A Brief History of the Spanish Language

by Pharies, David A.

• ISBN13: 9780226666839
• ISBN10: 0226666832
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-05-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

In what will likely become a classic introduction to the history of the Spanish language, David Pharies clearly and concisely charts the evolution of Spanish from its Indo-European roots to its present form. An internationally recognized expert on the history and development of this language, Pharies brings to his subject a precise sense of what students of Spanish linguistics need to know.

Author Biography

David Pharies is professor of Spanish and linguistics and chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Florida

Table of Contents

Author's Note	p. ix
Preface	p. xi
Abbreviations	p. xv
Introduction	p. 1
What Is a Language History?	p. 1
Why Study the History of Spanish?	p. 4
Language Change	p. 7
The Inexorability of Language Change	p. 7
Changes in Progress	p. 8
Language Change as Observed through Written Evidence	p. 9
The Categories of Language Change	p. 11
The Causes of Language Change	p. 13
The Mechanism of Language Change	p. 15
Sociolinguistics	p. 16
Questions	p. 18
The Genealogy of Spanish	p. 19
Language Families	p. 19
Some Important Language Families	p. 23
The Indo-European Language Family	p. 24
The Italic Branch	p. 25
Bilingualism and Diglossia	p. 26
Genealogy of Spanish	p. 28
Questions	p. 28
External History of the Iberian Peninsula up to the Thirteenth Century	p. 31
The Iberian Peninsula before the Arrival of the Romans	p. 31
The Romanization of the Iberian Peninsula	p. 34
The End of the Roman Empire	p. 36
The Visigothic Invasion	p. 37
The Muslim Invasion	p. 40
An Extinct Variety of Ibero-Romance: Mozarabic	p. 42
The Reconquest	p. 44
The Rise of Castilian	p. 47
Questions	p. 50
The Latin Language	p. 51
Stages in the History of Latin	p. 52
Phonology	p. 53
Orthography and Pronunciation	p. 55
Nominal Morphology	p. 57
Verbal Morphology	p. 66
Syntax	p. 67
Text Analysis	p. 68
Questions	p. 70
From Latin to Medieval Castilian: Phonology	p. 75
The Nature of Phonological Change	p. 75
The Most Important Phonological Changes of the Romance Period	p. 77
Phonological Derivations	p. 90
Exceptions to Regular Phonological Change	p. 93
Text Analysis	p. 95
Alphonsine Orthography	p. 96
Questions	p. 97
From Latin to Medieval Castilian: Morphology and Syntax	p. 101
Interdependence of Morphological and Syntactic Changes	p. 101
Nominal Morphology	p. 102
A Linguistic Myth: The Cacophony of the Pronoun Combination le lo	p. 113
Verbal Morphology	p. 118
Principal Syntactic Changes	p. 126
Text Analysis	p. 132
Lexical Archaisms in Alphonsine Prose	p. 135
Questions	p. 137
From Medieval Castilian to Modern Spanish	p. 141
Political and Cultural History of Spain after the Middle Ages	p. 141
An Archaic Dialect: Sephardi	p. 144
Linguistic Changes	p. 151
A Linguistic Myth: The Lisping King	p. 155
Text Analysis	p. 164
A Linguistic Myth: The Phonemic Character of Spanish Orthography	p. 165
Questions	p. 166
History of the Spanish Lexicon	p. 169
Routes of Lexical Integration in Spanish	p. 169
The Reduplicative Playful Template	p. 176
Etymology	p. 181
Stages in the History of the Spanish Lexicon	p. 184
Questions	p. 187
Spanish Dialectology	p. 191
Varieties of Spanish in the Two Castiles	p. 192
Andalusian	p. 194
Canary Island Spanish	p. 203
American Spanish	p. 204
Demography of the Spanish Language	p. 211
Four Distinctive Varieties of American Spanish	p. 212
Spanish in the United States	p. 226
Questions	p. 230
Rudiments of Spanish Phonetics and Phonology	p. 233
Glossary of Linguistic Terms	p. 239
Maps	p. 251
Works Cited	p. 261
Index of Spanish Words Cited	p. 267
Subject Index	p. 285
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