11. The Accidental Grammarian

WHEN ISABEL WAS VISITING SALAMANCA with her traveling court, a certain Andalusian scholar named Antonio de Nebrija decided to take advantage of the visit to present to the queen an early version of an unusual project he was working on: a Spanish grammar. The queen was not impressed. “What’s the use of it?” she reportedly asked.

Most erudite Spaniards of the fifteenth century would have understood her puzzlement. In fact, many would have laughed at the idea that Castilian even had a grammar. In their minds, only scholarly languages like Latin or Greek had a grammar.

In a way, at least at that time, they were right.

Until Nebrija wrote his grammar, no one had bothered even to define what the nouns and verbs of Castilian were, let alone describe the rules that governed their use. The same was true of all European vernaculars at the time. A number of scholars had produced specialized grammars, lexicons, and spelling guides targeted to specific fields such as poetry or notary work. French scholars had penned a learning guide for members of the English court. In the thirteenth century, Uc Faidit had written a grammar of Provençal.

But none of these even came close to what Nebrija was working on. Nebrija understood that vernacular tongues had a grammatical structure, and that to be useful and thrive, their grammar needed to be defined. With his Gramática de la lengua Castellana, he became the first European to record and thoroughly systematize the grammar of a vernacular tongue.

Early in his career, Nebrija had distinguished himself mostly as a teacher of Latin: everything in his life had steered him away from Castilian. Born Antonio Martínez de Cala y Jarava between 1441 and 1444, near Seville, Nebrija adopted the name of his hometown, Nebrixa, now spelled Lebrija. He studied in Salamanca before traveling to Italy to complete his education at the University of Bologna. In Italy, he fell under the spell of the international humanist movement, which promoted the revival of classic literature in Latin and Greek and went as far as Latinizing his own name as Antonius Nebrissensis, after the fashion of the humanists.

Little more is known about the man himself. One historian described him as ill-tempered, another as unfaithful in matrimony. Only one thing is certain: Nebrija was inhumanly energetic. Like Alfonso X, the scholar is often described as Spain’s first “academician,” even though he lived two hundred years before Spain got a language academy. But in fact, he was an academy all by himself.

When Nebrija returned to Salamanca after studying in Italy, he was already a renowned Latinist whose knowledge surpassed that of even the most literate Castilians. Nebrija brought home the new science of philology—combining the study of literature with history and linguistics. Then he quickly settled on his new mission: to completely revamp Latin teaching in Spain, a reform he felt vital if Spaniards were to benefit from the humanist movement, whose lingua franca was a Latin of the highest standards.

Latin teaching in Spain was in a sorry state at the time, and Nebrija set out to raise the standards by his own example. His teaching methods were so rigorous that many doctors, theologians, jurists, and scholars who had unwittingly built careers on botchy Latin turned against him. Some of Nebrija’s foes were so resentful they tried to drag him in front of the Inquisition, accusing him of heresy.

Yet Nebrija soldiered on. In 1481, he published one of the great literary successes of the European Renaissance: a grammar of Latin called Introductiones latinae. It would be reprinted seventy times during his lifetime and remained the Spanish reference book for Latin teaching until 1770.

Nebrija didn’t stop with the Introductiones. One of his protectors, a Dominican friar named Hernando de Talavera, who was confessor and counselor to the queen, suggested that Nebrija translate the grammar into Spanish so that more Spaniards could read it. Nebrija took his advice and in 1488 published a new edition of Introductiones that included some comparison between Latin and Castilian. The work included a basic translation dictionary.

This was Nebrija’s first step toward standardizing Castilian.

The first translation of his Latin grammar was a revelation. It exposed a very basic problem that had escaped everyone else’s notice: Castilian had a grammar, as did all languages, but it was completely undefined. Before this, no one had even bothered to write a comprehensive dictionary to translate Latin into Castilian, or vice versa.

