Word: barcelona
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From Phillip II onward, the Castile-based court has treated Barcelona as something like an ugly sister. Naturally, there has always been a rivalry, but Barcelona has been getting the worst of it as of late (perhaps staging the Olympic Games, something of a coup for Barcelona, will change all that). Nevertheless, that city has a past that stretches back for 2000 years, and the first half is nothing short of glorious...
...Barcelona...
...beginnings of Barcelona's feisty sense of autonomy lie embedded deeply within its lexical past. Contrary to popular belief, Catalan is not a bastardized version of Castilian, but a proper language in its own right. When the Romans conquered the Iberian peninsula, as Hughes tells us, they brought with them, two kinds of Latin from two distinct socio-economic classes. While the Roman elite went south to the silver mines (and hence, the money), the Roman farmers and laborers settled in the fertile northern regions, bringing their more modern, "slangy" Latin with them...
...from these humble origins that the city first arose. While the rest of Spain speaks Castilian, Barcelona and Catalunya claim Catalan as their own; its existence as a language apart bolsters the region's own sense of political and cultural identity. The cultivation of the land by the region's first farmers also aided this nation-building process. Even today, as Hughes readily informs us Barcelona is "more a city of capital and labor than of nobility and commerce," and "its democratic roots are old and run very deep...
...enduring features of the city. On account of its lively plebian past, the city has always had something of a chip on its shoulder towards any centralized authority. And during much of the past 500 years, or ever since Phillip II established Madrid as the Spanish capital, much of Barcelona's ire has been directed towards her sister city sprawling in the middle of the peninsula's arid plains...