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Scholar casts doubt on claims that Columbus was a Catalan

The latest "Columbus was a Catalan" flimflam is truly mindboggling.
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http://medievalnews.blogspot.com/2009/10/scholar-casts-doubt-on-claims-that.html

Monday, October 26, 2009

Scholar casts doubt on claims that Columbus was a Catalan

The recent announcement that the explorer Christopher Columbus was not
an Italian, but rather came from the Kingdom of Aragon, has come under
scrutiny, with one scholar poking large holes into the thesis.

Last week, we reported that a new book by Estelle Irizarry, a
linguistics professor at Georgetown University, claims that evidence
from Columbus' own writings shows that he was likely a Catalan and may
even have been Jewish.

One of the key pieces of evidence was the explorer's used of a slash
symbol - similar to the ones used in Internet addresses - that
Columbus employed to indicate pauses in sentences.

That symbol, also known as a virgule, did not appear in texts of that
era written in Castilian nor in writings from any other country, but
only in records and letters from the Catalan-speaking areas of the
Iberian peninsula, namely present-day Catalonia and the Balearic
Islands.

Irizarry explains, "The virgules are sort of like Columbus' DNA. They
were a habit of his. Columbus was a punctuator and was one of the few
of that era."

Now, in an interview with Medievalists.net, Dr. Diana Gilliland Wright
confirms that the slash symbol was used in other places outside of
western Spain. Wright, who is an expert in Italian history in the late
Middle Ages, says, "the virgule is a very common marker for pauses in
sentences" among Venetian documents from the later half of the
fifteenth century.

Dr. Wright also casts doubt on Irizarry's belief that Columbus'
spelling inconsistencies can also be a clue to his origins. "Spelling
in the 15th century was extremely fluid," she says, "and it is normal
to find in official Venetian documents and records three different
spellings of the same name, even when it was the name of a person
known to the writer of the document. I cannot see that variation in
spelling can be used to demonstrate anything but that the writers
didn't have my spelling teacher."

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