Words of welcome from the Director of Cultural Affairs of the Cabildo de Tenerife, Cristobal de la Rosa Croissier.

 
Sally Burgess, Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Philology, Margaret Cargill, co-president of the Organizing Committee, Dr Lourdes Divasson and members of the organizing committee, distinguished guest speakers, ladies and gentleman.

Each individual is an invention. We invent languages which intercede in reality and in our perceptions of reality. There are languages that designate and explain what we see, hear, and what we feel; languages in which we think.

If a culture, as UNESCO defines it, is a collection of distinctive features – of spiritual and material features, of intellectual and affective features which characterize a society or social group, and which encompasses, not only the Letters and the Arts, but also lifestyles, fundamental human rights, value systems, traditions and beliefs,  then each individual is indeed a cultural invention.

And this is so because we invent our languages through our culture so as to understand our world, so as to survive in our world.

The English writer Samuel Johnson said that language is the cloak of thought - a cloak that is created for others, to capture their attention, to explain, to persuade, to influence, to dissent and to collaborate.

As a European, I believe that one of our great achievements is the diverse ways in which each cultural community has resolved the particular problems of communication it faces. As a Canary Islander who knows that each of our islands is different  yet at the same time very similar in that; each is bathed by the same ocean, and caressed by the same breezes but has been shaped differently by our volcanoes, I cannot but believe in diversity. It is a diversity that in fact unites. It unites us as a community that knows how to look at the world from different points of view, through different languages, inventing them anew each time, but which has the capacity to cloak its thoughts in the same way, to promote exchange, to promote global communication.

It is for me very moving to be with you today, because by virtue of shared languages we are able to express ourselves, although we are different. This is one of the great duties that the ‘Big Languages’ must take on board.

It is especially interesting to highlight the fact that, while we have been able to create different cultures and languages, we have remained faithful to our own feelings and emotions.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, intrepid travellers visited the island of Tenerife with two principal objectives. The less fortunate, came in search of good health and the much longed for “health resort”, hoping to find a place of rest and happiness in the Orotava Valley that would allow them to recover from the ailments that beset them. The more adventurous, meanwhile, embarked upon a search for the great panoply of treasures that this volcanic island had to offer. Their desire to describe, to classify, to catalogue the geology and the flora and the fauna of the island, made possible an unprecedented development in scientific knowledge in relation to this delicate environment.

This same desire to understand this unique land we see again in the research into our traditions, customs and folklore. Thus, to Sir Alfred Burton Ellis, we owe the first ethnographic descriptions of these Atlantic islands, descriptions which are still cited today as models for ethnographic research and scientific method.

The names of both the writer and traveller Olivia Stone, a wonderful store-teller who wrote about the cultural realities of Tenerife at the end of the 19th century and the Anglican clergyman Thomas Deraby, who travelled around the island of Tenerife at Easter in early 1849, still resound as just two examples of this urge to describe.

All of this is still evidenced by the research and descriptions that they have left us and which have travelled the world over, not through the language of Cervantes, but through the language of Shakespeare, and which have in turn gone on to form a part of our island cultural heritage. Perhaps because of that and because of the fact that Canary Islanders, Spanish, English and Portuguese people have over the centuries lived along side one another here,  our way of speaking Spanish (the so-called Atlantic-meridional Spanish) finds in Canarian speech the additional characteristic of a curious melange of anglicisms and lusitanisms, to which we should add many words from our prehispanic ancestors, the Guanches, who once inhabited these islands.

Perhaps to conclude, in representation of the President of the government of our island, which we call the Cabildo Insular de Tenerife, Ricardo Melchior, and for my own part and that of all “Tinerfeños”, I would like to thank you for visiting us here, as scholars and experts, whose quest is the emotion of the word, a common language, communication which seeks to share, whose quest is that humble invention we call the human being.

Many thanks.