Writing has led humanity through three revolutions. They were slow revolutions, with the possible exception of the third, the one we are living through. None of them is complete.

The first revolution was the invention of writing itself. Human beings lived for a very long time with language and with the ability to draw the world (on cave walls, for example). Writing emerged when someone thought of bringing those two traditions together.

As a kind of pun, a Sumerian accountant used the drawing of a reed to represent the abstract concept of reimbursement, for the simple reason that “reed” and “reimbursement” were pronounced the same way in Sumerian. Writing had been invented. It seems to have happened independently in several parts of the world: at least in Sumer, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica.

The ability to record events revolutionised the administration of kingdoms and empires and gave us the power to tell stories to the humans of the future. Yet for most of the past 5,000 years, the overwhelming majority of the population could neither read nor write. Even in the Roman Empire, few people could read, and fewer still could write.

The second revolution was not the invention of printing, which was much older, but its explosion, first in Europe and then throughout the world, beginning in the fifteenth century. Suddenly, with a machine that was relatively easy to build, we could reproduce the same text an immense number of times. Instead of laborious handwritten copying, the machine released entire books into the world in hundreds or thousands of copies. It was the invention of publishing.

Over the centuries, this revolution brought reading to a large part of the population, changing history forever. How many revolutions, wars and inventions were fuelled by the fire of writing?

Over the past hundred years, we have experienced something unprecedented: for the first time, more than half of the world’s population can read and write, though with enormous differences between societies.

In recent decades, this statistical fact, together with technological developments familiar to us all, has laid the foundations of the third revolution. Now that we have the technology of writing (the first revolution) and the means of bringing reading to great numbers of people (the second), we are entering a world in which everyone writes.

Our lives are flooded not only with reading, but also with writing.

Where once there was a class of people intensively trained to write, the scribes of so many historical periods, today all of us not only know how to read and write, but need to do so in order to live.

This is also one of the reasons why so many people feel that everyone writes badly nowadays. The point is that everyone writes, and we do so continuously.

Writing is difficult. The invention is recent, and we do not have the same natural propensity for learning to write that we have for learning to speak. The difficulty of writing is far more visible today than it was in a world in which only a few had mastered the art, and even they had editors and proofreaders to correct and shape their texts.

Texts that go through such processes are now a drop in the ocean of writing and reading in which we live.

We can spend an entire day at home using the languages we carry in our heads without ever opening our mouths. To us, this is ordinary; to anyone from the past, it would be extraordinary.

We are learning to live in a new world.

We are animals that speak — and now we are animals that write.

A fuller account of these three revolutions can be found in book: Atlas Histórico da Escrita.

From January to August, the months bear names derived from gods, emperors, and other Roman origins – no surprises there. However, the last four months – September, October, November, and December – intriguingly derive their names from numbers: seven, eight, nine, ten. But logically, shouldn't they represent nine, ten, eleven, twelve instead? Why does the ninth month start with 'seven'? Did the Romans not understand counting?

Indeed, they did. For a long time, the year began in March, the onset of spring, which makes sense. It was not until around the 5th century BC, with the introduction of January and February, that the year started on January 1st. Despite the shift, the names of the months remained unchanged. Hence, December became the 12th month yet retained 'ten' in its name.

The evolution of languages and human constructs is a fascinating blend of order and chaos. We encounter glimpses of logic only to find a mesh of complexities nearby. This is evident in languages and many other human systems. Take, for instance, the first day of the year: even before the first century, the Romans had established January 1st as the start of the year. Yet, during the Middle Ages, various dates marked the new year across Europe, with March 25th being a popular choice. The Gregorian Calendar, which we follow today, solidified January 1st as the year's beginning.

However, remnants of the year starting on March 25th persist. George Washington's birth, for example, was recorded as February 11, 1731 – back when February was the penultimate month. In England and its colonies, the new year was celebrated on March 25th. When England eventually adopted the Gregorian Calendar, it not only removed 11 days but also shifted the year's start to January 1st. Consequently, Washington's birthday is now recognized as February 22, 1732, although older texts still show the original date. Another remnant of this old English New Year is the tax year, which still begins on April 6th (March 25th in the old calendar).

Our calendar is an intricate mix of precise mathematics and the remnants of old words, numbers, and names. It attempts to mirror the orderly path of stars across our sky, marking time's passage. Yet, no calendar is perfect, just as no grammar or system can flawlessly describe the world. The tension between our attempts to impose order and our inherent tendency towards disorder – which often quickens our heartbeat – is what makes language and all human constructs so intriguing. It's this very tension that brings a smile to my face when I remember that our 12th month still carries a ten in its name.

After several years of writing and speaking about languages in Portuguese (and some articles in English on this page), I have decided to create a podcast in English.

🎥 Inaugural Episode: The Galician-Portuguese Connection
Are Galician and Portuguese distinct languages of a singular linguistic heritage or different varieties of the same language? In my first video, "What is the connection between Galician and Portuguese?", I talk about the roots and evolution of these languages and the present-day linguistic dynamics in Galicia. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

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There’s more!

If you’re interested, you’ll also find videos about Portuguese words in my channel. The first one is about five different ways of translating “bell” into Portuguese:

See you soon!

The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Jon Fosse, who writes in Nynorsk, one of the two official standards of Norwegian. The following article tries to explain the peculiar linguistic situation in that country.

Why does Norway have two names?

I don't know if any of my readers have ever had the pleasure of going to Norway. I haven't — and I'd love to! I've never been there, but I like to imagine the journey... Off we go on these European roads until we finally reach the border between Sweden and Norway.

When you get there, you see a sign without our familiar twelve stars (Norway is not part of the European Union) and with two names for the country...

It's true that everyone notices what interests them. With Norway’s breathtaking landscapes, perhaps few will focus on a piece of metal. But those who like to know what languages societies use will certainly be intrigued by this plaque... Norway, in Norwegian, appears to be "Norge" — or "Noreg"! So they haven't decided how to name the country?

What's going on here? Why two names? Are there two languages?

Norway does have more languages (remember Sámi languages), but the sign is only in Norwegian. It's just that it's in both official versions of Norwegian...

A bit of history

To understand the peculiar situation, we have to go back to the 19th century. Norway was united with Denmark for over 400 years. The union ended in 1814 — and right after the divorce, Norway immediately married Sweden. It only decided to live on its own in 1905.

In 1814, when Norway broke away from a 400-year-old union, there was no official Norwegian language used by the state. The language used by the Crown and the elites was Danish. In a city like Oslo, those who wrote and argued in cafés spoke Danish with some Norwegian features.

If we moved away from the cities and travelled around the country, we would hear different ways of speaking, all descended from Old Norse (the language of the Viking people). It should be noted that Danish is also descended from Old Norse — in fact, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish (in all their variants) are very closely related languages.

But let's continue the story.

With Norway separated from Denmark, it was natural for Norwegians to think about a Norwegian language. In the capital, Danish spoken in a Norwegian manner became the standard. Basically, the urban population was happy to call Norwegian to their Norwegian Danish. They got their own language without changing much.

We were, however, in the days of Romanticism and the idealisation of popular speech and customs. This idealisation went hand in hand with the nationalism that was sweeping across Europe: a new country shouldn’t have a standard so similar to the language of the nation it had freed itself from.

There were those who wanted to drink from the purest Norwegian dialects (the notion of linguistic purity is a very 19th-century notion) and create a new Norwegian language. Ivar Aasen, a Norwegian philologist, was the central figure in this process of creating a standard based on Norwegian dialects and not on Danish as spoken in Norway.

As a result, two standards for writing Norwegian were created: one based on the uses of the capital, very close to Danish; the other closer to the forms used in regions of Norway far from the capital. The two standards have gone through various phases and names, but today they are known as bokmål (the standard close to Danish and the most widely used) and nynorsk, created on the basis of Ivar Aasen's study of Norwegian dialects.

This binormativity is inscribed in our own computers. If you open Microsoft Word and try to change the language of the text, you'll find "Norwegian (bokmål)" and "Norwegian (nynorsk)" in the list of languages.

What differences are there between the two versions of Norwegian? Let's use the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to get a rough idea of the degree of distance:

Bokmål: Alle mennesker er født frie og med samme menneskeverd og menneskerettigheter. De er utstyrt med fornuft og samvittighet og bør handle mot hverandre i brorskapets ånd.

Nynorsk: Alle menneske er fødde til fridom og med same menneskeverd og menneskerettar. Dei har fått fornuft og samvit og skal leve med kvarandre som brør.

This comparison has its dangers, because even using the same standard, two different translators would translate differently. But it stands as an example.

The plot thickens...

So every Norwegian chooses the language they speak? Not really: every Norwegian speaks the way they learnt in their region — it's in writing that these two standards are most noticeable.

If we want to imagine a similar situation in Britain, let's think of this hypothetical scenario: each Briton speaks as they learnt in their hometown, with a certain accent, some of their own vocabulary and typical constructions. Then, when they write, they have to choose: either they use a standard based on Southern English or they use a standard based on elements collected in various regions of the North of England. The comparison seems a bit forced because the Norwegian situation is, in fact, a peculiar situation, to say the least.

Throughout the 20th century, the Norwegian government tried to bring the two standards closer together with the ultimate aim of creating a unified Norwegian standard. This single standard would be called samnorsk. Thus, in a series of reforms promoted by the state throughout the 20th century, bokmål moved closer to nynorsk and nynorsk moved closer to bokmål.

The result? Some advocates of bokmål rejected the approach and switched to a standard even closer to Danish than bokmål: it's called riksmål and has its own academy.

On the nynorsk side, there were also those who refused the reforms and switched to høgnorsk, a traditionalist version of nynorsk.

This leaves us with four versions of Norwegian:

• bokmål (official), close to Danish

• riksmål, used by several newspapers and even closer to Danish

• nynorsk (official), further from Danish

• høgnorsk, used by some defenders of nynorsk

But why didn't some Norwegians accept these gradual changes?

The emotions that the use of our language provokes are difficult for outsiders to understand.

