about; I understand the occasional typo or mistaken detail, but big mistakes or even consistent small ones erode that trust. I'm not interested in double-checking every single thing in the book, but at this point, I'd feel like I had to.

My Spanish is conversational though not fluent, and in just the first few chapters, I'm noticing consistent sloppy mistakes in the Spanish examples; heck, in the pronunciation guide at the very beginning (p. xii), they claim 'ñ' is pronounced like the 'ng' of "sing", which is just blatantly wrong — in what Spanish dialect is "niño" pronouned "ningo", please? And these mistakes aren't limited to the Spanish; on page 25, they claim that the English "brother" is derived from Classical Latin's "frater"; they may share a PIE root, but "brother" is firmly Germanic in origin.

The passage illustrating the establishment of SVO word-order features clumsy Spanish that actually obscures the point being made; the example sentence in Latin is "Marcus patri librum dat," which they translate as "Marcus is giving his father the book." This morphs into Vulgar Latin as "Marcus dat librum ad patrem," which they argue would have been pronounced something like "Marcu' dat libru' a' patre'." And then they finish with, "Notice how close the Vulgar Latin is to modern Spanish: Marcus está dando un libro a su padre (Marcus is giving a book to his father)." To begin with, this Spanish isn't even correct; it should be "Marcus le está..." — but even so, the given Latin example (just like Spanish) could also be translated as "Marcus gives his father the book." The better Spanish translation for the equivalent Latin phrase would be "Marcus le da el libro al padre." Which the careful reader will notice is actually much closer to the Vulgar Latin example.

And even the high-level concepts seem shaky at times. Their description of how Classical Latin morphed into Vulgar Latin was very superficial and seemed ignorant of the actual mechanics of language change (if languages with case endings are somehow too difficult for most people to learn and only used by the literate and educated, how have Russian and German toddlers and peasants managed through the centuries?).

The last straw for me was this gem from page 34: "The way a language is conceived tends to mirror the way the law of its speakers is organized. English-speaking countries use common-law, a system based on customs, canon law, parliamentary writs, and royal decree. Common law does not proceed from a code or from principles, and English itself is a disorganized tongue that follows no code." That is such arrant pop-linguistic bullshit, I about threw the book across the room. Historically, linguistically, it doesn't even make enough sense to debunk.

Hard pass.

[Federico Davoine · Rating 3 out of 5]

At the beginning, it was a nice and enjoyable book. As a native Spanish speaker, I've always asked why Spanish and Portuguese use "queso"-"queijo" instead of "fromage" and "formaggio". I was amazed to discover that it was due to our earlier contact with the Romans. However, after the first awesome chapters, the book starts to display more and more inaccuracies and misunderstandings from the authors. Uruguay didn't called itself "República Cisplatina" before 1918. Nobody in Latin America says "vos tenéis cara de triste", but the more common "vos tenés" or the Chilean "vos tenís" (the omission of one vowel is an interesting feature to delve in). There are lot of more mistakes.
The addition of personal anecdotes only help to depict the authors as naives "gringos", that don't understand completely what is happening around them. For example:
"Curiously, in the Mexican countryside, we learned that gringo was also strongly associated with Protestantism. When we told the locals we met that we were French speaking and Catholic, they told us that that made us less gringos."
The "gringo" concept is not associated with any religion (please, note the rise of Protestantism in Latin America), but with culture. Being French speaking means that they are from another Latin culture (like Italian or Portuguese), making they less alien (="gringo") to Spanish people.
I strongly recommend the authors to hire a couple to Spanish native speakers (from more than one country), to systematically note and correct those errors.

[K · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was intrigued about this book following an NPR interview with the authors, and since I'm currently learning Spanish, it seemed to be a "must read." On the whole, this is a very well done book, complete with history, fun facts, and a comprehensive look at where Spanish has been and to where it seems headed.

For some reason, following the interview, I'd imagined that this book would read more like a novel and less like a scholastic text but, sadly, was wrong. Not that it's dry or boring-- far from it-- but there are so many facts and so much information packed into each chapter that I felt a bit overwhelmed at times. Nevertheless, the takeaway from reading it, for me anyway, was the tremendous extent to which Spanish is spread across the world, and the myriad words and expressions in the U.S. that have their roots firmly in a language that, but for some chance decisions centuries ago, might never have escaped the rather confined borders of the Iberian peninsula.

Now, back to social distancing and practicing my Spanish. Adiós a todos.

