South

American And
Spanish
Literature

spanish
Language 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 Wings

by 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 greatgrandfather 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 God
by:gregorio lopez fuentes

Authors biography
Gregorio Lopez y Fuentes
Gregorio 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 mexico

He 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

Authors Biography
Miguel 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.

quotes
Too much sanity may be madness and the
maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it
should be.