Father of the Spanish Language

Somewhere in the packed filing cabinets of my mother’s office are several small books that where made out of printing paper by my second grade self. These books contain colorful drawing and incoherent story-lines filled with characters from my imagination (and the movie Tarzan, because the elephant was my favorite character at the time) and peppered with the silly made-up words that my friends and I used in our everyday conversations. Likewise, in the works of Spanish writer Cervantes you could find many colorful characters and made up words.

The primary difference between the books written by Cervantes and myself (besides the literary merit, as needless to say nothing I wrote was near as good as Don Quixote) was that while my words slipped out memory after a few weeks the words that Cervantes created are not only still remembered, but are part of a regular Spanish vocabulary. In fact, Cervantes is to Spanish what Shakespeare is to English, buoying up the vocabulary of the infant Spanish language like the plays of Shakespeare contributed to the English language. He might have had even more of an impact, given that his works where published in the early 1600s, and where therefore in circulation longer. With the established dictionaries of today words created by an individual are less likely to catch on, but the brilliance of writers like Cervantes makes it easy to see why their words have endured and are still used today.