This has been repeatedly addressed; I tried to make it very clear that in that limited context I was using Spanish as a political adjective, not a linguistic one. Again, I meant only that “Basque is one of the languages of Spain.” (You’ll find that phrase too, or a version of it, in practically all of the discussions of the languages of Spain that are to be found on the web.)
Can I cordially recommend that neither you nor Polycarp quit your day jobs to become Spanish translators?
They don’t matter when they don’t prove anything. He hasn’t come up with a single cite that proves his original point. If they do, I’d be glad to hear your explanation for how, since lissener has not done so great at explaining it to the rest of us.
At any rate, finding pages on Google doesn’t prove that you’re right if they don’t say what you think they do. Again, while I’ve tried to argue this through reason, I have to wonder whether lissener has taken a single course in Spanish sociolinguistics, or any sort of linguistics. Because I have. I’ve studied Spanish for a long time. I’ve taken classes in Spanish sociolinguistics; I’ve studied Catalan in school. I’ve been to Galicia. I’m fairly certain that I’m better acquainted with Spanish, Catalan, and Galician than lissener is (though I don’t know much about Basque). I understand that expertise doesn’t count for much, but I do know my shit and I know what I’m talking about.
Meanwhile, I don’t really know what lissener’s talking about. Since apparently the original argument was over the wording of the Spanish Constitution, clearly everybody except lissener was confused over what we were arguing! It’s amazing!
So then lissener: in the interests of trying to salvage something relevant - what the hell point are you originally arguing? Spell it out precisely because the rest of us are still confused, and that makes your cites seem irrelevant. Of course, I’m not going to consider it until you acknowledge you were wrong about all the points you’ve abandoned along the way - in particular the hilarious statement that Basque is, in some way, subsumed by the term “Spanish”.
(Incidentally, I should point out that every textbook I’ve seen on Spanish linguistics refers to the language as español, which is an interesting counterpoint to lissener’s assertions about “technical correctness”.)
Wait, what? All that to tell us that Basque is spoken in Spain? Wow, you are the master of pointing out the irrelevant, aren’t you?
Don’t buy it, though. Because you used that to bolster your argument that Spanish should technically be called “Castilian” and not “Spanish”. A point which you now seem to have abandoned, but you haven’t yet acknowledged was wrong.
All in favor say ‘aye’.
:: raises hand ::
Aye! 
Sigh. No, I meant that, in that limited context, the language popularly known as Spanish was, for the purposes of the Constitution, “officially” called Castilian. I made the political distinction–all the languages spoken in Spain are, politically, “Spanish,” to point out that the “official” language was referred to as Castilian specifically so as to make that distinction.
In other words, as I understand it, to use the word “Spanish” would be to imply that speakers of the *other *languages of Spain were somehow *less *Spanish. The specificity of the word Castilian, in that context, was (so goes the interpretation) to reserve the political connotation of the word Spanish to refer equally to all languages spoken in Spain.
I have just NOT explained that clearly, but that is the distinction I was trying to make between the political and the linguistic connotations of the word “Spanish” (“Spanish” as in the State and “Spanish” as in the language), and why–therefore–“Castilian” was more specifically apt for the Constitutional language. See, again, the correspondence from the UW prof, who is somewhat clearer, and my first cite, which says more explicitly “The use of the term ‘Castilian’, and not ‘Spanish’, makes an important statement acknowledging the existence of various ‘Spanish’ languages.” That author puts it in quotes to distinguish its meaning as political, rather than linguistic. At least, that’s how I interpreted it.
So . . . we’re going backwards here? I thought we’d made progress, in that you understood that the only context I was addressing was the “official” constitutional phrasing? I never suggested–have repeatedly suggested otherwise, in fact–that the word “espanol” should be eliminated, and that the word “Castilian” should be universally used to refer to that language.
I have also repeatedly addressed the Basque question, and I really won’t do so again. To make it clear, I happened to know that Basque was linguistically unrelated to Spanish, and I won’t make any further attempts to explain my description of Basque as a language that is spoken in Spain, not as a language linguistically related to Spanish. Done and done.