To help understand the problem, let's go back to the alternative reality in which Britain also has two official language standards. There's one standard based on London usage and another based on Northern usage. Now let's imagine that the government decides to bring the two standards closer together. The Northern standard would include constructions such as "us cars" (instead of "our cars"). Let's imagine that, in this endeavour to merge both standards, the government decided that the form “us cars” should be used in the whole country (the choice would always be random, as is the case of many language interventions). I can't imagine how people would react (“they are going to teach ‘us cars’ in school??”)...

One language, two standards

In short, the good intentions didn't work. Reforms aimed at unifying two linguistic standards ended up creating even more standards. This top-down approach to language is always dangerous... The government gave up and, from the 1980s onwards, tried to contain the damage. Norwegian has two standards and that’s it. The two standards are, in fact, regulated by the same institution: the Språkrådet. As a remnant of the conflict, there is yet another academy that regulates riksmål (which is now practically indistinguishable from bokmål).

In practice, each municipality decides on the form it prefers to communicate with the state, each school decides which standard to apply in the early years and, throughout their education, all students learn the two official standards. A large majority of Norwegians write in bokmål, but nynorsk is well protected and defended. Almost all newspapers are written in bokmål (or its more conservative version, riksmål), but there are some local newspapers and books published in nynorsk. The books by the new Nobel laureate, Jon Fosse, are written in nynorsk.

So we've arrived at the situation where the name of the country itself exists in two flavours, as we saw on the sign that greets us on arrival in Norway. "Norge" is the name in bokmål and "Noreg" is the name in nynorsk.

Notes

A very complete description of the case can be found in the article "Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk". Interestingly, the article was first published in Portuguese (in a version that is not accessible online), in the book Quem fala a minha lingua, vol. 2, published by Através, a Galician publishing house specialising in language issues. And while we're on the subject of Galicia, it should be noted that some Galicians have advocated a Norwegian-style solution for Galician (called "binormativismo"). There would be two official standards in Galicia: Galician, which is the official standard today, and Galician with forms and spelling closer to Portuguese. José Ramom Pichel wrote a recent article on the issue, which mentions other articles in the Galician discussion about the Norwegian-style solution.

Another reading suggestion: in 2017, Gaston Dorren published an opinion piece presenting a solution to unify the two standards of Norwegian. The English version is here. If you like these issues, I suggest you read the book Lingo, by the same author. It's one of those books I can't recommend enough!

1. Barcelona

In the last week of the 20th century, when I was in my silly twenties, I found myself on a bus heading for Barcelona with a group of friendly Algarvians. I don't have space here to explain from the beginning what led me to be on that bus. What you need to know is that we were happy to go and arrived very, very tired — and went to sleep the very first night in a parish centre near the Vall d'Hebron Hospital, where Jordi, a reserved and competent-looking Catalan, looked after us, trying not to miss any young Portuguese during that week at the end of the year, the century and the millennium.

At that young age, I already suffered from a very rare affliction: catalanophilia. A trip to Barcelona was a rare pleasure for me. Finding so many things written in Catalan around me and hearing, on the metro, the pronunciation so strangely similar to my own left me in a state of dangerous intoxication.

2. The Portuguese woman who hated Catalan

As is always the case when travelling, I made several friends during those days, with whom I roamed around Barcelona. But there was a thorn in these rosy days: that group of friends included Carla — who had a particular hatred of Catalan!

I didn't quite understand how she got that hatred. Somehow, if I suffered from Catalanophilia, Carla had caught the Catalanophobia virus. And there we were, walking through the streets of Barcelona talking and arguing...

Perhaps I'm overstating it. More than hate, Carla had a slightly annoying tendency to claim that Catalan is not a language.

It's true that linguists often don't agree on where one language ends and another begins. But there are languages that do not raise much doubt, and Catalan is one of them. Whatever criteria we use, Catalan should be counted as a language: it is recognised as a language of its own by its speakers, it has an established standard used in writing, it has a standard while showing a healthy dialectal variety, in addition to a centuries-old literary tradition. Long before there was a Kingdom of Spain, many people spoke and wrote in Catalan, although they didn't always call it that. And don’t forget: it is the only official language of an independent state (Andorra). It has its own distinctive grammatical features. It has an established orthography. I could go on all day. I'll end with this: Catalan speakers have at their disposal all the linguistic arsenal typical of a language with a written tradition: dictionaries, grammars, encyclopaedias and, of course, books complaining about language these days.

In other words, Catalan really is a language — and a language with millions of speakers. The only fact that leads some (Carla included) to negate this is: the territory that gave the language its name is not independent. But, heck, the Basque Country isn't independent either, and no one dares say Basque is a dialect of Spanish. We can give many more examples of languages with names that refer to territories that are not independent. Leaving the Peninsula, but without leaving Europe: Scottish Gaelic, Occitan, Breton, Sorbian, Lappish, Welsh... If you look closely, even the names "English" and "Castilian" refer to territories that are not independent.

3. That's some language!

Well, that didn't matter to Carla. We'd walk through the metro and she'd point to the Catalan notices that came with the Spanish translation underneath, compare the similar Catalan and Spanish words and decree with a sneer:

“How come is that a language?!”

I shuddered and stopped myself. She kept going: she looked at sentences in Catalan and ranted about how “some people” consider it a language!

This happened because, in fact, Catalan is a language similar to Spanish... But so is Portuguese — and French, Italian... Basically, she discovered that Latin languages are close to each other!

When we talk about the differences between neighbouring languages, it is always possible to find examples to prove everything and its opposite. Knowing this danger, here I leave some triads of words to see how Portuguese, Spanish and Catalan are both similar and quite distinct:

Two quick notes...

Firstly, the article "el", used in Catalan, is a typical mark of Spanish in the minds of the Portuguese. It is one of the reasons why some distracted people look at a text in Catalan and think it is in Spanish. Note, however, that the Catalan "el" does not follow the same rules as the Castilian "el": for example, "el meu cosí" corresponds to "mi primo" (although, to be strict, these differences in the use of articles also happen within the same language). Before moving on, two surprises: the Catalan "el" is often read as "âl"; moreover, it can be joined to the following word, thus becoming "l'home". Oh, and note the plural: the masculine plural definite article in Catalan is "els" and not the very Spanish "los".

Second note: the words in the various Latin languages may have the same roots, but appear in different places (so to speak): thus, the Catalan "parlar" (“speak”) corresponds to "falar" in Portuguese, but the same root of “parlar” appears in other Portuguese words: "parlamento", "parlatório" and, with an older common origin, "palavra" ("palavra" — “word” — is also linked to the word "paraula" in Catalan, of course). Finding these subterranean connections between Latin languages is one of the pleasures I get from comparing them.

All these differences, of course, do not invalidate that Catalan has a very strong Spanish influence, which is quite noticeable in the typical pronunciation of Barcelona (just as an example). Despite this, it remains a perfectly separate language, with a Latin origin in its own right.

Well, it's not just Carla who doubts it. I've already heard a Portuguese businessman complaining about the ignorance of those who call Catalan a "language" when it is "obviously" a dialect; a Portuguese academic declaring the use of Catalan in academic articles absurd, given that Catalans have access to another, far more useful language (I sigh…); a television commentator calling Catalan a "rag-tag language" — and so on....

These confused statements are a very long way from an active contempt for the language (which is probably easier to find in Spain). I imagine that very few Portuguese people take the trouble to hate Catalan. I just happened to meet one of those very few Portuguese — and right on the streets of Barcelona!

4. Sleeping at the ATM

Anyway, apart from those Catalan nuisances, we all got on well. What a delight it was to ride the metro and hear the names of the stations in Catalan, while walking the streets and discovering a new city at the age of 20, at the exact turn of the millennium, in a week of cold and Christmas and lots of people running around with shopping in their bags and hurried steps — not to mention the pleasure of finding Barcelona's architectural gems at every turn.

One night, lost in the city, we were late — when we finally arrived at the door of the centre where we were staying, Jordi was no longer there and no one opened the door for us. Where did we sleep? Well, where we could: in one of those compartments in a bank agency where you can withdraw money all night. There's no point in telling you much more. Soon the sun started to rise and Jordi arrived, scolding us in Catalan and Spanish, in order for everyone to understand.

Since I spent that night on the floor of a bank, may I suggest to the reader that if you ever find yourself in front of an ATM in Barcelona, you'll have Spanish and Catalan as options (in addition to English, French, German and, in certain obscure corners of the city, Portuguese). I dare you to select Catalan: the money will still come out and you'll learn a bit of the language.

5. Manuel de Barthelona

I must have sinned a lot those days — perhaps it was my less than generous thoughts towards that Catalanophobic Carla — because I ended up having to go to Señor (with a proud Ñ!) Manuel's house for lunch. I can't remember his surname, but I know he was from Barcelona, but didn't like Catalonia at all...

I went there for lunch because the gentleman was very active in the parish and wanted to take part in the youth meeting by hosting some participants for a meal. I, a Portuguese who could speak a little Spanish and English, was chosen to accompany a group of Lithuanian girls who could speak a little English. For Señor Manuel did not know English — at all! He only knew his mother's Spanish and Catalan, although he could only speak and not write it. I would be the interpreter in that improvised Hispano-Lithuanian Meeting.

The young women were beautiful representatives of the brand new Republic of Lithuania, which had won a hard-fought independence a few years earlier. They were very proud of their new nation.

Señor Manuel was a Spaniard living in Barcelona with a strong distaste of Catalan nationalism. The very word "independence" made him break out in a cold sweat. He was Spanish — and he said "Barcelona" in the Spanish way, with the "th" sound in the middle, the vowels wide open, reminiscent of old Manuel from Fawlty Towers — who was, of course, from Barthelona. The sound was reminiscent of Manuel from the series, but the look of this new Manuel from Barthelona was not: he was a paunchy man, with that good-natured air of someone who likes to chat at the table with good food and wine to accompany it.

I remember many blonde heads at the table, speaking English, and me trying to translate the conversation between a Spaniard and several Lithuanians. It went better than I feared.

Señor Manuel was very surprised when I told him I was Portuguese. He then explained to me that the image he had of the Portuguese and Galicians (he put us all in the same bag, as he made a point of saying) was different: he always thought of strong, hardworking, dark-skinned people of few words. Well, let’s just say I was not very strong and, being an improvised interpreter, was full of words during the whole lunch.

