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Stephen Maturin’s Spanish | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Books, Literature & Reading |  | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4552 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes  Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 2 30 September 2013 at 3:18am | IP Logged |
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Stephen Maturin is a fictional character in the Aubrey Maturin series of historical novels by Patrick O'Brian. These books cover the experiences of Jack Aubrey, an English captain, and Stephen Maturin, a surgeon in the Royal Navy, during the Napoleonic wars.
Maturin is described as a Catalan/Irishman raised in Catalonia and Ireland during the 1770s. He is described as a native speaker of English, Catalan, Spanish, and French with a smattering of Irish. My question concerns his Spanish. What sort of Spanish would he have learned in Catalonia in the last part of the 18th century? Seseo? Distinción? Other features? These books have been a wonderful part of my life over the years, and I wonder how one of my favorite characters sounded... :) Edited by sfuqua on 30 September 2013 at 3:18am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4426 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 2 of 2 01 October 2013 at 6:01pm | IP Logged |
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Probably not so different from how Spanish spoken by a Catalan is today. The period of modern Spanish goes more or less from the beinning of the 18th century. The main changes from medieval Spanish to modern Spanish started in the 15th century and was consolidated by the end of the 17th.
To what extent your character would have spoken with a strong Catalan accent one can only wonder. From 1715 onwards the central government of Madrid pushed strongly for Spanish to be used throughout the kingdom in all official contexts, but Catalan was still tolerated and used in local administrations etc, and most "ordinary people" would speak Catalan at home. However the aristocracy and the growing "middle class" embraced Spanish more readily as the language of the future, turning their back on the traditions and also the Catalan language. The Spanish spoken in Catalonia at the time would certainly not have seseo, as this is confined to the south mainly. What is most notable when many Catalans speak Spanish today is the pronunciation of "l" at the end of a word as uvular rather than dental, that is as a "thick L" with the tongue raised towards the palate. Whether that was the case in the 18th century I do not know. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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