7. The Prince of Language Buffs

THE EASTERN AND WESTERN WALLS of the U.S. Capitol’s Chamber of the House of Representatives are decorated with twenty-three relief portraits of famous historical lawgivers who inspired American legislators. It’s kind of a curious collection. There are more French faces (including Napoleon’s) than British, more Muslim kings than popes, and more great figures of antiquity than actual Americans (which include only George Mason’s and Thomas Jefferson’s).

One of the portraits, the face of a handsome bearded medieval king, framed in laurels, doesn’t really fit any category.

The enigmatic character is Alfonso X, who was king of Castile from 1252 to 1284. Castilian though he was, King Alfonso X actually had a more direct impact on American law than some of the more obscure characters on the wall. Alfonso X codified the Siete Partidas (Seven Parts), which remained the basis of the Spanish legal system until the nineteenth century. When the United States annexed what is now the American Southwest from Mexico in 1848, old Spanish deeds, oaths, and contracts were recognized by American courts and Alfonso X’s Siete Partidas became a foundation law of the United States.

Alfonso X would make tremendous contributions to the story of Spanish. Yet he certainly did not go down in history as one of Spain’s great kings. Alfonso X was an ambitious imperialist who spent his reign dilapidating Spain’s royal treasury to finance far-fetched schemes like invading Morocco, or trying to get himself crowned Holy Roman emperor, neither of which came to fruition. His fiscal policy was so misguided that he ended up setting off major rebellions throughout his kingdom, first, of the mudéjares in 1264, then of the entire Castilian nobility in 1272. When Alfonso finally departed from this world, he left his kingdom on the verge of a civil war.

Yet in one way, Alfonso X did as much to unify Spain as had his father, the great Fernando III. Alfonso X devoted all his talents and energy to achieving a single objective: improving the reputation of the Spanish language. It was his one project that proved a resounding success.

Though by Alfonso X’s time the reputation of Castilian was improving, few poets were willing to use it for literary production, or for writing anything more refined than a contract—and poets were the arbiters of taste in the Middle Ages. Fernando III had done his bit to promote Castilian by ordering his chancery to write official documents in it. Yet at the end of Fernando’s reign, Castile was still multilingual. Fernando’s own tombstone was testimony to this: it bore inscriptions in four languages: Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, and Castilian.

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Even a king can’t force people to use a language they’re not interested in and Alfonso X knew it. To get his subjects to adopt Castilian, he had to make it more prestigious. And there was only one way to do that: by making Castilian a vehicle of culture, on par with Greek and Latin.

Despite his shortcomings as a statesman, Alfonso X was unmatched in his erudition. He came by this both by inclination and through education. Although he spent much of his childhood in Galicia, Alfonso’s mother spoon-fed him the Arab classics available in Toledo, the intellectual jewel of Europe. Known as the cabeza de Europa (head of Europe), Toledo had attracted renowned twelfth-century European scholars like the English Daniel of Morley and the Italian translator Gerard of Cremona, both of whom traveled to Toledo to study ancient Greek and Arabic texts there.

To transform Castilian into a prestigious tongue, Alfonso worked with what he had—literally.

During his thirty-two-year reign, Alfonso earned the title El Sabio (translated as “the Wise” although it literally means “the Savant”). He orchestrated the production of his brain trust like a giant conductor. He determined what books would be written or translated, assigned the work, then edited and improved language or style. He went as far as saying what illustrations should be included in manuscripts. There is a lot of dispute, still to this day, about what Alfonso actually wrote himself and what he had commissioned. According to Alfonso’s biographer Joseph O’Callaghan, the king would have described himself an “active general editor” rather than author.

Many scholars consider Alfonso the precursor of the humanist movement in Europe, which encouraged the recovery and study of lost classics. Whatever the case, Toledo was full of important Latin, Greek, and Arabic works, and Alfonso spent his life translating as many of them as possible into Castilian. Before he became king, Alfonso translated two Arab classics himself: El Libro de Calila e Dimna (anecdotes and moral tales for the use of kings) and El Lapidario (a book on magic). In the prologue to El Lapidario, published in 1250, he explains that he translated it from Arabic into Castilian so people could “have a better understanding of it, and could approve of it.”