[digbybare · Rating 3 out of 5]

The most disappointing thing about this book is that the authors are surprisingly unknowledgeable about Spanish (despite claiming that they speak it fluently in the introduction). They make countless mistakes that anyone with a cursory knowledge of Spanish would notice, such as consistently using tu for tú, or incorrectly translating/defining some words and phrases. Beyond these technical errors, they're fairly unknowledgeable about the current differences in the usage of Spanish in different countries, which is extremely surprising, as that's one of the main topics of the book. For example, they say that the exclusive use of ustedes and absence of vosotros is limited to a small part of Mexico (rather, vosotros is absent in all varieties except peninsular Spanish), and make various mistakes about the usage of voseo.

Their overall understanding of the Spanish-speaking world is very shallow as well. They constantly lump Spain and Latin America together as one monoculture, when inhabitants on both side of the Atlantic would be quick to point how just how different the two are (and that's not to mention the many cultural differences between the various Latin American countries themselves).

Beyond the fact that they obviously have very little understanding of the topic at hand, it's interesting as a general history of Spain and the Spanish-speaking world.

[Lauren Hiebner · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book delves into the origins and development of the Spanish language. It further identifies the influence of various outside languages and cultures up to the present time. It explains how complicated writing a standard dictionary can be when 22 countries share the same language. The book does a good job of looking at the linguistic differences that exist in various countries. It also looks at how the Spanish language is reflected in countries via literature, art, music, the media (like telenovelas), technology, economics, and politics. Spanish is as much a language as it is a culture. My favorite chapter was about Spanglish, it’s origins, development, and usage today. This Is a must read for any student or speaker of Spanish.

[David Dinaburg · Rating 3 out of 5]

The City is everywhere. “The City”—as in, “I’m headed to the City tonight for dinner”—is a game of geographical domination: by San Francisco in the Bay Area, by Chicago in the Midwest, by New York City in most of the Northeast (unless it’s a town perilously adjacent to the greater Cambridge/Boston area). It is purely contextual nomenclature, further complicated with a sliding scale of sincerity; residents of Paducah might ironically refer to their downtown area as the City, but drop a sincere reference to Louisville as The City without reflection. It always comes down to context.

New York has its own foibles; an Outer Borough denizen would tell out-of-towners they live in The City. But if you’re telling your Bushwick neighbor you’re headed to The City, it’s pretty clear you mean Manhattan. And if you live into Manhattan, “The City” is no longer a cogent reference point; you’re going Downtown, Crosstown, to TriBeCa, or—god forbid—to the West Village.

If you were to move from Chicagoland’s prototypical suburban Naperville to Bloomington, Indiana, any story you tell a Hoosier about “The City” is going to require a distinction between Chicago—the likely culprit—and Indianapolis. I’ve seen it. It gets confusing. So when I say The Story of Spanish is stunningly comprehensive as well as distressingly thin, it’s because you can spend days parsing the ins and outs of almost any word, in any language, given a particular context. Spanish is the official language in 22 modern geopolitical entities. It has a lot of history. Centuries that became millennia. That simply cannot fit into a single book:

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.

That’s the strength of The Story of Spanish; it’s going to go everywhere. It covers a whole language; everything and anything is up for grabs:

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!

Perhaps you’d rather spin the “Spain-invades-the-Americas” wheel forward a century or so:

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.

Which is the major concern with The Story of Spanish—not misleading strangers, but that its staggering depth can leave things a bit underdeveloped. How can it not? Its ambition is laudable, not embarrassing. It doesn’t fall flat so much as collapses after pushing itself as hard as it could for far longer than anyone could have expected. It is a wonderful survey-level discussion and nearly every page is heavy with fascinating detail. It wilts from the burden of carrying so many facts. Millennia of ethnographic and linguistic history are not exactly spry subject materials. When one needs to explain how a language evolved, necessity compels the story to be framed by the negative space—what is left out. Otherwise the book would simply never end.

Selecting on what to focus is a so important because there is too much material to waste space with filler:

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.

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.

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).

Most of The Story of Spanish pulls this double-duty: history and etymology, linguistics and culture:

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.

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.

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?

Don’t let the rude English and Dutch linguistic snipes distract you from the insults an entire epoch is about to levy against an older era:

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.

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.)

Take that, Gothic architecture, you deviant, non-classical style, you. All those beautiful cathedrals, spawned from heresy; well I never would have guessed.

