Watching Helen Mirren last night. Quoth the people of Spain: Elizabeth -> Bess not Beth because it was given her by her Andalusian seseo-masters. And one was snoring too hard to disagree.

Dido and Hengist are remembered as early heroes of isoperimetry for having solved the challenge of maximising the area of a land grant made to them by stringing together strips of oxhide and using the resulting closed superthong to trace, respectively, a semi-circle at Carthage and a full circle at Kaercorrei.
What was news to [...]

James Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianae: Familiar Letters, Domestic and Forren (1688, on GBS):
There is a Tradition, that there were divers Mines of Gold in Ages pass’d amongst those Mountains; and the Shepherds kept Goats then, having made a small Fire of Rosemary-Shrubs with other combustible stuff, to warm themselves, this Fire grew along, and grew so [...]

MM has kindly mailed the story of an illegal from Mali found climbing one of the Sierra Nevada’s major peaks in flipflops. Jorge Rodríguez’z story in El País, plagiarised by Elizabeth Nash for The Independent, has Anthony Braxton Tony Brascons making the same journey in reverse undertaken in sandals by Judar Pasha, who they describe [...]

The other night reading the C18th Motteux translation of Quixote “by several hands” in a cheap American edition without date or attribution. The passage where they free and are then beaten by galley slaves has this:
They also eas’d Sancho of his upper coat, and left him in his doublet.
The translator or editor leaves a [...]

The action sometimes turned a shade Bulgarian during the Granada Wars–at least that’s what one infers from Diego Hurtado de Mendoza in this extract from Guerra de Granada (paras introduced for legibility):
Wounded by two poisoned arrows, Don Alonso [de Aguilar] fought until he fell, disabled by the poison used among hunters since ancient times. As [...]

Lovely phrase, something along the lines of “lavish in life, eager in death”, used here to describe the Spanish, although you will doubtless recall similar elsewhere. It’s from the discourse by the Count of Portalegre which rounds off the BBG edition of Guerra de Granada, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza’s chronicle of the disastrous rural uprisings [...]

There’s some excellent decorative stonework in the posher parts of Barcelona’s Eixample, but the Italians are in a different league.

Found whilst hunting help for a tiny bit of Judæo-Spanish/Sefardi/Dzhudezmo/Judezmo/Spanyol/Spanyolit/Ladino-English translation I did for someone. The book is The Lives of the Right Hon. Francis North …, The Hon. Sir Dudley North …, and The Hon. and Rev. Dr. John North (Roger North, 1826, available on GBS), the year is 1680, and the great English [...]

Zazie@Cocanha has scanned extracts from two versions of the highly amusing Cartas d’el Rei D. Fernando, O Catholico, a varios reis e principes do mundo, e suas respostas: colligidas e commentadas por Fr. Antonio Tarfan de los Godos, Commendador na Ordem de S. João de Jerusalem: the first bunch from a manuscript in the collection [...]

Check the curious items and documents starting p591, including payments to “blak Margaret” and the precept granting “the Earl and Lord of Little Egypt” the power “to hang and punish all Egyptians within the Kingdome of Scotland.”

I’ve been merrily dilettanting away recently with a couple of literary robberies and forgeries, so it’s good to see that Zazie over at cocanha found a really great one.
What he has are extracts from a book published in 1842 in Porto, Portugal under the promising title, Cartas d’el Rei Don Fernando, O Catholico, a varios [...]

Account of a murder trial at the Old Bailey on January 17 1676:
There were two men drinking, and there arose a dispute between them concerning a Spanish word, one affirmed that it was not properly exprest, the other gave him provoking language for saying so, he reply’d, Sir I know not how to bear that [...]

Account of a murder trial at the Old Bailey on January 17 1676:
There were two men drinking, and there arose a dispute between them concerning a Spanish word, one affirmed that it was not properly exprest, the other gave him provoking language for saying so, he reply’d, Sir I know not how to bear that [...]

I believe the current early chronology of versions containing all the basic motifs is as follows:

Joseph Fouché was a politician and administrator, and the delightfully wicked creator under Bonaparte of something vaguely resembling the modern police service. According to PBS, he wrote in something called Archives of the police of a series of murders committed [...]

Thomas Wright, Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English:
For they say the king of Portugal cannot sit at his meat, but the giants and the ettins will come and snatch it from him. (Beaumont and Fletcher, The knight of the burning pestle (1613))
I think that means that an ettin/eten/etayn is not, or is not quite, a [...]

A few from Jonathan Faydi, who lives in one of my favourite towns. Dunkerk is Dutch for Dunechurch; Jesuit traitor Henry Garnet and other Gunpowder Plot conspirators awaited news of Guy Fawkes in an English one (usually spelled Dunchurch), evidently unaware of the danger of shifting sands.

For freaks: Antonio Nebrija’s 1492 Gramática, the first systematic study of Spanish, summarises the various types of metaplasm referred to here, making clear here that he regards them as acceptable corruptions. Valdés attacks Nebrija for his Latinate affectations, but it’s unfair to regard them respectively as descriptivist and prescriptivist extremists.

Linguistic syncopes are confusing for musicians, who think of syncopation as redistributive rather than reductive. Confusingly, too, many of the syncopated words in Juan de Valdés’ gem of early descriptive linguistics and linguistic politicking, Diálogo de la lengua (late 1530s), are not produced by medial deletions. Here’s the conventional scheme of things (Hartmann & Stork, [...]