He then told me about his pride in being Spanish. He showed me Christmas cards he had received from the Spanish prime-minister and even from the king. He was the headmaster of a small Catholic school in the parish, and perhaps that was the reason he received these cards, which he showed us with dignified pride.

6. Classic Catalan

Perhaps, given the setting, it would have been wiser to conceal my predilection for the Catalan language and Catalonia. But I couldn't... I told him I loved Catalan and Catalonia.

The very Spanish Señor Manuel paused for a moment and smiled, rather puzzled. He didn't say anything. I continued:

“I can even speak a little Catalan...”

The man was amazed:

“Then say something...”

I took a deep breath and said, in Catalan:

“Jo parlo una mica de català!” (“I speak a bit of Catalan!”)

He then showed me a very enthusiastic smile, shouting in Spanish:

“¡Pero eso es catalán clásico!” (“But that’s classic Catalan!”) — an exclamation explained by the fact that I used my Portuguese accent, which is very close to the older, rural Catalan, less influenced by Spanish.

The world is complicated and Spain is even more so. The man, a die-hard Spanish nationalist, was visibly pleased to find a Portuguese youngster speaking Catalan. He picked up some parish bulletins he had been creating in Word, where there was always a page in Catalan, which he wrote with difficulty. For him, writing in Catalan was a challenge because he had never learnt the language at school — only at home and on the street. His son, on the other hand, who was at the table with us, delighted with the Lithuanian invasion of his home, had learnt Catalan and Spanish at school and could write well in both languages.

We had lunch and chatted and enjoyed ourselves — if this was an article about Lithuania, I'd tell you more about what happened across the table, but that's for another time.

7. A priest jealous of Portugal

Did I only met people not very fond of Catalan culture during those happy days? No, not at all! I will now tell you about my conversation with a priest from Barcelona. If Señor Manuel was definitely Spanish, this priest was quite Catalan.

The gentleman (whose name I can't remember) began by telling me that there, in that pavilion next to us, he himself had taught Catalan during the 1960s — which was (to put it mildly) frowned upon by authorities. He explained that the children of the proudest Catalans who went to public schools in those years — where the only language was Spanish, of course — learnt to write in Catalan in improvised classes in their spare time.

The situation is confusing. We will hear many people say that Catalan was banned during Francoism. Its use was not banned — not least because it was difficult to ban a language spoken at the table, in bed, in the garden, in whispers. Beyond what was said in private, Catalan was not completely banned: from the 1940s onwards, books could be published in Catalan; there were music festivals with entries in Catalan; in short, it was a language that was more or less tolerated.

Now, let's face it: the fact that it was not forbidden doesn't mean it was welcomed. Note, moreover, that any limitation on the use of our own language is always something we resent. Just imagine how it would feel to have the government your country prohibit the use of your language in courts (just an example). Maybe then we'll start to understand a little better how Catalan-speaking families felt in those days. There were several practical prohibitions or exclusions: Catalan had no place in education, television was only in Spanish, street signs were also in Spanish... No one had any doubts: for the Spanish State, Catalan was a mere dialect, which was to be tolerated until the day Catalans finally gave it up (sooner the better!).

Let's go back to the last week of the year 2000. That priest was happy, in the winter sun of Barcelona, in a parish off the beaten track. He was happy because those times were past, a somewhat mythologised past, as befits any past. Around the year 2000, teachers in schools taught Catalan — and not only taught the language, but used the language to teach other subjects, apart from Spanish language itself (which is mandatory).

The Catalan government applies — to the horror of some Spaniards from other regions — a policy of linguistic immersion: regardless of the mother tongue of their parents, all students are taught in Catalan, with the aim that by the end of their schooling they will all be able to write and speak Catalan and Spanish very well. Does this jeopardise the knowledge of Spanish, as some people argue? Well, the truth is that all the kids speak Spanish, in their Spanish exams they score as well or better than students from other regions — and on the streets of Barcelona it's easier to hear Spanish than Catalan. So, Spanish is hardly in danger. Note that — as far as I know — the language policy of promoting Catalan is supported by a large majority of the Catalan population. It's not just the nationalists who are in favour of protecting the language.

Suddenly, the priest leans over and tells me in confidence:

“In fact, we are very envious of you, the Portuguese.”

I laughed.

“Really?”

“Yes, of course.”

“What the hell for?”

“Because you are independent.”

So, I had just met a Catalan independentist. It's not difficult nowadays, but it was rarer then. I eventually learnt that there is an old slogan of Catalan independentists that says: "The autonomy we need is the autonomy of Portugal." It rhymes, but only in Catalan: "L'autonomia que ens cal és la de Portugal." In other words: this autonomy stuff is all very well, but what we'd really like is to be like the Portuguese.

This is just a simple story about what happened to me during those days at the end of the century. My great passion is Iberian languages — all of them. I don't have much to say about how the section of the peninsula that is not Portugal is to be organised politically…

8. How to tell the time in Catalan

On the last day of our week in Barcelona, in January, 2001, already in the new century, in the new millennium, Jordi (who had put up with us all those days) organised a meeting to say goodbye.

During that week, he had spoken to us mostly in Spanish — but in his last speech he used Catalan to address everyone. Most people understood what he said, but there were a few surprised looks. It seemed some Portuguese had been in Barcelona for a week and only then were hearing this other language...

At one point, he informed us all that the bus that would pick us up would be there at the door at "un quart de dotze".

Before continuing, it is worth explaining that there is a very peculiar characteristic of Catalan: the way of telling the time. Perhaps many Catalans don't use it in everyday life, but it exists and is used when making a speech or writing a text.

Thus, eleven and a quarter, in Catalan, can be expressed in this strange way: "un quart de dotze". Literally, "a quarter of twelve". The logic seems to be this: a quarter past eleven is the first quarter of the twelfth hour of the day. If we look closely, the first hour of the day runs from 00:00 to 00:59. The second hour goes from 01:00 to 01:59. The first quarter of an hour of the second hour goes from 01:00 to 01:15.

Anyway, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that eleven and a quarter is "un quart de dotze" and Portuguese speakers will inevitably interpret it as "um quarto das doze", which translates as "a quarter past twelve". Everyone understood “12:15” and not “11:15”.

Similar languages can confuse us — especially if they are invisible as Catalan is for many Portuguese.

I tried to let everyone know what was going on. Carla cut me off:

“I can speak Spanish very well and I heard Jordi say ‘a quarter past twelve’!”

“Carla, I know you speak Spanish wonderfully, but the man spoke in Catalan...”

“Don't start with that nonsense again!”

I shrugged:

“Do as you like. The bus will arrive at a quarter past eleven, not twelve.”

Ah, wouldn't it have been nice to be alone waiting for the bus at the right time?

Jordi, however, was well aware of the confusions that Catalan time could get us into. So he decided to explain, in Spanish: "I repeat, the bus leaves at 11:15!"

The Portuguese looked at each other. Some asked him to repeat the time in English as well. Finally, there was no doubt: the time was indeed 11:15.

I walked away slowly and discreetly. I didn't want anyone to notice the smug smile that had settled on my face.

*

On the journey to Portugal, everything went well. We sang and talked and slept. And, beyond languages and timekeeping, Carla and I began to talk about other things, further and further away from the city that had bewitched us in opposite directions.

1. The Bilingual Princess

The journalist was enthralled by the feat of the little princess who managed (imagine that!) to learn Spanish by talking with her Spanish nanny... She learned a language just by speaking! (The news I'm talking about is here.)

Forgive my hint of irony. I'm genuinely happy to think about little Charlotte speaking Spanish effortlessly — just as I'm happy to think about all the other children, starting with the children of immigrants, who learn two, three, sometimes four languages without making the headlines. Because, well, the princess's feat is not extraordinary. To learn two or more languages effortlessly, one does not need to be the great-granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth II — nor, truth be told, have a special talent for languages. One just needs to be a child.

I was reminded of the news because I spent yesterday afternoon among children playing in various languages. My kids have two cousins born in England who are here, in Portugal, during their holidays. The oldest one is already five years old and speaks English and Portuguese (what would she do if she had a Spanish nanny?). Sometimes, in the middle of playing with my kids, she says a few things in English but immediately translates them. To them, it's all natural and an excuse for more laughter and jumping.

Now, my brother — father of the two girls — has two neighbors — a German and a Pole — who are also here on holidays. They joined us for a beach afternoon and brought their one-year-old daughter who is now beginning to say her first words. I'm sure that, in about three years, the girl will be able to speak a bit of English, as well as German and Polish.

My eldest niece, when she saw the neighbors showing up, was confused for a few seconds, as it happens to all of us when two of the worlds we move in collide. In her girlish voice, she warned them in English: "They speak Portuguese here... But don't worry, I'll teach you!"

The curious thing is, even if that couple started living here, they would probably not be able to learn Portuguese as well as my niece. Why?

It is certainly not because she descends from Portuguese and they do not. The only reason is this: their age! A child learns one, two, three languages with great ease — but, from adolescence onwards, the ability to learn another language decreases significantly. It's curious to think that languages are an exception to what is usual — after all, we learn almost everything more easily after adolescence: just try teaching equations to a child and a 25-year-old to realize that the child has a little more difficulty...

2. The Language Learning Machine

The brain seems to have a mechanism that aids in learning languages — a mechanism that begins to fade away at some point. A child can learn any language, as long as they interact with that language regularly. There are languages with millions of forms for each verb (yes, millions!) — a child learns them with ease. In fact, languages go through periods of simplification when they have to be learned by many adults — this is what happened with Persian and English, which underwent periods of simplification throughout their history. If transmission is done from adults to children, the younger ones learn the most ludicrous grammatical rules, maintaining or even increasing the complexity of the language.

The same does not happen with writing systems: symbols can be more or less complicated, and in fact, it is harder for a child to learn to write in Chinese than in Portuguese (regarding English, with its peculiar spelling, the difference may not be so clear). Writing is something artificial, that we learn with effort — in contrast, the grammar of the language, the one we learn before we write, is a system much more organic and natural than we think, accustomed as we are to see it embodied in books that describe the written form of the language.

