Apparently the four corners of a square reel used in this Huesca village in hemp yarn production represent four horses bound for France. I wonder which horses these were: those that awaited the Duke of Calabria, when he sought with three others to flee the court of King Ferdinand of Aragon, or others? (If folksy…
Whoever runs Fabirol‘s website tells us on a page re a museum near Zaragoza called La casa del gaitero, Bagpiper House in corporate speak, that in Aragon gaitero can be used to describe any popular musician. What would an equivalent lowest-common-denominator term be in the English-speaking world? “Artiste” misses the instrument component and, frequently, the…
Here from Braudel (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II/El Mediterráneo y el mundo mediterráneo en la época de Felipe II) is some context for today’s Libro verde item on the fall of Barcelona to Juan II’s great beasts: At the end of the fourteenth century, the Mediterranean belonged to…
One would almost suppose from nationalist eulogies that Aragón came from paragon. In fact it is a corruption of paraguas, umbrella, which, placed upside-down, clearly resembles the hydroelectric dams which the region so cherishes. There is a river Paragua in Venezuela, and in the City pressure is growing to rename that stately stream that with…
Someone told me once that the best brothel in Spain, ever, was a mythical one run in medieval Valencia by one Rei Arlot under licence from the King of Aragon. The reality is slightly more predictable: King Harlot was the popular name given to the government official charged with regulating prostitution, and the office was…
There’s still no article on Chistabín in the Oiquipedià, the Occitan version of Wikipedia, believed to have around 1,832 legitimate pages (Arabic = 11,824).
Currently doing a bit of literary translation out of one very strange dialect into another, and here’s something not so completely different: a basic grammar of Chistabín, the well-preserved (whatever that means) dialect spoken in the Chistau valley in northern Huesca. There’s a small lexicon, sorry, lesico. I like words like agila (águila in Spanish)…
Today’s Libro verde entry (front page, right bottom) has Fernando VI in 1758 undoing various stuff done by Felipe V in 1714, including reëstablishing the right of imperiage. I speculated that “this must be some kind of feudal arrangement governing property and revenue sharing between landowners”, but a description has turned up (thankyou JA) in…
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