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October 31
In their letter in this week’s CBN, Angela and David Hudson show ignorance when they write off Catalan as “a bastard Spanish language.” They should read the article on Catalan Language in Wikipedia. There they will see that Catalan already developed in the Middle Ages from Late Latin; like Spanish, French and all the other so-called Romance languages. It’s true that over the years Catalan has borrowed a lot of vocabulary from Spanish. Languages in close contact always borrow from one another. English borrowed a large slice of its vocabulary from French, but we wouldn’t call it bastardised French.
It’s not only spoken Catalan that’s as old as Spanish. The great Valencian Catalan medieval novel “Tirant Lo Blanch” (Tirant, The White Knight), written by Joanot Martorell around 1490, preceded and perhaps influenced Cervantes while he was writing Don Quixote.
Brian Harris