Now, if it's amazing to think about the learning process of a single language by a child, what about the ability to learn several languages? A Portuguese child in Luxembourg, for example, will finish school knowing how to speak Portuguese (which they learned at home), French and German and probably Luxembourgish. They may not know all four languages at the same level, but they will certainly be able to speak them better than an adult who decides to learn them at the age of thirty.

3. Will So Many Languages Be Good for the Brain?

Today, it's common to say that learning multiple languages is beneficial. However, some still fear so many languages taking up space in children's brains.

A few years ago I heard about the case of a couple from the French Basque Country who refused Basque education for their child for fear it might spoil the child’s French. When I go to Spain and talk to a Spanish monolingual, I notice a certain horror when talking about the poor children of regions like Galicia or Catalonia, who are obliged to learn two languages (and English!). Even here, in Portugal, it is not hard to find those who think that foreign languages should not be taught too early — pushing their learning precisely to the age when that mechanism starts to switch off...

Then, there are those who are horrified when they realize that not always do immigrants' children learn the family language as if they were living in the country of origin. Now, each one of us always knows a portion of each language, but never the whole language. Languages are shared territories that no one knows in their entirety — for example, I can talk quite well in Portuguese with the accent of the South (one of the accents of the South, in fact), but I do not know a number of terms and intonations more typical of the North (and I'm sure there are many Southern terms that I also do not know). Similarly, I can talk with specialists in the areas I know well, but I feel foreign at a mental medicine conference. In English, I get on better with the written register than with familiar language — in Portuguese, I'm more used to using various registers. A child who only uses a language to talk with parents will know how to use it very well in that familiar register, but will have difficulty reading in that same language — unless they make the effort to read a lot.

4. Languages in Double

Bilingual children have a ticket to more languages, to more territories — maybe some of them will end up never exploring some of the languages they learned, while others live well, all their lives, in several languages, developing them as well or better than any monolingual speaker. These children have the advantage of accessing, quickly, more people, more texts, more conversations — and also of exercising the brain with two or three grammatical machines, which is an enviable form of mental gymnastics. If each language brings with it allusions, sayings, recurring jokes, words of different weights and values, two languages are a doubling of pleasure and possibility — and also of utility.

Therefore, I am pleased with Princess Charlotte — and even more pleased with my bilingual nieces and with all the children who, around the world, live in more than one language. Then, I look at my own children — I am amazed at how a child learns the words and phrases that whirl around them, slowly beginning to say sentences that no one else has said before, seizing the language and the world as if they were their own (and they are!).

Article written in the Summer of 2021.

We are never really sure when a word entered a language. We may find it in an ancient text, but it was probably already used in conversation — and we can never be really sure if someone won’t find another older manuscript with the same word. In the case of “galaxy”, as far as we know, the first time it appeared in writing in English was in House of Fame, a poem by Chaucer. Here it is, in all its Middle English glory:

See yonder, lo, the Galaxyë
Which men clepeth the Milky Wey,
For hit is whyt.

The verses seem rather easy to translate into modern English: “…the Galaxy, which men call Milky Way, for it is white.” We can also easily translate it into other languages. However, this apparent translatability of the word hides a very wide gap between the word in Chaucer’s time and the very same word in our time. This gap tells us a lot about our knowledge of the Universe.

When writing about the Galaxay—which men call Milky Way — Chaucer is talking about, well, the Milky Way, which we can hardly see in our cities. In a field, far from lights, we can still see it.

The Milky Way has various names around the world: it is the Silver River, as the Chinese call it, or the Skirt of Stars, in the mouths of the Aztecs, or the Path of Birds, in Finnish — or it is the Way of St. James, as the pilgrims said, for whom this streak in the sky served as a nocturnal guide.

The Greeks and Romans looked up at the sky and saw spilled milk — there was the Galaxy or the Milky Way. Little did they know that the secrets of the beginning of everything were hidden in that streak.

With the naked eye, we cannot perceive what that streak of light is made of. It is this mystery, this ignorance, that lies behind Chaucer’s words. That Galaxyë is not the galaxy we find in school books. It is a streak in the sky that we can’t explain.

Like a clue to solve a crime, our curiosity about these streaks in the night sky has been revealing, over the centuries, secrets about the past and future of the Galaxy — but, in Chaucer’s time, not much more was known than this: there is a huge whitish streak in the night sky. We are on Earth, at the center of the Universe, and up above there are stars — and that streak.

With increasingly powerful lenses, we finally understood that the Milky Way is the light of a group of so many distant stars that we cannot distinguish them. We also began to understand that Earth is not the center of the Universe — the center would be the Sun.

Over time, some studied the shape of that cloud of stars and — in a surprising twist — we eventually concluded that we are part of the Milky Way! Neither Earth nor the Sun are the center of the Universe: the entire Solar System revolves around the Galaxy. When we look at the Milky Way, we look at the center of the galaxy.

We thought we had found the shape of the Universe: a dense heart of stars, with arms of stars around it (in one of them are we), all spinning. But the surprises had not ended…

Telescopes allowed us to see, in the midst of our galaxy, a few distant objects that were neither stars nor clearly identifiable. A Frenchman, named Charles Messier, cataloged these intriguing objects. He called them nebulae. They were yet another clue inscribed in the sky.

One of these nebulae was actually known to ancient astronomers because it can be seen with the naked eye — it’s located in the Andromeda Constellation and was cataloged as M31. Little did Messier know that this particular patch — the Andromeda Nebula — would give rise to one of the greatest surprises in the history of astronomy.

Some had already suspected. Immanuel Kant proposed the idea that these patches in the sky could be other galaxies… The idea was as strange at the time as suggesting today that there are other universes — some people do propose this, but, now as then, we are dealing with pure speculation.

In the 1920s (not even 100 years ago…), Edwin Hubble finally managed to measure the distance separating us from the Andromeda Nebula. It was approximately 900,000 light-years away. In short: it is extremely far — significantly farther than the center of our own Galaxy. In fact, Hubble made a mistake: Andromeda is actually more than 2.5 million light-years away. When we look at that patch, we are not seeing a nebula within our galaxy: we are looking at another galaxy.

From that point on, with telescopes improving every day (the most famous one even bears Hubble’s name), we realized that there are millions upon millions of galaxies… Andromeda and the Milky Way (which ceased to be synonymous with “galaxy” and became the proper name of our galaxy) are just two among many.

The Universe seems to be made of strands of galaxies, and these are made of stars, planets, and other materials.

For now, we still have two twists to reveal in the story of the Milky Way and company.

By observing galaxies using increasingly powerful telescopes, astronomers noticed that all of them had a redshift in their luminosity. Why? Because they are moving away from us in all directions — just as an ambulance sounds lower-pitched as it moves away, a gigantic object appears redder, which can only be detected with advanced equipment.

If galaxies are moving away, it means they were once closer together. By making calculations — and what calculations they were! — astronomers deduced that 13.8 billion years ago, all galaxies were in the same place. It was at that moment that everything began (and it hasn’t ended yet). The Big Bang theory emerged, which explained the history of the Universe (except for the exact initial moment, which still eludes all calculations). In the 1960s, the cosmic microwave background radiation left by the Big Bang was discovered, a radiation that the calculations of those who developed the Big Bang theory had already predicted.

The Big Bang became the most rigorous scientific explanation for the history of the Universe — it doesn’t explain everything, but it matches the data we have.

Of course, there is still much to learn — for example, what is dark matter made of, which calculations predict, but cannot be seen? Without it, many of the galaxies we observe couldn’t exist, as the gravity of stars is not enough to hold them together. It’s not hard to see in it the reflection of the mystery of that whitish patch in Chaucer’s sky: what will future generations say when they think of us and the honest name of Dark Matter? Will they give it another name?

The very term Universe: will it cease to mean everything that exists, just as Galaxy once did, and come to signify one of several universes within a multiverse?

Now, the last twist. The Andromeda Galaxy, the galaxy that was key to discovering all the others and realizing that our galaxy is not alone, does not exhibit the redshift deviation. It is not moving away. Its light, in fact, has a slight shift towards blue. It is approaching, just as is the case with a handful of nearby galaxies.

In other words, in a good many million years (many millions!), the Milky Way and Andromeda — with its approximately 12 trillion stars — will collide, merging into a single galaxy. None of us will be around to see it, but when it happens, it will be as if even more milk were spilled across our skies. At least it won’t be a surprise. That smudge in the Andromeda constellation will grow ever larger.

We began with Chaucer and ended in the future, with an intergalactic collision. Human beings live in this space between the unknown expanse and our perception of it, reflected in the words with which we fill our days.

While we await the collision, I have two suggestions.

The first suggestion is to read a book about this entire story: Until the End of Time (Penguin, 2020), by Brian Greene.

Second: if you are in a city one of these days, take yourself and travel a good few miles to the darkness of the countryside. Gaze upon the Milky Way and, with the help of one of the many apps available on smartphones, also look for the Andromeda Galaxy. The light that will enter your eyes left Andromeda 2.5 million years ago when the humans who existed then looked at the starry night and scratched their heads. They may have already had, I would say, the flashes of curiosity that led us to invent telescopes and perform calculations upon calculations to understand what those smudges in the sky actually were. This curiosity has already given us quite a few surprises — I cannot even imagine those that are yet to come…

Lane Greene has recently written about the English language, translation, artificial intelligence, and other topics. He is responsible for the new edition of The Economist‘s style guide (to be published soon) and has two published books about the English language: You Are What You Speak and Talk on the Wild Side.

The lecture is titled English Usage in the 21st Century. Lane Greene will discuss with the NOVA FCSH community ideas about the current use of the English language.

The session is free and open to everyone on site.

I invite you to imagine an isolated island that has existed for millennia in the heart of the ocean. The inhabitants of this island, who arrived there through an ancient migration lost in the mists of myths and legends, have never since made contact with other people. Undoubtedly, a language exists on this island — no group of human beings has ever been discovered without the use of language.