Nebrija knew the time had come to codify Castilian grammar. Thanks to the legacy of the thirteenth-century King Alfonso X, whose court had been a veritable factory of literary production of all kinds, Castilians were producing massive amounts of poetry, prose, plays, and chronicles by Nebrija’s time. Literary production had become particularly abundant after the 1450s. But this boom in Castilian writing had a curious side effect: it highlighted Castilian’s shortcomings and, more specifically, made Castilian’s lack of standardized grammar and spelling rules glaringly obvious. When the printing press arrived in Spain in 1472, the need for consistent grammar rules became even more urgent. In the absence of a dictionary, printed works become the reference of a language. Before the printing press, copyists produced manuscripts one at a time, so the grammar or spelling inconsistencies in these works showed only once. But when printers began producing hundreds, or even thousands of copies of documents, more people were exposed to grammatical and spelling errors, and those errors challenged the standards, which were still ill defined.

Since the time of Alfonso X, the reading public for Castilian had increased dramatically. In fact, Castilian was quickly wiping out the other written vernaculars on the peninsula. Castilian had even invaded poetry, previously the exclusive turf of Galician-Portuguese. Its influence had reduced Leonese to the status of a rustic language: playwrights used it in their works for the dialogue of shepherds and villains. Even Aragonese was disappearing: in 1528, the playwright Jaime de Huete would apologize for including Aragonisms in his plays.

Castilian was also changing rapidly. First, its pronouns were taking new forms. The plural pronouns vos (you) and nos (we) were in the process of being transformed by the addition of otros (others). This led authors to produce the forms that are current today: vosotros and nosotros, which literally have the sense of “you all” and “we all.” Ustedes is the contraction of uuestra mercedes (your graces); usted is the same abbreviation in the singular. This formal form was generalized the same way you took precedence over thou in English (historically, you was formal and thou was informal).

The suffix -illo had by this time morphed into -ito, -cito, and even -tico, and was creating a whole new category of diminutives that are still common in colloquial Spanish today: disgusto (disgust) becomes disgustillo (a slight disgust), poco (a little) becomes poquito (a wee bit), and pobre (poor) is morphed into a probrecito (poor little thing). (Costa Ricans are known as “Ticos” in the Spanish-speaking world because of their custom of using the suffix -tico instead of -ito or -cito: they say hermanitico instead of hermanito for “little brother.”)

The Italian Renaissance was in full swing in Nebrija’s time, so people were introducing hundreds of Italianisms into Castilian, including bonanza (fair wind, prosperity), corsario (corsair), novela (novel), piloto (pilot). As humanism became more fashionable, literate Castilians tried to add chic to Castilian by introducing Latin words, phrases, and syntax. The Latin trend affected the written style of Castilian: writers began separating adjectives from nouns and putting two, three, or four unrelated terms in between. Writers also took to displaying their knowledge by multiplying synonyms, a fashion to which even Nebrija himself succumbed in the prologue to his grammar:

Cuando bien comigo pienso mui esclarecida Reina: y pongo delante los ojos el antigüedad de todas las cosas: que para nuestra recordación e memoria quedaron escriptas: una cosa hallo y saco por conclusión mui cierta (…)

If you thought like me, my enlightened Queen, and considered with your eyes the antiquity of all things which have been left into writing for our record and memory, there is one conclusion I found out and drew with certainty (…)

In 1492, Nebrija published both a first grammar of Castilian and a dictionary, the Lexicon hoc est Dictionarium ex sermone latino in hispaniensem.

He was actually not the first scholar to write a dictionary of Castilian. Two years earlier, Alfonso de Palencia had published the Uniuersale Compendium Vocabulorum, which supplied Castilian translations of Latin words. But Nebrija’s Latin-to-Castilian dictionary, with thirty thousand entries, set a new standard. And Nebrija kept raising the bar. Three years later, he added a volume to the dictionary, this time with Castilian-to-Latin translations, which included the first Native American word: canoa (canoe). Though Nebrija embraced the rule of one entry per line, and categorized each term as noun, adjective, verb, or adverb, the work was far from what we would call a dictionary today: it didn’t include full definitions, and the words were sometimes classified in alphabetical order, sometimes according to etymology.

