Spanish is one of the most important languages in the world. It is ranked second by number of speakers and has been claimed as the language to speak to God But, where does Spanish come from? Linguists don't know for sure how the human language has evolved, but they have been able to point out languages started to change as populations distanced from one another.
The fact of living in isolated places with different weather, animals, vegetation and different neighbours resulted in small variations in dialects that evolved into completely different languages. Linguists recognized that many languages have similar characteristics in their grammar and vocabulary, as if they were related. This way, they grouped the languages in families, spread around the world.
and since they are families, it is possible to make a genealogical tree that shows us that thousands of years ago there were fewer languages. Spanish, or properly called "Castilian", belongs to the Indo European family. In the Iberian peninsula, nowadays Spain, and up to the III century BC, Spanish was not spoken.
The inhabitants were Iberians, Celtics, Celtiberians, Tartessians, and even Phoenicians and Greeks. From these languages, called substrate languages, we have, for example, the difference between the concepts of "ser" and "estar" (to be) that do not exist in other languages. That concept comes from the Celtic language.
Or words like "gancho" (hook) and "colmena" (hive). From the Iberic language stem words like "barranco" (cliff), and from the Vasco, "izquerda" (left) and "chaparro" (short of stature). Between the III century BC and I AD, the Roman empire conquered all of the region around the Mediterranean, imposing their language, Latin.
From that Roman language emerged the Romance languages: Italian, French, Rumanian, Portuguese, Catalan, and Spanish. By getting mixed with local languages, vulgar Latin, i. e.
the Latin that working-class people spoke, not the educated language in which books were written, various languages emerged. One of them was the language from the Castile region: Castilian. Due to Barbaric invasions, Germanic words were incorporated in the language like "guerra" (war) and "yelmo" (helmet).
Then the Arabs conquered the Iberian peninsula and stayed there for almost 700 years. They created a combination of languages called Mozarabes and left in the Castilian language more than 4000 words, such as "almohada" (pillow), "aceite" (oil), or "ajedrez" (chess). In the XIII century, Alfonso X, "the Wise", an intellectual and promoter of the arts, standardized what we now know as Medieval Castilian, giving relevance to the Toledo dialect.
In 1492, the Catholic kings Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon united and they expelled the Arabs. They establish Castilian as the official language. Scholars unify its grammar and orthography, and expand it throughout the country.
In the golden century, the Auric Spanish emerges, that, despite being unified, still has many regional differences. For example, in the majority of Spain, the "c" and the "z" are pronounced differently than "s". This is not the case in the Canary Islands or Andalusia, where they are pronounced as "sss".
And Sevilla, in Andalucia, was the gate from where the conquerors departed to America. Many were born there and the majority had spent some time living in the region. That is why we Latin Americans say "serbesa" and not "cerveza".
When the Spaniards reached America, Castilian started to mix with the local substrate languages in each region. Mexico contributed words from Nahuatl, such as "tamal", "chicle" (chewing gum), or "tomate". Quechua, from Peru and Bolivia, contributed "caucho" (rubber), "condor", and "papa" (potato).
And without the Antilles languages like Taino, we wouldn't have "barbacoa" (BBQ), "canoa" (canoe), or "hamaca" (hammock). It's also been debated whether the word "huracan" (hurricane) is Tainan or Mayan. Languages are alive and in constant evolution.
Nowadays, it is not rare to include English words, or that English borrows words from Spanish. And the same exchanges happen with other languages. For example, the word "tiza" (chalk) is from Nahuatl origin, and is used in all Spanish speaking countries, but not in Mexico, where the same object is called "gis", that comes from the Latin word gypsum.
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