[gothic-l] Re: Spanish surnames

[Denis Glenard]

Hi Dirk,
Hi everyone,

I'm not a scholar in these things, but there are a couple points from your previous Emails I'd like to press here:

"Dirk:
I doubt that this is correct to be honest. The Roman period in Spain
is very important and Spanish, as a romanic language is a direct
result."

Spanish is definitely a romance language. We should perhaps be very precise and call it castilian, as there are many other languages in Spain.
Castilian is only a romance dialect, mainly spoken by the southern basques/castilians at the beginning of the 2nd millenium, hence the pronunciation of modern "spanish" is derived from basque (that's why they "sound" the same). The fact that the Reconquista was undertaken from the northern territories, including the Basque Country, helped impose this dialect as the main one in the kingdom, although many others were and still are spoken locally (whether these are languages or dialects is not relevant here, there are many battles going around this, quite a few of them political).

The Iberian language, the language spoken before the Roman invasion of Spain, is quite well known. It has it's own alphabet and although some of it is still not understood, progress is made every year.

Modern Spanish language is therefore made of bits and pieces taken from the languages spoken by it's invaders and original inhabitants, Celts, Iberians, Basque, Goths, Moors, etc. in varyiing degrees, obviously.

Dirk, you state in your other Email  : "modern Spaniards (...) include a
rich mixure of ethnic groups including people like Celt-Iberians,
Romans, Greeks, North Africans, Jews and of course Germanics."

I resent your leaving out the Basque, who were there before almost all of the other ethnic groups, who have fought every battle to free Spain from every kind of invader. You also leave out the Phoenicians (the palm fields in Elche (Elx) were planted by them as a food resource for their maritime trips) and the Cartaginese (although one could say they're part of the "north Africans").
I'm not sure either I agree with you assertion of the mixture with the Moors and Jews. The mixture was rare, for religious, not race reasons.
The Moors (who weren't that many to start with) did not take in converts, simply beacause christians paid more taxes. As for Jews, it is a well known fact that they do not proselytise and you are only Jewish because your mother was Jewish. This is why it was easy for the Catholic Kings to root out Muslims and Jews in 1492; had they been mixed within the general population, it would have been impossible.
This of course does not mean 100% separation, just that mixing was so small than it would probably be impossible to trace nowadays.

Sorry if I've been a bit long on this one, but the Basque can never be taken for granted ;-)))

Denis GLENARD








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