Yet in spite of its shortcomings and limitations, Nebrija’s dictionary shaped the development of Spanish lexicography for centuries. In 1500 it was translated into French, as Vocabularius. Though it was eventually eclipsed by the work of the French lexicographer François Estienne, who published two French-Latin dictionaries in 1539, Nebrija’s work did inspire the early French lexicographers César Oudin and Jean Nicot.

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Nebrija’s choices consolidated what Alfonso had begun two hundred years earlier and shaped the development of the Spanish language for centuries to come. Nebrija reinforced some of the fundamental characteristics of Spanish, including a strong tendency toward phonetic—rather than etymological—spelling.

Like all great grammarians and lexicographers, Nebrija determined the written standards for Castilian by referring to common usage. Even from its earliest origins, Castilian had always tended toward simplicity, no doubt a result of the multiple instances of leveling the language went through during the population shifts that took place during the Reconquista. Like Alfonso, Nebrija embraced this quality. In the introduction of the Gramática, he stated his goal as “adecuar la escritura a la pronunciación” (to conform writing with pronunciation).

Again, following Alfonso’s precedent, Nebrija jettisoned Latinized spellings.

Some Castilian scholars were still writing fablar, facer, and fijo, which were etymologically correct, even though Castilians pronounced them hablar (to speak), hacer (to do, to make), and hijo (son). (In the Poema del mio Cid, these words appear with an f, even if oral Castilian had never pronounced the f.) Sticking to Latin etymology would have been a common choice for a grammarian of his time, but Nebrija bucked this trend. He noticed that some writers had started to replace silent f’s with h’s and decided to systematize the practice.

Yet the letter h was an issue of its own. A Latin inheritance, it was sometimes silent, sometimes pronounced, as in English. Nebrija decided to keep the h in spelling but only if it was actually pronounced (again, much like in English). Most Spanish grammars written after Nebrija did the same.

One of Nebrija’s great contributions was to distinguish between the letters u and v, and i and j, which nobody had done before. U and j do not exist in the Classical Latin alphabet. They had begun to appear in Castilian centuries earlier as a fancy way to write v and i. Nebrija realized that these graphic innovations could actually make Castilian clearer, but only if he assigned specific sounds to them. So he did.

Nebrija was the first to develop terminology for verb tenses: he called them passado (simple past), venidero (future), acabado (perfect), no acabado (imperfect), mas que acabado (pluperfect). It would take four more centuries for another grammarian, the Venezuelan scholar Andrés Bello, in the nineteenth century, to follow Nebrija’s path and organize the verb system of Spanish.

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More globally, Nebrija also introduced two notions that became the foundation of Spanish speakers’ attitude toward their language: buen uso (good usage) and fijeza (fixedness, or stability in the sense of standardization).

In the case of buen uso, Nebrija was, again, perpetuating the work of Alfonso. Two centuries earlier, the king had established buen uso—he called it castellano drecho—as the “ethic” of Castilian. It summed up his quest, and that of all the copyists he employed, to find a middle ground where language rules would follow good taste. After Nebrija embraced it, the idea would become influential not just in Spain but also abroad. In France it spawned the notion of bon usage, which became the foundation of the French ethic of language purism.

Nebrija also established the idea of fijeza, or “setting” a language. Previously, the idea that a language could be “pure” or “classical” had applied only to Latin; Nebrija was the first to apply it to a vernacular. The idea caught on, especially outside Spain. In 1583, the Florentines created the first language academy, the Accademia della Crusca, which produced a dictionary twenty-nine years later, 120 years after Nebrija. Crusca means bran, the part of wheat that is discarded. The academy took this name because its mission was to clean up the language (i.e., discard the bran). In 1635, the French followed suit and created the French Academy.

It is an understatement to say that Nebrija devoted his life to standardizing Spanish. He was about fifty-one when he published his grammar and his dictionary in 1492. Over the next twenty years, he added ten thousand words, and he didn’t stop there. At age seventy-five, in 1517, Nebrija set another precedent in the story of Spanish when he published his Reglas de la Orthographía en la lengua castellana (a book of spelling and pronunciation). Like his grammar and his dictionary, the Reglas de la Orthographía was a spin-off of his original Latin grammar. Reglas de Orthographía became an instant hit and inspired a long series of similar works.

