Word: catalane
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Traditionally, the rallying point of the Catalans is their language -- "our ancient, melodious and abundant tongue," as the 19th century poet Joaquim Rubio i Ors put it -- spoken by about 6 million people today and matrix of an important national literature that goes back to the days of the troubadours. (Catalan and Provencal were sister languages, and poets writing in both moved among the courts of France and Catalunya...
...various times since the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, Castile has tried to take Catalunya over and suppress its speech. Francisco Franco banned all publishing and teaching in Catalan, hoping to prevent his subjects from thinking separatist thoughts. But obdurately, Catalan survives, and now that separatist dreams have faded -- Jordi Pujol, the president of the autonomous region of Catalunya, dropped the separatist plank from his party's platform last October -- it is the language that remains the focus of Catalunya's enthusiasm for cultural distinction...
...best buildings constructed anywhere in Spain between 1860 and the outbreak of World War I were all in Catalunya, and mostly in Barcelona. The combined talents of its turn-of-the-century architects made it La Ciudad de los Prodigios, or the City of Marvels, as the Catalan writer Eduardo Mendoza titled his savagely ironic, picaresque novel of fin-de-siecle Barcelona...
Gradually it filled Cerda's grid, which is now the world's greatest museum of 1900s architecture. The big Catalan mercantile families who made their piles after 1850 and ran the city tended to preen themselves on being modern versions of Renaissance princes -- all the more so since most of their grandfathers had been artisans or colonial hustlers. There was a lot of pent- up vigor and ambition itching to glorify itself...
...they built copiously through the three decades of what Catalans still call their Renaissance. La Renaixenca was a powerful, diffuse movement. It revolved obsessively around the issue of Catalan independence. It embraced politics, social theory, poetry, architecture. It was both progressive and intensely nostalgic. It believed in the future; it also drew its confidence from invoking the vanished era of the Catalan counts, the troubadours, the Cistercian monasteries...