eDELE.org Excellentia Didáctica: Español como Lengua Extranjera Online Preparation for DELE Exams (Spanish as Foreign Language) WORKBOOK #1 History and Origins of the Spanish Language First modern novel in a First grammar handbook European language for a European language W.P. Steenkamp D. Litt. et Phil. © eDELE s.a. 2013 1 THE SPANISH [CASTILIAN] LANGUAGE : ORIGINS AND HISTORY 1. Why bother with the roots? In many ways, the ability to talk is what separates our species from other animals. Language separates groups of humans from each other as distinct cultures. Even today – within one language – how we talk that language separates us into social classes. Language has been with us for millennia, with the modern languages of today having evolved along routes as contorted as the geographical routes that led our species to populate the far corners of the planet. Yet our “globalised” world of today is very recent – before that, peoples (and their languages) existed and developed very much in isolation, giving rise to important divergence and idiosyncrasies. The latter is particularly true because of the reality that languages were “created” from the bottom up, by the common folk – only relatively recently have linguists and national academies begun to standardise, but always based on the real-world meanderings that (for better or worse) had become embedded in the tongue spoken by the populace. It therefore stands to reason that, for the speaker of one language, the grammatical structure of any foreign language will firstly be different, and secondly may lead him/her to even question whether it has any logic, or to call its structure “stupid”. The easy junior school-style remedy is to simply insist that “that’s how it is; you have no option but to memorise it by route learning”. That, however, is not how the adult mind works – we want to understand, to get to know the answer to the “why”. And such answers do exist, because – as the product of the spontaneous free will and ingenuity of millions of intelligent human beings over many centuries, all of them intent on communicating clearly – every language self-evidently does have some kind of underlying structural logic. Much like life in an ant colony has its intelligent structure and sensible answers to its why’s and wherefores, even though it all grew naturally, without dictate. It is also obvious that humans build and adapt on the basis of what they have received from their forebears. This is why knowing the essence of its history is a useful tool in unveiling the logic that does exist in the grammatical structure of modern Spanish. Once you comprehend how Spanish differs from your own language, and have mentally plugged into its different structural logic, you will find learning Spanish so much easier and more rewarding. You will also be better able to extract value from the commercially available study materials and handbooks, which – typically yet lamentably – tend to be based on mere route learning and a book chapter structure that simply presents each tense / set of conjugations sequentially, as if disconnected from any overarching plan. The study goal of this Workbook is therefore to help the student contextualise and differentiate modern Spanish in relation to his/her own tongue, the world family of languages, and understand that it does indeed “make sense” (and not only to the 406 million native Spanish speakers and 60 million 2nd language speakers of our planet) as will be further elucidated when we introduce the Structure of Spanish Grammar in Workbook #2. 2. Names of the language (Source: Wikipedia) In Spain and in some other parts of the Spanish-speaking world, Spanish (español) is also called castellano (Castilian), that is, the language of the region of Castile, contrasting it with 2 other formally recognised regional languages spoken in parts of Spain such as Galician, Basque, and Catalan. Native speakers of these regional languages prefer the term castellano for what we foreigners commonly call Spanish, as they consider their own languages to be equally "Spanish". The Spanish Constitution of 1978 uses the term castellano to define the official language of the whole Spanish State, in contrast to las demás lenguas españolas (lit. the rest of the Spanish languages) which enjoy concurrent official status in their respective Autonomous Communities. The Spanish Royal Academy, on the other hand, currently uses the term español in its publications but from 1713 to 1923 called the language castellano. The Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (a language guide published by the Spanish Royal Academy) states that, although the Spanish Royal Academy prefers to use the term español in its publications when referring to the Spanish language, both terms, español and castellano, are regarded as synonymous and equally valid. Two etymologies for español have been suggested. The Spanish Royal Academy Dictionary derives the term from the Provençal word espaignol, and that in turn from the Medieval Latin word Hispaniolus, 'from—or pertaining to—Hispania'. Other authorities attribute it to a supposed medieval Latin *hispaniōne, with the same meaning. 