[3] Letters from an English Traveller in Spain, in 1778, on the Origin and Progress of Poetry in that kingdom, London 1781.—This book was written by Mr. Dillon, author of “Travels through Spain,” “History of Peter the Cruel,” &c.
[4] Fought in the year 712.
[5] This remark, from the Indiculo luminoso of Bishop Alvaro of Cordova, is noticed in the preface to Du Cange’s Glossary, and is repeated by Velasquez in his History of Spanish Poetry, Dieze’s edition, page 33.—See also Eichhorn’s Allgemeine Geschichte der Cultur und Litteratur, vol. i. p. 121. The details of the history of Arabic poetry in Spain cannot be comprehended in a history of Spanish and Portuguese poetry. The bibliographic erudition on the subject of Arabic poetry, which Dieze has displayed in his remarks on Velasquez, does not belong to the subject of this work.
[6] Velasquez, Dieze, and other authors, furnish information on the history of the Biscayan language and poetry. This language, with the poetry to which it may have given birth, has had no influence on literature beyond its own territory, and appears to have had very little even there.
[7] How sensibly the neglect of the Catalonian or Valencian tongue, after the union of the kingdoms of Arragon and Castile, was felt in the provinces which belonged to the former, may be seen from the passage quoted by Eichhorn, in his Allg. Gesch. der Cul. u. Litt. vol. i. page 129, from Scuolano’s History of Valencia. But the pleasing language of the Troubadours was doubtless very defective. It would otherwise have been difficult to have made the Catalonian poets so soon proselytes to the Castilian dialect, especially as, besides the difference of language, the natural jealousy between the Arragonian and Castilian provinces was strong enough to manifest itself by political effects even in the eighteenth century. The imperfection of the Troubadour phraseology may have been partly owing to its fluctuations, and the various forms it assumed, in the several dialects. The difference of the dialects appears particularly evident on comparing the real Provençal of the French Troubadours with the Valencian, called Lengua Vallenciana. The dialect of the Provençal Troubadours may, without much difficulty, be translated by conjecture, if the reader be acquainted with French and Italian; but the meaning of the Valencian cannot be so easily guessed at, even with the additional knowledge of Castilian. As a proof of this, it will be sufficient to peruse a passage of the Libre de los Dones, of Mosen, [that is, Monsieur, instead of the Castilian Don] Jaume [James] Roig, reprinted in Valencia, 1735, in 4to. The author is one of the last poets who wrote in the Valencian dialect, and the whole didactic poem, if so it may be called, is composed in short verses of the following description:
Yo com absent
Del mon vivint,
Aquell linquint
Aconortat,
Del apartat
Dant hi del peu,
Vell jubileu
Mort civilment,
Ja per la gent
Desconegut,
Per tots tengut
Con hom selvatge
Tenint ostatge, &c. &c.
Owing to the difference of the dialects, a foreigner might, by a short residence in Madrid, learn to express himself in Castilian with more fluency than it is spoken by a great part of the inhabitants of the Arragonian provinces.
[8] At least such is the opinion of Gregorio Mayans y Ziscar, given in his work, known under the title of Origenes de la Lengua Española, part i. page 8.
[9] An old prejudice attributes the forcible aspiration which the Spanish shares in common with the German and Arabic, solely to the mixture of the latter with the Castilian. This prejudice is pardonable in the Spaniards, who are not aware of the influence which the German guttural must have had over their language; but the Germans, who know the nature of their mother tongue, ought to recollect that the same Arabic words which are strongly aspirated by the Spaniards, are pronounced by the Portuguese, though equally naturalized among them, with a hissing sound. Besides, how does it happen that the G before E and I, which is a guttural with the Germans, has nearly the same sound with the Castilians, though it is never so pronounced by any other people whose language appears to have risen on the ruins of that of ancient Rome? The Germanic pronunciation of the Visigoths, which was doubtless preserved in the mountains of Castile, would afterwards be easily confounded with the Arabic. The Castilian conversion of O into UE, also resembles the change which takes place in German of O into OE. Let, for instance, the Spanish Cuerpo and Pueblo be compared with the German Körper and Pöbel.
[10] The Portuguese language would perhaps be less depreciated by the Spaniards, if it did not remind them of the vulgar idiom spoken by the Galician water-carriers in Madrid. On the contrary, the Portuguese think the Castilian language inflated, and at the same time rough and also affected. Both nations are as little disposed to come to an agreement on the merits of their respective languages as the Danes and Swedes are regarding theirs; for the Castilian and Portuguese are, like the Danish and Swedish, only two conflicting dialects of the same tongue. The Swedes admit that the Danish language exceeds their own in softness, though they consider that softness disagreeable, and the harsher Swedish more sonorous on account of the greater abundance and fulness of its vowel sounds; thus, precisely in the same manner, do the Spaniards condemn the softness of the Portuguese tongue. The elision of the letter L in a great number of Portuguese words, as in COR, PAÇO, for color, palacio, and the remarkable change of L into R, as in branco, brando, for blanco, blando, are peculiarities of that language to which foreigners do not easily reconcile themselves.