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betiana's review against another edition
Very interesting information about how the language has changed over the centuries.
sarahjsnider's review
2.0
Bill Bryson makes linguistic facts entertaining, and he makes it look easy. This is definitely a rocky companion piece about Spanish. The quality varied greatly by chapter. Most of the information about language academies and official standards (something Mr. Bryson doesn't have to address re: English) was very dry and skimmable. Not terrible, but disappointing.
bluepigeon's review against another edition
4.0
Thank you Goodreads First Reads for this book!
As someone who has been learning Spanish as a third language, and living in NY, and a serious student of flamenco, I can easily sum it up by saying that The Story of Spanish hit the spot! The book is a great way to re-read world history from the point of view of not Spain, per se, but Spanish, a living, changing, evolving, stretching, retracting, exploding language. The story begins all the way with Phoneacians, who gave the peninsula its original name, travels through the Moors and the Inquisition, and moves across the Atlantic, and explodes in a whole new continent. As a native Turkish speaker, I even learned where some of the weird words we have originally came from, though Turkish borrowed them directly from French and Italian, I had never thought that they had borrowed them from the native languages of South America (the Americans!) The book is full of fun trivia that I relentlessly repeat to my friends, who roll their eyes at me. Did you know that the first European language spoken in what is now the USA was Spanish (dates back to 1560s). And, here I was thinking those fierce Native American tribes were always expert horse riders! The book also gives a good account of all the Spanish language academies across the different Spanish-speaking countries, and the development of various dictionaries across time.
A perfect book to read before/after "The Story of Ain't" and any Henry Hitchings book.
Recommended for those who like to know where words come from, those who like Latin America and Latin American literature, telenovelas, civil wars, and world history.
As someone who has been learning Spanish as a third language, and living in NY, and a serious student of flamenco, I can easily sum it up by saying that The Story of Spanish hit the spot! The book is a great way to re-read world history from the point of view of not Spain, per se, but Spanish, a living, changing, evolving, stretching, retracting, exploding language. The story begins all the way with Phoneacians, who gave the peninsula its original name, travels through the Moors and the Inquisition, and moves across the Atlantic, and explodes in a whole new continent. As a native Turkish speaker, I even learned where some of the weird words we have originally came from, though Turkish borrowed them directly from French and Italian, I had never thought that they had borrowed them from the native languages of South America (the Americans!) The book is full of fun trivia that I relentlessly repeat to my friends, who roll their eyes at me. Did you know that the first European language spoken in what is now the USA was Spanish (dates back to 1560s). And, here I was thinking those fierce Native American tribes were always expert horse riders! The book also gives a good account of all the Spanish language academies across the different Spanish-speaking countries, and the development of various dictionaries across time.
A perfect book to read before/after "The Story of Ain't" and any Henry Hitchings book.
Recommended for those who like to know where words come from, those who like Latin America and Latin American literature, telenovelas, civil wars, and world history.