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from Spanish, chaparro loosely meaning small evergreen oak, from Basque txapar, "small, short". chaps. from Mexican Spanish chaparreras, leg protectors for riding through chaparral. chayote. from Spanish, literally: "squash", from Nahuatl chayotl meaning "spiny squash".
Words of Germanic origin are common in all varieties of Spanish. The modern words for the cardinal directions (norte, este, sur, oeste), for example, are all taken from Germanic words (compare north, east, south and west in Modern English), after the contact with Atlantic sailors. These words did not exist in Spanish prior to the 15th century.
This is a list of Spanish words of various origins. It includes words from Australian Aboriginal languages, Balti, Berber, Caló, Czech, Dravidian languages, Egyptian, Greek, Hungarian, Ligurian, Mongolian, Persian, Slavic (such as Old Church Slavonic, Polish, Russian, and Croatian). Some of these words existed in Latin as loanwords from other ...
Spanish (español) or Castilian (castellano) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin spoken on the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. Today, it is a global language with about 500 million native speakers, mainly in the Americas and Spain, and about 600 million when including second language ...
This word ending—thought to be difficult for Spanish speakers to pronounce at the time—evolved in Spanish into a "-te" ending (e.g. axolotl = ajolote). As a rule of thumb, a Spanish word for an animal, plant, food or home appliance widely used in Mexico and ending in "-te" is highly likely to have a Nahuatl origin.
Formative influences. As Spanish went through its first stages of development in Spain, it probably received influences from neighbouring Romance languages, and also from Basque, which is a language isolate and thus completely unrelated to Spanish in origin. Umbrian and Oscan influences have also been postulated for the Roman colonization period.
Old Spanish (roman, romançe, romaz; [3] Spanish: español medieval), also known as Old Castilian or Medieval Spanish, refers to the varieties of Ibero-Romance spoken predominantly in Castile and environs during the Middle Ages. The earliest, longest, and most famous literary composition in Old Spanish is the Cantar de mio Cid (ca. 1140–1207).
The word is derived from Latin castella, the plural of castellum, which, in turn, is a diminutive form of castrum ' 'fortress, castle'. Through most of the Middle Ages the word was spelled Castiella, a form that survives in Leonese today. (Modern Spanish has transformed all words ending in -iello, -iella into illo, -illa.)