2770: Guadalajara, Guadalupe, and Whisky Jul 21, 2024

Spanish does not have [w] as the first sound of a word, and in spelling Spanish only uses W in foreign words, predominantly from English, but there are older loanwords that look differently. In the middle of a word, the sound exists, such as in ‘agua’ [ˈa.ɣ̞wa] (water) but occurs with U after a consonant, so around Iberia, namely around former Andalusia, there are places:

Guadalajara, Guadalupe, Guadix, Guadalcanal, Guadalquivir, Guadalperal Dolmen, some referring to cities, some waterways, but all come from the Arabic وَادِي (wadi) or … وَادِي الْ (wadi al…) which in Arabic standardly refers to a seasonal river that dries up each year, but in Muslim Spain just denoted a river. Since Spanish words don’t naturally begin with [w] the [g] was added for phonetic ease. Of course, unlike with English loan words, Arabic’s are in another writing system which makes wholesale borrowing like Modern Spanish ‘whisky’ (from ‘whiskey’) overall a harder feat too.

In a few even rarer cases the spelling is UA- like in ‘ualabí’ (wallaby), but this very foreign looking and is really used for when enunciating each vowel, like transliterating the city name, Ouagadougou (Uagadugú).

2761: Español is not Normal Jul 12, 2024

‘Spanish’, in Spanish, is ‘Español’ but by people-group or language standards, this is a pretty new word. In Old Spanish it was ‘espanyol’ or  ‘espanno’, but this really only took place at the time of the reconquista and eventually the Spanish Inquisition. Up until this time, under Moorish, Muslim rule it was called Al-Andalus, and there was not a uniquely Iberian identity per se. Before the total success of the reconquista, one might identify with a local kingdom or more likely as a ‘cristiano’ (christian), after which point, the Latin ‘Hispania’ was revived, itself taken from a Semitic word from the days of the Carthaginian empire, from the Canaanite/Phoenician ‘yšpn, related to the Hebrew שָׁפָן (shafan), probably in reference to hyraxes along the coast in ancient times.

All of this is to say that the word ‘Español’ is rather strange looking, because normally one would expect to see *españuelo according to what one would expect to see in the transition from the expected Vulgar Latin *Hispaniolus into Old Spanish through to Modern Spanish. Since this is not a normal Latin word, nor was this in common use while the transition from Latin → Vulgar Latin → Old Spanish was underway, it has its modern form.

2593: Ç Jan 18, 2021

The letter Ç, known as C-cedilla, is used among many Turkic language along with some Romance languages like French & Portuguese. It is not, however, used for the language where this symbol originated: Spanish. Moreover, in other languages this represents the [s] sound, but in Old Spanish, this was /t͡s/ before /a/, /o/, and /u/, like a Z in German, but this is not how it was adopted later. Later by Early Modern Spanish, this represented a /θ/ or /s/ before those same letters but fell out of use altogether after. In Turkic languages however, this is usually for /t͡ʃ/ (like CH in English 'chew'), or [s] in French. A number of other languages took it on but usually in line with one of these.

2553: Calzones and Underpants Dec 9, 2021

The pizza-dish known as 'calzone' in Italian means 'stocking; trouser' certainly does not mean the same thing as it does in Italian, but across other romance languages there is another level of semantic distinction. In Italian 'calzoni' these days means 'trousers', but in Spanish 'calzón' means 'underpants'. Even in languages developed later from these Romance languages don't always retain the meanings, with this distinction seen in the Papiamento word for trousers 'kalzon', taken from the Spanish 'calzón' (underpants).

2150: ser/estar: Why Differ? Nov 3, 2020

The Spanish verb 'ser' is notable for a lot of reason, but both it and its counterpart 'estar'—meaning 'to be'—come from the Latin meaning 'to sit' (sedēre) and 'to stand' (stāre) respectively, which may help to explain why 'ser' is for permanent things, and 'estar' is more often for transient uses. This is not actually so rare to see verb meaning 'sit' or 'stand' used existentially. While in some languages this is standard, even English has the phrase "that sits well with me", though this is obviously not exactly the same. In the case of 'ser', the verb is irregular partly because some forms come from the Latin 'sum', always having meant 'to be', namely present tenses, the imperfect, and the preterite tenses.