However, the language of this island, after millennia of isolation, reveals little about the world’s history. It may provide insights into the island’s history and perhaps even have evolved into multiple languages. There might be various records, different usages, or idioms stemming from wars. The accents of the island’s different regions could help us understand the society, but the history of the world remains beyond the scope of this isolated language or languages.

Very few languages exist in such isolation. The vast majority flourish in open spaces, with borders more imaginary than real, exchanging words and phrases like passing breezes. Portuguese is one such language — perhaps even more so than others. It has never been an isolated island.

After all, the region where Portuguese developed lies at the edge of the ancient world. This world stretched from China to these remote, distant shores, touching the Atlantic. The center of that world was what we now call the Middle East in Europe. Echoes of that center reached the location of modern-day Portugal, leaving behind words like remnants on its beaches.

Afterwards, this edge of the world transformed into the center of another world for a time, a world no longer based on the land axis that spanned Europe, Africa and Asia but on oceanic communication. Lisbon became one of the hubs, and the language, rather than collecting remnants, dispersed fragments across the globe, which can still be heard in far-off languages.

Eventually, Portugal transitioned from being the end or the center of the world to occupying a small corner in Europe between the center and the periphery. The language, meanwhile, has a whole new story to tell, much wider than Europe.

So let us embark on a brief journey through world history, guided by 10 words in Portuguese (or related languages). The first word we’ll explore is:

1. MAGIA (“magic”)

Portuguese, like many other languages, originated from a specific form of Vulgar Latin, which was influenced by earlier languages about which little is known. Latin itself emerged from other preceding languages, which in turn stemmed from Proto-Indo-European, believed to have been spoken in the region of present-day Ukraine around 6,500 years ago. Languages descended from Proto-Indo-European are spoken today in India, Iran, Europe, and many other places worldwide.

The presence of a Latin language in the western Iberian Peninsula is a testament to the history of the Roman Empire and its expansion. Latin reached the end of the World, Finisterra, in the Northwest of Hispania.

In addition to Indo-European words that evolved on the Italian Peninsula, Latin brought words from other languages. For example, the word “magic,” the first word in our journey, is a Greek word that arrived through Latin and had already been imported into Greek from Old Persian.

The Latin that arrived in Northwest Iberia was Vulgar Latin, the speech of the people. It mixed with other languages, endowing those who lived in this western region with a language composed of both distant and closer words. Portuguese, like many other languages, has always been crafted from materials of diverse origins.

2. LUA (moon)

The end of the Roman Empire can still be felt in our language. Before talking about “lua”, we can look at “luva” (glove), a word of Germanic origin that arrived in the Iberian Peninsula during the fall of the Roman Empire. It came from the Gothic language, brought by the Germanic peoples to the Iberian Peninsula. The Gothic language left only a few words integrated into the local Hispanic Latin. Interestingly, Gothic persisted for centuries in a completely different part of Europe — Crimea. The history of the world as revealed by languages is much more complex than it seems.

There are not many examples of words from these Germanic tribes in Portuguese because the Suebi and Visigoths, who came to occupy the Peninsula, adopted Latin as their own language and probably did not arrive in large numbers. The inhabitants of the peninsula continued to be Hispanic Romans, living in new kingdoms with a Germanic nobility.

We can say with some certainty that the Latin spoken in the 6th century was already much different from the Vulgar Latin spoken during the height of the Roman Empire. Some features of Portuguese, such as the use of numbers to name weekdays — “segunda-feira” (Monday), “terça-feira” (Tuesday)… — come from that era. It is quite possible that during this time, specific phonetic phenomena — such as the loss of /n/ and /l/ between vowels — also began to shape the language, but they would only appear in writing much later.

For example, the word for moon, in Portuguese, is not the Spanish “luna” or the French “lune,” but rather a shorter word: “lua”. Speakers in Northwest Hispania (in Roman Gallaecia) began to drop the /n/ and /l/ between vowels. Why? We don’t know. It was, if you will, a mistake that crystallized. After all, each language is a collection of mistakes from previous languages. We all speak corrupted Latin — but Latin itself was already a corrupted version of a previous language. This is how humanity’s languages are made.

3. AZUL (blue)

In the 8th century, the Iberian Peninsula largely fell under the control of Muslims. Their presence is reflected in the language: there are many words of Arabic origin, as well as words of Persian origin that passed through Arabic. Words as significant as “açúcar” (sugar), “laranja” (orange), or “azul” (blue) illustrate this influence. Indeed, it is rare for a Portuguese person to go a day without using words of Arabic origin.

The Portuguese language bears witness to the rise and fall of empires and the power of wars during those times. The expansion of Christian kingdoms from north to south in five bands introduced various Latin dialects from north to south, mixing them with Mozarabic, a Latin language with a strong Arabic influence spoken in the south of the Peninsula.

The Romance language of the northwest of the Peninsula reached Lisbon in the 12th century, when the first King of Portugal, Afonso Henriques, helped by Crusaders from the North of Europe, conquered the city. The language blended with Mozarabic and Arabic. It should be noted that there were also North African languages in this mixture — much research remains to determine the influence of these languages on Portuguese. I’ve heard some argue, for example, that “azul” (blue) did not come to us through Arabic but has Amazigh (sometimes called Berber) origins. As the attention given to these languages by Portuguese historiography was limited, it is not improbable that many North African words have slipped into Portuguese (and other Iberian languages) unnoticed.

And thus, we arrive at the word that is the name of the language:

4. PORTUGUÊS (Portuguese)

The Kingdom of Portugal adopted the Northwestern Romance language — which came from present-day Galicia and the North of Portugal — as the language of administration, particularly during the reign of King Denis.

It wasn’t until the 15th century that someone wrote the name “Português” (“Portuguese”) as the name of the language: the person who christened the language was Prince D. Pedro, in the preface of a translation of Cicero.

Throughout the 16th century, after the expansion of the printing press across Europe, Portuguese gained grammars and began to slowly standardize. This was also the time of the zenith of Castilian influence. Portuguese — at least in Lisbon and around the court — was filled with words and constructions from this closely related language.

By the 16th century, the language we now call Portuguese incorporated elements from Asian (Arabic and Persian), North African, Celtic, and Castilian sources, as well as materials from other places that we might not recognize. It was mixed Latin, with shades of the entire continental mass known as the Old World. Analyzing the chemical composition of our language reveals the history of Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Portuguese began to spread beyond Europe during the Age of Exploration, leaving traces in languages throughout the world. This marks the second moment in our history. The presence of Portuguese in other languages serves as testimony to the long and often painful history of Modernity. Let’s start this new stage with a word from another language:

5. PAPIAR (Cape Verdean for “to speak”)

The Portuguese language spread across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The growing presence of Portuguese led to the incorporation of Portuguese words in various languages. Just as an example, the Arabic word for orange, as well as its equivalents in Turkish, Greek, and other languages, seems to have originated from the name “Portugal.”

However, let’s delve deeper. Situated in the middle of the Atlantic is Cape Verde, with a population of African and European origin, speaking Cape Verdean Creole. This language, which many simply call “crioulo”, has many similarities with Papiamento Creole, the official language in some Caribbean islands. The name “Papiamento” appears to be derived from “papiar,” a Cape Verdean word meaning “to speak.” These two languages, one on each side of the ocean, remind us of the cruel history of Atlantic slave trade.

Creole languages are not only reminders of that history: they are also evidence of human linguistic ability. In situations of partial language transmission, new generations crafted languages with distinct grammars and vocabulary. Human linguistic creativity is always present, waiting to flourish.

Now, let’s cross the Atlantic, just as many slaves did, to uncover another word:

6. SAMBA

In the Americas, Portuguese changed — a lot. Initially, the language underwent significant changes as it was spoken by indigenous people, slaves, and settlers alongside the “general languages” of Tupi-Guarani origin. Brazilian Portuguese still retains elements of this early phase in its spoken form today.

Later, towards the end of the 18th century and throughout the 19th century, Portuguese was standardized in Brazil. The new nation adopted a language standard with a strong European bent (reflecting the formation of the new state: the Emperor was a prince of Portugal). In the meantime, much changed, and these two varieties — one oral and originating in the 16th century, the other written and originating in the 19th century — exist side by side and intermingle, creating a complex linguistic landscape.

Brazilian Portuguese is another testament to the history of the Americas, Brazil, and humanity, transcending its European roots where Latin first arrived over 2,000 years ago. The word “samba” exemplifies the story: it has African roots, was adopted by the language in South America and is now used also in Europe.

Let’s continue our journey to the Indian Ocean, where our eighth word is the Swahili name for Portugal:

7. URENO

… a transformation of the word “reino,” the term that the inhabitants of the African coasts of the Indian Ocean heard from navigators en route to India.

In the Indian Ocean, Portuguese emerged as a lingua franca, utilized by the Portuguese and other Europeans, such as the Dutch, as well as by local populations to communicate with foreigners. To this day, we find languages of Portuguese origin in countries like Sri Lanka and hundreds of Portuguese words in languages such as Indonesian.

Additionally, we discover Portuguese words in Japanese. Contrary to popular belief “arigato” is not such a word. A true example is “igirisu,” which means “English,” demonstrating how the Portuguese introduced many Asians to Europeans.

Now, let’s examine a very different word, perhaps unexpected in this context:

8. FETISH (yes, in English)

Portuguese travels around the world have often resulted in the exchange of words and meanings. One such example is the word “fetish,” which has evolved and taken on different forms in many languages. It originated from the Portuguese term “feitiço,” an old word derived from Latin, meaning anything artificial or makeshift. By examining the history of this word, we can gain insights into the development of languages and the world in recent centuries.

When Portuguese navigators arrived at the Gold Coast, a remote region they had little knowledge about, they encountered magical objects revered by the local people. All cultures have amulets — the navigators themselves carried crosses — but in the hands of the others, amulets take on a mystical and exotic quality.

The Portuguese referred to these objects as “feitiços,” a word that later also came to mean a magical effect. As the navigators returned to Europe, Northern European writers used the Portuguese term to describe the customs and practices of the Gold Coast. The first known usage of the word was by Dutch explorer Pieter de Marees in 1602. He referred to the amulets as “fetissos” in his work Description and Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea.

