Spanish

Spanish is, like all other idioms spoken in the world today, a dynamic and ever-changing language. This is only to be expected: As the world changes around us we need new ways of talking about that world and so we change our language to meet those needs. This is not a new phenomenon of course: Languages that are spoken are always in a state of flux. Spanish, now one of the world's most widely spoken languages, has changed substantially since its origins in Latin as well as Celtic and other languages. This paper examines those origins and some of the most important changes between Spanish as it was first spoken and as it is spoken now.

The beginnings of Spanish lie not surprisingly in the Iberian Peninsula. During the sixth century BCE, the original inhabitants of this peninsular, the Iberians, began to intermarry with and form joint settlements with Celts, whose origins lay in central Europe, but whose nomadic ways has spread them far west and south of their origins. The blended culture that arose - which was called Celtiberian - used a form of Celtic (Mar-Molinero 38). The culture, and the language that they spoke appear to have been relatively stable (there are relatively few documents from this period that can be studied to determine the rate of language change). However, in the third century BCE, the culture and its language would be radically changed by the invasion of the Carthaginians in 237 BCE. The Carthaginians spoke Punic, which was a dialect of Phoenician languag

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