Peret’s (Catalan-language) recording of El mig amic is from Spanish telly in 1969, when, as Wikipedia continues to remind us, the “use of Catalan in the mass media was forbidden.” Such claims have decreased considerably over the last five years due solely to kalebeul’s relentless and fearless campaigning. One important defeat for the inventors of […]

Xavi Caballé has read a book which suggests that the 18th century predecessors of the Norfolk Regiment were thus called because Spanish soldiers thought their Britannia badge represented the Virgin Mary. There’s another, more scurrilous version:
Well, I got fond enough, after all, of the Holy Boys, as the old Ninth lads were called… You see, […]

Or something along those lines. Jerry R Craddock clears up this and a number of other confusions in his excellent inaugural Disparatorio del suroeste. (Via Jesús Rodríguez Velasco). Galdós was politer in Trafalgar, but we all know what he meant. This one will run and run.

A summary of the statement made to the Commons in April 1714 (History and Proceedings of the House of Commons : volume 5: 1713-1714):
Catalonia swore loyalty to Philip V and its ancient privileges were guaranteed. Unfortunately it then changed its mind, rebelled, and appealed to Britain for help, claiming that Catalonia and Spain were […]

One of the many etymologies of flamenco is rather curious. From the typically poor Spanish-language entry in Wikipedia:
Durante el siglo XVIII el asistente Olavide pretendió combatir el bandolerismo instaurando colonias de catolicos alemanes y flamencos (tenidos por disciplinados y laboriosos) en el Alto Guadalquivir. El fracaso de adaptación de muchos de ellos engrosó las […]

The monument is a quality marble tomb round about where the sea gate was, on which Habsburg general Josep Moragues’ head hung in a cage for 12 years from 1715-1727, his body having previously been quartered on the Ramblas. This for surrendering on a Bourbon pardon at the end of the War of the Spanish […]

Antonio Gascón Ricao:
Es de sobras conocido que una de las habilidades más comunes de las brujas consiste en clavar agujas o cortar con unas tijeras un corazón, el hígado o los riñones de un animal, y así, el daño causado en dichos órganos animales se puede reproducir de igual forma en la persona a la […]

The 2006 PISA report is a tribute to the success of Spanish regional and national governments and teaching unions in maintaining high levels of popular illiteracy and innumeracy–one wonders how many new property owners understood anything of the mortgages they contracted during the construction boom; see also ADN, which believes there’s a 1 in 20 […]

Over at the new Barcelona historical almanac I’m slowly putting together I just posted the passage from José Sabau y Blanco’s update to Juan de Mariana’s Historia general de España (1822) dealing with the end of the Hapsburg rebellion in and around Barcelona, with massacres by both sides of villages and the lynching by the […]

Mr. T. was struck with the number of lunaticks confined in the several provinces of Spain:

Just found in a cabinet in an uninhabited house in the central Pyrenees: a concealed drawer that doesn’t appear to have been touched since the 1960s. Contents: a will from 1818; pages dealing with testaments torn a reprint of a revised (1930s?) version of the Spanish 1888-9 Civil Code, including annotations detailing regional variations (in […]

Foreign language tutors are quite common in lists of books banned by the Inquisition. Check for example this page in the 1844 Indice general de los libros prohibidos, which records the proscription in 1797 of a French-Spanish commercial correspondence course and of an English-Spanish conversation primer published in 1719 by the Anglican minister in Seville. […]

In 1927 the Catalan literary researcher and writer, Ramon Miquel i Planas (1874-1950; henceforth MiP) wrote a little book, published in a bibliophile edition, called La llegenda del llibreter assassí. In it he reflects on the origins and recycling of “Le bibliomane ou le nouveau Cardillac”, an anonymous tale published as if true in 1836 […]

Anyone know if they’re online anywhere? I’m interested in the Floncel anecdote, which I believe is on page 24. Talk to me here and be forever blessed.

Here are the maps created by French surveyors in the face of extreme weather, demolished triangulation points (church spires had a bad time) and bloodthirsty mobs in order to calculate, with what we now know was an extraordinary degree of accuracy, the physical length of the 1791 commission’s definition of the metre as one ten […]

Today’s Libro verde item (13/7/1714 The troops of Felipe V enter by assault, with which ends the War of the Spanish Succession.) is surely a mistake. From a Barcelonan perspective the war ended on 11/9/1714, although Spain didn’t sign the peace treaty until 1720.

Someone just quoted me a bit of Clément Marot I didn’t know (OK, let’s be honest: I’d didn’t even know Marot):
En tant qu’Ouy et Nenny se dira,
Par l’univers le monde me lira.
Which Leigh Hunt (The Companion, 1828) translates as:
As long as Love says Yes and No,
The universe shall read Marot.
More info on les langues d’oc, […]

Completely off-topic but delightful, this is from The Joviall Crew, or the Devill turn’d Ranter: being a character of the roaring Ranters of these Times, represented in a Comedie. Containing a true discovery of the cursed conversations, prodigious pranks, monstrous meetings, private performances, rude revellings, garrulous greetings, impious and incorrigible deportements of a sect (lately […]

This is re Margaret’s post re Stewart Lee’s. The first references I know to the stereotype are not British but are to be found in the early German romantics. They note (1), as does Lee, the various expressive possibilities afforded by various languages; (2) the failure of German writers to exploit these former to the […]

From the The Hai-Lu (1783-1797), as quoted on this page on this excellent site, again via TdiT:

Portugal (called Ta-hsi-yang, or Pu-luchi-shih ". . . has a climate colder than that of Fukien and Kwangtung. Her chief seaport [Lisbon] faces the south and is protected by two forts manned by 2000 soldiers and equipped with about […]

If I were a bit smarter I’d have tried a couple of alternative spellings before posting this. There’s a good chapter by Anthony Reid dealing among others with Sakender in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (ed Stuart B Schwartz) in which […]

The elaborate precautions taken in Spain to mitigate the effects of such torrents as we’re having at the moment can lead to puzzlement during dry spells. Here’s Isaac D’Israeli in Curiosities of Literature:
In one of his odes [Gongora] addresses the River of Madrid by the title of the Duke of Streams and the Viscount of […]

The other day I serendipited upon a review in Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië (1853) of Abraham Benjamin Cohen Stuart’s translation of what sounds like an absolutely brilliant Javanese epic poem dealing with the life and loves of one Baron Sakendher, Geschiedenis van Baron Sakendher. Een Javaansch verhaal van vertaling, […]

Joseph Townsend, A Journey Through Spain in the Years 1786 and 1787 (1791):
When we drew near to Barcelona, we had to cross a river [ie the Besòs], in which we counted fifty felons, clothed in green, and employed in clearing the channel, whilst sentinels stationed at convenient distances prevented their escape.
It is curious to observe […]

An interesting proscription is to be found in the description of a Barcelona Easter week pageant in Joseph Townsend’s A Journey Through Spain in the Years 1786 and 1787:
In the processions of the present day, practices which had crept in when chivalry prevailed, with all its wild conceits, practices inconsistent with sound morals, and offensive […]

From The Tatler, 1709:
THIS is to give notice, That if any able bodied latine will enter into the Bonds of Matrimony with B[illegible] Pepin, the said Palatine shall be settled in a Freehold [of] 40s. per Annum in the County of Middlesex.
I wonder if this is an in-joke, because 40 shillings isn’t very much–around £180 […]

Re a post by Amando de Miguel in his interesting, if fairly Pleistocene, language column for Libertad Digital, I’ve compiled a little table of hits over time from Mark Davies’ corpus for several Spanish versions of the Great Satan (no hits in there for el Gran Satanás unfortunately). I’ve omitted

USA = América because I’m interested […]

I don’t know when cardiopulmonary resuscitation was first performed, but here’s a 1753 citation by Benito Jerónimo Feijoo (Cartas eruditas y curiosas) from the London news para in the Madrid Gazette of 1753/4/17 of something that was apparently new to Spain:
It was believed that a man who had suffocated on the fumes produced by coal […]

The isleños (islanders), the Canarian-based dialect speakers based in St Bernard parish near New Orleans, are some of the less-publicised victims of the floods. Their victory against age-old enemies in the interests of yet more Anglo hegemony is commemorated in this 1970s song (more links; Mississippi song project):

Setecientos setentaisiete,
varias familias dejaron las Islas Canarias,
para la […]

“In contrast with Arabic words, the words of [Other Languages] appear lame, maimed, blind, deaf and leprous, and entirely bereft of a natural pattern,” writes Zaid Al-Alaya’a (via Onze Taal), who is clearly up there with Werner Georg Patel in the self-deprecatory humour stakes.
I think (checking would be hard) that there’s a fairly good […]

“The first day of this month will be remembered throughout the centuries because of the earthquakes and fires that have destroyed a large part of this city; fortunately, the safes of the royal exchequer, as well as those of many private citizens, have been recovered from the ruins.” (Taken from an article by André Belo […]

Amando de Miguel notes the commonsensical notion that two people will tend to speak the language that supposes the least combined effort for them (all other things being equal), and proposes naming this law for his correspondent, Candela Zamora. You all know what a candela is, of course.
De Miguel refers in the same piece to […]

Surprise has been expressed in circles, squares and other pleasingly simple geometrical arrangements of peapoles, that revolutionaries should want to destroy those who, according to Ken Livingstone and other prophets of the New Municipalism, are their nearest and dearest. What folly, my darlings!
We creaky reactionaries know that revolutions always destroy society (and often themselves) from […]

Wordlab notes that Marie Antoinette didn’t really invite her subjects to storm the pâtisserie. I could, however, imagine her saying “Qu’ils mangent de la caque” (cf HistoricAL), were it not that Vulgum says it was derived later, by Céline, from caquer/caguer, to shit. Cognates turn up in other Romance dialects, as do they in Dutch. […]

Brits tend to see Trafalgar (search) as the stage on which British naval hegemony was established. The French official view, on the other hand, is that it is just another anniversary. For some Spaniards, meanwhile, apart from being a reminder of the perils of entrusting project management to the French, it recalls imperial glory (we’re […]

Since my reader in the northern hemisphere is spending all his time hanging around in a beach bar, hoping someone will talk to him, I’m going to post the occasional bit of new-to-me nonsense from down south until things cool down again in September.
I think there’s no question that we’re all going to end up […]

Most of the Spanish press screw up and write that today’s referendum is the first in Holland’s history. Not true: constitutional referenda were held in 1796, 1798 and 1801, while Holland was occupied by … the French. Symbolic local referenda were also held in 1952 over a European constitution whose progress was blocked by the […]

On earth things are not quite so fine.

Sez Miquel Porta Perales.

I am forgotten the newspaper, and it has forgotten me.