Many authors wrongly credit Alfonso with creating Toledo’s famous Escuela de traductores (School of Translation). In fact, the school was nearly a century old when Alfonso was born. Its real creator was Raimundo, archbishop of Toledo from 1126 to 1151. Many classics that had been forgotten in Europe and often survived only in their Arabic translation had been made available to Christian Europe after the taking of Toledo in 1085. Thanks to Raimundo, Jewish, Arab, and Christian scholars systematically translated them into Latin or Castilian or both.

But even by Alfonso’s time, Toledo still had plenty of works left to translate. And thanks to the diverse cultural heritage of Toledo, the king also had a good supply of Arab, Jewish, and Christian scholars and translators at his disposal. Under Alfonso’s supervision, they produced, literally, a tidal wave of Castilian translations on all manner of subjects—from magic and law to astronomical tables. They produced the Libro de los juegos (Book of Games), which included a description of a novel Persian game called ajedrez (chess). It is fascinating to read the thirteenth-century description of a game that had not yet been Europeanized, with moves like jaque mate (checkmate), itself an Arabicization of shâh mâtâ, meaning “kill the shah.”

Yet during his lifetime, it was Alfonso’s scientific work that brought him the most renown in Europe. Like his Arab predecessors in Toledo, Alfonso was fascinated with astronomy and astrology. His most famous accomplishment was the Alfonsine Tables, which calculated the position of the moon, sun, and planets with respect to stars. For the next three centuries, these remained the most popular astronomical tables in Europe. Everyone used them, even Nicolaus Copernicus, the first European astronomer to claim that Earth was not the center of the universe. Alfonso also commissioned a translation of the Libro del saber de astronomía (Book of Astronomical Knowledge), a collection of thirteen Arabic scientific treatises from the ninth to the twelfth century.

Alfonso X’s range of interest had almost no limits: he worked on everything from history and astronomy to poetry and science. He produced the Estoria de España and the Crónica General, histories of Spain and of the world. The former alone has an astounding 1,135 chapters. To write it, Alfonso X drew on the Bible, Saint Augustine’s commentary, Pliny the Elder, Ovid, French authors, and even Arab historians like ibn-Wasif and el Bacrí. The very title Estoria de España also demonstrates eloquently how much progress the French idea of an “España” had made in the peninsula.

In terms of the language itself, Alfonso’s two most influential works were his law code, the Siete Partidas, and his Primera Crónica General (History of the World), both of which would be read by generations of scholars and lawyers. The Siete Partidas, known in its time as the Book of Laws, would be particularly influential. Alfonso’s father had translated the Latin Fuero Juzgo into Castilian in the early thirteenth century, but Alfonso went much farther by recompiling laws and standardizing them, something that had not been done for six centuries. In just nine years, between 1256 and 1265, his appointed team of experts in law and philosophy produced seven books dealing with the church, canon law, marriage, inheritance, crimes, and commerce.

As a result of this program, Castilian gained a degree of prestige it had never known. Alfonso managed to replace texts in Arabic, Hebrew, Galician, and Aragonese with Castilian, and even substituted Castilian for Latin as a language of history, science, and jurisprudence.

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Alfonso X was the first medieval king in Europe to put his vernacular language to broad and spectacular use. He was also the first to recognize that vernacular languages needed rules.

A prince among language buffs, El Sabio was centuries ahead of most of Europe’s other crowned heads in forging language policy and three centuries ahead of the Italian and the French in standardizing the grammar and spelling of a vernacular tongue. During his reign, Castilian went from having great differences in spelling from one text to the next to having almost no differences. His influence was so profound that Alfonso X is sometimes referred to as Spain’s first “academician,” even though the Spanish language academy wasn’t founded until four centuries after his death. Most of Alfonso’s standards remained in place until the sixteenth century.

Alfonso’s language policy was that any documents produced by his chancery, any translation made by his scholars, any scientific work written by astronomers or legists under his patronage had to meet impeccable writing standards and be understandable to readers. He himself was an indefatigable editor, constantly taking collaborators to task for sloppy writing and copying. His works are full of notes with definitions of Latin or Greek words scribbled in the margins in Castilian. His ideas evolved considerably, and in the later years of his reign he even called for retranslations of some of his earlier translations.

