Influences on the Spanish language

Add links
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Spanish language
A manuscript of the Cantar de mio Cid, 13th century
Overview
History
Grammar
Dialects
Dialectology
Interlanguages
Teaching

Spanish is a

Arabic and from Paleohispanic languages such as Iberian, Celtiberian and Basque
.

In

African heritage. The extensive contact with native American languages
especially has resulted in the adoption of many lexical items from these languages, not only in local dialects of Spanish, but throughout the language as a whole.

Formative influences

As Spanish went through its first stages of development in Spain, it probably received influences from neighbouring Romance languages, and also from Basque, which is a language isolate and thus completely unrelated to Spanish in origin. Umbrian and Oscan influences have also been postulated for the Roman colonization period.

Celtiberian influence

Two specific types of

bilingual Celtiberian–Vulgar Latin speakers existed long enough to have had an influence on the development of Old Spanish. The second assumption is that Continental Celtic, an extinct branch of Celtic, did indeed exhibit the types of lenition that are known to exist in modern Insular Celtic languages
. Alternatively, the Spanish development may therefore just be a natural internal process, not due to outside influence.

Basque influence

Many Castilians who took part in the

Gascon language in Gascony, in southwestern France, an area that is close to the Basque Country too. The claim is that the Basque language
lacked the [f] sound and thus substituted it with [h], the closest thing to [f] in that language.

There are some difficulties with attributing this change to Basque, however. There is no hard evidence that

medieval Basque did or did not have an [f] sound. Presumably early borrowings of forms with initial [f] into Basque were usually received as [p] or [b] (e.g. FESTA > Basque pesta or besta, depending on the dialect), rather than [h]. Adding to this is the fact that the f-to-h lenition is not peculiar to Spanish. In fact, the change from [f] to [h] is one of the most common phonological
changes in all kinds of world languages. According to the explanations that negate or downplay Basque influence, the change occurred in the affected dialects wholly independent of each other as the result of internal change (i.e. linguistic factors, not outside influence). It is also possible that the two forces worked in concert and reinforced each other.

Another claim of Basque influence in Spanish is the

bilingualism of speakers of Basque and Vulgar Latin
.

Gothic

Spain was controlled by the

Visigoths between the 5th and 8th centuries. However, the influence of the Gothic language (an East Germanic language) on Spanish was minimal because the invaders were already somewhat Romanized, were secluded in the upper echelons of society, and generally did not intermarry with the natives. Besides a few military words, Spanish borrowed the following from Gothic:[2]

  • A new noun declension (nominative -ā, oblique -āne), which originated from the Gothic n-stem declension. This was used mostly with proper names, e.g., Old Spanish Fruela ~ Froilán (for the same person) and also guardia "guard" ~ guardián "guardian" (from Gothic nominative wardja, accusative wardjan).
  • The originally adjectivizing suffix -engo (Germanic -ing), as in abolengo 'ancestry' (cf. abuelo 'grandfather'), abadengo 'abbatial', realengo 'belonging to the Crown', camarlengo 'chamberlain'.
  • Perhaps the originally patronymic surname suffixes in -z (as in Díaz, Pérez, López, Ruiz, Muñoz, etc.) is from numerous Latinized Gothic genitives in -īcī, from original -iks. Thus, Roderic(us) (→ Ruy) → Roderīcī 'son of Roderick' → Rodriz → Ruiz.
  • A few words of Gothic origin, e.g., ganso 'goose' (← *gans), rueca 'distaff' (← *rokko), tascar 'to beat hemp or flax' (← *taskōn), triscar 'to set, tease' (← þriskan 'to thresh'), ataviar 'to attire, adorn' (← *attaujan 'to mend').

Although

cardinal directions (norte, este, sur, oeste — 'north', 'east', 'south', 'west') are not documented until late in the 15th century. These direction words are thought to be from Old English, probably by way of French.[4]

Arabic

Main article:
Arabic influence on the Spanish language

In 711 AD, most of the Iberian Peninsula was

Arabic, mainly in southern Iberia, Spanish has a significant lexical component from that language, constituting some 8% of its vocabulary according to some estimates.[5][6][7][8][9]

Spanish borrowed words from Arabic in many semantic fields:

Many of these borrowings (especially in the scientific field) were then passed on to other languages (English acquired most of them through French).

Most Spanish nouns beginning with the letters al- (from the Arabic definite article) have their origin in Arabic.[10]

As to how many words in Modern Spanish are of Arabic origin, the estimates vary widely, depending largely on whether the count includes derived forms and place names. One respected authority

Real Academia Española
so far includes 1,200 confirmed Arabisms, excluding place names and derivatives.

Morphological borrowing was scarce. The suffíx -í (deriving adjectives from place names, as in Marbellí, Ceutí or Iraní, "from Marbella", "from Ceuta", or "from Iran" respectively) is an example.

Influences from Native American languages

In October 1492

native American languages. Most of these were wiped out or severely reduced in number of speakers and distribution area during the colonization, but Spanish adopted a number of words from some of them
. The following list is by no means exhaustive.

Those words referring to local features or animals might be limited to regional usage, but many others like cóndor, canoa or chocolate are extended even to other languages.

Modern borrowings

Spanish borrowed many words from other European languages: its close neighbors such as

Germanic languages
like English. For example:

  • chao, chau "bye" from Italian ciao (sometimes co-existing with adiós)
  • chofer "chauffeur" from French (co-existing with "conductor")
  • elenco "team" or "cast" from Italian (co-existing with equipo, when used as team, and reparto)
  • sándwich, from English (co-existing with "emparedado" and sometimes with "bocadillo")
  • briquet from French (used in Colombia, co-existing with encendedor)
  • capot from French
  • carnet from French (identification card)
  • fútbol from English (football) (originally balompié)
  • gendarme from French (prison guards).
  • coche from Hungarian kocsi.
  • pistola from German Pistole.

Recent borrowings

In recent times, Spanish has borrowed many words and expressions from English, especially in the fields of computers and the Internet. In many cases, technical expressions that superficially employ common Spanish words are in fact

captain's log
on a boat) is also common.

Words of non-Latin origin

Some authors estimate that seventy-five percent of Spanish words have come from Latin

Arabic, Indigenous languages of the Americas, Germanic, and Celtic
in roughly that order.

Lists of Spanish etymology

African – Americas –

Arabic
– Austronesian – Basque – Celtic – Chinese – Etruscan – French – Germanic – Iberian – Indo-Aryan – Iranian – Italic – Semitic – Turkic – uncertain – various origins.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Penny (2002:272-284)
  2. ^ Penny (2002:14–16)
  3. ^ Spaulding (1971:49–51)
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Corominas (1973)
  5. ^ Dworkin (2012:83)
  6. ISBN 0-7190-0788-7
    .
  7. ISBN 9788498226539
    .
  8. ^ Patronato de la Alhambra y Generalife: La influencia árabe en la lengua española
  9. ^ Ma Asmaa. "Al-Ándalus: El legado lingüístico árabe en el castellano" – via academia.edu.
  10. ^ For example, 152 (72%) of the 210 nouns in al- listed in Corominas (1973), are of Arabic origin.
  11. ^ Lapesa (1981) §33, n. 5 bis
  12. ^ Corominas (1980–1991). The first edition, Corominas (1954–1957) contains an appendix in which words are grouped by language of origin.
  13. ^ Teofilo Laime Ajacopa, Diccionario Bilingüe Iskay simipi yuyayk'ancha, La Paz, 2007 (Quechua-Spanish dictionary)
  14. ^ Chandler & Schwartz (1991:2)

References

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Influences_on_the_Spanish_language&oldid=1210963848"