The Orthographía (or ortografía in its modern spelling) is a genre unique to Spanish culture and alien to English and French speakers. An ortografía is the closest thing one can get to a sixteenth-century tape recorder. It explains how each phoneme in Spanish sounds and shows how each sound is written. In short, an ortografía sets out the rules for spelling, pronunciation, and punctuation so that speakers can transcribe what they hear and sound out what they read.

Nebrija’s Orthographía was an ingenious and original idea that spawned an entirely new genre of Spanish reference works. After Nebrija, a new ortografía appeared in Spanish every fifteen years or so, up to the present. In 2010, the Real Academia Española (Spain’s official language academy) published an eight-hundred-page ortografía.

Nebrija’s Reglas de Orthographía arrived in the nick of time, just when the Crown of Castile was putting the overseas colonial expansion into overdrive. Scholars often wonder at the unity of correct pronunciation and grammar among countries as varied as Spain, Mexico, Paraguay, and Ecuador. Nebrija is the reason. The fact that he codified spelling prevented Spanish from exploding into a myriad of dialects after the Spanish Empire spread across the globe.

Strangely, during his lifetime, Nebrija’s Castilian grammar was less successful than his other works. On one hand, this can be explained by the fact that grammars simply never sell as well as dictionaries, mainly because vocabulary changes faster than do the structures of a language (dictionaries have to be revised more frequently to remain useful). But another factor accounted for the relative unpopularity of Nebrija’s grammar: he was ahead of his time. Even educated Castilians had difficulty swallowing the idea that Castilian had a grammar. (By the time the idea sank in, the Spanish language had evolved so much that Nebrija’s work was obsolete.)

One last factor that might explain the modest success of the grammar was Nebrija himself. He never managed to conquer his inner Latinist. When he wrote his grammar, Nebrija believed that Castilian was on a downhill slope. At best, he thought the grammar would stall its inevitable decadence. In his dedication to the queen in the grammar’s prologue, Nebrija promised to “limpiar, fijarla en su alcanzado esplendor” (clean, stabilize [Castilian] in its broken splendor)—the decisive word here being “broken.”

Nebrija’s bleak assessment of Castilian’s prospects probably didn’t help Isabel overcome her earlier doubts about the utility of a Castilian grammar. That might be why, in the Gramática’s prologue, Nebrija pitched the work as a tool of foreign policy. On the fifth line of the prologue, he writes, “Language has always been the companion of empire and has followed it in such a way that they have jointly begun, grown, and flourished…” Farther down, he explains, “After your Highness has put the barbarians and the nations of foreign tongues under her yoke, upon your victory, these will need to receive your laws, those that a conqueror imposes to the vanquished, and with those laws our language. Then, my Grammar shall assist in the knowledge of these laws, like we needed to learn the grammar of Latin to learn Latin.”

Looking back, Nebrija’s words sound prophetic, but only in retrospect. He wrote the prologue in August 1492, just after Christopher Columbus had set sail for India. Yet Nebrija wasn’t referring to an empire in the New World, because no one yet suspected its existence. The empire to which he alluded was the one Spain’s monarchs dreamed of establishing over the Mediterranean world, all the way to Jerusalem, and maybe even to India—Isabel and Fernando were never short on ambition.

So while Nebrija was the first thinker in Europe to conceive of language as a political tool, he was mistaken about the trajectory of Castilian. Language is rarely the instrument of empires. It follows empires, and even then, not always. Nebrija did not have to look far for examples. Of all the empires that had controlled the Iberian Peninsula—including the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Visigoths, and the Arabs—only one imperial language had taken root: Latin.

When Nebrija died in 1522, around the age of eighty-one, all his predictions about Spanish were proving wrong. Far from declining, the Castilian language was reaching new literary heights. Though Spanish would become the language of an empire, it wasn’t the empire he’d imagined.