El monstruo de Barcelona sounds like it might be worth a read. It is not, however, as popular as the rather undevastating El bastardo de Ceuta.

Here’s an old foreshadow–give or take the odd sacrifice–of a recent nocturnal trip in the English translation by Grace Frick of Yourcenar’s Hadrian:
A few days before the departure from Antioch I went to offer sacrifice, as in other years, on the summit of Mount Casius. The ascent was made by night; just as for Aetna, [...]

Two Italian bodybuilders in the gym, one lifting great heaps of metal while the other stands over him and shouts in his ear things like: “STUFF YOUR DICK IN YOUR MOUTH, WHORESON” and “I FACK YOUR MOTHER”. I wonder if the Italian army is like this.
(It is a common misconception that the first hint [...]

Benjamin Zimmer links to a paper by Jane H Hill on Mock Spanish (with references to Jocular Yiddish, and others). I wonder how much of this is applicable to the experience of Welsh immigrants to Renaissance London, with a context that included repressive cultural legislation and the use of caricatural Welsh English (eg devoiced initial [...]

I suspect Ian Fleming knew (Noel Coward, allegedly: “Dear Ian, the answer to Dr No is no, no, no, no!”) the stereotypical Signor No in Thomas Dekker’s The Noble Spanish Soldier (1622-ish):

Today’s Libro verde entry (front page, right bottom) has Fernando VI in 1758 undoing various stuff done by Felipe V in 1714, including reëstablishing the right of imperiage. I speculated that “this must be some kind of feudal arrangement governing property and revenue sharing between landowners”, but a description has turned up (thankyou JA) in [...]

Surely of interest to someone. The scrawl on the front page says “Royal Veterinary School”.

Mark Liberman wonders whether Cinderella slipped two dead squirrels round her tootsy-toes that night, while Chris Waigl does not. I think glass is a reasonable interpretation, although it may not have been the material used.
DH Green (Language and History in the Early Germanic World) notes that both Pliny and Tacitus used glaesum/glesum to refer [...]

If QEI didn’t like Catholics, then in harsher economic times she wasn’t too keen either on black people, many of whom also came from Spain, with, for example, Catherine of Aragon. Here’s her deportation order. It’s not clear where they ended up. The site is interesting and includes the usual conjectures about the origins of [...]

I’d like to see Guus Hiddink take over England asap, but then I was supporting Mark Oaten (go on, get me one for my birthday!) to run the Lib Dems until he started chasing the England job, leaving Boris Johnson as the LDs’ only potentially electable leader.
(Apparently the Koreans gave Guus a villa on [...]

More from Disraeli’s dad, this time on the peculiarly Spanish (continental?) fondness for long titles:
The Spaniards then must feel a most singular contempt for a very short name, and on this subject Fuller has recorded a pleasant fact. An opulent citizen of the name of John Cuts (what name can be more unluckily short?) was [...]

If Javanese portray their common folk as cowards and fools, here’s a different view, taken from Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535 - 1557):
This Indian [in the Columbian sense] was from Java but had married on Machian/Makian/Maquiem/Maquieu/Matjan [in the Moluccas; one of the four islands to which cloves were [...]

De Son, nae d’oude sleur,
De doode cruiden, deur
Sijn hitte, doet verrijsen,
Die doen haer open blij;
Maer wie can doch in mij
Levendich leven wijsen?
(Hooft)

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, [...]

Here’s a cautionary tale from Alonso de Villegas’ Fructus sanctorum y quinta parte del Flossanctorum (1594):
Gauberto Fabricio of the Order of St Bernard writes that in 1386 [Peter/Pedro/Pere IV] of Aragon took away various possessions of the cathedral church of St Tecla in Tarragona. Although the clergy protested, they were unable to prevent the mischief.
Now, [...]

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 [...]

When Philip IV (III of Aragon and Portugal) came to Barcelona for the first time, he paused at the Valdoncellas/Valldonzellas convent, which was then outside the city. There they dressed him up in rosa seca (surely more than dry rose), hat (Iberian, not Mexican), feathers and diamonds (from the finest of which hung a pearl [...]

Christmas has come early for ultra-nutty separatists, Plataforma per Catalunya (PxC), after a fortune teller said on telly that they had purchased the winning number in the big seasonal lottery. However, the calls they’re apparently getting from mini-lot repurchasers all over Spain (sorry, “the Spanish state”–IRA-speak rules…) will of course not persuade them to take [...]

The claim by jokers like Jordi Bilbeny that whatever contains the odd Catalanism must have been written by a Catalan is obviously and completely ridiculous because it ignores a basic truth of the Mediterranean littoral: that multilingual jostling and experimentation has been going on here for as long as people have had horses, boats and [...]

The problem with Catalan “philologist” and “historian” Jordi Bilbeny being a 24-carrot burro is that when he occasionally says something half sensible no one listens. The conspiracy theory which rules Bilbeny’s life is that guys like Columbus and Cervantes were really Catalan, but that a powerful group destroyed all the evidence and then disappeared without [...]

Chávez’s anti-gringo rhetoric forms the basis of his appeal, but new evidence (which may gull the gullible and disturb yet the already disturbed) suggests that the guiri–the Spanish gringo–may have actually originated in what should perhaps be renamed the República Guiriana. Here’s Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo in Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535) [...]