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.”
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Famous quotes containing the word language:
“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)
“The language I have learnt these forty years,
My native English, now I must forgo,
And now my tongue’s use is to me no more
Than an unstringèd viol or a harp.”
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