I know my Spanish is less than fluent. I was simply attempting to write something using idiom (llamarse, for example) to prove by example that literal translations may be inadequate.
And I would hope that the idea that minority ethnolinguistic groups might deserve nuanced terminology in a constitution addressing, among other things, an improvement in their status, is not lost on anyone. That was key, in my opinion.
I’ve seen and heard “Castellano” used as a synonym for Spanish in Spanish – but never translated “Castilian” except in the cites lissener provided. Which are, I think, alive to the nuance that Catalan et al. are languages of Spain, and unfortunately inordinately literal in their rendering.
In any case.
This is obviously a fascinating discussion. With copious googleable support for all the various opinions.
But I’m really not interested in debating this in the Pit any further, where this tone of hostility is de rigeur. (Pardon my Français.) It obviously interests me to a great degree, but I’d rather discuss it in a forum where mature debate is the norm, and not the vitriol that I’d have to brave to continue it here. I just don’t see any reason to subject myself to it for the sake of an academic discussion.
Can we therefore conclude that in the second quote (taken from the other thread) you were shudder WRONG?
Shouldn’t that be all in favor say Si?
Um, I’m not snarking at you, and FTR I not only don’t know who’s correct nor do I care other than from academic curiosity, but why? You’re posting “cites” here which are unsubstantiated and unverifiable alleged communications from anonymous random professors at universities who may or may not have any knowledge in the area?
All other cites aside, and I’m not judging those - with respect to the above, WTF? That’s like saying “I have 50 e-mails in my Inbox in support of my position; who they are from - out of respect for their personal safety - I cannot say.”
Try building your case again without the surprise masked witnesses; it cuts down greatly on the (I’m certain) unintended humour. Just a thought.
I was unclear. I was attempting to explain my understanding of why “espanol” was not used in place of “castellano” in the Constitution. Which is that, for example, the people who live in Spain but speak, say Galician, still consider themselves Spanish. So to use the word “espanol” would have been to imply that they were somehow LESS Spanish. The word Spanish, politically, refers to all the people of Spain, no matter what language they speak. To use the word “Spanish” in the consitution, then, to refer to one of the many languages spoken in Spain, would have been exclusionary. So to be more precise, they used the specific word “Castilian” rather than the more (politically) generic word “Spanish.”
So I failed to get my point across, but it’s still the point I was originally trying to make. The Spanish/British analogy I stole from my first cite, and meant it, also, only in the context of distinguishing, for the purposes of the Constitutional language, between why they chose to use the word “castellano” instead of the word “espanol.”
I know, I figured the 9 previous cites would stand on their own. I only posted the emails from the professors in the hope that people know me well enough to know that I don’t make shit up out of whole cloth, no matter how much they disagree with my interpretations; and having received the answers, I felt I should pass them on. I decided at the last minute not to include specific contact info because it occurred to me it might violate board policy.
In any case, I invite anyone else to email their own selection of Spanish professors.
(people in this thread translated to 4th grade taunting)
Who cares what you say or what you meant or what cites you give? You’re still a poopyhead with a bad attitude. I don’t like you. You stink. AND you like Showgirls. What a loser. Nyah Nyah. (/people in this thread translated to 4th grade taunting)
Go ahead, dear boy. It seems you’d benefit by blowing off a bit of steam. You seem also, if I might say, eminently suited by temperament to the Pit.
I have emailed Polycarp separately. In case anyone’s interested, the thread I was referencing was Homebrew’s “What’s Next Anglicans? Female circumcision?”
On the subject of whether not being able to ever admit you are wrong is pathological, there is a disorder that I consider when I see that trait:
Signs and symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder may include:
Grandiose sense of one’s own abilities or achievements
Fantasies about having exceptional power, attractiveness or success
Believes he or she is special or unique
Need for constant praise
Expectations of special treatment
Exploitation of other people
Lack of empathy for other people
Envy of other people or a belief that you are the subject of other people’s envy
Haughty or arrogant behaviors
Never admitting to being wrong fits nicely with these.
