Galician language

“ The Spanish Language
The Iberian Peninsula is not a linguistic unit. Not to speak of the Basque, which still forms an island of some importance in the north-west, three Romance languages share this extensive territory: (1) Portuguese-Galician, spoken in Portugal, Galicia, and a small portion of the province of Leon; (2) Castilian, covering about two-thirds of the Peninsula in the north, centre, and south; (3) Catalan, occupying a long strip of territory to the east and south-east. ”

“ But the fact of paramount importance in the condition of Austrian Poles is that in spite of their minority in the largest part of Galicia, they represent the dominating element in the Galician population. Vast estates and great industries are almost exclusively in their hands. They are also intellectual leaders and the liberal professions are practically entirely held by them. ”

“ Portuguese, like Castilian, is a literary language, which for ages has served as the vehicle of the literature of the Portuguese nation constituted in the beginning of the 12th century. Galician, on the other hand, which began a literary life early in the middle ages—for it was employed by Alfonso the Learned in his Canligas in honour of the Virgin—decayed in proportion as the monarchy of Castile and Leon, to which Galicia had been annexed, gathered force and unity in its southward conquest. ”

“ The main part of the peninsula uses languages that have arisen from Latin, one on the west coast which is known in the two forms of Portuguese and Galician, one along the northern portion of the east coast which is called Catalan, and is more nearly related to the langue d'oc than to Spanish, which is the language {31} of the great plateau of the peninsula, and has become also the language of Andalusia and of the non-Catalan east coast. ”

“ The herdsmen, or vaqueros, of Leitariegos, on the Upper Narcea, form almost a distinct tribe. They keep apart from the rest of the Asturians, and always marry amongst themselves. Old dialects maintain their ground. The peasants on the coast of Cantabria talk their bable, and in Galicia the dialects differ even from village to village. The gallego, especially as spoken near the Miño, is Portuguese rather than Spanish, but a Lusitanian is nevertheless unable to understand a Galician, owing to the curious sing-song intonation of the latter. ”

“ It was as recently as the last decade of the nineteenth century that students of Spanish history became conscious of the fact that a true knowledge of the history of Spanish civilisation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries could only be attained by careful study of the literature produced in the Galician tongue during Galicia’s second age of gold. ”

“ The natives of Galicia speak a dialect more allied to Portuguese than the Spanish, being of more decided Celtic descent, like the Portuguese, than the rest of the people of the Peninsula. The natives of Catalonia speak a dialect half French, half Spanish, which may be considered the representative of the ancient Provencal or Limoisin. It is very guttural as well as nasal. The Basque or Biscayan language is entirely distinct from the modern Spanish, and also from the Latin, the Celtic, or that of any neighbouring country, and is well deserving of study. ”

“ From points of natural wealth and beauty, Galicia is perhaps, of all countries, the least favoured of God. Shut out from the warm southern winds by the Carpathian mountains, and exposed to the northern blasts that sweep down from the broad steppes of Russia, the long and narrow stretch of Galician territory is probably the most inhospitable region in the western world. ”

“ Galicia seems to have been the land of romantic sentiment whence the poetry of love exhibited in the lyric compositions of Spain and Portugal was transplanted. No Portuguese or Spaniard is so celebrated in poetic literature, for the influence of love on his fate, as the Galician poet and knight Macias, who lived in the first half of the fifteenth century, and of whose remarkable history a brief sketch may properly be introduced here. ”

“ The Galician, it is true, possesses some shrewdness, especially when the question is how to cheat his neighbor, but for all that he can neither cultivate any industry nor better his miserable condition. ”

“ Clear and distinct her poetic personality stands out from amongst all the rest; she has given the impulse, and others are already following in the path her genius has so clearly indicated, and a literary movement has been set on foot which may possibly terminate in a third Golden Age for Galicia.
Is it necessary for the complete nationalisation of France that the language of Provence should die? Is it indispensable for the welfare of Belgium that the Flemish tongue should disappear? ”

“ There are popular couplets written in the language of Galicia which can be traced back to the year 1110, namely the couplets that were sung on the occasion of the enthusiastic welcome given by the townspeople of Santiago to Bishop Gelmirez, who in 1105 had founded there a school for the cultivation of oratory, letters, and the Latin tongue. It is true, as Valmar points out, that the formation of the languages of Castille and Galicia must have required centuries, but that formation reached its completion towards the middle of the twelfth century. ”

“ The Galician is well favoured by Nature, and being a patient, hard-working man of not much mental capacity, very pious and an ardent advocate of small holdings, gets through life with a contented spirit. ”

“ The constant drain of the best and strongest of the male population of Galicia by emigration is the saddest phase of Galician life. Something like twenty thousand Gallegos emigrate to the Argentine Republic every year. They are usually men of the soil, crowded out by a vicious system of taxation and the infinite subdivision of the soil amongst a multitude of peasants owning their tiny crofts. The soil and climate of Galicia are the best in Spain and the people are by far the most laborious ”

“ The visitor whose aim is but to pass a pleasant holiday of a few weeks in Galicia, especially without [Pg 17] a good knowledge of the language, cannot hope to study the unspoilt people in their own homes. Those whom he will meet in the seaports and along the bays are to some extent sophisticated and accustomed to deal with foreigners, but it would well repay a scholar interested in Celtic folklore to live amongst the peasants of some of the inland valleys for a time, to gather some of the traditions which are yet handed down from remote antiquity amongst these primitive folk. ”

