Where do Spanish Words Come from? — Heirs of the Ancient
Spanish, the second most spoken language in the world, is the result of spectacular historic events, many of which even happened by chance. Or did they?
A new language is born when it adopts a lexicon and a grammar of its own. When, after deriving from its mother tongue, it becomes independent from that, unintelligible even, following a process of evolution and emancipation: a language’s daughter becomes a variant, which in turn becomes a dialect, which finally becomes a language. And then, the life circle begins again.
The Origin
Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a group of people lived long ago. They were peasants speaking a vulgar tongue: Castillian Spanish, a new language that was being born from Latin through a process by which new features were being developed. Due to interchanges and influences of other variants, this new variant adopted morphological, syntactic and phonetic features that began to distance more and more from Latin: the first Spanish words were being uttered.
If we can categorize the history of Spanish, we can distinguish three major events:
- The Medieval Era.