Just saying. It would be wrong of me to diagnose anyone on the basis of their behavior on a board. Besides, I get paid to diagnose. 
Ah, end of this hijack. I permitted my anger at Peter Akinola and his merry crew to raise my level to the point where I leveled a very smarmy veiled insult at Roger for asking a valid if slightly off-topic question in that thread he linked to, eighteen months ago.
He’s right. It was unjustified, and I’m surprised I didn’t get a warning for it. I want to make a public apology to him here for it, and for the anger he has no doubt felt for a year and a half now. I disagree with his point – that little comment about motes and beams is I think relevant – but it in no way justified my nasty comment about him.
Apologies, Colibri, for furthering the hijack. But rather than resurrect an 18-months-old thread, this is the appropriate place to do it, and the apology should be as public as the insult was.
I see you cited the Wikipedia entry “Names given to the Spanish language” in the other thread. Seems you didn’t pay much attention to it, though:
That’s not what you said. You said this: “It’s my understanding that, technically, ‘Spanish’ is a generic term that includes the languages you mention plus Castilian, which is (again, technically ) the official language of Spain. ‘Castilian’ is to ‘Spanish’ what ‘English’ is to ‘British.’”
This is false. I have explained why, but I will do so again, as a courtesy. “Spanish” is not a generic term that includes all of the official languages of Spain, nor is “español”. For instance, the introductory Spanish linguistics class in my school’s Spanish department is called “Spanish Structure” in the (English-language) course guide, and in class, “La estructura del español”. We only studied Spanish in that class; not a mention was made of any of the other languages of Spain. The textbook from a class I took on Spanish phonetics was Fonética y fonología españolas - again, it only addressed Spanish. The term “español” is specific to one particular language; if I say, “I wrote a letter in Spanish” or “Escribí una carta en español”, there is no doubt what language I’m referring to. So your statement that “technically, ‘Spanish’ is a generic term that includes [various languages spoken in Spain]” is false; “Spanish” as an adjective may describe several languages, 38 million or so people, various styles of cooking, various styles of dance, and so forth. But as a noun, it describes a single language. There is nothing “technical” about either usage; there is no usage of it that I have ever heard - nor of “español”-the-noun - to describe other Spanish languages.
I have yet to see you retract this statement. I have seen you attempt to pretend you meant something else by it, but what you meant to say was clear, in my opinion.
You also said that technically, the official language of Spain is “Castilian”, and not “Spanish”. You have not proven that. You have proven that one line in the Constitution is best translated as “Castilian” - according to one of your professors. (The other preferred “Spanish” as the noun, with Castilian an attributive adjective or perhaps the first noun in a compound.) That doesn’t suggest that the official language is “technically” Castilian; that would only make sense if “Castilian” and “Spanish” were “technically” different. Which of course is what you argued at the time, but you have distanced yourself from that statement. Since “Castilian” and “Spanish” refer in this context to the exact same thing no matter what terminology is used, there is no sense in which the official language could be “technically” one or the other; the choice of which term is used to describe is has some stylistic significance, as it may imply something unwanted to some people (though I think your analysis is lacking here as well; more later on that.)
But since both terms refer to the same thing, both are correct. I have argued, and I hope thoroughly demonstrated, that technical usage does not demand one or the other in Spanish, though my experience has suggested that “español” is far more common even in technical usage. (Another example: in a course I took a couple semesters ago on Romance Linguistics, the professor - a professor of Spanish who spoke pretty fluent Catalan as well referred to the language consistently as “Spanish” and “español”, both in lecture and in the coursepack; this even in the special out-of-class sessions when she taught Catalan.)