3. Pre-History Modern Spanish derives from the single language spoken around 5,000 – 3700 before the Common Era over much of what is today Europe and the Indus Valley in India. This Proto- Indo-European language (PIE) is the common ancestor of the most important modern Indo-European languages (although in Europe and on the Iberian Peninsula other languages not related to PIE do exist, such as Basque). Scholars estimate that PIE may have originally been spoken as a single language (before divergence began) by people who were centred between the Vistula River in Poland and the Caucuses mountains to the East, or in the Anatolian region of present-day Turkey. Important languages derived from PIE that show clear inter-relationship in the roots of verbs and in their grammar, include Sanskrit and classical Greek and Latin. Almost counter-intuitively, PIE was not a simple primitive language at all, but in fact a hugely complex one – much more so than modern languages such as Spanish, which have undergone significant simplification over the millennia. For example, PIE used three numbers (singular, dual and plural – as opposed to two in Spanish, singular and plural). PIE also used more moods (“mood” = the “state of mind” that determines which set of verb terminations to employ when conjugating verbs, such as the imperative mood for giving commands). In modern Spanish everything related to actions that are uncertain, irreal, or reflect wishes, fears, desires etc., are subsumed into one mood, the subjunctive. PIE, on the other hand, used the subjunctive only for the irrealis, and another mood (with its own conjugations), the optative, for wishes, desires, fears etc. PIE thus had a complex system of morphology. Nouns used a sophisticated system of declension and verbs used a similarly sophisticated system of conjugation. 3 As is explained in Wikipedia: The Indo-European verb system is complex. Verbs were classed as stative (verbs that depict a state of being), imperfective (verbs depicting ongoing, habitual or repeated action) or perfective (verbs depicting a completed action or actions viewed as an entire process). PIE verbs have at least four moods (indicative, imperative, subjunctive and optative), two voices (active and medio- passive) as well as three persons (first, second and third) and three numbers (singular, dual and plural). Verbs were also marked by a highly developed system of participles, one for each combination of tense and mood, and an assorted array of verbal nouns and adjectival formations. 4. Romance / Latin / Italic roots of Castilian The modern Romance languages (such as Italian, Castilian, Catalan, French and Romanian) form a subfamily of the Indo-European language family (other subfamilies are the Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Celtic, Armenian, Albanian and Greek). The Romance languages derive from Vulgar Latin, which in turn originated from the classical Latin of the Roman Empire, which was an Italic language (i.e., the now extinct languages stemming from PIE spoken in the Italian peninsula, such as Latin, Umbrian, Oscan and Faliscan). Latin’s daughter languages, the Romance languages that took root in the old Empire, are the only survivors of the original Italic languages, via Latin and Vulgar Latin. The Latin alphabet emerged from the Old Italic alphabets, which in turn were derived from the Greek and Phoenician scripts. Historical Latin came from the prehistoric language of the Latium region, specifically around the River Tiber, where Roman civilization first developed. Vulgar Latin (in Latin, sermo vulgaris) is a blanket term covering vernacular dialects of the Latin language spoken from earliest times in Italy, as well as including the dialects which evolved beyond Italy in other parts of the Western Roman Empire. From it developed the early Romance languages, with the latter first represented in writings around the 9th century. 5. The emergence of Spanish (Castilian) The Spanish language as such, evolved from Vulgar Latin (colloquial Latin), which was brought to the Iberian Peninsula by the Romans during the Second Punic War, beginning in 209 B.C. Prior to that time, several pre-Roman languages (also called Paleohispanic languages)—unrelated to Latin, and some of them unrelated even to Indo-European—were spoken in the Iberian Peninsula. These languages included Basque (still spoken today), Iberian, and Celtiberian. The early Iberians left few traces of their language in modern Spanish: Some of these words are: arroyo(small stream), García(family name), sapo(toad), manteca (lard), cachorro (puppy). 4 Toward the end of the sixth century before the Common Era (BCE), a nomadic tribe from central Europe known as the Celts moved into the area and mixed with the peninsula's inhabitants, the Iberians. The result was a new people called the Celtiberians, and they spoke a form of the Celtic language.