Handbook for translators of Spanish historical ... - University Library

PALEOGRAPHY
side the range of this sketch.
Because of the Roman conquest of Spain, the common language
of the Spanish peninsula for the first four or five
centuries of the Christian era was the Roman. The "Visigoths,
who eventually" conquered all of Spain, had attained
a high degree of civilization in their prolonged contact
with the Romans in Gaul. Their conversion to Catholicism
helped to perserve the Latin language. Nevertheless, although
these northern tribes adopted the Roman language of
the Spaniards, they modified it to suit their convenience.
After the northern invaders had initiated the corruption
of the Roman language, Spain was deluged with Moors from
Africa. These southern invaders further hastened greater
deterioration of the language. Although the Moors permitted
the use of Latin, the common people soon developed
a corrupt mixture of their language with the Arabic. Cultured
Spaniards cultivated the Arabic language so assiduously
that by the ninth century they surpassed even the
Moors in its embellishment, to the utter neglect of Latin.
Spaniards that took refuge in the mountains rather than
submitting to the Moorish conquest, were the preservers
of the Latin-barbarian Spanish, from which modern Spanish
developed. These Spaniards organized separate and independent
feudal kingdoms which developed characteristic
peculiarities of language. Thus it was that Castilian,
Catalonian, Provenjal, and other languages grad\ially developed.
The Castilians extended their language to all the
territory they conquered from the Moors. While driving the
Moors before them, however, the Castilians adopted certain
elements of the Arabic language left behind by the conquered.
The expansion of Castilian power, therefore, extended
the Castilian language, which was a mixture of Latin, barbarian,
and Arabic. True Latin retreated into the churches
and monasteries.^ The further extension of the Castilian
language, to the exclusion of others, was hastened by the
efforts of Ferdinand and Isabella, by the publication of the
Arte de la Lengua Castellana. written by Antonio de Lebrija,
in 1492, and by the advent of the printing press, which
made it possible to reproduce this and other similar books
in large nvimbers.3 There has been very little change in the
Estevan de Terreros y Pando ,
pp. 1-30.
^IMd. , p. 29.
Paleograf{a
-9-
espanola,