The book was later translated into French, and the translator adopted the term “fetissos.” Over time, the French adapted it to “fétiche,” and the English soon incorporated it into their language as “fetish.” Once adopted by both French and English, the word’s future was secured.

By the end of the 19th century, the term “fetish” began to be used to describe a sexual fixation on an object or body part, a unique form of idolatry. The word’s meaning then expanded again, taking on more general connotations. For example, one might have a fetish for yellow books.

From English and French, “fetish” spread across European languages and eventually returned to Portuguese, its origin. This journey demonstrates the fluidity of words and languages, the influence of French and English as languages of science replacing Latin, and the ways in which languages borrow from one another. It also sheds light on the creation of scientific and technical terminologies and the transformation of these terms into new words over time.

9. RÚA (in Galicia)

Before exploring the final word, let’s return to the origin — the Northwest of the Iberian Peninsula. It’s important to note that Northwestern Romance gave way not only to Portuguese, but also to Galician.

Galician was only standardized within the past 50 years, though it was spoken by nearly everyone until quite recently. If someone crossed the border between Portugal and Galicia at the end of the 19th century, they would not find significant differences between the dialects spoken in villages on both sides. After centuries of political separation, after Portugal became a kingdom in the 12th century, Galicia and Portugal still shared a language.

In the meantime, European languages underwent a rapid standardization process, driven by the expansion of the nation-state concept. Each state chose a language and a specific form of that language as its official language. Literature in this standard became a national symbol. Portugal chose — quite naturally — Portuguese and Spain chose Castillian, which became what is now known as Spanish. However, other languages were still spoken by wide majorities of people in some regions.

These other languages, including Galician, became somewhat invisible despite being spoken by millions. This invisibility was counteracted by literary revivals in the context of 19th-century Romanticism. It was the case of Galician. Finally, after being again ignored (and actively repressed) during Francoism, Galician became an official language in the 1980s.

Today, walking through Galicia, one can find old words on signs that are the same as in Portugal, reminding us that history of Portuguese began in this region. Take “rúa” as an example — the word for “street” is quite similar to the Portuguese “rua” (the difference lies in spelling, which is always a contentious topic in Galicia).

The northern border of Portugal is a line that bisects the territory where the language emerged. This division and the difference in prestige between Galician and Portuguese — which both originated in the same area and were based on the same linguistic material — illustrates how the languages of states experienced vastly different fates compared to languages that are not associated with states.

Here too, we find the history of the world: the establishment of national language standards alongside efforts to preserve and defend languages that were excluded from this narrative.

Now, let’s journey down to Lisbon and listen to someone chatting among friends. Perhaps the word we’re looking for will come up…

10. BUÉ (“a lot”, informally)

This particular word, unfamiliar to Brazilians, means “a lot” and is used in very informal situations (so informal that when it entered dictionaries there was a big fuss). Several theories exist about its origin, but the most common suggests it came from a word in Kimbundu, a language spoken in Angola.

The word would have been introduced to Portugal during the decolonization process, brought by those returning to the metropolis and by Africans who migrated to Portugal. This development serves as another testament to history: the world’s independence movements in the 20th century and the significant population shifts of recent decades.

The presence of this African word in Lisbon also reminds us that the future of Portuguese is intertwined with Africa. The language is experiencing tremendous growth on this continent, and it wouldn’t be surprising if, within a few decades, the largest number of Portuguese speakers reside here.

This story unfolded in just a few minutes, demonstrating how the Portuguese language, as spoken today, bears traces of ancient histories — from the Roman Empire, the Silk Routes, and Islamic expansion to the Iberian expansion, the slave trade, Indian Ocean history, the development of national languages, the use of French and English as languages of science in the last two centuries, and the history of Africa. All of this is inscribed in the words we use, bearing witness to the history of the world.

This article originated from a talk at the University of Carthage for students of Portuguese, given at the invitation of Prof. Maria de Lurdes Ferreira. I dedicate it to Anis Mokni, a Tunisian translator and teacher of Portuguese. A brief bibliography on the History of Portuguese can be found on this page.

Remnants of empires

As the British Empire ebbed away, it left a few droplets — a handful of islands here, a smattering of oddities there (such as Jamaica having a king who bears a striking resemblance to the former Prince Charles) or military bases in Cyprus. Close by, we find one of these remnants: Gibraltar, a British city basking in the Andalusian sun, a colony in Europe, a slice of territory that Spain covets and that the English (I suspect) wouldn't mind handing over if it weren't for the inhabitants' desire to retain the same king as the Jamaicans.

This piece of the Iberian Peninsula has been a colony since the early 18th century, ceded in perpetuity by Spain at the conclusion of the War of Succession. The cession was perpetual, but Spain hasn't relinquished its hope of reclaiming the gift.

At one point, the small border between Gibraltar and Spain was entirely closed. By isolating Gibraltar, Spaniards hoped to persuade the inhabitants of the Rock to switch their allegiance to Spain. Somehow, it didn’t work.

A city governed by Great Britain and adjacent to Spain, and having had to endure prolonged isolation, Gibraltar unsurprisingly gained something close to independence. The Spanish are unable to govern it, and the British, provided they retain space for sailors and the like, aren't overly concerned about the activities of the inhabitants of the world's most renowned Rock.

Consequently, the territory has evolved into a miniature country, exuding a certain charm (if one disregards some tax-related machinations). It brings to mind ships in bottles or cities encased within snow globes. These objects seemingly diminish the world's complexity into something we can grasp in our hands. Gibraltar, too, appears to encompass everything in a condensed form, resembling a fictional country designed as the backdrop for a detective novel — or perhaps a model nation for children to study in school. There's the Governor's House, the Post Office, Parliament, the Cable Car, the Airport, the Beach...

Continents and countries

We ascend the cable car and, upon reaching the summit of the Rock, gaze southward.

We behold two continents, a sea, and an ocean. We stand atop one of the Pillars of Hercules; on the opposite side, we glimpse the other pillar, Ceuta, a fragment of Spain that Morocco covets (both sides of the strait present geopolitical challenges). These two cities have an history of changing hands. Gibraltar – the Mount of Tariq – marked the onset of the Muslim conquest of the Peninsula; Ceuta marked the commencement of the Portuguese endeavor to conquer North Africa (it later became Spanish). History's whirlwind has swept through those pillars: if we visited them randomly throughout history we would find Romans, Americans, Phoenicians, Arabs, Russians, Greeks, Portuguese – and now, numerous Chinese cargo ships.

Let's shift our gaze to the north. Observing the city from this elevated vantage point, we can compare it to the map. The city sprawls on the left. To the right, we can glimpse several beaches alongside the water reservoir – a Gibraltarian Riviera –, with the Andalusian coast extending to the horizon.

Monkeys and languages

We looked southward, we looked northward, and now, when we glance at our feet, we discover a monkey attempting to steal our mobile phone. The monkeys of Gibraltar bewilder us: we are so accustomed to observing their counterparts in zoos or from the safe distance of television that we assume these monkeys will be just as docile. However, these are wild animals, unafraid to snatch what they can, and then perching on the ledge to watch their human relatives construct cities, countries, and borders below.

Monkeys and humans share many traits, including a fondness for the sense of sight. We delight in observing! Yet, it is our sense of hearing that we have harnessed to create what truly sets us apart as humans: languages.

So, which languages do we encounter in Gibraltar?

On the signs, nearly everything is in English, the sole official language. As we stroll through the streets, we overhear a lot of Spanish, featuring various Andalusian accents. We also discern English – and people who speak standard English alongside Andalusian Spanish, in a fascinating blend that demonstrates whether one speaks the standard language is not a matter of greater or lesser linguistic ability.

If we listen attentively, we might still catch someone speaking Llanito, the distinct language of Gibraltar, born from the contact between English and Spanish, with traces of Maltese, Genoese, Portuguese, and even a word or two of Hebrew. Under the dominance of English and Spanish, Llanito is now fading, but it remains a defining aspect of Gibraltar's identity. Llanito is not a simple amalgamation of words from the two languages – it possesses its own structure and systematic usage. It is a genuine language created by contact. It is not inferior to any other language. While unlikely, it is possible to imagine a world where Llanito becomes a standardized language, spoken by millions. After all, when examined closely, English itself is a language forged through contact between Old English, the Norse of the Vikings, and later, Norman French (and this account is already a simplification).

There have been attempts to create a Llanito orthography. On this page, we find texts like this:

Er Llanito ê un Iberou Ròumants làngwij ke tiene’r Westen Andalûh komo lingwìstik beis. Ouva lô s’anyô ête lingwìstik beis s’a vîto ìnfluentst polô làngwijez ke històrikli s’an avlàu n’Hivertà (Henovêh, Haketìa, etc). Nlô s’ùrtimô 70/80 anyô er Llanito s’a vîto strongli ìnfluentst pol’Inglêh Vritàniko tanto à un lèksikol komo à un gramàtikol lèvol.

The text begins: "Llanito is an Ibero-Romance language that has Western Andalusian as its linguistic base." I'll leave the rest as a translation exercise for those who are interested...

A storm of languages

It is a way of speaking of a particular town, but Llanito also exemplifies a universal phenomenon. In every corner of the world, the use of languages is distinct. Gibraltar is exceptional for uniting two well-known languages and for being a territory separated from its neighbors by a border; here, languages intermingle as in a test tube. However, all cities blend words in their own manner, even if there are fewer borders involved. Indeed, each family, neighborhood, class, or group of friends possesses its own unique way of speaking... We can use zoom of our linguistic lens to recognize that each individual has a singular mix of vocabulary, pronunciation, and syntax – linguists employ the term idiolect: the language as used by a single person.

From the effervescence of language on the streets, standards, artificial constructs for general use, emerge. They have gained such momentum that they now overshadow many regional nuances. Yet, even in a world where standards are paramount, all languages maintain variation – especially visible (or audible) in lands like Gibraltar, due to the amplifying effect of contact between different languages.

Human language constantly experiences centripetal forces, such as standards, the education system, and the social prestige of specific words or constructs, as well as centrifugal forces, like individual creativity, contact between languages, and the hidden prestige of words we use exclusively in a particular group.