There were no dictionaries or grammars to speak of at the time: Alfonso forged the standards of Castilian while creating his entire body of work. The material his chancery produced stood as the model for correct usage. It was a work in progress. His earlier works include many words borrowed from Aragonese and Occitan as well as Arabic, Latin, and French. The first 116 chapters of his Primera Crónica General (which predate 1270) contain a number of archaisms, such as amalgamated pronouns, like nimbla for ni me la and quemblo for que me lo. There were also some verb contractions, like Té for Te he (I have you). These archaisms would disappear from later chapters.

As time went on, he changed his approach. He either Castilianized the borrowings (by hiding them in Castilian-sounding words) or opted for bona fide Castilian terms. He dropped the Arabic terms for latitude and longitude and replaced them with the Castilian ladeza and longueza.

Castilian syntax also became more sophisticated during his rule, which allowed writers to express nuances. In early Castilian, sentences were short and simple, and subordinate clauses were rare. During the thirteenth century, largely as a result of Alfonso’s intellectual pursuits, sentences became longer, with more conjunctions, pronouns, and time markers.

On this particular point, Alfonso X might have been too successful. Spanish prose came to be characterized by very long and windy paragraphs stocked with adjectives and subordinate clauses. Spanish-language writers often seemed to be trying hard to avoid the appearance of being direct.

People who learn Spanish after speaking English, or even French, are often struck by how much more phonetic and systematic Spanish appears to be. The roots of this feature can be traced back to Alfonso X. At the time of his reign, some Spanish writers were still using the Arabic alphabet to render Spanish dialects. And even within the Roman alphabet, there was a lot of variation.

Alfonso X set out to put order in Spanish spelling, which he rationalized to a degree. The writers, grammarians, and lexicographers of many languages were faced with the same choice at the time of whether to make the spelling of words conform to their original, Latin form—even if the actual pronunciation of the word had changed—or to adapt spellings to be consistent with their pronunciation. In most European languages, writers and grammarians took the phonetic route and created spelling systems that moved away from etymological roots. There were two resounding exceptions: French and English, whose scholars and clerics relished obfuscated spellings that didn’t reflect pronunciation. They simply could not resist the temptation of showing off their erudition in Latin, even when they were writing in vernacular.

Under the influence of Alfonso, Castilian went the other way. It maintained its phonetic form even if that meant reducing the number of sounds to fit what was available from the Roman alphabet. Spanish has never been perfectly phonetic: b and v sound the same, as do c and z. And Alfonso had to acknowledge that new letters or groupings of letters were necessary—such as rr, ñ, ç, gu, and ll—in order to render some sounds that were common in Spanish but nonexistent in Latin.

One more factor that pushed Spanish spelling in such a different direction, particularly from that of French and English, was the background of Alfonso X’s writing brain trust. In France, as in England, writers (including translators) were clerics or Latin trained. In either case, they resisted their vernaculars. Latin was the language of prestige, period. When French clerics did write in Françoys, they constantly tried to Latinize it to give it a luster of legitimacy and prestige.

The situation in Castile was completely different. Castile had two languages of prestige: Latin and Arabic. Thanks to five centuries of Muslim presence in Spain, the writers, translators, and scribes who worked in Alfonso’s court were not dominated by clerics or Latin-trained scholars: they included many non-Christians and, notably, a large number of Jewish scholars.

Jews had arrived in Spain in Roman times and had endured persecution under the Visigoths—some of the writings of St. Isidore, for instance, were rabidly anti-Semitic. As a result, they welcomed Arab rule, which was relatively tolerant, at least at first. When this tolerance was erased by the fundamentalist dynasties, Jews switched their loyalty to the Christian kings.

Jewish translators were known for their language skills in Latin, Arabic, Greek, and Hebrew. They also welcomed Castilian as a language of learning. Promoting Castilian actually allowed them to undermine the Catholic church by displacing Latin, the liturgical language and language of teaching (though in Spain, Arabic competed for this status). Alfonso X and the Jews had different reasons to promote Castilian, but they concurred on the result, and they succeeded.

Alfonso X welcomed Jewish scholars to his court and provided generous patronage to them to translate classical Arabic and Hebrew sources. He even freed them and their descendants from paying taxes, although like his father he required Jews to wear a yellow-and-red badge.

