First of all, the influence of Arabic is quite present in Spanish, especially in the lexicon.
There are around 4,000 words in Spanish from Arabic origin, but 1,000 of those are between the 10–12,000 words a normal speaker uses the most (from that, sometimes they say that Spanish has a 10% or Arabic although it is false).
Second, the invasion of Spain was much shorter than the Norman rule. Yes, I know they invaded in 711 and were in the country until 1492, but by 1150 they just held a small part of the country. Let’s borrow this beautiful gif from Wikipedia:
As you can see they lost a lot of territory by the 12th century.
But the most important factor was that the Arab conquerors had personal laws. That means that different laws applied to the Muslims, to the Jews and to the Mozárabes (Christians living in Muslim Spain).
Usually only those that converted to their faith could hold official positions, while the Christian population kept speaking their evolved Vulgar Latin[1].
That means that Arab was the language of the invaders but they didn’t mix much with the local population. In fact, that it was the fact that helped them to invade the country with a relatively small force: for most people, it just supposed changing the Visigoth Lords for Muslim ones and everything worked the same.
By the end of the 10th century the languages spoken in the north of the Peninsula weren’t Latin no more but Castilian, Galician/Portuguese, Leonese, Aragonese and Catalan. During the 11th and 12th centuries these languages developed a lot, while the Christian kingdoms conquered territory to the Muslims and brought new settlers from the north that had had very few contacts with the Arabs and spoke their own language.
By 1200 (when the Arabs held less than 1/6th of the Peninsula) we have the first long text in Spanish, El Cantar del Mio Cid (which is difficult to understand by a modern speaker but several Quorans have written they understand it perfectly so perhaps I’m a little dull). From then on, the kingdom of Castille would became the most important in Spain, leading the rest of the Reconquest.
For that reason, most of the Arabisms in Spanish are not in common words but in new foods, jobs or techniques that they introduced in the Peninsula so the Christian society took the word they used.
[1] Also, the Arab conquerors liked the language spoken by the Christians (the mozárabe, the Spanish of the south), especially the popular poems the people sang in the streets, called Jarchas. They were so popular that they added them at the end of their poems, written with Arab calligraphy but in Mozárabe:
Tant’ amáre, tant’ amáre,
habib, tant’ amáre!
Enfermaron uelios gaios,
e dolen tan male.”
Which in Medieval Spanish was
Tant amare, tant amare
amico, tant amare
Enfermaron sos ojos gayos
e dolen tan male.
Muslims never completely submitted the whole of Spain; there were still some petty independent Christian lordships in the North. In conquered Spain, some elites (who had been considered as heretics by the Papacy because they followed the doctrine of Arianism) converted to Islam, and the important Jewish community could stay and even throve. All of those people spoke a descendant of Latin, "Mozarabic" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mo... ) which was a Romance language like Spanish (Castilian) and shared surely some degree of mutual intelligibility. Before the Muslim conquest, the Wisigothic Realm was considered the most civilized country of Western Europe, and spoke a descendant of Latin (except for the Basques); it had therefore a powerful linguistic background to resist any assimilation from outside. That's why Arabic had not such a big impact (though still significant in the vocabulary) as French had on English.
Normans stayed forever and eventually became a key ingredient of Englishness, whereas the Arabs were a foreign occupier which was eventually expelled from the Peninsula.
Let me give you an example. This is the Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom. Please notice the motto beneath:
“Dieu et Mon Droit”, meaning “God and my Right”… in French. Now, the Spanish coat of Arms:
The motto here is “Plus Ultra”, which means “beyond”. This is Latin, mind you, not Arabic. British elites used to speak French for centuries, Castilian elites never spoke Arabic.
There is no gap, no break between the Norman conquest and modern Britain, just evolution. At no point there was a successful attempt to bring back Saxon hegemony to power, let alone Celtic hegemony.
In Spain, however, the Arabs were always an alien presence. Religion meant that there was always a huge cultural divide between the Christian kingdoms of the North and Muslim southerners. No doubt they represented a massive influence as well, since Arabs were, for a long time, much wealthier and far more advanced in almost every sense than their Christian enemies. Many words in Spanish, particularly technical terms in many crafts, are of Arab origin. There used to be many more but those are now obsolete, since they referred to medieval concepts such as “adarga” (small, round shield), “adarve” (chemin-de-ronde, you see? The English term is French!) or “aceifa” (war raid).
The influence of Arabs in medieval Spain could be akin to American influence in contemporary Spain. Many terms, especially technical terms, are adopted, but the bulk of the language (grammar, pronunciation and basic terms such as mother, father, knee, food, day) remain unchanged.
Well, to start, it should be pointed out that Arabic had probably the biggest influence on Spanish of any outside language, at least as far as new vocabulary (borrowings) went. I think the short answer to your question is that Arabic-speaking entities never actually conquered the areas where Spanish came from. You ended up with a crusades/reconquest situation. While there was certainly a lot of cooperation and intermingling in many cases, there was also a line of thinking that “Christian” culture was superior.
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