la cátedra (interesting word)
When I heard this word for the first time of late ,, I thought it means Cathedral ... on researching around it I found that it means something entirely different ..
It is one of the false cognates between English and Spanish which sounds almost the same as the English word Cathedral but its real meaning is professorship or profesorial chair (at the universaty)
And the related word El catedrático/La catedrática means a profesor or senior instructor.
Happy Learning.
6 Answers
Es una palabra latina y muchos lo utilizan ( por ejemplo en mí país ) donde tuve una cultura latina. No solamente como el oficio del profesor pero como la tarima en la escuela.
It is a Latin word and many use it (for example in my country) where people had a Latin culture. Not only as the chair of a professor, but as a platform in the schoolroom.
The Latin culture has been passed down through a number of broad genres.
Latin (Listeni/?læt?n/; Latin: lingua lat?na, IPA: [?li??wa la?ti?na]; the noun lingua, "tongue" and "language", and the adjective latinus, latina and latinum in its three genders, "Latin") is an ancient Italic language[2] originally spoken by the Italic Latins in Latium and Ancient Rome. Along with most European languages, it is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Influenced by the Etruscan language and using the Greek alphabet as a basis, it took form as what is recognizable as Latin in the Italian peninsula. Modern Romance languages are continuations of dialectal forms (vulgar Latin) of the language. Additionally many students, scholars, and some members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and it is still taught in some primary, secondary and post-secondary educational institutions around the world.[3][4]
--
Latin is still used in the creation of new words in modern languages of many different families, including English, and largely in biological taxonomy. Latin and its derivative Romance languages are the only surviving languages of the Italic language family. Other languages of the Italic branch were attested in the inscriptions of early Italy, but were assimilated to Latin during the Roman Republic.
The extensive use of elements from vernacular speech by the earliest authors and inscriptions of the Roman Republic make it clear that the original, unwritten language of the Roman Kingdom was an only partially deducible[clarification needed] colloquial form, the predecessor to Vulgar Latin. By the arrival of the late Roman Republic, a standard, literate form had arisen from the speech of the educated, now referred to as Classical Latin. Vulgar Latin, by contrast, is the name given to the more rapidly changing colloquial language, which was spoken throughout the empire.[5]
Because of the Roman conquests, Latin spread to many Mediterranean and some northern European regions, and the dialects spoken in these areas, mixed to various degrees with the indigenous languages, developed into the modern Romance tongues.[6] Classical Latin slowly changed with the decline of the Roman Empire, as education and wealth became ever scarcer. The consequent Medieval Latin, influenced by various Germanic and proto-Romance languages until expurgated by Renaissance scholars, was used as the language of international communication, scholarship, and science until well into the 18th century, when it began to be supplanted by vernaculars.
Latin is a highly inflected language, with three distinct genders, seven noun cases, four verb conjugations, six tenses, three persons, three moods, two voices, two aspects, and two numbers. A dual number ("a pair of") is present in Old Latin. The rarest of the seven cases is the locative, only marked in proper place names and a few common nouns. Otherwise, the locative function ("place where") has merged with the ablative. The vocative, a case of direct address, is marked by an ending only in words of the second declension. Otherwise, the vocative has merged with the nominative, except that the particle O typically precedes any vocative, marked or not.
As a result of this case ambiguity, different authors list different numbers of cases: 5, 6, or 7. Adjectives and adverbs are compared, and the former are inflected according to case, gender, and number. In view of the fact that adjectives are often used for nouns, the two are termed substantives. Although Classical Latin has demonstrative pronouns indicating different degrees of proximity ("this one here", "that one there"), it does not have articles. Later Romance language articles developed from the demonstrative pronouns, e.g. le and la (French) from ille and illa, and su and sa (Sardinian) from ipse and ipsa.
¡Culture of Latin origin still exists in Europe. It is true that a part of it coming from Greece, because the Romans were taking over a part of their culture from the Greeks, but all the other countries got it through Rome. A great part of the European languages ( for instance the Spanish, French , Italian) are coming from the " lingua latina" In our country the intelligentsia was speaking Latin up to the beginning of the twentieth century , that way distinguishing themselves from the ordinary people.
Check this out at the RAE. See what you make of it.
Gracias por compartir esta palabra con nosotros.
Hmm. thanks for sharing this. That is an interesting word. I am sure that you already know this, but the word for cathedral is la catedral. 