The Story of Spanish doesn’t just focus on wizards and heretics, though I’d probably read that book with just as much gusto (gusto: English from Italian, Italian from the Latin gustus (taste). Did the Spanish sabor (taste) break away from an older version of the Vulgar Latin for taste? You find out, and tell me—all of my word origin dictionaries are English-only. Why yes, I do own more than one word origin dictionary.). There’s contemporary business in there too:

“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.

Other bits of history round out parts of the picture, even if they sometimes aren’t specifically etymologically focused:

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.

The lexicographical flow is not completely outward; sometimes you learn where Spanish picked up a few choice terms: “The world-famous cry of Spanish bullfighting olé! comes from the Arabic wa llah meaning “by God.” And, based solely on phonetics, I’m willing to bet the French voilà as well. (Looks like I would lose that bet. Muy malo, la langue française. It is just a cram-up of “see there”; how tedious.)

There’s so much to learn about the Spanish language. The Story of Spanish—with its minimalist cover emblazoned with the aesthetic la historia del español—does a good job keeping the reader coming back, page after page. The crushing weight of time has created so much material that there could be a billion more pages devoted to the subject. Perhaps even un billón. And I would likely recommend them all.

[Frances · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spanish teachers should read this. Spanish professors should read this. Latin American studies people should read it. Hispanic studies people should read it. Spanish and Latin American history people should read it. People who enjoy reading nonfiction tomes would like this.
And while I enjoyed this book, it reinforced a lot of things I already knew, and I learned many fun new facts for trivia night, I wouldn't recommend it to people other than the ones I mentioned above. It's just really, really, long. I wouldn't want anybody to feel compelled to try to finish the whole thing if they didn't want to.

Are all of the facts accurate? I don't know. There are some opinions presented as fact, as well.

I would love to be able to photocopy many small chunks of this to use in all my different Spanish classes, because so many parts of it are relevant. But that violates US copyright law.

One final thought: when I was getting licensed to teach Spanish, I had to take an exam that many, many people failed on their first (and second, third, fourth...) attempt because they did not know enough cultural information about Spain and Latin America. This would be a very useful book to help prepare for that exam if you never had the relevant material in college.

[Rodrigo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Terrible. A huge deception. This is more like the "unauthorized biography of Spanish", written by a show-bizz not-so-professional reporter, and, as any "unauthorized" text, it is full of rumors, assumptions and mistakes.
I had read their previous "The story of French" and I really enjoyed it! So, being a native Spanish speaker, I was really excited to read the same about my own language. But I was so disappointed! The amount of mistakes, fake information and misspellings (yes, lots of misspellings in Spanish, the subject of the book) is overwhelming. And really deceiving, making me wonder how much of what I "learned" and enjoy from "The story of French" is true. Now, I doubt every word of what Nadeau and Barlow might say about anything. And they say they had Spanish speaking people checking out the book!!!!! Some of them: "galápago" is not Spanish for "turtle", but a kind of turtle; "además" doesn't translate as "above all"; "guardia" is not "policeman"; "aceite" refers not only to "olive oil" but to any oil; and the best one: who told the authors that mexicans pronounce the name of their country, Mexico, like "Meshico"????
Really, if you want to really know what is all about Spanish as a language, go and read something else.

[Don O'goodreader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let's start with full disclosure: I LOVE books about about language, especially their history. The Story of Spanish is a fascinating and comprehensive new entry in this genre, the gold standard of which is: The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson.

This book is full of wonderful trivia like the Iberian peninsula was named before the Romans by the Phoenicians and means something like Land of Rabbits, and canoe and barbecue are native American words from the time of Columbus that English received through Spanish. In addition to etymology, spelling, grammar, this extensive book also covers history, politics, economics and sociology of both Iberia and Latin America for the last 2,000 years.

Overall a wonderful book for anyone interested in language and words.

For more see: http://1book42day.blogspot.com/2013/0...

I received a free copy of this book from the Goodreads First Reads program.

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a Hispanophile, this book was a thoroughly enjoyable and insightful overview of the high-level changes that the language has undergone over time. Although, as the other reviewers have mentioned, there are quite a few glaring typos that detract from the academic nature of the book, anyone with at least a high school level of Spanish should be able to spot them out and know what the actual spellings are supposed to be. There were also multiple instances where the authors repeated the same stories and anecdotes, which made for a slightly repetitive read at points. The later chapters also tended to veer off the linguistic premise of the book, but given the inextricable relationship between language and history, this is to be expected. All in all, a solid introduction to the cultural aspects of the Spanish language.

