Castilian Sentence Examples

On the death of the queen in 1504 her son-in-law claimed the regency, and was supported by the Castilian nobles.

He also helped her in quieting Ferdinand, who was chafing under the privileges of the Castilian grandees, and succeeded so well that the king also took him as confessor.

The Cid of history, though falling short of the poetical ideal which the patriotism of his countrymen has so long cherished, is still the foremost man of the heroical period of Spain - the greatest warrior produced out of the long struggle between Christian and Moslem, and the perfect type of the Castilian of the 12th century.

The extinction of the western caliphate and the dispersion of the once noble heritage of the Ommayads into numerous petty independent states, had taken place some thirty years previously, so that Castilian and Moslem were once again upon equal terms, the country being almost equally divided between them.

The moral influence of the queen's personal character over the Castilian court was incalculably great; from the debasement and degradation of the preceding reign she raised it to being "the nursery of virtue and of generous ambition."

Until he lost the king's protection he was the central figure of the Castilian history of the time.

The title of prince of Asturias, conferred on the heir-apparent to the crown of Spain, dates from 1388, when it was first bestowed on a Castilian prince.

It is free from Moorish idioms, and, like Galician and Portuguese, it often retains the original Latin f which Castilian changes into h.

In physique, the Asturians are like the Galicians, a people of hardy mountaineers and fishermen, finely built, but rarely handsome, and with none of the grace of the Castilian or Andalusian.

The normal Castilian landscape is an arid and sterile steppe, with scarcely a tree or spring of water; and many even of the villages afford no relief to the eye, for they are built of sunburnt unbaked bricks, which share the dusty brownish-grey tint of the soil.

Castilian, which is the literary language of Spain, and with certain differences, of Spanish America, is spoken in Old and New Castile, Aragon, Estremadura, and the greater part of Leon; in Andalusia it is subject to various modifications of accent and pronunciation.

As there is little, if any, difference of racial origin, character and physical type, among the inhabitants of this region, except in Andalusia, and, to a less extent, in Estremadura, the Castilian is justly regarded as the typical Spaniard.

Among the Castilian peasantry, where education and foreign influence have never penetrated deeply, the national character can best be studied.

The Castilian use of the word in the sense of a right, privilege or charter is most probably to be traced to the Roman conventus juridici, otherwise known as jurisdictiones or fora, which in Pliny's time were already numerous in the Iberian peninsula.

While actually owning the lordship of the Castilian crown since about the middle of the 14th century, these provinces rigidly insisted upon.

The citizens attributed their misfortunes to the "Castilian" government, and a strong party anong them favoured annexation by France.

Alphonso of Leon considered himself tricked, and the young king had to begin his reign by a war against his father and a faction of the Castilian nobles.

His own ability and the remarkable capacity of his mother proved too much for the king of Leon and his Castilian allies.

This famous romance of chivalry survives only in a Castilian text, but it is claimed by Portugal as well as by Spain.

The number of these "ancient originals" is not stated, nor is there any mention of the language in which they were composed; Montalvo's silence on the latter point might be taken to imply that they were in Castilian, but any such inference would be hazardous.

A further step was taken by the historian Joao de Barros, who maintained in an unpublished work dating between 1540 and 1550 that Vasco de Lobeira wrote Amadis de Gaula in Portuguese, and that his text was translated into Castilian; this is unsupported assertion.

Lastly, there is the incontrovertible fact that Amidis de Gaula exists in Castilian, while it remains to be proved that it ever existed in Portuguese.

As to its substance, it is beyond dispute that much of the text derives from the French romances of the Round Table; but the evidence does not enable us to say (1) whether it was pieced together from various French romances; (2) whether it was more or less literally translated from a lost French original; or (3) whether the first Peninsular adapter or translator was a Castilian or a Portuguese.

The prevailing language is a degenerate form of Spanish, nearer to Galician than to Castilian.

The monarchy owed its triumph to its championship of national interests, to the support of the municipalities and military orders, and to the prestige gained by the royal armies in the Moorish and Castilian wars.

In 1384 a Castilian army invested Lisbon, but encountered a heroic resistance, and after five months an outbreak of plague compelled them to raise the siege.

The most urgent matter which confronted the king - or the group of statesmen, led by Joao das Regras and the " Holy Constable " who inspired his policy - was the menace of Castilian aggression.

At the same time he gave fresh life to the national redondilha metre (medida velha) by his Cartas or Satiras which with his Eclogues, some in Portuguese, others in Castilian, are his most successful compositions.

All through this century Portuguese dramatists, who aspired to be heard, wrote, like Jacintho Cordeiro and Mattos Fragoso, in Castilian, though a brilliant exception appeared in the person of Francisco Manoel de Mello (q.v.), whose witty Auto do fidalgo aprendiz in redondilhas is eminently national in language, subject and treatment.

