Historia externa del español americanoHistoría de la Península Ibérica
It's 1492. You all know what happened in 1492, ¿verdad?
(Columbus discovered America.) Since we're living here on the
other side of the Atlantic, this sounds pretty important to us,
but at the time, other things where on the Spaniards' minds. After
more than 700 years of constant warfare, the Christians succeeded
in hounding the last Moors out of the Iberian peninsula. United
under Isabella of Castille and Fernando of Aragon, they proved
more than a match for the few remaining Muslims in their mountain
stonghold of the Alhambra in Granada. Thus Spain became the first
nation in the modern sense of the word, with a central government
and homogenous society.
Well, the society was more or less homogenous. Once the Moors
were sent packing to North Africa, everyone was Christian - everyone
but the Jews, of course. Fernando and Isabella asked them to convert
to Christianity, but most of them refused. So they were kicked
out of the country and wound up settling in the major cities of
the Netherlands, North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. These people,
the Sephardies, never forgot their Spanish origin. In particular,
they never forgot their 15th century Spanish, which is still in
use today, giving us a window on the late-medieval form of the
language.
Having accomplished all this, you would think that Ferdinand
and Isabella would be happy just to sit back and manage their
own little piece of Christianity. O-o-o-o no. They wanted more.
Especially Isabella, who, against the advice of her experts, agreed
to finance Columbus' crazy plan of getting to the spices in the
East by sailing west.
Into this giddy atmosphere, where Europe's first nation was about
to become the world's first global power, stepped a scholar from
Salamanca, with a new book. The scholar's name was Antonio Nebrija,
and his book was a grammar of the Castillian dialect of Spanish,
based mainly on the usage of Toledo. Imagine Isabella's consternation.
A book explaining how to speak a language that everyone knew by
the time they were eight? What good is that? Well, as the bishop
of Avila was quick to point out, after Isabella had subjugated
all the fabulous lands that Columbus' expedition was going to
open up to her, she was going to have govern them under Spanish
law, which meant teaching them Spanish, as spoken in Toledo.
Por eso llamamos "castellano" al idioma español.
Historia externa del español americano
