Summary: | After the Spanish conquest and colonization, the underdeveloped nations of America
had to accept the Spanish language as their own. The language that the kingdom of Castille
had already been imposed on other Iberian provinces, with the exception of Portugal. At
this moment, this language was just acquiring grammatical accuracy, as a consequence
of the evolution of the Latin language, introduced in the Hispanic peninsula during the
Roman empire in the year 19 B.C. Over the decades, Latin phonetics, morphology, syntax
and semantics were altered to form many dialects. Some of them, like the Castilian, took
a distance from their mother tongue and became different languages altogether, with
their own grammatical systems. Later Visigoth and Arab invasions left a scarce trace on
the Castilian language, because Hispanics (Roman name meaningland of rabbits ) had
a more solid culture than their invaders. The Spanish we speak today comes from the
Classical Latin as well as from the Vulgar Latin, Late Latin and Medieval Latin, spoken
and written in the Middle Ages (V-XVI centuries). Each of these periods were important
to the phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic changes that occurred in
Spanish. Nowadays, Spanish keeps evolving, despite universality and the expansion of our
linguistically unifying communication media.
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