Three years later the Moderado party or Castilian Conservatives made their queen marry, at sixteen, her cousin, Prince Francisco de Assisi de Bourbon (1822-1902), on the same day (loth October 1846) on which her younger sister married the duke of Montpensier.

There was no discovery here, for the whole Canarian archipelago was now pretty well known to French and Spanish mariners, especially since the conquest of 1402-06 by French adventurers under Castilian overlordship; but in 1418 Henry's captain, Joao Goncalvez Zarco rediscovered Porto Santo, and in 1420 Madeira, the chief members of an island group which had originally been discovered (probably by Genoese pioneers) before 1351 or perhaps even before 1339, but had rather faded from Christian knowledge since.

The Montana (hill country) of Burgos, and in particular the district called the Alfoz of Lara, was the cradle of the heroes of the Castilian share in the reconquestthe count Porcellos, and the judge of the people, Lain Calvo, the infantes of Lara, the bastard Mudarra, and Ruy Diaz 0I Bivar, in whose lives legend and history are mingled beyond disentanglement, and of whom some are pure figures of romance.

The Mozbrabes brought in the large Arabic element, which is one of the features of the Castilian language.

The Basque, who till much later times practically included the Navarrese, was a man of another nationality and another speech from the Castilian.

Aragon spoke a dialect of Castilian.

In 1591 the support given by the Aragonese to Antonio Perez led to the invasion of their country by a Castilian army.

The political as well as the administrative life of the country was absolutely in the hands of the wire-pullers in Madrid; and their local agents, the governors, the mayors and the electoral potentates styled los Caciques, were all creatures of the minister of the interior at the head of Castilian centralization.

If a given province now speaks Catalan rather than Castilian, the explanation is to be sought simply and solely in the fact that it was conquered by a king of Aragon and peopled by his Catalan subjects.

Even Murcia was peopled by Catalans in 1266, but this province really is part of the Castilian conquest, and accordingly the Castilian element took the upper hand and absorbed the dialect of the earlier colonists.

Catalan, which by the reunion of Aragon and the countship of Barcelona in 1137 became the official language of the Aragonese monarchyalthough the kingdom of Aragon, consisting of the present provinces of Saragossa, Huesca and Teruel, has always been Castilian in speechestablished a footing in Italy also, in all parts where the domination of the kings of Aragon extended, viz, in Sicily, Naples, Corsica and Sardinia, but it has not maintained itself here except in a single district of the last-named island (Aighero); everywhere else in Italy, where it was not spoken except by the conquerors, nor written except in the royal chancery, it has disappeared without leaving a trace.

All the proparoxytones of modern Catalan are of recent introduction and due to Castilian influence.

For these last in ii there exists a plural formation which is more in accordance with the genius of the language, and consists in the suppression of the s before the 1; from aquest, for example, we have now side by side the two plurals aquestos, in the Castilian manner, and aquets.

On the, pronouns it has only to be remarked that the modern language has borrowed from Castilian the composite forms nosaltres and voseltres (pronounced also nosaltros and nosatrus), as also the form vosti, vust (Castilian usted for vuestra merced).

It is agreed on all hands that Castilian is one of the two branches of the vulgar Latin.

One and the same vulgar tongue, diversely modified in the lapse of time, has produced Castilian and Portuguese as two varieties, while Catalan, the third language of the Peninsula, connects itself, as has already been pointed out, with the Gallo-Roman.

Within the Castilian domain, thus embracing all in Spain that is neither Portuguese nor Catalan, there exist linguistic varieties which it would perhaps be an exaggeration.

We shall proceed in the first instance to examine the most salient features of the normal Castilian, spoken in the provinces more or less closely corresponding to the old limits of Old and New Castile, so as to be able afterwards to note the peculiarities of what, for want of a better expression, we must call the Castiian dialects.

In some respects Castilian is hardly further removed from classical Latin than is Italian; in others it has approximately reached the same stage as Provenal.

As regards the tonic, accent and the treatment of the vowels which come after it, Castilian may be said to be essentially a paroxytonic language, though it does not altogether refuse proparoxytonic accentuation and it would be a mistake to regard vocables like 1dm para, lagrima, rdpido, &c., as learned words.

Vowels.Normal Castilian faithfully preserves the vowels, I, O, 12; the comparatively infrequent instances in which and a are treated like i and must be attributed to the working of analogy.

In many cases the old language is more rigorous; thus, while modern Castilian has given the preference to mente, como, modo, we find in old texts mienle, cuemo, inuedo.

Jnfiexion.There is no trace of declension either in Castilian or in Portuguese.

Some nominative formsDis (anciently Dios, and in the Castilian of the Jews Dlo), Cdrias, Mdrcos, sastre (s a r t 0 r) have been adopted instead of forms derived from the accusative, but the vulgar Latin of the Peninsula in no instance presents two forms (subjective and objective case) of the same substantIve.

Castilian displaces the accent on the 1st and 2nd pers.

