Early Modern Spanish Explained

Early Modern Spanish (also called Classical Spanish or Golden Age Spanish, especially in literary contexts) is the variant of Spanish used between the end of the 15th century and the end of the 17th century, marked by a series of phonological and grammatical changes that transformed Old Spanish into Modern Spanish.

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, wherein voicing remains before voiced consonants, such as Spanish; Castilian: mismo, Spanish; Castilian: desde, and Spanish; Castilian: rasgo, but only allophonically), (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 Spanish colonization of the Americas, and thus it forms the historical basis of all varieties of New World Spanish. Meanwhile, Judaeo-Spanish preserves some archaisms of Old Spanish that disappeared from the rest of the variants, such as the presence of voiced sibilants and the maintenance of the phonemes pronounced as //ʃ// and pronounced as //ʒ//.

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.^[2]

Phonology

From the late 16th century to the mid-17th century, the voiced sibilants pronounced as //z//, pronounced as //z̺//, pronounced as //ʒ// lost their voicing and merged with their respective voiceless counterparts: laminal pronounced as /link/, apical pronounced as /link/, and palatal pronounced as /link/, resulting in the phonemic inventory shown below:

! rowspan=2

Labial	Alveolar		Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Laminal	Apical
Obstruent	Voiceless	pronounced as /p/	pronounced as /t/		pronounced as /t͡ʃ/	pronounced as /k/
	Voiced	pronounced as /b/	pronounced as /d/			pronounced as /g/
Voiceless fricative		pronounced as /f/	pronounced as /s̻/	pronounced as /s̺/	pronounced as /ʃ/		pronounced as /(h)/
Nasal		pronounced as /m/		pronounced as /n/	pronounced as /ɲ/
Tap				pronounced as /ɾ/
Trill				pronounced as /r/
Approximant	Central				pronounced as /ʝ/
	Lateral			pronounced as /l/	pronounced as /ʎ/

! Labial! Alveolar! Palatal! Velar! Glottal

Obstruent	Voiceless	pronounced as /p/	pronounced as /t/	pronounced as /t͡ʃ/	pronounced as /k/
	Voiced	pronounced as /b/	pronounced as /d/		pronounced as /g/
Fricative	Voiceless	pronounced as /f/	pronounced as /s̻/	pronounced as /ʃ/		pronounced as /(h)/
	Voiced		pronounced as /z̻/	pronounced as /ʒ/
Nasal		pronounced as /m/	pronounced as /n/	pronounced as /ɲ/
Tap			pronounced as /ɾ/
Trill			pronounced as /r/
Approximant	Central			pronounced as /ʝ/
	Lateral		pronounced as /l/	pronounced as /ʎ/

• The phoneme pronounced as //h// (from Old Spanish initial pronounced as //f//) progressively became silent in most areas, though it still exists for some words in varieties of Andalusia and Extremadura. In several modern dialects, the sound pronounced as /[h]/ is the realization of the phoneme pronounced as //x//; additionally, in many dialects it exists as a result of the debuccalization of pronounced as //s// in syllabic coda (a process commonly termed aspiration in Hispanic linguistics).
• In the Americas, the Canary Islands, and almost all of Andalusia, the apical pronounced as //s̺// merged with laminal pronounced as //s// (the resulting phoneme is represented as pronounced as //s//). In central and northern Spain, pronounced as //s// shifted to pronounced as //θ//, and the apicoalveolar sibilant pronounced as //s̺// was preserved without change and so it can be represented phonemically as pronounced as //s//).^[3] Some authors use the transcription pronounced as //s̪// and pronounced as //s̻// for pronounced as //s// and/or pronounced as //s̠// for pronounced as //s̺//.
• Many dialects have lost the distinction between the phonemes pronounced as //ʎ// and pronounced as //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.^[4]
• The loss of the phoneme pronounced as //ʒ//—through a merger with pronounced as //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 Real Academia Española, a semi-governmental body. There was no reference book or other authority writers or compositors could turn to, to find the "correct" spelling of a word. In fact, spelling was not considered very important. Sometimes words were spelled according to their Latin origin, rather than their actual pronunciation (trasumpto instead of trasunto). That presents a challenge to modern editors of texts from the period, who are forced to choose what spelling(s) to use.^[2] The radical proposals of were not adopted.

References

Citations

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.
• Book: Eberhard. David M.. Simons. Gary F.. Fennig. Charles D.. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. 2020. SIL International. Dallas, Texas. 23rd. 22 June 2002. 6 April 2006. https://web.archive.org/web/20060406012854/http://www.ethnologue.com/. live.
• Hualde, José Ignacio (2005): The sounds of Spanish, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Penny, Ralph (1993): Gramática histórica del español, Ariel, Barcelona, .

Notes and References

1. Book: Castilic. http://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/cast1243. Harald. Hammarström. Robert. Forkel. Martin. Haspelmath. Sebastian. Bank. 2022. Glottolog 4.6. Jena, Germany. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. .
2. Daniel. Eisenberg. Cervantes' Consonants. Cervantes. Cervantes Society of America. 10. 2. 1990. 3–14. https://web.archive.org/web/20180326180505/http://www.h-net.org:80/~cervantes/csa/articf90/consonan.htm. dead. 2018-03-26.
3. J. I. Hualde, 2005, pp. 153–158
4. Bob de. Jonge. El desarrollo de las variantes de vuestra merced a usted. Spanish. 2005. Estudios de Lingüística del Español. sec. 7.3. 22. 1139-8736.