Estelle Irizarry | |
---|---|
Born | 1937 |
Died | 2017 79–80) | (aged
Estelle Irizarry (1937-2017) was a Costa Rican professor emeritus of Hispanic literature at Georgetown University, Washington, DC. [1] She was one of the first historians to provide objective evidence based on scientific criteria and methodology to solve the mysteries surrounding the identity of Christopher Columbus.
She has written books about Spanish authors such as Francisco Ayala, Rafael Dieste, Odón Betanzos Palacios and E. Fernández Granell, as well as Spanish writers-painters of the 20th century. [2]
In 2009, she presented the book The DNA of the Writings of Christopher Columbus in Madrid, where she concludes that Columbus wrote in Catalan and was a Jewish convert. [3] [4] [5] [6] After researching Columbus's letters, she notes that some are punctuated with semicolons and periods [/.] [/] [//].and this "style of punctuation obeyed a geographical arrangement, that those in Castile did not use commas as it was typical of the Catalan-speaking lands of the old Crown of Aragon", [7] and she added: "In the book the navigator's writing system is compared with manuscripts from Galicia, Portugal, Italy, Tarragona, Castile, Barcelona, Ibiza, Europe or Genoa, among others, and so far the (linguistic) DNA points to Ibiza», [8] theory supported as well by Nito Verdera. [9]
Irizarry received the Grand National Prize of the International Book Fair in Puerto Rico in 2010. Her latest works are an updated edition of Alonso Ramírez's Misfortunes and a new fiction - Christopher Columbus's love letter to Queen Isabel.
Aragonese is a Romance language spoken in several dialects by about 12,000 people as of 2011, in the Pyrenees valleys of Aragon, Spain, primarily in the comarcas of Somontano de Barbastro, Jacetania, Alto Gállego, Sobrarbe, and Ribagorza/Ribagorça. It is the only modern language which survived from medieval Navarro-Aragonese in a form distinct from Spanish.
Spanish 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 speakers. Spanish is the official language of 20 countries, as well as one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Spanish is the world's second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese; the world's fourth-most spoken language overall after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu); and the world's most widely spoken Romance language. The country with the largest population of native speakers is Mexico.
Year 1492 (MCDXCII) was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Julian calendar.
The term Hispanic refers to people, cultures, or countries related to Spain, the Spanish language, or Hispanidad broadly. In some contexts, especially within the United States, "Hispanic" is used as an ethnic or meta-ethnic term.
The Royal Spanish Academy is Spain's official royal institution with a mission to ensure the stability of the Spanish language. It is based in Madrid, Spain, and is affiliated with national language academies in 22 other Hispanophone nations through the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language.
The Spanish language has two names: español and castellano. Spanish speakers from different countries or backgrounds can show a preference for one term or the other, or use them indiscriminately, but political issues or common usage might lead speakers to prefer one term over the other. This article identifies the differences between those terms, the countries or backgrounds that show a preference for one or the other, and the implications the choice of words might have for a native Spanish speaker.
The Iberian Romance, Ibero-Romance or sometimes Iberian languages are a group of Romance languages that developed on the Iberian Peninsula, an area consisting primarily of Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar, Andorra and southern France. They are today more commonly separated into West Iberian and Occitano-Romance language groups.
The Catholic Monarchs were Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon, whose marriage and joint rule marked the de facto unification of Spain. They were both from the House of Trastámara and were second cousins, being both descended from John I of Castile; to remove the obstacle that this consanguinity would otherwise have posed to their marriage under canon law, they were given a papal dispensation by Sixtus IV. They married on October 19, 1469, in the city of Valladolid; Isabella was 18 years old and Ferdinand a year younger. It is generally accepted by most scholars that the unification of Spain can essentially be traced back to the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella. Their reign was called by W.H. Prescott "the most glorious epoch in the annals of Spain".