“ His texts reveal a virtuosity in the use of old Castilian with a mingling of the pure vocables of Galician, once the poetic tongue of Spain, so imaginative as to be an art. It is an art of tone and verbal plastic. Don Ramón is an hidalgo of Galicia, that rocky northwest province which the Arabs scarce pierced: and he boasts of his Celtic blood. There is a strong and curious kinship between the dialogue of his books and that of Synge. But the kinship goes no deeper than an echo. The volumnear body of Valle-Inclán’s prose serves to mass a death: his drama is one of furious rhetoric. ”

“ Portuguese and Gallego were the same language up to the fifteenth century, hence it is that the great critic Menéndez y Pelayo always includes Portuguese writers in his studies of Spanish literature.
Galicia is fortunate in having an able living exponent, the Señora Emilia Pardo Bazán, whose novels are full of the charmed melancholy of the province. The Gallego is derided in other parts of Spain, his name is synonymous with boor, for he is judged by the clumsy mozo who seeks work in the south. "The more unfortunate a country the greater is the love of its sons for it. ”

“ To see the Galician peasant as he is, one must study him at his local fair, and on one of his long pilgrimages to a holy shrine. On these occasions, as on similar occasions with the Irish peasantry, he is for a time boisterously gay, given to singing, dancing, and music, the latter being [Pg 18] produced from the native bagpipes, gaita, and tambour. But in the long winter nights in his dark cottage, with its smoky fire of vine-cuttings and pine-cones, the Gallego, like his brother Celt elsewhere, is moody, poetical and speculatively mystic. ”

“ Nearest of all the Iberian peninsula to our own land, the ancient kingdom of Galicia is as well-nigh unknown to us as any section of Europe. As far back as mankind's memory carries it has been Spain's "last ditch." Up into this wild mountain corner of the peninsula retreated in its turn each subdued race as conqueror after conqueror swept over the land,--the aboriginal Iberians before the Celts, the Celtiberians before the coast-hugging Phoenicians and Carthaginians, these before the omniverous Romans, followed as the centuries rolled on by Vandal, Suevi, Goth and Moor. ”

“ Galicia of the twentieth century has inherited from Galicia of the Middle Ages poetry, sculpture, and architecture, each of which, in its own line, is absolutely unrivalled. These offer a wide and fascinating field of research to all those who seek to understand the civilisation of that period in the world’s history. The architecture of Galicia can be said to be exclusively Christian, for Moorish influence, which, penetrating into every other part of Spain, mingled itself with Christian art and produced what Spaniards cell el estilo mudejar, never gained any footing in this province. ”

“ It is a comforting reflection now—such is the mellowing effect of time—that though he was unable to appreciate the technical advice I gave him in English, yet he also did not realise the force of my additional remarks when I criticised his work—indeed, when I left he raised his hat, and in the politest and most polished manner wished me, so I gathered, continued health and prosperity. The Galician who has wronged you has a wondrous gift for making you understand that you are the offender. ”

“ Feijoó went on to insist that the Gallegan idiom was not, as generally supposed, a sub-dialect of Latin nor a corruption of the Spanish tongue, but an independent branch from the Latin tree, a branch more closely connected with the parent stem than even the language of Castille. “No one denies,” he says, “that Latin words have degenerated less in the Portuguese and Gallegan idioms than they have in Spanish: this could not be the case if they were sub-dialects of the Spanish language—the nearer the fountain the purer the stream. Italian is the purest of the Latin dialects ”

“ In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries they attained such proficiency in imitations of Provençal song that it became the fashion for lyrics throughout Spain to be composed in Galician or Portuguese, and a large collection of lyrics in praise of the Virgin was compiled and in part written by King Alfonso X of Castille in the Galician tongue. ”

“ A Galician, for instance, is more like an Auvergnat than a Catalonian, and an Andalusian reminds us of a Gascon. Most of the inhabitants, however, have certain general features, derived from a common national history and ancestry. ”

“ There are towns in Galicia that are decaying for want of roads by which they can carry on commerce with their neighbours. All the water used in Coruña has to be carried by women from the fountains, and the town waterworks are only now in course of construction.
Aguiar speaks of the strong nomadic instinct of the ancient Celts as being inherited by the Gallegan people—and certainly the Irish Celts are addicted to emigration. As regards education—of the various provinces in Spain, Galicia can boast of having the best educated lower classes. ”

“ Journeying by diligence, despite its drawbacks and discomforts, is one of the most convenient ways of seeing Galicia, and if the traveller understands Spanish there is every opportunity of learning the names of places and buildings and getting explanations of the meaning of unfamiliar customs. ”

“ Delimitation of the area of the Polish speech is more easily [114] made in theory than on the field. The transition to alien languages is rarely well defined. Such detailed work as has been undertaken in western Europe, where the predominant language in small villages and hamlets is often determined, does not exist for eastern sections of the continent. The zeal of German and Russian agents of nationalist propaganda aggravates the problem. Within Galicia the boundary line passes west of Sanok and Radymno. ”

“ Nothing can more clearly give an idea of what primitive travelling in Galicia means than to watch the diligence from Ferrol, Finisterre, or Santiago drive up with jingling bells and cracking of whips, to put down weary passengers, and, the horses having been unharnessed, to see the oxen draw the coach to its departure-place. There are to be seen, too, the miradores, glazed frontages for which Corunna is celebrated. These vast stretches of windows protect the houses from the strong winds in winter and form bright and warm interior verandahs. ”

“ Two of Spain’s greatest living archæologists, Villa-Amil y Castro and Lopez Ferreiro, are sons of Galicia; and “the best authoress that Spain has produced during the present century,” [308] Doña Emilia Pardo Bazán, is Galicia’s daughter. So much for the stupidity of the Gallegans.
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Fare thee well, Galicia! Thou art a land where railways have preceded roads, and where motor-cars have arrived before trains; thou art a land whose peasants are oppressed by bad government, usury, and their own crass ignorance ”