Early Modern Spanish
Early Modern Spanish | |
---|---|
Early Modern Castilian | |
| |
Pronunciation | Iberian peninsula |
Ethnicity | Spaniards |
Era | 15th–17th century |
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Early forms | |
Latin Aljamía (marginal) | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | – |
Glottolog | stan1288 |
Early Modern Spanish (also called classical Spanish or
Notable changes from Old Spanish to Early Modern Spanish include: (1) a readjustment of the sibilants (including their devoicing and changes in their place of articulation), (2) the phonemic merger known as yeísmo, (3) the rise of new second-person pronouns, (4) the emergence of the "se lo" construction for the sequence of third-person indirect and direct object pronouns, and (5) new restrictions on the order of clitic pronouns.
Early Modern Spanish corresponds to the period of
Early Modern Spanish, however, was not uniform throughout the Spanish-speaking regions of Spain. Each change has its own chronology and, in some cases, geography. Slightly different pronunciations existed simultaneously. The Spanish spoken in Toledo was taken as the "best" variety and was different from that of Madrid.[3]
Phonology
From the late 16th century to the mid-17th century, the voiced sibilants /z/, /z̺/, /ʒ/ lost their voicing and merged with their respective voiceless counterparts: laminal /
Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Laminal | Apical | ||||||
Obstruent
|
Voiceless
|
p | t | t͡ʃ | k | ||
Voiced
|
b | d | g | ||||
Voiceless fricative
|
f | s̻ | s̺ | ʃ | (h) | ||
Nasal | m | n | ɲ | ||||
Tap
|
ɾ | ||||||
Trill | r | ||||||
Approximant
|
Central | ʝ | |||||
Lateral | l | ʎ |
Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Obstruent
|
Voiceless
|
p | t | t͡ʃ | k | |
Voiced
|
b | d | g | |||
Fricative | Voiceless
|
f | s̻ | ʃ | (h) | |
Voiced
|
z̻ | ʒ | ||||
Nasal | m | n | ɲ | |||
Tap
|
ɾ | |||||
Trill | r | |||||
Approximant
|
Central | ʝ | ||||
Lateral | l | ʎ |
- The phoneme /h/ (from Old Spanish initial /f/) progressively became syllabic coda(a process commonly termed aspiration in Hispanic linguistics).
- In the which?] use the transcription /s̪/ and /s̻/ for /s/ and/or /s̠/ for /s̺/.
- Many dialects have lost the distinction between the phonemes /ʎ/ and /ʝ/ in a merger, called yeísmo. Both phonemes have remained separate in parts of the Iberian Peninsula and in parts of South America, mainly in Bolivia, Paraguay, and Peru.
Grammar
- A readjustment of the second-person pronouns differentiates Modern Spanish from Old Spanish. To eliminate the ambiguity of the form vos, which served for both the second-person singular formal and the second-person plural, two alternative forms were created:
- The form usted (< vuesarced < vuestra merced, 'your grace') as a form of respect in the second-person singular.
- The form vosotros (< vos otros) as a usual form of second-person plural. In parts of Andalusia, in the Canary Islands, and in the Americas, however, the form did not take hold, and the form ustedes came to be used for both the formal and the informal second-person plural.[5]
- The loss of the phoneme /ʒ/—through a merger with /ʃ/—caused the medieval forms gelo, gela, gelos, gelas (consisting of an indirect object followed by a direct object) to be reinterpreted as se lo, se la, se los, se las, as in digelo 'I gave it to him/her' > Early Modern Spanish díselo > Modern Spanish se lo di.
- In Early Modern Spanish, clitic pronouns were still often suffixed to a finite verb form, as in Portuguese, but they began to alternate with preverbal forms, which became the norm in Modern Spanish: enfermose and muriose > se enfermó and se murió.
Spelling
Spelling in Early Modern Spanish was anarchic, unlike the Spanish of today, which is governed and standardized by the
References
Notes
- ^ In yeísmo dialects,castellano is pronounced [kasteˈʝano].
Citations
- ^ Eberhard, Simons & Fennig (2020)
- ^ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2022). "Castilic". Glottolog 4.6. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
- ^ a b Eisenberg, Daniel (1990). "Cervantes' Consonants". Cervantes. 10 (2). Cervantes Society of America: 3–14. Archived from the original on 2018-03-26.
- ^ J. I. Hualde, 2005, pp. 153–158
- ISSN 1139-8736.
Further reading
- Alvar, Manuel (director), Manual de dialectología hispánica. El Español de España, Ariel Lingüística, Barcelona, 1996 and 2007.
- Cano, Rafael (coord.): Historia de la lengua española, Ariel Lingüística, Barcelona, 2005.
- Eberhard, David M.; Simons, Gary F.; Fennig, Charles D. (2020). Ethnologue: Languages of the World (23rd ed.). Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Archived from the original on 6 April 2006. Retrieved 22 June 2002.
- Hualde, José Ignacio (2005): The sounds of Spanish, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
- Penny, Ralph (1993): Gramática histórica del español, Ariel, Barcelona, ISBN 84-344-8265-7.