Discover great curiosities of Spanish

UPGRADE

Here we are always: what if English this, what if French that, now what if a little German … But we have our language very forgotten and that, because it cannot be the truth.

That is why today we have decided to speak a little more of our language and tell you curiosities about Spanish, because it never hurts; that sometimes we get too smart with the knowledge of another language, while we do not continue to nurture the knowledge of our own (what a scolding I have given you, eh? the flu is raging, and there is lack of sleep).

But hey, we are not going to get involved any more and let’s go on to discover what mysteries this commendable language hides from us, whoever speaks it (as Luis Piedrahita says).

1. The only word that contains five r’s is:  ferrocarrilero .
2. The Ecuadorian  and  aeronautical words   have the same letters, but in a different order. This is called an anagram.
3. One thousand  is the only number that has neither O nor E.
4. The Spanish is the official language / co – existing in countries across 5 continents. Which there is nothing! We can presume that on every continent, in at least one country, Spanish is spoken. In Europe it is very easy to know which country is the flag. But in Africa it is official in two countries, Morocco and Equatorial Guinea. In the Asia area, we have the Philippines. And if we move to Oceania, we can speak Spanish on Easter Island.
5. Our language has approximately 300,000 different words or concepts. Although in the RAE they only collect 88,000
6. A Spaniard uses an average of 300 words. A cultured person increases the number of words, reaching 500 a day. A journalist or writer can use 3,000.
7. Spanish takes the gold medal for the language faster to speak. And they are measured according to the number of syllables that can be said in a second by an average speaker.
8. Miguel de Cervantes came to use around 8000 different words in his work (Don Quixote).
9. In the years 974-978 (the exact date is still debated), a monk from the Monastery of San Justo y San Pastor in La Rozuela (León), was the author of the first text written in Spanish . The curiosity of the text is that it was not the monastery scribe, who recounted the life of the monks, but made “a list of kitchen expenses”, to put it in some summarized way. The text was called Nodicia de Kesos, and that is where it listed how the cheeses from that monastery had been spent.
10. The word cinco(five) has five letters, a coincidence that is not recorded in any other number.
11. In  aristocratic , each letter appears twice.
12. The word  heard  has three syllables in three letters.
13. In 1994, it was decided that the letters CH and LL were no longer welcome in our alphabet. So they went down in history, although more than one of the times of the EGB (and our elders) still remember them when it comes to spelling.
14. The word  recognize (reconocer)  is read the same from left to right as vice versa.
15. The longest words without repeated letters are  Calumbrientos (13), Centrifugados (13), and Vislumbrándote (14).
16. But instead the longest word collected by the RAE is  Electroencephalographer,  this word contains 23 letters.
17. The only word that contains each of the five vowels twice is  Equatorial Guinea .
18. In the term  centrifuged,  all the letters are different and none are repeated.
19. There are four words that have four consonants in a row: transplant, subtract, abstract, abstract .
20. The term  I was  contains four consecutive letters in alphabetical order: stuv.
21. Some of the strangest words that Spanish contains are: amover, barbián, jipiar, orate, vagido … Does anyone know their meanings without asking San Google?
22. Almost more than 4000 words are inherited from the time of Arabic domination, that represents 8% of our current vocabulary.
23. The term “Noche Toledana” is still surprising what the story behind it is. It goes back to the year 812, when a cruel young man who went by the name of Jusuf-ben-Amru ruled in Toledo . The riot of the town caused that this was beheaded, but his father, Amru , took revenge widely doing the same with the heads of the nobles of the city , who had been invited to a banquet by the warrior. (I don’t know why, but Game of Thrones has come to mind …)
24. We have a word that we can pronounce, but not write. Funny, eh? It is the singular of the imperative ‘come out’, which, if we wrote it (‘salle’), we would read [salle], and not [sal.le], due to the digraph ‘ll’.

There are many more curiosities, surely you know some more, and if you are so nice to share them with us in the comments of the post, we and the rest of the travelers will be very grateful to you.

We hope you liked the post, and we keep traveling to see what next topic we write about.

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