But Alfonso’s program of rationalization didn’t work perfectly; there were lots of exceptions. As a result of Latin’s influence, he still used u for v and i for j—so the modern viejo could be spelled vieio, uiejo, and uieio. Huvo (I had) was spelled uvo or ruo. There was some variation between t and d as final consonants—voluntat or voluntad (will). And he never managed to define whether the verb endings for the imperfect tense (also called the past continuous in English) would be ía or íe, as in tenía or teníe (I was holding). Usage did settle to tenía in the years to come.

Yet overall, Alfonso X made Spanish spelling better reflect pronunciation. By controlling his production, he was able to set a standard for Spanish that would remain in place for centuries. The regularity of the spelling and grammar in the Poema del Cid—generally believed to have been copied in the fourteenth century—shows that Alfonso’s standardization efforts bore fruit.

When Alfonso X embarked on his ambitious program, he called Castilian “Our Latin” with the intention of instilling Castile’s vernacular with the same prestige as Latin—a long shot at the time. Then, during the 1270s, he went even farther, describing his language policy as castellano drecho (“right” or “straight” Castilian). This meant that his writers had to strive to use a “pure,” correct Castilian devoid of foreign influence, namely, French.

His ideas spread.

The great Mexican philologist Antonio Alatorre called the spirit with which Alfonso imbued the language conciencia linguistica (linguistic awareness). With Alfonso X as a model, writers had to consciously try to conform to the correct way of writing. In the absence of any reference book, Alfonso’s doctrine of castellano drecho was the drive and the model.

This idea of correctness, which is usually associated with French and with language “purism,” is in fact central to Spanish culture and much more ancient. In Spanish, correctness is less a quest for purity—as in French—than a desire to use language in an exemplary manner. Even though today, as a result of mass media, the populist trend is as strong in Spanish as it is in English, native speakers of Spanish expect public discourse to be a model, to set an example. Even the uneducated expect to be addressed with a certain elevation in language use, as a mark of respect.

All languages are driven by usage, the result of billions of exchanges between millions of individuals. Usage is shaped by jokes, interjections, contracts, plays, poems, and more. But in all languages, some key individuals play a more central role, and Alfonso X played that role for Castilian. His influence was already evident in the work of other writers of his generation. His nephew, the poet Don Juan Manuel, closely supervised the work of copyists to make sure that they did not introduce mistakes or “improve” on his work. This sort of care was unheard of before Alfonso X.

A good example of this sense of correctness was the effort of Castilian writers who worked to reverse a linguistic trend in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In all languages, speakers tend to erode and cut words. Under the influence of French, Spaniards had begun to leave off final vowels. They said and wrote yot recib instead of yo té recibe (I receive you), nief instead of nieve (snow), trist instead of triste (sad). During the last eight years of his life, Alfonso X worked to restore castellano drecho and bring back the vowels that were being dropped. This could have been just a fad, if all writers of Castilians had not followed his lead, but by the fourteenth century, they had stopped truncating words and reverted to previous spellings. This reversal of the erosion of Castilian speaks volumes about the existence and the effectiveness of the “linguistic conscience” of Spanish.

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In spite of Alfonso’s intellectual and linguistic achievements, there was one field in which the king changed little: poetry.

One of Alfonso X’s most famous works is a set of 420 religious poems titled Cantigas de Santa María (Songs of Saint Mary). Accompanied by no fewer than forty miniatures and abundant musical notations, the Cantigas praise the grace and miracles of the Virgin Mary. According to the king, the poems were endowed with some miraculous healing power: after Alfonso X fell ill in 1277, he claimed to have been cured after the Cantigas were laid on his chest.

Yet, curiously, the poems were written in Galician, not Castilian. Historians suspect that a cleric named Airas Nunes actually wrote them, although Alfonso knew Galician, having spent much of his childhood in Galicia. It was all very well to develop Castilian prose, but even Alfonso was still loath to write poetry in Castilian. He was probably unaware of the body of work of his contemporary, Gonzalo de Berceo, the first poet to write poetry in Castilian.

The reason Alfonso was so untypically averse to in using Castilian for poetry was that during his reign the prestige of Galician was still unmatched—in fact, it was bolstered by the powerful Crown of Portugal.