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Recent Reading:
The Story of Spanish, by Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow is exactly what the title promises: the story of the Spanish language, from before the Romans to the present. There's good stuff on things like the interconnections between Spain and the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. I had some "wait a minute" reactions in the early chapters because, despite being Canadian, the authors assume Castilian rather than American pronunciations—assuming meaning that it takes them quite a few chapters to mention that not everyone who speaks Spanish pronounces "j" or "s" or "x" the same way. and don't mention that the differences even exist. I suspect that's because they've written a history of Spanish, and the Americas don't come into it until after they've covered Basque and Latin and Arabic and Mozarabic and Hebrew.
But they go into the differences between different Spanishes, as well as the ongoing connections, and the early attempts to make Spanish a respectable language for writing and business in a country which expected contracts to be in Latin, Arabic, or maybe Hebrew. That eventually led to the Royal Academy of the Spanish language, and after the nineteenth-century wars of independence, similar academies in other Spanish-speaking countries, which now work together and have produced a global dictionary that tries to describe and to some extent recommend Spanish usage in two dozen different countries.
Nadeau and Barlow aren't trying to write a history of Spain, nor of Latin America, and the once-over-lightly discussions of things like the Reconquista [the Spanish/Christian expulsion of the Arabs from Iberia] and the life and career of Simon Bolivar are probably sufficient for the purpose. The purpose being linguistic, the main thing I learned about Che Guevara is why he was called "Che."
Given my magpie memory, and that I wasn't studying this book with an aim in mind, a chunk of what I'm likely to retain is the amount of Latin-derived vocabulary Basque picked up, and the way Basque influenced Spanish pronunciations (in places French and Italian are closer to Latin), and the fact that "Guadal" in "Guadalajara" and "Guadalquivir" and a variety of other place names is from Arabic "wadi" meaning "river" and the definite article "al-."
I'd recommend this one if the topic seems at all interesting.
Current Reading:
Chasing Steam, by Terry Pratchett. The most recent Discworld book, and I'm not far enough into it to say more than that.
Other:
I tried reading Nicola Griffith's Hild, but it's interesting and complicated in ways that made it slow going, and I had to give it back to the library because other people had also requested it. I suspect this is a book I'm going to want a good dictionary for, and I'm not sure what would suffice as a "good dictionary," given that one of the things I didn't need to look up in the first chapter was "thegn," which I spotted as connected to "thane" (as in Macbeth). That said, I may still get it in ebook format, since there's nothing stopping me from using the kindle in my own apartment.
The Story of Spanish, by Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow is exactly what the title promises: the story of the Spanish language, from before the Romans to the present. There's good stuff on things like the interconnections between Spain and the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. I had some "wait a minute" reactions in the early chapters because, despite being Canadian, the authors assume Castilian rather than American pronunciations—assuming meaning that it takes them quite a few chapters to mention that not everyone who speaks Spanish pronounces "j" or "s" or "x" the same way. and don't mention that the differences even exist. I suspect that's because they've written a history of Spanish, and the Americas don't come into it until after they've covered Basque and Latin and Arabic and Mozarabic and Hebrew.
But they go into the differences between different Spanishes, as well as the ongoing connections, and the early attempts to make Spanish a respectable language for writing and business in a country which expected contracts to be in Latin, Arabic, or maybe Hebrew. That eventually led to the Royal Academy of the Spanish language, and after the nineteenth-century wars of independence, similar academies in other Spanish-speaking countries, which now work together and have produced a global dictionary that tries to describe and to some extent recommend Spanish usage in two dozen different countries.
Nadeau and Barlow aren't trying to write a history of Spain, nor of Latin America, and the once-over-lightly discussions of things like the Reconquista [the Spanish/Christian expulsion of the Arabs from Iberia] and the life and career of Simon Bolivar are probably sufficient for the purpose. The purpose being linguistic, the main thing I learned about Che Guevara is why he was called "Che."
Given my magpie memory, and that I wasn't studying this book with an aim in mind, a chunk of what I'm likely to retain is the amount of Latin-derived vocabulary Basque picked up, and the way Basque influenced Spanish pronunciations (in places French and Italian are closer to Latin), and the fact that "Guadal" in "Guadalajara" and "Guadalquivir" and a variety of other place names is from Arabic "wadi" meaning "river" and the definite article "al-."
I'd recommend this one if the topic seems at all interesting.
Current Reading:
Chasing Steam, by Terry Pratchett. The most recent Discworld book, and I'm not far enough into it to say more than that.
Other:
I tried reading Nicola Griffith's Hild, but it's interesting and complicated in ways that made it slow going, and I had to give it back to the library because other people had also requested it. I suspect this is a book I'm going to want a good dictionary for, and I'm not sure what would suffice as a "good dictionary," given that one of the things I didn't need to look up in the first chapter was "thegn," which I spotted as connected to "thane" (as in Macbeth). That said, I may still get it in ebook format, since there's nothing stopping me from using the kindle in my own apartment.
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