Language
The poem is written in "castellano" (Castilian), thus the language is basically an antiquated version of the Spanish spoken throughout the Hispanic world today. The "castellano" or Spanish of Mena’s time is generally understandable to speakers of Spanish today and even to advanced non-native students of Spanish. Mena’s language, however, is considerably more difficult. He uses many archaic words that even in his day had already fallen out of use. Even more often, he uses Latinisms. Some of the Latin words that Mena introduces were later adopted into Spanish, most were not. This linguistic experimentation creates a text that can only be read with great difficulty, and we may assume that Mena’s contemporaries faced a similar difficulty. As medieval Spanish scholar Alan Deyermond states that “the precise meaning of some lines has baffled editors from the late-fifteenth-century…to the present.”
Read more about this topic: Laberinto De Fortuna
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“The “sayings” of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech—it is a gift from heart to heart.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)