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En un día como el de hoy, pero en 1565, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés fundaba la ciudad de San Agustín en el actual estado de Florida, que hoy es la ciudad más antigua de los Estados Unidos
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Chris Crommet, chief of CNN en español, who grew up in Puerto Rico, speaks out his love por Spanish language and his pride of being part of a first quality news service that equals its English equivalent. Among other items, Crommet describes the subject "Español neutro", a language spoken nowhere, but present in the international news world.
For the second consecutive year, the annual literary award of the Guadalajara Book Fair (Mexico) is not going by its original name: the Juan Rulfo Award. Javier Dávila proposes definitively abandoning the name Juan Rulfo and calling it the Guadalajara Literature Award in 2008.
The US hispanic community has a growing influence over the culture in this country, where second generation immigrants who have English as mother language but who also speak Spanish, are the jewell of the crown as consumers, spectators, readers for media and advertising firms. Much so, taking into consideration official data showing that the number of families who speak a foreign language in the US, Spanish in particular, has increased in eight millons since year 2000.
The Real Academia Española, a state-owned entity in the kingdom of Spain, is invested with the authority to dictate the language of 400 million Spanish speakers in 20 countries. Ricardo Soca notes how this does not occur in the case of other languages, whose speakers consider good dictionaries - like the Oxford or the Merriam Webster in the case of English - to be the sole linguistic authority. Soca explains how such high-quality, comprehensive works are lacking in Spanish: the dictionary published by the Academia is known for its deficiencies and gaps - and for its Eurocentrism.
In the second edition of his book Lengua curiosa, which will be released in the next few weeks, Uruguayan author Carlos Liscano tells us about palindromes, especially in Spanish, though the article begins with a well-known English language palindrome: "Madam, I'm Adam."
Bobby Hogg, 87, and his brother Gordon, 80, are believed to be the last fluent speakers of the "Cromarty fisher dialect", that is said to be the most threatened dialect in Scotland and is to be recorded for an internet-bases cultural archive.
A 95-year old grandmother received a blog as a birthday present from her grandson and she now communicates with the world on a daily basis, sharing her youthful spirit and her cybernaut experiences as one of the oldest "bloggers" in the world.
The factual errors and the atrocious translations into Spanish of certain programs on The History Channel, one of many supposedly "cultural" channels, represent a true threat to history. Columnist Jorge Abbondanza from the daily El País explains how the channel spreads its drivel across the globe.
Ladino or Judeo-Spanish, the language of the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain by the Catholic Monarchs in 1492, survives in Turkey today, a relic of XV century Spanish. Five centuries after the emigration of the Jews, however, the language's existence is threatened by the national language, Turkish.