[satej soman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not quite as good as Nadeau and Barlow's The Story of French. (After reading a couple hundred pages of comparing the Real Academia Española and Insituto Cervantes with the Academie française and the Alliance française, you're almost bound to compare the two books).

Pretty engaging early history of how Old Castillian developed from the Vulgar Latin dialects on the Iberian Peninsula, as well as a discussion of Arabic's role as a second prestige language before the Reconquista.

The same care doesn't extend to Spanish post-colonial literature - after dozens of pages of drily summarizing the entirety of 19th-century Latin American politics, the authors fail to connect that history to the works of El Boom (Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, etc.) and further fail to discuss how these authors actually shaped the language. In general, the narrative woven prioritizes grammarians (Alfonso X, Nebrija) over writers and poets (Cervantes).

The book does make a cogent argument for treating Spanglish, like AAVE, as a proper language in its own right, especially by documenting how early Spanish grammarians' foresight in setting down rules for Hispanicizing calques and foreign loanwords gives core Spanish its flexibility to mingle with other languages (Portuñol, Frangnol, etc).

I wish there had been more discussion of the development of Portuguese given its similarity to Galician. Overall enjoyable, and I would probably read a story of German, English, or Italian by the same authors if they decided to write one.

[Maria · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars

It had several interesting points but I was bored for half of the book. And I love reading history books.

[Melissa Bradford · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book answered many questions I’ve had as a speaker, learner, and teacher of Spanish for many years. I’ve recommended it to my colleagues with the tagline “it reads like a textbook but is way more interesting.” The chapters don’t dive too deep into their topics (ranging from the Roman Empire to Cinco de Mayo) but give just enough information that supplements what Spanish learners know about the language’s history and culture. Overall I am very impressed with what the authors (a Canadian couple who speak fluent English and French) were able to uncover about parts of the history of Spanish, and the way they were able to portray all languages that have contributed to Spanish as valid and valuable. Would recommend to anyone with one to one hundred years of experience learning the language!

[Hillary · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this book, and in many ways, it did not disappoint. I had loved their earlier book, The Story of French. This book is recommended for anyone interested in linguistics, the Spanish language and of course, history. There was a lot of history--to my mind, sometimes too much. Some chapters were primarily about wars, conquests, new lands...and very little language. That is my first quibble.
I do love learning about the origins of words, how spelling and pronunciation evolved and why language is structured as it is. The Story of Spanish covered that all very well. I most certainly learned a lot, especially vocabulary. It's a great book for those who have learned Spanish and think they know it, as I do---but my exposure is limited and there are a lot of variations from one country to the next. Fascinating!
My other concern, however, about this book is the number of errors in the written Spanish. There are numerous typos--accent marks, spelling, verb forms. For example, in writing about the filmmaker Almodóvar, his name is misspelled twice. Or, "finish your tea" in Spanish should be "termina tu té," not "termine tu té," as they write. This is an editing issue, but it's pretty glaring, given that Spanish is the main subject of the book! All that being said, there are some English typos as well. I can only assume that the editing was a rush job. (It seemed there were more errors later in the book, but maybe I'm wrong about that.)
If I could, I'd give the book three and a half stars. It has great intentions, lots of scholarship, and is well organized. But the perfection is marred somewhat by the mistakes and also, to my taste, too much history (as compared with the linguistic material). No matter; I still recommend this book for language geeks like me.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very fun but imperfect popular history of the Spanish language. The authors, two Canadians who have written several books about the French language and culture, provide an accessible and engaging account of how the Spanish language developed and spread across the globe. Given that the vast majority of the world's Spanish speakers no longer live in Spain, the book devotes considerable attention to the push and pull between the forms of Spanish spoken in various Hispanophone countries, including the United States, and the ongoing attempts to create clear linguistic standards that accommodate all of the variants of Spanish spoken in the world. While the book is quite informative and clearly evidences the authors' passion for the topic, it has a rushed quality to it -- discussions of topics end abruptly, ideas are introduced only to be abandoned, certain points and phrases are repeated over and over, and the manuscript itself (at least the e-book) is full of production errors. It feels as if the publisher rushed the book to market without giving the writers enough time to refine their work or the production team enough time to ensure that the book met high production standards. That said, I enjoyed the book enough to consider reading one of the earlier books about French.

