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  • The Story of Spanish by Jean Benoît and Julie Barlow
  • Eligia Calderón-Trejo
The Story of Spanish. Jean Benoît and Julie Barlow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013. 496 pp. Maps, charts, tables, appendixes, bibliography, index. $27.99 hardback (ISBN: 978-0-312-656027). Also available as an e-book (ISBN: 978-125-0023162).

This is a fascinating account of the evolution of the Spanish language emphasizing its complex history and geography. Let’s be honest—who would know that the names Hispania and España derive from the Roman pronunciation of what the Phoenicians called “the land of the rabbits”? This is but one of the many gems of information contained in this superbly researched and intriguing story of the origins and development of what most of us would call Spanish, setting apart its linguistic cousin Castilian.

The authors adopt the attractive mode of presenting the subject as a biography of the language, treating it as a character, as opposed to a medium: how it evolved and matured, and who and what influenced it over its long life in distinctive geographical contexts. Its diffusion speaks of colonial power and early globalization, linguistic confrontations with indigenous cultures and imperial competitors, and more recently its encounter with non-Spanish technical terms and population for whom Spanish is a second language.

In the Iberian peninsula many of what we consider classic Spanish words originated from pre-Roman Celtic culture: puerco, toro, álamo, salmón—most relating to agricultural life and the material world: barro, charco, manteca, cabaña, cama. The Euskeras of the Basques added the rolled “rr”: pizarra, chaparro, zamarra. The key role of “vulgar Latin”, a flexible and easily modified form also played a significant role in most of the Romance languages affecting the order of parts of speech—the subject-verb-object as well as the invention of the definite and indefinite articles (el la, lo, etc.) Though the Vatican could declare in 2005 that the patron saint of the Internet was Isidore, Bishop of Seville in the seventh century, the invasion of the peninsula by the North African Berbers (often mistakenly called Arabs) from 711 has to be seen as a fundamental stage in the development of Spanish. These invaders brought with them the [End Page 228] numerical zero from India, paper-making from China, as well as new minerals, clocks, musical notation and more than 4,000 word borrowings from Arabic. A major impact is to be noted in toponyms and new agricultural systems of water management (acequias, zanjas). The migrations routes of the southern invaders and the northward advance of their cultural frontier extended through until the late fifteenth century. An incidental story is that of the regional Portuguese language that developed in parallel form, but exhibiting the early Portuguese attention to overseas maritime linkages, hence new words from new contexts: volcán, bambú, banana, etc.

1492 was not only the date of the expulsions of the “Jews” from the peninsula but also the initiation of Spanish’s extension to the New World, soon to become feminized as “Las Américas”. It allowed Columbus to register the first Native American word that he heard: canoa. The sixteenth-century witnessed the move of a quarter of a million Spaniards to the New World, with another half million in the next century. The focus of this massive exodus was Andalucía with their seseo/yeísmo (the pronunciations of c and z as an s, rather than the th used in central and northern Spain, and the distinctive pronunciation of the ll as a y). Since Spanish in Spain was evolving during the colonization of their new domains other variations of oral speech entered—practice of the voseo as opposed to the tuteo. The question now becomes one of identifying regional migration streams as Lockhart emphasized several years in his innovative study of early colonial northern Peru. The documentation of local notary publics more closely reflects the variations of colonial Spanish than does the official Castilian reports sent back to Spain. Facing the problems of interpretation of nahuatl and other languages of what became called Mexico, Cortés encouraged specialized intepreters (lenguaraces...

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