Arroyos and Beer

I have finally got around to reading How Spanish Grew by Robert K. Spaulding, and what an interesting passtime it is proving! The book is a history of the Spanish language from pre-Latin (I mean, pre-Latin-in-Spain) days through the 1940's. I'm only through the first two chapters, but what a ride that was!

The history of Spain, let alone its language, is new to me, so I am delighted at trifles. One word Spaulding offers as pre-Roman is arroyo which he defines as a "small stream". Although I've never come across that particular usage in English, ours is fairly close as it means a washout or, as Merriam Webster's has it, "a water-carved gully or channel." Upon reflection, I suppose we probably use a good many words that are as old and well-traveled as this one. . .still, there it is, a pre-Christian word that belonged to some vague, faceless people with good taste in cave drawings; a word that survived a flood of Latin and a couple of thousand years, crossed an ocean and wandered about a new land until it got itself pinned on the Southern Californian coast in Arroyo Grande.

Arroyo, as I said, was the linguistic property of some pre-Roman people. Spaulding (and Strabo before him) list quite an array of Iberian tribes, several of whom, evidently, spoke separate languages. Some of these were the ancestors of today's Basques, others were the Celtic populations of Galicia. Not surprisingly, it was the Celts who are credited with giving the Spanish language the indispensable word cerveza, that is, "beer."