[Alex Goldstein · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ужас-ужас. Во-первых, неприятный стиль изложения, большое количество разговорных выражений, выглядит несерьезно. Во-вторых, при описании развития языка, авторы фактически излагают историю Испании - крайне поверхностно и не всегда точно. В третьих, в отзывах людей, знающих испанский, утверждается, что очень много неточностей и ошибок в самих примерах из испанского языка. Меня добила фраза о Гранаде, отделенной от остальной Испании хребтом Сьерра Невада. Я там ездил, и Гранада находится по эту сторону хребта...
Из почерпнутого - испанский является прямым наследником Vulgar Latin. Кастильский диалект подвергся сильному влиянию баскского языка, в котором нет звука "f". Поэтому, в отличие от других романских языков, во многих словах буква "f" была заменена на "h", например голод = hambre, тогда как в португальском (fome), каталанском(fam) и французском(faim) эта буква осталась.

[Nile Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

An intriguing concept that begins to falter and eventually falls completely flat about half way in. I appreciate the research and effort put into the book; unfortunately, after the actual history of the language was explored, the authors dive into every conceivable subject relating to the Spanish-speaking diaspora. Much of this fails to reasonably connect to the subject of the book itself, instead becoming an odd practice in miniature biographies for television actors or in-depth explanations about the history of salsa dancing. I wish the authors had kept the book more focused on the concrete history of the language instead of venturing off to explore only vaguely (if at all) related topics.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The information in this book is quite interesting but the editing is abysmal. The word "literally" is unnecessarily and inexplicably used throughout the book, dates are wrong (Miro lived from 1893-1883?!), misspellings run rampant, several facts are given without justification, and information often seems to be loosely organized. The vast amount of errors is so distracting that it makes me wonder how well all of the historical facts were checked. This is unfortunate because this could have been a really good read.

[Victor Gonzalez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good book. I learned a lot about Spanish (but not necessarily a lot of Spanish). It also allowed me to have great conversations with native Spanish speakers about Spanish. Great book.

[Julia Drury Mueller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes I forget there are other people just as interested in my specific, nerdy interests as I am. This book was a gem, I had the time of my life with it.

At the risk of being reductive: it's the story of how Latin became Spanish and the etymological history that encompassed the religious, political, and social movements that gave us the words we use today. This includes Phoenician, Visigoths, Moors, nerdy linguist aristocrats, colonialism, telenovelas, and more.

Personally, I enjoyed the earlier chapters more, reading about how we got individual terms. That's my stuff. The later chapters were more about influential Spanish-speakers and the language's role in global markets, and these are valuable but can't excite me like etymology can.

There were several typos throughout this book which made me wonder about the budget and the publishing house, but the information was valuable, and I'm certain I'll read The Story of French by the same authors soon enough.

--------------

A veces olvido que hay otras personas tan interesadas en mis intereses específicos y nerdy como yo. Este libro fue una joya; yo pasé genial con este.

A riesgo de ser reduccionista, es la historia de cómo el latín se convirtió en español y la historia etimológica que abarcó los movimientos religiosos, políticos y sociales que nos dieron las palabras que usamos hoy. Esto incluye fenicios, visigodos, moros, aristócratas lingüistas frikis, colonialismo, telenovelas y más.

Personalmente, disfruté más de los primeros capítulos, leyendo sobre cómo obtuvimos términos individuales. Eso es lo mío. Los capítulos posteriores se centraron más en hispanohablantes influyentes y el papel del idioma en los mercados globales; estos son valiosos, pero no me encantan tanto como la etimología.

Hubo varios errores tipográficos en este libro que me hicieron preguntarme sobre el presupuesto y la editorial, pero la información fue valiosa y estoy seguro de que pronto leeré La historia de Francés de los mismos autores.

(No es necesario hablar español con fluidez para leer este libro, pero sí es necesario hablar inglés con fluidez.)

[Ian Elder · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book provided a broad and interesting introduction to the history of the development of Spanish. I personally enjoyed the authors' anecdotes from their travels around the Spanish-speaking world; I thought it added a lot of flavor, even though sometimes they tended to turn anecdotes into evidence more than I would have liked.

After having read it, I feel like I have a good overall knowledge of the topic. I'm glad I read it because of the information it contained, but I really wish it had been better.

My number one issue is the writing and editing quality. For a published book, it's unusually poorly written. In terms of style, the writing is just okay. The editing, though, is downright bad. There are lots of typos, both English and Spanish, inaccuracies, and logical inconsistencies, wherein the authors will claim something in one paragraph, then a few paragraphs later, state something that completely contradicts what they just claimed, without explanation. On a few occasions, I read completely ambiguous sentences, which could be read just as easily in two contrasting ways.

