4.2 A Short History of Spanish

Spanish and English share many common roots with LATIN. To the point that dozens of English Prefixes are exactly the same in Spanish. This brings us to a most necessary, if brief, history of the origins of Spanish.

The first occupants of the Iberian Peninsula arrived more than 1.2 million years ago. We know that the first written records of human activity in the region appeared about 2,200 years ago. The history of powerful North African rulers trying to conquer the Peninsula is long and intricate. Then in rapid succession, what would one day be Spain belonged to the Visigoths, the Christians, the Muslims, England and France among others.

After almost 900 years of Roman presence in almost all present-day Europe, the peninsula of Hispanicca was the seeding ground for many dialects of Latin origin. Then, Roman Control of the peninsula entered a period of chaos as the Empire collapsed and Spain fell in the hands of the Visigoths. In 711 of the Christian Era, the Muslims attacked Spain from North Africa and gained a control that would last centuries. The north of Spain remained under Christian Control.

Things remained like this until those Christian forces fought the Muslims and managed to defeat their states by the mid-thirteenth century.  Only Grenada remained in the hands of the Muslims. That brilliant centre of Arabic art, culture and religion then fell to Christian hands in 1492, the same year that Columbus arrived in America.

Then came the Spanish Domination by the Catholic federations of Aragon and Castile between 1250 and 1479 and finally Spain was United as a Kingdom under Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile from 1479 to 1516.

This brief summary of a very complicated and tortuous period of the History of Spanish can also be viewed from a linguistic point of view in four essential periods:

1. Initial Visigoth and Celtic influences
2. Impact of Celtiberian, Basque, Gothic and Arabic
3. Almost one thousand years of Roman conquest and settlement with LATIN as the common base language of the conqueror and eventually of the conquered.
4.  Centuries of Arabic domination that brought the sounds and words of Arab to the common everyday language of the conquered.

The Spanish language then, is the result of multiple hybridizations (just like English). More than 75% of modern Spanish vocabulary is derived from LATIN.  Some ancient roots were brought down from the Greek into Latin and then finally included in Spanish. In Spain, the language has been influenced by French, Catalan, Portuguese and Italian. Around the world, it mixed with and borrowed many aboriginal languages from the different territories where the Spanish Empire spread. English and Spanish share thousands of common Roots and affixes that make it easy to recognize words that come from one same ancestry and then adapted to each particular language. In Chapter 6 you will see how these hundreds of words are classified.

Right now, have fun watching this video! Listen carefully to the words and notice the many similarities between Spanish and Arabic: