Talk:History of the Spanish language

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[edit] Not what I expected

This article is almost entirely about the spread of the Spanish language, as opposed to the history of the Spanish language (what I expected was an article about how the language evolved over time, both in written and oral form, starting from the fusion of the native culture and Latin, to elements of modern society that are influencing the development of Spanish (i.e. technology, the academy that presides over standard Spanish, etc...); and distinct historical versions of Spanish, like old Spanish, middle Spanish, etc... (if such things do exist); not that the information in here isn't useful, but unless it has information about how the spread of the Spanish language influences the Spanish language (which isn't in this article yet), it may be better to place it in a different article, entitled "The spread of the Spanish language" --Confuzion 11:26, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Move

Perhaps we could move this to the History of Spanish. It's shorter and means the same thing. it came from my mom which came from spain which came from my mom's mom which came from my mom's mom's mom

[edit] Pre-modern Spanish orthography

I've been doing some reading which includes excerpts of old documents between about the time of the Conquest of Mexico until about 150 years ago. I'm seeing both systemtic and random differences to modern Spanish orthography. I cannot find anything on Wikipedia about anything but the current orthography. I would like to know if there were previous reforms, what those changed, or if Spanish orthography was unruly until recently. Any details greatly appreciated!

Examples of systematic differences:
  • á for modern a
  • muger for modern mujer
  • coraçon for modern corazón
  • dixo for modern dijo
  • ansí or assí for modern así
  • mas for modern más
  • double s in some verb forms
Examples of non-systematic differences:
  • é or i for modern y
  • io for modern yo
  • Letter v in many places taken by modern b
  • Letters u and v are interchangeable
  • Many missing modern acute accents

I am aware of some of the historic sound changes and that the u/v distinction goes back to Latin, but I am most interested in standardization issues. When was the spelling first standardized? What specific things were standardized at that time? How many times has this standard been reformed since? What were the specific changes made in those reforms? This related to work on Wiktionary where I would like to distinguish spellings which were considered correct at any point in history from non-standardized spellings, and possibly also from poor spelling.

I'm cross-posting this question from Talk:Writing system of Spanish and Talk:Spanish language where I reveived some useful responses but was directed here. — Hippietrail 14:50, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] History of Spanish

  • I too am dissatisfied with the history of Spanish on wiki and I'd like to do something about. The existing article is good enough for the purpose of thracking the world-wide spread of Spanish, but gives little info on phonological changes/ changes in orthography, etc. I have a book from an upper-level undergrad course titled "From Latin to Spanish" by Paul M. Lloyd. (ISBN 0-87169-173-6) It covers everthing all the way back to Classical Latin and has nearly 200 pages in the sections I intend to cover (Late Latin to Old Spanish & Old Spanish to Modern Spanish). This will be quite an undertaking that will take weeks at a minimum and I'd like some feedback before I start. Namely, how do I connect it to everything else? I think this current page should be moved to a title more appropriate to its content (Spread of the Spanish Language?) with the proper adjustments to its content, of course. I could even start writing the page outside of wiki and paste it in when it's substantial enough. Any thoughts?--Hraefen 03:45, 26 November 2005 (UTC)
I suggest a subpage (such as /Draft or /Linguistic evolution or whatever). I usually edit outside of Wikipedia in a common text editor and then paste a "first stable version" when it's ready. Don't worry about the connection to the rest, for now. "History of Spanish" covers both geographic/cultural expansion and linguistic evolution, so I'd rather not have separate pages; maybe there should be a historic section first, and then a detailed survey of linguistic evolution with pointers to the previously covered historical facts (so as to give the reader an idea of what was happening when). --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 12:28, 26 November 2005 (UTC)
The article could benefit from the explicit use of the terms "external history" and "internal history". These technical terms are standard in language history. External history is about the social history of the speakers, the geographic distribution, standardization, etc. -- everything that doesn't refer to specific sounds, words, or sentences. Internal history is the standard term for what this article is calling "linguistics": phonology (the sound system), morphology (internal structure of words), and syntax (phrases, sentences, agreement -- the relations between words in discourse). There would be no need to separate external and internal histories into separate articles if they were labeled as such in this article. I would suggest that the section on internal history be given three subsections: (1) phonology (including a summary of the history of Spanish orthography), (2) morphology, and (3) syntax. A fourth area, lexicon (= vocabulary), is probably best treated under external history, since it deals largely with loanwords from other languages in contact. Kotabatubara 04:33, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Pre-modern Spanish pronounciation

Was the j pronounced as in the French and Portuguese pronouciation? Something like zsh? This must have evolved to s in the Philippines. In Filipino, we have 'sabun' (jabon- soap), 'relos'(reloj- watch), sugal(jugar-to play, in Filipino to gamble). Some Filipinos have names like Sesus (Jesus) , Sese . Saviour is Javier (and Xavier).--Jondel 02:15, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

IIRC j = /ʒ/ ("zh") and x = /ʃ/ ("sh"). Then they merged into the latter (that's why old writings hesitate between j and x - people no longer distinguished the two sounds and didn't remember how the word was originally written). At some point the sounds moved back and became velar, but I'm not sure if this was before or after the merge. --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 12:34, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Comprehension levels

Could a speaker of modern Spanish understand a speaker of Spanish spoken centuries before and vice versa? Say, around the 12th and 13th centuries? I know that Spanish seems to have changed much less than English or French from that time to now. Can anyone answer the question? Thanks. Stallions2010 18:57, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

  • Spanish from say, the late 1400s would be comprehensible, but documents in "Spanish" from the timeframe you're talking about (1100s & 1200s) are nearly impossible to come by. The language was considerably different from Latin by this time, but basically everything (including "Spanish") was still written in Latin. It's from the "mistakes" made by scribes and others that were less familiar with Classical Latin that give us the best glimpse of what Spanish may have been like at that time. Read Linguistic history of Spanish for a better understanding of this. But to give you an answer even though I (nor can anyone definitively) can't really back it up, Spanish from the late 1400s would be comprehensible but the further back in time you go, the less mutual comprehension there would be.--Hraefen 19:33, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
  • I have a differing opinion on the availability of texts written in 12th- and 13th-century Spanish. See the Wikipedia articles on "Cantar de Mio Cid", "Gonzalo de Berceo", and "Alfonso X of Castile" for example. Excellent editions of these works have been published in the original language. For an untrained modern Spanish-speaker, reading 13th-century Spanish is a moderate challenge. Listening comprehension would be a greater challenge, since the sounds (consonants especially) have changed more than the spelling. Kotabatubara 19:31, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed merge of Linguistic history of Spanish into this article

Dbachman recently suggested the merge and I knew it would happen eventually. I created "Linguistic history" because "History of" contained so little info about phonetics, etymology etc. and concentrated mainly on the social/historical spread of Spanish rather than its genetic makeup and its evolution. I didn't want to step on anyone's toes by completely re-arranging this article, so I just started one from scratch. Anyway... my vote is that we keep the basic format of "Linguistic history" as it is and essentially try to merge in any info from this page. Some of the tables at "Linguistic history" could be moved to the bottom because their place in the chronology of the language is hazy at best. The name of the article is also of little importance to me. Any thoughts?--Hraefen Talk 16:26, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Most Interesting

It is well known the Romance languages derived from Latin. How the language
is adapted and transformed through generations and geographical
areas is the most interesting to me. The question could a
spanish speaker from 400 years ago have a discussion and understand spanish
speakers of today got me thinking. My initial response was no there have been
too many changes in pronunciation, as demostrated above, and the new
spanish slang. Today, spanish slang is used so greatly an aged spanish
speaker would need to be informed of the slang. Reguardless of the root
being Latin and spanish being a popular language spanish people from
400 years ago would not uphold a conversation. While catching the general
vocabulary the slang and transformation of the language would be the language
barrier. That question was the most interesting paragraph I read.
--216.184.3.245 05:20, 15 January 2007 (UTC)Stephanie Ambrose from Span 101 section 52

[edit] Mozárabe

The intro has the following confusing paragraph:

The standard Spanish language is also called Castilian. It originated in the Cordillera Cantabrica, in northern Spain in the 8th and 9th centuries AD, but others claim to came from a Franco-Navarre and Gothic-Castillian dialects in the 11th century AD. After the Reconquista, this northern dialect was brought to the south and nearly replaced the provincial dialects, such as in Andalusia which it shown heavier influences of Moorish Arabic, (Moro or Morocho), Christian Arabic (Mozarabe) and Sefardi Jewish grammar (Ladino, a form of Hebrew is nearly extinct in the 21st century, also known as Judeo-Iberian/Judeo-Hispano), all but vanished by the late 16th century.

Well, the mozárabes could be described as Christian Arabs, I suppose, but the Mozarabic language was a Romance language, not a form of Arabic! FilipeS 19:49, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merge and re-title

(1) I second the suggestion to cut the section "Influences" out of the article "History of the Spanish language" and merge its contents with the separate article "Influences on the Spanish language": It is a large enough topic to merit its own article. BUT...

(2) I suggest that the separate article be retitled "Loanwords in Spanish" or "Lexical borrowing in Spanish". Why? Because virtually all of the so-called "influences" that are solidly established are adoptions of words from other languages. Aside from vocabulary, all the given examples of "influence" are controversial, as the present text of the article correctly points out. F > h thanks to Basque? "No hard evidence." Lenition thanks to Celtic? The article cites problems with the proposal. Germanic phonological influence? "Very little." Arabic influence? All lexical (though the cross-referenced article "Arabic influence on Spanish" cites some phrases in addition to words). "Influence" is a nebulous term, much too general for the contents of the section/article merger under discussion. The unconfirmed speculations about Basque f > h, Celtic lenition, etc. can be included as incidental comments in the respective sections on sound change; they don't merit the focus of a dedicated section on "influences".

(3) I recommend that the separate article "Arabic influence on Spanish" be cut and merged with the newly-titled article "Loanwords in Spanish" (or that the latter article give up its Arabic section to be merged with the former article).

(4) An argument could be made to treat "learnèd" vocabulary in the "Loanwords" article, as borrowings from Latin.

(5) For the article on word-borrowing, languages not yet developed in the article include Catalan, French, Portuguese, Provençal, and Greek.

(6) Where claims about etymology become complex, they should be supported by consulting reputable dictionaries, such as J. Corominas's Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, and Corominas should be cited in the article's final section, "Sources". This dictionary has an appendix that organizes words according to source language. Kotabatubara 17:07, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The section on "External History" is too USA-centred

This is a frequent problem in Wikipedia. The section devotes more space to the Phillipines than to the whole of South America. It also gives particular attention to Puerto Rico and even to the Marianas - islands most Spanish speakers have never heard of. I won´t delete half of this section yet, but I may do. I suggest quite a few paragraphs of the section could be transferred to a new page called "The Spanish language in formerly Spanish territories acquired by the USA". The rest of this article is informative and good reading. Sebatianalfar 21:25, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] New oldest spanish text discovered

A new series of Old Spanish legal texts have been discovered in Valpuesta (Basque Country, Spain). The oldest of the texts was written in 804, so it is the first text written in a romance language unless another one is discovered.

See theese links (in Modern Spanish, sorry):

http://www.valpuesta.com/hemeroteca/noticias_valpuesta/hemeroteca10.php

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartularios_de_Valpuesta

http://www.euskonews.com/0053zbk/gaia5303es.html

In the begining, the Spanish language was spoken in the Basque Country only, and not in Castile. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.3.244.25 (talk) 21:27, 23 November 2007 (UTC)