La terra per la paraula

This intervention will be a pairing between personal experiences and the author’s language, all set in a Mallorcan town far from the island’s capital and at the time very poorly communicated. The years of the speaker’s childhood and adolescence, that is, from his first memories in 1955 until around 1970, without giving up on more advanced excursus in time, will be approximately the chronological milestones to show how he had access to a conservative language, with archaic features, transmitted by older relatives, including his parents, an uncle and three aunts, all with precise and minimally adulterated words. They had the native speech so embedded in their understanding that to express themselves in the superimposed language they had to make efforts and the result was not the most brilliant, especially that of the uncle and two of the aunts. The latter died when they were already old and without having ever left the island.

It will therefore be shown for what reasons and under what circumstances the language and customs of this Mallorcan people influenced the author when he decided to begin his studies of Catalan philology when he was already mature, at the age of forty-one, and to write a thesis on the toponymy of Santanyí and ses Salines, a territory of about 165 square kilometers with a long maritime facade, in which he was able to collect from his own mouth about six thousand toponyms still in use, and about seven hundred more that had already disappeared by consulting old documents.