Llanito borrows words from various sources. This language ultimately shatters the illusion with which we started. Lands like Gibraltar are far from being cities within snow globes: regardless of the number of borders established, people and words from diverse origins have converged there, resulting in a blend that makes the city particularly captivating.

“Book”, in Portuguese, is “livro”. So, to talk about books, we use “livros”. It seems quite straightforward: the plural is formed with an “-s” at the end of the word.

When we actually hear the plural “-s” coming out of the mouths of the Portuguese, it becomes a bit more complex. Syllable-ending “-s” can be read as (I’m using the International Phonetic Alphabet):

• [ʃ] if the word is isolated or the following sound is a voiceless consonant (“livros todos”);

• [ʒ] if the following sound is a voiced consonant (“livros dados”);

• [z] if the following sound is a vowel (“livros azuis”).

Curiously, few Portuguese notice this. If asked, most would say they read the letter always in the same way.

That’s because the difference between these three sounds, when at the end of a syllable, is never used to distinguish different words. The speaker doesn’t even realise it is making these distinctions — a linguist would say these three sounds are the same phoneme (in fact, they are three allophones of the same phoneme).

With these same sounds, but at the beginning of the syllable, it’s possible to create different words. In that place, all speakers notice the difference between the sounds:

• Chás [ʃ]

• Jaz [ʒ]

• Zás [z]

The same distinctions are either quite noticeable or rather imperceptible depending on the position of the sound inside a syllable.

Speakers know much less about their language than their own linguistic brains — it’s one of the amazing facts about human language.

This text is part of a larger article.

Our Latin “A” came from the Greek “A”, with little change, at least in the uppercase version. In between, “A” probably passed through the Etruscan script. People copied other people, not exactly knowing they were creating new scripts: letters were (and still are) useful tools.

But whom did Greeks copy? They copied the first letter of the Phoenician script, called “aleph”, which represented a consonantal sound to which Greeks had no use. In Greek, it was used to represent a vowel. (Phoenician script only represented consonants.)

The Phoenician letter was probably a simplification of a drawing of an ox that may have come from an Egyptian hieroglyph. Even today, if we turn our letter upside down, we can easily imagine horns.

So, my son, learning to write the letter “A”, is keeping up a tradition that goes back to Phoenicians and, quite probably, to Egyptian hieroglyphs — and we do the same when we press A in our keyboards.

If you’re interested in the history of writing, you may start by reading The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs and Pictograms, by Andrew Robinson.

For very good reasons I’ll explain soon, a few weeks ago I saw a play in a language I couldn’t understand: Sassarese. (I promise I’ll explain why I watched the play very soon… It had something to do with saving that particular language.)

Sassarese is spoken in northern Sardinia, so closely related to Corsican that there is no consensus as to whether they are separate languages or not (which is a common predicament). What Sassarese is not is a dialect of Italian.

The experience of seeing a play in an unknown language without translation is quite curious. You hold on to every detail to understand the story.

It was not impossible to follow the play’s broad lines. There's a common human (or is it Southern European?) base that allowed me to recognise gestures, intonations, jokes.

However, when we see a play with characters we can easily identify with, but do not understand, we begin to develop what we could call translation yearning. We don't want the play to be in our language — but we do want to understand it.

We are always hearing complaints about what is lost in translation, about how it is so much better to read the original text... Many people seem to forget they don't speak but a fraction of the world's languages.

Translation gives them access to books, films, texts and plays from all over the world.

Translators’ work is taken for granted in everyday life. When it is absent where we expect it, we finally understand what is lost without translation.

While I’m working on a new article for Language Travels, I invite you to read this one from last year.

Thanks so much!

See you soon,

Marco Neves

Language Travels

The languages of Afghanistan (and the origin of "orange")

A common origin Afghanistan, like almost every country in the world, has many languages. Two of them are especially important: Persian, the language most Afghans speak (many of them as a second language) and Pashto, a language spoken in the area nearest to Pakistan (where it is also spoken…

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5 years ago · 1 like · Marco Neves

Between Northern Portugal and Galicia, there was once a territory controlled by neither Portugal nor Spain. I’m talking about Couto Misto, which existed for centuries before its official partition in 1864, through the Treaty of Lisbon. Until then, it was independent in practice.

What language was spoken there? In those small villages you wouldn’t speak Spanish, certainly, except in very particular situations. Nor would standard Portuguese be heard so far away from big cities…

What was spoken was a language, quite varied as all languages tend to be, that would be called Portuguese on one side and Galician on the other. These two names, in the 19th century, around the border, would still point to very similar ways of talking — or at least to ways of talking that would not change abruptly when crossing the border.

In this area, we would be hard pressed to know which speakers were Galicians and which were Portuguese — in fact, we can still find older people living by the border whose speech is very difficult to pin down to Galician or Portuguese.

In Couto Misto, part of neither country, the name of the language would be what mattered least.

It was only during the 20th century that the border between Portugal and Galicia — one of the oldest borders in the world — began to clearly mark, in the language heard on the street, a clear division between Portuguese, increasingly standardised, and Galician, sharing more and more mental space with Castilian Spanish.

Couto Misto is one of many small cracks in the map that help us understand how national borders often hide a surprising linguistic world below.

This text is part of a larger article:

Language Travels

Princely Tongues: The Languages of Europe’s Five Smallest Countries

Tiny countries are fascinating. They always remind me of fairy tales (“there was a small kingdom where everybody was happy”), even if with some un-Grimm-ly tones (“they happily never paid a dime of taxes ever after”). They also tell us something about the history of Europe and its languages…

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4 years ago · 5 likes · Marco Neves

If you ever visit Galicia, you’ll find there are two official languages there: Galician and Spanish.

For an English speaker, it may be difficult to distinguish between Latin languages, especially if they are close.

A few hints to help you identify Galician (there are many more)...

1. Articles

Galician articles are “a”, “o”, “as” and “os”, instead of Spanish “la”, “el”, “las”, “los”.

This is also true of contractions: Galician uses “do” while Spanish uses “del”, for example.

2. Lack of “n” and “l” between vowels

In many words where Spanish has an “n” or a “l” between vowels, there’s nothing in Galician: “lua” (Spanish “luna”) or “cor” (Spanish “color”).

3. “Ano” instead of “año”

Some words where you find “ñ” in Spanish have an “n” in Galician: the Spanish “año” is “ano” in Galician.

4. “-de” instead of “-d”

Many words that end in “-d” in Spanish end in “-de” in Galician. So, the Spanish “red” is the Galician “rede”.

5. Many instances of “ei”

There's quite a number of "ei" diphthongs in Galician: "ribeira", "leite"...

You can find some of these differences in this photo. Above, you have Galician (“Rede de Estradas do Estado”) and below you have Spanish (“Red de Carreteras del Estado”).

By the way (and this is important…): you can also use everything I say above to help identify Portuguese.

This was just a preview of many more things I have to say about Galician…

1. Port wine (English)

This is a Portuguese product very much a feature of British culture. By the way, in Portugal we also have a typical product that comes from afar: bacalhau.

The name of port wine, spelled in lower-case letters in English, comes from the name of Porto, a Portuguese city (although, in fact, the wine cellars are in the neighbouring city of Gaia). Porto has a traditional English name, which is…

2. Oporto (English)

A foreign name for a city is called an exonym. Oporto was the traditional English exonym for Porto. It is starting to fall into disuse and, today, we more easily find Porto in English texts.

The origin of “Oporto” is clear: the name merges the Portuguese masculine definite article o with the name Porto.

Curiously, “Algarve” was also formed in a similar fashion. It merges the Arabian article with the noun meaning “West”. “Al”+”garve”: Algarve.

3. Porto (Portuguese)

The name of the city is also a common noun in Portuguese, meaning “harbour”.

Unlike most place names in Portuguese, it is necessary to use the article when talking about the city. So, Portuguese will say "O Porto é uma cidade." (Porto is a city), but "Lisboa é uma cidade" (without the article). 

But where does the common noun “porto” comes from?

4. *Pertus (Proto-Indo-European)

The origin of "porto" is the Latin word "portus". This word, in turn, originated from the Proto-Indo-European word "*pértus", which meant something like passage or crossing.

5. Pol (Persian)

The ancient Proto-Indo-European word meant “crossing”. That is the reason why we will find the same word, much altered, in Persian, meaning not “harbour”, but “bridge”. The word is "pol" — it has the same origin as "Porto" and, therefore, as "port [wine]".

So, we pulled the thread and went from port wine to a bridge in Tehran…

This is the third installment of the article What is the oldest language in the world?.

9. Written language

The previous part of this article ended with the sentence:

The point at which we begin to tell the history of a language is always a choice. It is quite arbitrary.

That may be true, but what matters to many people is the standard associated with written — and formal — language, based on the formal speech used in a particular zone or by a specific social group (usually the elite that inhabits the most important cities of each country). This standard is then associated to a language name: Portuguese, French, English, Irish…

In other words, when people ask what is the age of a specific language, they are asking the age of the written and literary tradition of that language.

Approaching the question in this way, it is possible to find some dates: the date when Portuguese became official; the date when Galician began being used in literature; the date when Irish gained a written standard…

It is this association between language and written standard that justifies anyone considering Irish to be a new language, as described in the first part of the article — the Irish have spoken it for millennia, but their current written standard is more recent.

The association also explains why there are some people who consider Galician an invention of the 19th century: modern Galician literature was reborn in that century — but even so, to say that Galician was born in the 19th century would mean ignoring that there had already been much older texts written in the language of the Galicians.

10. History backwards

This way of looking at language history is quite misleading: no language starts by being written.

Focusing on the written standard is telling the history exactly backwards.

The history of the written use of languages is important and interesting, but it hides so much! We must accept that dates are difficult to establish when looking at the origin of languages. We could then discover…

… how Portuguese didn’t just appear from nowhere when the first documents showed up — even though it is very difficult to be certain about what happened before.

… how the word “mother” came from the Indo-European “méh₂tēr,” a form reconstructed from a language that no one wrote.

… how those Indo-Europeans never called themselves that and never wrote the word “méh₂tēr” — but in whatever form, the word “mother” existed in the mouths of real people who perceived and felt their language how we feel ours.