The University of Salamanca is a Spanish public research university, located in Salamanca, in the autonomous community of Castile and León. It was founded in 1218 by King Alfonso IX. It is the oldest university in the Hispanic world and one of the oldest in the world in continuous operation. It has over 30,000 students from 50 different nationalities.
The Association of Academies of the Spanish Language is an entity whose end is to work for the unity, integrity, and growth of the Spanish language. It was created in Mexico in 1951 and represents the union of all the separate academies in the Spanish-speaking world. The association publishes reference works on the Spanish language and commemorative editions of Hispanic literature, among other publications.
The Spanish language has nouns that express concrete objects, groups and classes of objects, qualities, feelings and other abstractions. All nouns have a conventional grammatical gender. Countable nouns inflect for number. However, the division between uncountable and countable nouns is more ambiguous than in English.
Spanish orthography is the orthography used in the Spanish language. The alphabet uses the Latin script. The spelling is fairly phonemic, especially in comparison to more opaque orthographies like English, having a relatively consistent mapping of graphemes to phonemes; in other words, the pronunciation of a given Spanish-language word can largely be predicted from its spelling and to a slightly lesser extent vice versa. Spanish punctuation uniquely includes the use of inverted question and exclamation marks: ⟨¿⟩⟨¡⟩.
The majority of languages of Spain belong to the Romance language family, of which Spanish is the only one with official status in the whole country. Others, including Catalan/Valencian and Galician, enjoy official status in their respective autonomous regions, similar to Basque in the northeast of the country. A number of other languages and dialects belonging to the Romance continuum exist in Spain, such as Aragonese, Asturian, Fala and Aranese Occitan.
The Diccionario de la lengua española is the authoritative dictionary of the Spanish language. It is produced, edited and published by the Royal Spanish Academy, with the participation of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language. It was first published in 1780, as the Diccionario de la lengua castellana and subsequent editions have been published about once a decade. The twenty-third edition was published in 2014; it is available on-line, incorporating modifications to be included in the twenty-fourth print edition.
The ethnic or national origin of explorer Christopher Columbus has been a source of speculation since the 19th century. The consensus among historians is that Columbus's family was from the coastal region of Liguria, that he was born and spent his boyhood and early youth in the Republic of Genoa, in Genoa, in Vico Diritto, and that he subsequently lived in Savona, where his father Domenico moved in 1470. Much evidence derives from documents concerning Columbus's immediate family connections in Genoa and opinions voiced by contemporaries on his Genoese origins, which few dispute.
Ferdinand II was King of Aragon from 1479 until his death in 1516. As the husband of and co-ruler with Queen Isabella I of Castile, he was also King of Castile from 1475 to 1504. He reigned jointly with Isabella over a dynastically unified Spain; together they are known as the Catholic Monarchs. Ferdinand is considered the de facto first king of Spain, and was described as such during his reign, even though, legally, Castile and Aragon remained two separate kingdoms until they were formally united by the Nueva Planta decrees issued between 1707 and 1716.
Moshe Shaul, also known as Mosheh Sha'ul, was a Turkish-born Israeli journalist, writer and researcher of the culture of Sephardi Jews whose work on preserving the Ladino language was key to its revival.
The Centre d'Estudis Colombins (CEC) is an association dedicated to the study of the historical links between Christopher Columbus and the discovery of America and the Catalan world, particularly, in the possible Catalanity of Christopher Columbus. The Center was born in 1989 following a cycle of conferences organized by Òmnium Cultural in Barcelona.
The International Conference of the Spanish Language, is a forum for reflection on issues related to the Spanish language, such as the problems and challenges faced by its speakers. It is held every three years in a city located in either Spain or Hispanic America. Its organizers are the Instituto Cervantes—which serves as the permanent general secretariat—the Royal Spanish Academy, and the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language, as well as the country in charge of each edition.
Nito Verdera was an Ibizan journalist, merchant marine pilot and researcher about Christopher Columbus. A member of the Centre d'Estudis Colombins, he has published several books in which he maintains the thesis that Columbus was crypto-Jewish and from Ibiza.
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