The official language of Spain is a language, not a name. The fact that the language is referred to by one name in the Constitution does not logically mean that the official language is “technically” only described by that one name, since in this case either name may be used with the same meaning. They are two different nouns, but their referrents are the same thing. The official language is not that noun, but rather the referrent - a language spoken by three or four hundred million people around the world called, “Spanish” or “español” or “castellano” or “espagnole” or “Spanisch” or “xibanyawen” or any number of other things. My Chinese dictionary doesn’t even have a word for “Castile” or “Castilian”, and I can’t find one on Google. I doubt there is a word, or at least not a commonly-known one. Does that make the sentence “The official language of Spain is Spanish” untranslatable into Chinese? Obviously not. The official language is a language, and there’s a term for that language in Chinese. There’s a term for it in English, “Spanish”, and an additional term used very rarely - but occasionally - in English, “Castilian”. Either is perfectly acceptable.
You were not discussing the reasons behind the wording of the Constitution in your original post - you were attempting a highly pedantic nitpick. We can see that in the fact that you didn’t mention the Spanish Constitution, or even vaguely allude to the reasons behind their choice of terminology. The trouble is that, for all your pedantry, you were wrong. Neither of the terms is preferable for any “technical” reason; further, the two terms “español” and “castellano” do not translate precisely into the English terms “Spanish” and “Castilian”, for reasons which were amply discussed in the original thread. You’ve been equating “español” and “Spanish” this whole thread, but they are not equivalents, as can be seen in the very fact that “castellano” is frequently used when speaking the language, while “Castilian” is very rarely used in English. (Try a google search: Spanish wins, 861 million to 3.04 million.)
Finally, I think your analysis of the wording in the Constitution is rather shallow. I think there’s another meaning you’ve entirely missed: to emphasize that Catalans and Galicians and Basques and everyone else are Spanish first and foremost. Because using the term “Spanish” to describe the language would imply that Catalans and Galicians and various other little groups aren’t Spanish at all - something that many of them did and do still maintain. The very weak central government of Spain and the high degree of autonomy granted to its divisions - termed comunidades autónomas, “autonomous communities” - is a direct reaction to the centralization and the emphasis on a single “Spanish” culture that led Franco to surpress the use of regional languages. It’s not only that the Catalans would have felt excluded by being - implicationally - less Spanish, but also that a lot of them would have been very happy to take the Spanish government up on the offer. Catalunya, Galicia, the Basque country, and Andalucia - regions with strong historic identity - are still recognized and given greater autonomy by the Spanish government. At the same time, perhaps the term “castellano” was more acceptable in Galicia and Catalunya, whose words for the language are “castelán” and “castellà” respectively.
You didn’t mean to talk about this in the original thread; I can tell that because you didn’t talk about any of it. You tried to offer a nitpicky correction; one that was, lamentably, not correct. Your analogy between “Spanish” and “British” was entirely false. What started this whole debate off was not you making “unclear” statements or “pedantic” statements or “technical” statements, but rather “incorrect” statements and “rude” statements and “presumptuous” statements and statements that “demonstrate the hypocrisy in your having opined that people who don’t know what they’re talking about shouldn’t ‘speak from a position of authority’”.
Wrong again. This is not even vaguely an interesting discussion. I hope my digressions into Spanish history and the situation of minority languages have been interesting; I know that Polycarp’s and everyone else’s have been interesting to me. But the central point of this discussion - whether “Castilian” is somehow “technically correct” is not interesting at all.
At any rate, we’re not “debating”. You are being corrected because you behaved abominably. If you can’t take the heat, stop being a jackass in General Questions. This is not a disagreement; this is you stubbornly trying to scrape together enough bits and pieces to cling to having been “right” when you made a statement that was wrong in every respect.
No forum where mature debate is the norm remains so when you are there, lissener, and so if you want to run like a coward - confirming what Colibri said about you - you may do so. But whatever spin you put on it won’t change the fact that it’s a cowardly thing to do.
Public apology publicly accepted. Any private response Polycarp wants to make to my private observations made by email can of course be made privately, if desired.