30 October
Spanish in the New World

You were asked to think about these issues

Spanish never made widespread or deep-seated progress in the Phillipines, and despite over three centuries of presence was soon displaced by English in the early twentieth century. It will be interesting to ponder the roots of the difference with Spanish in the Americas, where despite US economic dominance Spanish is still growing at the expense of English.

Yes, indeed. Let us "ponder the roots of the difference with Spanish in the Americas."


... when a population starts to move towards that irresistable attractor, the US economy, as the Mexican and central Caribbean populations now are, new speaker communities will begin to crowd in, even if this means encroaching on the heartland of the most dynamic, and widely spoken, language in the world, English.

Does this worry you Anglophones? Should Anglophones be worried? Will they have to change themselves at all?


The scribes used by the inquisitors were ignorant of Latin, so that all other languages had to be translated into Castilian, with the corresponding danger (as the Catalan authorities pointed out) of distortion of meaning. An imperial power in this way found itself unable to communicate with or understand the peoples of the empire, save through the mediation of interpreters. This created an enormous and insuperable obstacle.

Is this not a fact of life today, in other circumstances? How can this communications gap be overcome?

an idea for the day

cover of the book named Ideas that changed the world

The idea of trade

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