A Brief Introduction to the
Origins of Spanish Vocabulary

Daniel N. Erickson (University of North Dakota)

The Spanish language began in the Iberian Peninsula, the modern home of Spain and Portugal, with the coming of the Latin-speaking Romans. In 218 B.C., during the war with Hannibal and the Carthaginians, the armies of the Roman Republic arrived. After the defeat of Carthage in 201, the Romans embarked on a two-century process of conquest and colonization. With the Romans in charge, Latin became the dominant language of the peninsula, and pre-existing languages mostly died out. The Basque language in northern Spain is the only pre-Roman Iberian language to survive to this day.

The direct ancestor of Spanish and the other Romance languages is not the Classical Latin of Caesar, Vergil, and other great ancient writers but rather the commonly spoken version known as Vulgar Latin. In comparison to Classical Latin, Vulgar Latin displays differences of sound, vocabulary, and other qualities. Thus, for instance, Classical Latin ovis ‘sheep’ lies behind Vulgar Latin ovicula, which leads to Spanish oveja ‘sheep.’ Classical culter ‘knife’ is cultellus in Vulgar, becoming cuchillo ‘knife’ in Spanish. A well-known example of a vocabulary difference is the word for kiss, which in Classical Latin is commonly ōsculum; the Vulgar word (which happens to occur in Catullus) is bāsium, from which comes the Spanish beso ‘kiss.’

Information on Vulgar Latin reaches us in various ways. For example, it crops up sometimes in Classical writers such as Catullus and Petronius, and it is common in the graffiti left behind when the Italian city of Pompeii was buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. It leaves traces in the writings of ancient grammarians, notably in Probus’ Appendix, a list of incorrect Latin forms to be avoided alongside the correct ones to be used; the incorrect forms are often signposts to the later Romance languages. Regarding the word for eye, for example, the Appendix says oculus non oclus. The wrong form oclus with the missing -u- actually leads to the Spanish word for eye, ojo.

Besides Vulgar Latin, there have been other influences on the development of Spanish vocabulary. Beginning in the fifth century and ending in the early eighth, the Visigoths contributed some words to Spanish. About seventy of them have survived into modern Spanish, most of them being proper names. The Greeks gave Spanish more words, many of which came into Spanish via Latin. Moreover, as a result of the Arab occupation of Spain for eight centuries (711-1492), there are currently more than 4,000 words of Arabic origin in the Spanish lexicon. During the Spanish conquest and occupation of the New World, the Spaniards brought home with them not only gold and other riches but also a good number of words of indigenous origin. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the era of the “Golden Age” of Spanish literature. In all the literary activity of this time, many words not inherited from Vulgar Latin were borrowed directly from written Latin. Other originally Latin words entered Spanish from Italian and French. Last but not least, due to the great influence of the United States throughout the world, many words of English origin have become part of Spanish vocabulary. The adoption of English words and those from other languages into Spanish is an ongoing process.