![]() How was Spanish shaped when it met the indigenous languages of Mexico?Ī. ![]() The word cobija, which comes from cubículo, is a sailor’s word. And if they were going to be shipwrecked, or there was an enemy ship, they had to break up the rancho to level the ship. For example, the word zafarrancho is a maritime word: what the passengers did was to establish their rancho, the place to store their trunks. These voyages lasted four to five months, and people adopted and added to the maritime lexicon. These very diverse dialects were coexisting in order to survive. Imagine that very intimate coexistence, in unimaginable conditions, with horrific diarrhea. But not only Mexico, much of America was also molded by the sea. In a recent lecture, you said that the sea molded Mexico’s lexicon. What came was Spanish with many dialects influenced by Andalusia and the Caribbean. We must get rid of the idea that a homogeneous Spanish arrived. And there were also many Jews and many Muslims, as let us not forget that a few decades earlier the Catholic Monarchs had taken the Kingdom of Granada. So Seville in the 16th century was a polyglot capital, because ‘the race to the Indies’ was fought by Andalusians, Castilians, Basques, Catalans, French and Germans. In order to embark, permission had to be requested from the Casa de la Contratación, and it could take months or even years. That flattening has Andalusian influences, because there were many Andalusians, and because the zone permitted for embarkation to America was in Seville. ![]() They were linguistically acclimatized to a ‘flat’ kind of Spanish, because they were influenced by many dialects, in a very complex human melting pot. We must remember that the Spaniards who arrived in what is known today as the Republic of Mexico had spent a long time in Cuba or the Dominican Republic. The language of a handful of Spaniards arrived, which was not a homogeneous language, because there were people from Extremadura and Andalusia, and so on. Many Mexicans still feel that Spanish is an imposed language, and do not feel that this is their languageĪ. There are even variants of Nahuatl that are not mutually intelligible. Nahuatl was the lingua franca, the language of the Empire, but the Nahuatl of Sierra de Puebla is distinctive from the Nahuatl of Milpa Alta. Not all of these languages had the same social function. All of these, and surely more, were spoken at the time of Hernán Cortés’ arrival. ![]() In present-day Mexico we have 68 linguistic groups, or families, which we call “trunks.” Some are single languages, such as Purepecha, and some are complex linguistic groups, like Zapotec, which incorporates quite a few languages. Before the fall of Tenochtitlan, a whole multitude of languages were spoken. What was the linguistic landscape like in Tenochtitlan in 1521?Īnswer. “But I believe that both sides are there negotiating, and weighing their votes, and it’s not going to happen.” “It wouldn’t cost Spain anything,” Company believes. To mark the 500th anniversary of the fall of the Aztec Empire on August 13, Company spoke with EL PAÍS about the Spanish conquest of Mexico right up to Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s demand for an apology from Spain for the events of the past. Rather than an imposed language, she considers Mexican Spanish to be proudly itself, and in continuous conflict with indigenous languages. It is a version of Spanish shaped by the sea and sailors, she explains, and also by dozens of indigenous languages from all over Latin America. She is a member of the Mexican Academy of Language, and as an academic with a foot on both sides of the Atlantic, she has a particular vision of the language that arrived from Europe more than 500 years ago with the conquest of Mexico. Linguist Concepción Company was born in Madrid and became a naturalized Mexican citizen in 1978. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |