Activitat

The languages of Spain

Personatges:

Tema: Romance and non-Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula. Geographic location.

Competències

Competència en Comunicació Lingüística

Competència Plurilingüe

Competència personal, social i aprendre a aprendre

Competència en consciència i expressions culturals

Matèries i cursos per Sistema Educatiu

Espanya > Cultura Clàssica > 2n ESO > Pervivència de les llengües clàssiques. Llengua i lèxic

Enunciat


Egeria was an upper class lady from the Hispanic province of Gallaecia who made a trip to the Holy Land between 381-384 AD, where she collected her experiences in the book Itinerarium ad Loca Sancta, written in the form of letters.    

In this activity we are going to imagine what would have happened if Egeria had traveled through her own country, that is, Hispania. Despite speaking Latin, like the rest of the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula, would she have had any communication problems? The Latin that Egeria spoke was the popular variant, with expressions of the spoken language, a trait that characterized the entire population, given that the Latin that entered the Peninsula was the colloquial language spoken by the soldiers and the townspeople. 

The Peninsula maintained the territorial distribution that Emperor Diocletian settled in the 3rd century AD. 

1- Look at the distribution by provinces on the map. 
2- List the different provinces with their capital cities. 
3- Read the text. 
4- Answer the questions. 
5- Place on the map the name of the provinces and their capital cities and the Romance language that emerged in each of them. 
 
1-Territorial distribution of Diocletian. 

https://truttafario.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/capitales-de-hispania-con-diocleciano.jpg 

2- List the provinces and their capital cities. 

3- Read the text.  
 
"When the Romans arrived in 218 BC in the North of the Iberian Peninsula, the language that we know as Basque today was spoken. Therefore, this language does not come from Latin. 
In Andalusia there were the Tartessians, and the Iberians were in Levante. In this area, at various times, the Etruscans, of Italian origin, left their traces; and also the Phoenicians (Gadir, Cádiz); the Carthaginians (Cartago Nova, Cartagena); and the Greeks, who named the Peninsula “Iberia” (Lucentum, Alicante). 
In the Center and Northwest of the Peninsula we find the linguistic presence of: the Ligurians, people from the Franco-Italian Mediterranean coast, (Toledo); the Celts, who arrived from the south of Germany towards the 7th century BC and occupied the high regions from the center to Galicia and southern Portugal (Segovia); the Celtiberians in the Center and Lower Aragón, where the speech of the two peoples is mixed. All these languages left their mark on Spanish and the rest of the constitutional languages. 

Our own translation from «Historia de la lengua española. Parte I», (retrieved on 19/09/2021), <https://www.csub.edu/modlang/department/spanish/LINGUISTICS/TEMA%207.1%20MA.pdf>  

4- Answer the questions: 
 
a- What are the Romance languages of Hispania? 
b- Where is each one spoken? 
c- How would you define a Romance language? 
d- Why has each language evolved in a certain way? 
e- Do the different Romance languages have anything in common? 
f- Is there any non-Romance language in the Peninsula? 
g- What languages were spoken in the Peninsula before the arrival of the Romans? 
h- Do a little research and answer: What century do the first written manifestations in the Romance language date from?  
 
5- Place on the map the name of the provinces and their capital cities and the Romance language that emerged in each of them. 

https://cloud.educaplay.com/recursos/42/1354014/imagen_1.jpg 

Observacions i context

Ever since Empress Helena and Empress Eutropia, mother and wife of Emperor Constantine respectively, travelled to Jerusalem to recover and repair the Holy Places, pilgrimages were common for the wealthy classes, including women. Melania the Elder, Paula of Rome or Melania the Younger had biographers who described their travels, but the originality of Egeria lies in the fact that she was the one to write her own diary. Egeria herself writes the immense satisfaction she felt when meeting the deaconess Martana. 

After her, the medieval chronicles tell us about the pilgrimage to Compostela of numerous women. In the 12th century AD, Bona de Pisa made pilgrimages to Compostela up to nine times as a guide for pilgrims, and Gerberga of Flandes brought the original of the Codex Calistinus with her from Rome to Santiago. In the 14th century AD, Bridget of Sweden and Queen Isabella of Portugal traveled. In the 15th century AD, Margery Kempe visited the main holy places of Christianity. The tale of her travels is an important part of her book, The book of Margery Kempe (ca. 1436), a work considered to be the first autobiography in English. 

The last territorial distribution of Hispania, that of Diocletian, is still the Hispania of Egeria. Less than a century separates the life that Egeria led, between her native Gallaecia and the lands she visited, from the convulsive end of her world: in 476, Odoacer deposed the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, and the Western Roman Empire ceased to exist. From then on, many things change and new ones emerge and develop, like the different languages of the Iberian peninsula. 

In this activity we take advantage of the last territorial distribution of Roman Hispania by Diocletian to talk about the different languages that will be created and developed from the 8th century AD on, but they had already come a long way. 

The activity is aimed at 2nd of ESO, Block The survival of classical languages. Language and literature, as a first approach to the Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula. It could also be done in the subject of Latin of 4th of ESO.

Descripció

Relating the Romance and non-Romance languages of the peninsula and placing them on the map. 

Resposta

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