South America And Spanish

South American And Spanish LiteraturespanishLanguage politics in Francoist Spain declared Spanish as the only official language in Spain, and to this day it is the most widely used language in government, business, public education, the workplace, cultural arts, and the media. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the Spanish parliament agreed to allow provinces to use, speak, and print official documents in three other languages: Catalan for Catalonia, Balearic Islands and Valencia; Basque for the Basque provinces and Navarre and Galician for Galicia. Since 1975, following the death of Franco, Spain has become a multi-party democracy and decentralized country, constituted in autonomous communities. Under this system, some languages of Spainsuch as Aranese (an Occitan language of northwestern Catalonia), Basque, Catalan/Valencian, and Galicianhave gained co-official status in their respective geographical areas. Otherssuch as Aragonese, Asturian and Leonesehave been recognized by regional governments.

Influences

The mention of "influences" on the Spanish language refers primarily to lexical borrowing Throughout its history, Spanish has accepted loanwords first from pre-Roman languages (including Basque Iberian and Celtiberian), and later from Greek from Germanic languages from the neighboring Romance languagesfrom Arabic, from Native American languages, and from English.The most frequent word that entered Spanish from (or through[) Basque is izquierda "left". Basque is perhaps most evident in some common Spanish surnames, including Garca and Echeverra. Basque place names also are prominent throughout Spain, because many Castilians who took part in the Reconquista and repopulation of Moorish Iberia by Christians were of Basque lineage. Iberian and Celtiberian likewise are thought to have contributed place names to Spain. Words of everyday use that are attributed to Celtic sources include camino "road", carro "cart", and cerveza "beer".Influence of Basque phonology is credited by some researchers with softening the Spanish labiodentals: turning labiodental [v] to bilabial [], and ultimately deleting labiodental [f]. Others negate or downplay Basque phonological influence, claiming that these changes occurred in the affected dialects wholly as a result of factors internal to the language, not outside influence.[It is also possible that the two forces, internal and external, worked in concert and reinforced each other.Some words of Greek origin were already present in the spoken Latin that became Spanish. Additionally, many Greek words formed part of the language of the Church. Spanish also borrowed Greek vocabulary in the areas of medical, technical, and scientific language, beginning as early as the 13th century.The influence of Germanic languages is, by most accounts, very little on phonological development, but rather is found mainly in the Spanish lexicon. Words of Germanic origin are common in all varieties of Spanish. The modern words for the cardinal directions(norte, este, sur, oeste), for example, are all taken from Germanic words (compare north, east, south and west in Modern English), after the contact with Atlantic sailors. These words did not exist in Spanish prior to the 15th century. Instead, "north" and "south" were septentrion and meridion respectively (both virtually obsolete in Modern Spanish), while "east" was oriente (or levante), and "west" was occidente (or poniente). These older words for "east" and "west" continue to have some use in Modern Spanish.

Spanish

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wingsby Gabriel Garcia Marquez

On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish. The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldnt get up, impeded by his enormous wings.

Frightened by that nightmare, Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his wife, who was putting compresses on the sick child, and he took her to the rear of the courtyard. They both looked at the fallen body with a mute stupor. He was dressed like a ragpicker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather took away any sense of grandeur he might have had. His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked, were forever entangled in the mud. They looked at him so long and so closely that Pelayo and Elisenda very soon overcame their surprise and in the end found him familiar. Then they dared speak to him, and he answered in an incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailors voice. That was how they skipped over the inconvenience of the wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm. And yet, they called in a neighbor woman who knew everything about life and death to see him, and all she needed was one look to show them their mistake.

A letter to a Godby:gregorio lopez fuentes

Authors biographyGregorio Lopez y FuentesGregorio Lopez y Fuentes was an author whose most famous work was Una Carta a Dios (a Letter to God). He was born on November 17 1985 on a farm called 'El Mamey' in the municipality of Huasteca, in the province of Side Cross in mexicoHe was 15 years old when the revolution began. At the same age he began to write. He became a teacher of Literature at a school in Mexico City. In 1921, he began writing for the Universal Graph, a newspaper. When writing for the newspaper, he often used the pseudonym Tulio F. Peseenz. He wrote many books and stories in his life, on many subjects, but typically he wrote about Mexico, the country and its people. His stories were seen as exciting and humorous and symbolic of Mexico.

Don Quixote de la mancha Alonso Quixano, the protagonist of the novel (though he is not given this name until much later in the book), is a retired country gentleman nearing fifty years of age, living in an unnamed section of la mancha with his niece and housekeeper, as well as a boy who is never heard of again after the first chapter. Although Quixano is mostly a rational man, his reading in excess of books of chivalry has produced the distortion of his perception and the wavering of his mental faculties. In keeping with the humorism theory of the time, not sleeping adequately because he was reading has caused his brain to dry; Quixano's temperament is thus choleric the hot and dry humor. As a result, he is easily given to anger and believes every word of these fictional books of chivalry to be true.Imitating the protagonists of these books, he decides to become a knight errant in search of adventure. To these ends, he dons an old suit of armour renames himself "Don Quixote", names his exhausted horse rocinante and designates Aldonza Lorenzo, a neighboring farm girl, as his lady love renaming her dulcenea del teboso while she knows nothing of this. Expecting to become famous quickly, he arrives at an inn which he believes to be a castle calls the prostitutes he meets "ladies" (doncellas); and asks the innkeeper, whom he takes as the lord of the castle, to dub him a knight. He spends the night holding vigil over his armor, and becomes involved in a fight with muleeters who try to remove his armor from the horse trough so that they can water their mules. In a pretended ceremony, the innkeeper dubs him a knight to be rid of him, and sends him on his way.Don Quixote next "frees" a young boy tied to a tree and beaten by his master, and makes his master swear to treat the boy fairly; but the boy's beating is continued as soon as Quixote leaves. Don Quixote then encounters traders from toledo, who "insult" the imaginary Dulcinea. He attacks them, only to be severely beaten and left on the side of the road, and returned to his home by a neighboring peasant.

Authors BiographyMiguel de Cervantes said that the first chapters are taken from "The Archive of La Mancha" and the rest translated from the Arabic from the Moorish author Cid Hamet Ben Engeli. This metafictional trick appears to be designed to give a greater credibility to the text, by believing that Don Quixote is a real character and that the story truly occurred several decades back. Yet it is obvious to the reader that such a thing is impossible, because the presence of Cide Hamete would have caused numerous temporal anomalies. It was a common method at the time because of the disapproval the novel genre was subject to at that time.quotesToo much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.