Many peculiarities isf pronunciation, however, are commonly called Andalusian which are far from being confined to Andalusia proper, but are met with in the vulgar speech of many parts of the Castilian domain, both in Europe and in America.

It is with the Andalusian dialect that we can most readily associate the varieties of Castilian which are spoken in South America.

Here some of the most characteristic features of the language of the extreme south of Spain are reproducedeither because the Castilian of America has spontaneously passed through the same phonetic transformations or because the Andalusian element, very strongly represented in colonization, succeeded in transporting its local habits of speech to the New World.

The fact that a poem of the 13th century (the Alexandro), and certain redactions of the oldest Spanish code, the Fuero Juzgo, have a Leonese origin has been made too much of, and has led to a tendency to localize excessively certain features common to the whole western zone where the transition takes place from Castilian to Gahician-Portuguese.

Portuguese, like Castilian, is a literary language, which for ages has served as the vehicle of the literature of the Portuguese nation constituted in the beginning of the 12th century.

At the present day Gallego, which is simply Portuguese variously modified and with a development in some respects arrested, is much less important than Catalan, not only because the Spaniards who speak it (i,8oo,ooo) are fewer than the Catalans (3,500,000), but also because, its literary culture having been early abandoned in favor of Castilian, it fell into the vegetative condition of a provincial patois.

Speaking generally, Portuguese is further removed than Castilian from Latin; its development has gone further, and its actual forms are more worn out than those of the sister language, and hence it has, not without reason, been compared to French, with which it has some very notable analogies.

But, on the other hand, Portuguese has remained more exclusively Latin in its vocabulary, and, particularly in its conjugation, it has managed to preserve several features which give it, as compared with Castilian, a highly archaic air.

Again, Portuguese alone has preserved the pluperfect in its original meaning, so that, for example, amara (a m a v e r a hi) signifies not merely as elsewhere I would love, but also I had Loved, The future perfect, retained as in Castilian, has lost its vowel of inflexion in the 1st and 3rd pers.

Portuguese, though less frequently than Castilian, employs ter (t e n e r e) as an auxiliary, alongside of aver; and it also supplements the use of e s s e r e with s e d e r e, which furnished the subj.

Galician.Almost all the phonetic feattires which distinguish Portuguese from Castilian are possessed by Gallego also.

In conjugation the peculiarities of Gallego are more marked; some find their explanation within the dialect itself, others seem to be due to Castilian influence.

It describes a wide curve eastwards past Soria, then flows westward across the Castilian table-land, passing south of Valladolid, with Toro and Zamora on its right bank; then from a point 3 m.

On Abdallah's side were many Castilian knights, among them Count Garcia Ordonez, a prince of the blood, whom the Cid endeavoured vainly to persuade of the disloyalty of opposing their master's ally.

These were a Castilian translation of The Life of Christ by Ludolphus of Saxony, and the popular Flowers of the Saints, a series of pious biographies.

Afterwards he became acquainted with the young Castilian, Diego Laynez, who had heard of him at Acala and found him out in Paris.

Owing to their almost entire immunity from any alien domination except that of the Romans and Goths, the Asturians may perhaps be regarded as the purest representatives of the Iberian race; while their dialect (linguaje bable) is sometimes held to be closely akin to the parent speech from which modern Castilian is derived.

His chief disciple, Antonio Ferreira (q.v.), a convinced classicist, went further, and dropping the use of Castilian, wrote sonnets much superior in form and style, though they lack the rustic atmosphere of those of his master, while his odes and epistles are too obviously reminiscent of Horace.

What has just been said as to the treatment of the final vowels in Catalan must be understood as applying only to pure Catalan, unaltered by the predominance of the Castilian, for the actual language is no longer faithful to the principle we have laid down; it allows the.final o atonic in a number of substantives and adjectives, and in the verb it now conjugates canto, temo, sentoa thing unknown in the ancient language.

Generally speaking, from various circumstances, and especially that of the reconquest, by which the already-formed idiom of the Christian conquerors and colonists was gradually conveyed from north to south, Castilian has maintained a uniformity of which the Romance languages afford no other example.

Asturian.The Asturian idiom, called by the natives bable, is differentiated from the Castilian by the following characters.

His office preventing him from taking possession in person, he deputed the task to Francisco Romeiro, a Castilian.

By special command of Raimund, archbishop of Toledo, the chief of these works were translated from the Arabic through the Castilian into Latin by the archdeacon Dominicus Gonzalvi with the aid of Johannes Avendeath (=ben David), a converted Jew, about 1150.

He had to surrender to Sucre at the final battle of Ayacucho, which put an end to Castilian rule.

The last year of his travels was spent in Spain, where he obtained a thorough knowledge of the Castilian language and literature.

Castilian is spoken by the upper and commercial classes; the lower and agricultural employ a dialect resembling that of the Catalans.