… how this “méh₂tēr” will also have come from another older “mother”, until we arrive at the day when someone first said the word “mother”…

This is just an example of how language just unfolds.

11. Language and clay

Human language, in all its variability, is like mouldable clay, always becoming something else.

Every once in a while, someone picks up a piece of this clay and bakes a standard language — but on the street people continue to play with the same material, changing the shape of the language until the rigid form of the standard breaks and has to to be replaced by something else.

Fortunately, the standard doesn’t have to be too solid, and it is good that it’s not, since only then do we guarantee that it doesn’t go the way of katharevousa (as described in the previous part).

The standard, being artificial, is not invented out of thin air — it is based in linguistic materials that already exist. The standard is a selection of linguistic materials that then acts as a force on those same materials, sometimes as a conscious political act, with more or less success, sometimes through unconscious mechanisms of approximation to the speech of the elite.

There were Greeks who tried to mould the clay to resemble Ancient Greek — they failed, though some words of this artificial standard survived. The Basques now teach a unified language and this process has been going well.

Curiously, the language of the Galicians and the Portuguese lived for centuries under different standards, but the common material is still there, allowing both people to understand each other, even without noticing how similar the clay is on both sides of the border.

People tend to look at those baked pieces of clay (standards) and think that’s what language is. Then, it is easy to ask: when was it baked? However, the mouldable clay in the hands of people in the street is where the real history of language happens.

12. What is the oldest language in the world?

Let us return to our question: what is the oldest language in the world?

The only reasonable answer is to explain that languages ​​don’t have an age, as Gaston Dorren says. Languages ​​change, go through phases, become subject to different standards, blend and influence each other. Along this complex course, we give them names and adopt them as flags of our identities. Therefore, it’s natural that we want to know when the flags were created.

Languages have names and seem to have histories with beginnings and endings. It is natural that, for instances, Portuguese speakers wish to know if Spanish is an older language than their own — but the answer, once again, can only be this: none of those languages were born, they were just moulded over the centuries, from previous materials, in a process that began many millennia ago — and keeps going.

We all speak the oldest language in the world. We speak what resulted from the uninterrupted succession of people speaking and mixing from the beginning of time — and so we will continue, endlessly moulding words in our mouths, for centuries to come.

This new version of the article was created by the author based on a previous translation by Jennifer King (Eurologos). You can find a Portuguese version here.

Last week, I started an article about What is the oldest language in the world? If you haven’t read it, you can go there now.

5. So what about Basque? Isn’t it older than Spanish?

Last week, I tried to argue that no language is older than another one. Some readers may now tell me: this is all well and good, but the truth is that today the Spaniards speak a language that is very different from Latin — while, for example, the Basques speak the same language as they did 7000 years ago! In other words, Basque is older than Spanish, French, Portuguese… There are even those who say that it is the oldest language in the world.

Let’s stay away from written language. Let’s just think about what is spoken. Now, Basque has changed as much or perhaps more than Latin in the nearly 2000 years that separate us from the Romans (and Latin itself never stopped changing during the Empire — even Cicero would complain about the language of the streets…).

Basque changed — and split into different languages, just like Latin. The Basque spoken at home in different regions of the Basque country has differences as stark as the differences between the various Romance languages.

The official Basque taught in schools is Batua Basque, a standard — a written and formal record and a literary language — based on central Basque dialects (but with some contributions from other dialects). It’s only natural that Basques tried to create a unified language — it would be more difficult to protect and promote Basque if it were a collection of languages ​​incomprehensible to each other.

In other words, Basque did not remain unchanged and indivisible for millennia, alongside languages ​​born from Latin.

6. The New Roman Empire

Basically, the Basque situation is similar to what would happen in an alternative universe in which we try to resuscitate Latin like this: we institutionalise the French dialect, change the vocabulary and grammar a bit to bring it closer to the other Latin dialects — and we call this standard “Latin”.

At home, people speak something like Portuguese, Spanish, Italian for centuries — until schools, television and urbanisation begin to spread the new institutionalised Latin standard throughout the New Roman Empire (in this alternative universe, southern Europe is unified in one state).

In present-day Lisbon, grandparents still speak the dialect of the land (the Portuguese of our universe). The younger generations, however, already use Latin (the French of our universe), except when they talk to their grandparents.

Seem strange? It is strange. But this is what happens in the Basque Country — which has the additional complication of having another language in competition with this system of incomprehensible dialects and a common standard (called, by the way, euskera batua) — I’m speaking about Spanish, of course.

7. Has Greek survived for millennia?

There is also the case of Greek. It has kept the same name since Antiquity — is it not obvious that it’s older than Portuguese?

In fact, a Greek person of today will not be able to easily read an Ancient Greek without learning something about the languages. It is not that different from a Portuguese reading a Latin text.

From the nineteenth century until the 1970s there was an attempt to bring Modern Greek closer to Ancient Greek, to impose an artificial literary language with some classical forms. This artificial language is called katharevousa, as opposed to Demotic Greek, that is, the Greek of the street that is now official.

The fights were terrible — people died! The Greek language is sacred for the Greeks and katharevousa was a manifestation of the tendency to sacralize the language of the past as more perfect and genuine (a universal tendency).

The modern Greek standard ended up breaking free from this anachronistic standard and today the official standard is much closer to the language of the street. Some are still wishing for the return of the old language, but the truth is that Greek didn’t freeze in antiquity and Modern Greek is very different from Ancient Greek. Trying to keep it as it was then is an inglorious effort.

All languages ​​are like this — they change constantly. Admittedly, sometimes there are abrupt transitions. For example, when a population adopts the language of another population as its own — the language often jumps through an accelerated simplification. But even so, a population does not create its language out of thin air — a language is not born: it unfolds.

8. When does a language become another language?

I spoke of Basque and Greek to say this: it is almost impossible to determine the age of a language.

If we use the criterion of the name of the language or even its permanence in the same territory, it means we consider that Modern Greek and Ancient Greek are the same language. It doesn’t make much sense: the linguistic differences are comparable to the differences between Latin and French.

If we find that one language is born the moment it separates from another, and there is no mutual understanding, then we will have to speak of several Basque languages ​​— and all of them quite recent. Regarding Portuguese, in this case, it would have appeared when it separated, for example, from Galician — and when was that? Has it already happened?

Languages ​​are like those bacteria that multiply through division: new bacteria appear, it’s true, but none is older than the other — none is the mother of the other. Languages are weird that way.

Someone will say, well, the language is born when the first written documents appear. It is an appealing criterion — it is concrete, it is physical, we can point to a specific date. But if it is so, then most human languages ​​were never born: they were never written.

Basically, the point at which we begin to tell the history of a language is always a choice. It is quite arbitrary.

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The third part of this article will be published in the next issue of Language Travels. It will begin with a journey to the beginning of language…

1. From Irish to Galician

Languages are a physical manifestation of our individual identity — that’s why discussions about language ​​are a prodigious source of fiery words, raised pulses, faces flushed with indignation and fingers drumming impatiently in a rush to respond.

Some years ago, Gaston Darren told us how he got into a Twitter discussion between two Irishmen: a Unionist and a Republican… The Unionist said that the Irish language was an invention of the 20th century. It got heated, and the other man fired: shut up, man! Irish is older than English!

There are also discussions like this further south. Not long ago I found (and got involved in) a very heated discussion between some Galicians and a mad Portuguese twiterati who insisted that Galician was invented in the 19th century! One of the Galicians answered back, in a “hold me back!”-manner, that Galician is older than Portuguese.

Who is right?

In a way, nobody — but whoever says Galician was invented in the nineteenth century is more wrong than the others.

You will have imagined that the answer would not be simple — but perhaps it will be surprising to understand why…

2. A misleading metaphor

We walk around with a certain idea of ​​what a language is, which compels us to compare it to a person: it is born, it evolves, sometimes it dies. This metaphor serves us in many cases. But in others, it gives rise to rather misguided ideas.

Regarding the origin of the Romance languages, the general idea is this: there was a stabilised language (Latin), which broke down and gave rise to embryos of other languages. These embryos eventually resulted in national languages: Spanish, French, Portuguese, etc. — these languages ​ developed till they reached the pinnacles of the golden ages of their literary traditions.

Well, this idea is not completely false — but it is quite misleading. To understand this in depth, we have to do something: we must forget written language. Let us just think, for the moment, about language spoken on the street.

3. A language without name

Imagine in the time of Afonso Henriques, the first king of Portugal — or even before. Imagine what was spoken in the streets of Portugal 100 or 200 years before it was made an independent kingdom.

In writing, the Latin of yore prevailed. But what people spoke was not a much different language, quite distinct from written language. There was no name for that language. However, was it worse than Latin? Was it worse than the language Portuguese people speak nowadays. It allowed speakers to express emotions and to talk, as much as during the Roman Empire or right now. (Don’t forget: we are talking about spoken language!)

You can find, all around you, the extraordinary variety and richness of the words we all use, even those who can hardly write. That never changes. Yes, I know that there are some people who are not so eloquent, but in general we talk to convince, discuss, mock, play… — sometimes we write a whole novel with the mere intonation of a voice in a simple phrase; sometimes we insinuate naughtiness with a little interjection said in a certain way!

Jokes in the playground… Quarrels between couples… Old stories told to grandchildren… Deep conversations on the terrace… Words leave our mouths every minute and let us do so many things!

4. Languages unfold

This ability to talk and to live did not diminish when the Roman Empire disappeared. There was never a time when the tongue spoken by people ceased to be a full-fledged language in the brain of each speaker.

In the same way, the Romans had already received their language from what had come before — and Latin languages, nowadays, continue unfolding into something else.

With natural languages, there is never a moment when we can say: this language was born today. In general, language is transmitted without radical cuts across generations. It just unfolds and changes.

As Gaston Dorren explained in the discussion I spoke of, English and Irish have no age. They are both as old as human language. The same can be said of Portuguese and Galician — with the added complication that many people consider they are still the same language (but that’s a subject for another day).

The second part of this article will be published in the next issue of Language Travels. It will begin with this question: “So what about Basque? Isn’t it older than Spanish?”