The fact that they weren't native Spanish speakers was just a little annoying; I got the sense on a few occasions they were playing fast and loose with their translations. But that's not such a big deal. I think the book suffered more from their not being historians or linguists. On this particular topic, I would have enjoyed some deeper and more thoughtful discussion of Spanish's historical and linguistic development.

Overall though, I felt like I greatly improved my knowledge of a lot of questions I had been wondering about as an English-speaking Spanish learner. If you are learning Spanish seriously, I would recommend reading this--unless you're able to find a better book.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Language is amazing and complex, and this book musters and parades evidence of those truths in a manner befitting the diverse, ornate lifespan of Spanish.

The co-authors trace the origins, evolution, and dissemination not just of Spanish but of Spanish civilization and culture from ancient times until today. Thus, to lovers of the inner workings of the language itself, it bears mentioning that philology winds up playing a minor role in this procession. The political and cultural forces that spread Spanish around the world take up far more of the authors' attention.

However, all these elements remain interesting. The book opened my eyes to the multitude of forces that influence the life of a language, and introduced me to elements I was not even aware of, such as rate of entropy.

I have one mild criticism, which is that there are numerous grammatical errors and instances of linguistic clumsiness throughout. Inasmuch as proofreading is an endangered profession in our corner-cutting, money-based society, one would think that if no other book merited careful editing, one about language itself ought to.

It pained me to see, for instance, in the pronunciation guide statements such as:

- "A sounds like the a in far but shorter."
Why not just choose an English word with the precise pronunciation, such as "la"?

- "O is the same as the o in lock."
¡¿Qué?! I'm sure they meant to say something like the o in "boat"...right?

Or later on in the book, to see Cádiz spelled "Cadíz."

Perhaps such missteps are actually the authors' own, sly attempts to put their own mark on the future of Spanish. All else being equal, the book is an enjoyable read.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disclaimer - I am a Spanish teacher, which should explain my draw to this book. If you’re not so much into linguistics and history, I’d say to keep looking for your next book. If you’re still interested after that? Read this! As a Spanish teacher, I know a decent amount about the language. It’s my job. 😊 This book gave me new tidbits and insight that I found incredibly fascinating. There are associations between Spanish and other languages that I plan to incorporate into my teaching to help kids see the interconnected nature of language. There were historical influences that I had no idea about. Now, as a Spanish teacher there were a few cringy translation moments for me that were tough to read. Some were things that I felt the authors’ language surrounding the translation made sound like literal translations when they were very much “the equivalent of this saying” type of things. And then, a couple of glossed over things. (Letting a non-Spanish speaker think that the Latin American definition of coger is “to fornicate” could lead to a very awkward situation in which someone tries to use a technical term and is really just swearing up a storm - or at least my experience with that word in Latin America would tell me! Who knows - maybe I’m misinformed!) But overall, I learned some really interesting information and enjoyed the book a lot.

[Carolyn Harris · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story of history, politics and culture in the Spanish speaking world and the impact of these developments on the language rather than the story of the language alone. The Story of Spanish is written in a lively style and is filled with interesting details about how new words were introduced into the Spanish language. For example, the chapter on Spanish conquistadors in the Americas observes that they did not have the words to describe what they were seeing. They described Aztec temples as mosques and adopted the Taino word "hurrican" - hurricane - when the Spanish words for different kinds thunderstorms seemed inadequate to describe the nature of the storms in the Caribbean. Unfortunately, there are a number of passages where historical events are oversimplified or inaccurate and there are errors in the translations of Spanish words. An enjoyable read but I preferred The Story of French by the same authors.

[Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book fascinating. How did what we call the Spanish language begin in Spain? How did it eventually dominate other languages spoken in the Iberian peninsula? Then, how did it migrate to the New World and how did it become the predominate language in Central and South America (except for Portuguese in Brazil)? A thorough bibliography can lead readers to further works on various aspects of Spain, Spanish, and Latin America.

Whether or not you speak Spanish, have studied the language, or are curious about it, you will learn about the many aspects of this language which is spoken and studied the world over.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first exposure to Spanish was in 1960s elementary school. That seems early for the explosion of Espanol in the Americas, but the wife-husband team behind The History of Spanish details how this small and fragmented Romance language has become one of the top tongues across the globe. As a kid, I learned a necessary phrase to travel in Spanish-speaking geography - donde esta el bano? - only to learn later a more common question would be hay servicios? There are many regional and national differences necessitating language institutions to sort out the meanings and usages. Now with the U.S. Population approaching 25 percent Spanish populations, maybe I should have practiced harder.