¿Por qué?: 101 Questions about Spanish 9781474227926, 9781474227919, 9781474227957, 9781474227933

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Contents
Detailed table of contents
List of tables
List of illustrations
List of boxes
Acknowledgments
Copyright acknowledgments
Preface
Part one Spanish in context
Chapter 1 Spanish today
Question 1. Who speaks Spanish?
Question 2. Who’s in charge of the Spanish language?
Question 3. Why is Spanish often called castellano?
Question 4. What are the different dialects of Spanish? Part I: Spain
Question 5. What are the different dialects of Spanish? Part II: Latin America
Question 6. What is the status of the minority languages of Spain?
Question 7. What is the status of the indigenous languages of Latin America?
Question 8. How is Spanish still evolving?
Question 9. Can all Spanish speakers understand each other?
Question 10. How important is Spanish on the Internet?
Chapter 2 From Latin to Spanish
Question 11. How old is Spanish?
Question 12. How did Latin become Spanish? Part I: Vocabulary
Question 13. How did Latin become Spanish? Part II: Phonology
Question 14. How did Latin become Spanish? Part III: The noun system
Question 15. How did Latin become Spanish? Part IV: The verb system
Question 16. How has Latin continued to influence Spanish?
Chapter 3 Spanish and Romance
Question 17. How have other Romance languages influenced Spanish?
Question 18. Is it true that Portuguese speakers can understand Spanish but not the other way around?
Question 19. How is Catalan different from Spanish?
Question 20. What is Ladino?
Question 21. What other languages are related to Romance?
Chapter 4 Spanish and other languages
Question 22. If Basque isn’t related to Spanish, what is it?
Question 23. What other languages were spoken in pre-Roman Spain?
Question 24. How did the pre-Roman languages influence Spanish?
Question 25. How did the fall of the Roman Empire affect Spanish?
Question 26. What impact did almost eight hundred years of Arabic occupation have on Spanish?
Question 27. How have the native languages of Latin America affected Spanish?
Question 28. How has English affected Spanish?
Question 29. How is Spanish sign language related to Spanish?
Chapter 5 Learning Spanish
Question 30. How do children learn Spanish? Part I: Sounds and words
Question 31. How do children learn Spanish? Part II: Grammar
Question 32. What kinds of mistakes do native speakers make in their Spanish?
Question 33. Does speaking Spanish change the way you think?
Question 34. Is it too late for me to learn Spanish?
Question 35. Is Spanish the easiest language for a speaker of English to learn?
Part 2 Inside Spanish
Chapter 6 Spanish vocabulary
Question 36. How many words does Spanish have?
Question 37. What are the most frequent words in Spanish?
Question 38. Where does Spanish vocabulary come from?
Question 39. Why does Spanish have so many charming derivational endings?
Question 40. Why do most Spanish negatives begin with n?
Question 41. Why does Spanish have two words that mean ‘to be’ (ser and estar) and two words that mean ‘to know’ (saber and conocer)?
Question 42. Why does Spanish have two words that mean ‘that’ (ese and aquel)?
Question 43. Why are Spanish prepositions unpredictable?
Question 44. Why does Spanish have two words that mean ‘for’ (por and para)?
Chapter 7 The written language
Question 45. What happened to ch and ll?
Question 46. Where does ñ come from?
Question 47. Why does Spanish have both b and v?
Question 48. Why is h silent?
Question 49. Why doesn’t Spanish capitalize days of the week and months of the year?
Question 50. Is Spanish spelling phonetic?
Question 51. Why does Spanish have so many accent marks?
Question 52. Why do some words keep an accent in the plural, some gain an accent, and some lose an accent?
Question 53. Who invented the inverted exclamation and question marks?
Question 54. Why doesn’t Spanish use apostrophes?
Question 55. How do you write txt msgs in Spanish?
Question 56. How do you write Spanish on a computer?
Chapter 8 The sounds of Spanish
Question 57. Why does Spanish only have five vowels?
Question 58. Why does Spanish have those five vowels?
Question 59. Why do Spanish speakers roll their r’s?
Question 60. Can all Spanish speakers roll their r’s?
Question 61. Why do Spaniards use the th sound? (And what about z?)
Question 62. Where does the /x/ sound come from?
Question 63. What are seseo, ceceo, and yeísmo?
Question 64. Why is it hard for Spanish speakers to say Spain?
Question 65. Why does Spanish stress the last syllable of teneDOR ‘fork’ but the next-to-last syllable of cuCHIllo ‘knife’?
Question 66. Is there a version of Pig Latin for Spanish?
Chapter 9 Names, nouns, and pronouns
Question 67. Why are Spanish names so long?
Question 68. Does Spanish have a ‘son of’ ending for last names?
Question 69. Why are Pepe and Paco the nicknames for José and Francisco?
Question 70. Why does Spanish have masculine and feminine nouns?
Question 71. Are the same words masculine and feminine in all Romance languages?
Question 72. Why do so many masculine nouns end in -a?
Question 73. Why is vacaciones plural?
Question 74. Why doesn’t Spanish (mostly) have a word for ‘it’?
Question 75. Why does Spanish have so many words for ‘you’?
Question 76. How do Spanish dialects differ in their words for ‘you’?
Question 77. What are leísmo, loísmo, and laísmo?
Question 78. How can su mean ‘his,’ ‘her,’ ‘their,’ and ‘your’?
Chapter 10 Where the action is:
Question 79. Why does Spanish have -ar, -er, and -ir verbs?
Question 80. Why conjugate?
Question 81. Why does Spanish have so many irregular verbs?
Question 82. Why do only some verbs have the “boot” pattern?
Question 83. Why do so many verbs have irregular yo forms in the present tense?
Question 84. Why does Spanish have so many ways to talk about the past?
Question 85. Why are there so many more irregulars in the preterite past tense than in the imperfect?
Question 86. How can Spanish use the same word for was and went?
Question 87. How can the subjunctive be used for actual events?
Question 88. Why does Spanish have two past tense subjunctives?
Question 89. Why does Spanish have a present and past subjunctive, but no future subjunctive? (a trick question)
Question 90. Why is the subjunctive so irregular?
Question 91. Why are the future and the conditional different from other tenses?
Question 92. Why are Spanish commands so complicated?
Question 93. Why does Spanish have so many “backwards” verbs like gustar?
Question 94. How can hay mean both ‘there is’ and ‘there are’?
Chapter 11 Building sentences:
Question 95. Why is the basic word order of Spanish subject-verb-object?
Question 96. How can an adjective’s position change its meaning?
Question 97. Why does Spanish have the “personal a”?
Question 98. Why are object pronouns sometimes placed before verbs, and sometimes after them?
Question 99. Why does Spanish have the “la la” rule? (Or does it?)
Question 100. Why does Spanish double mark indirect objects?
Question 101. Why does Spanish have double negatives?
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

¿Por qué?

101 ­Questions about S­ panish

Also available from Bloomsbury: First Language Acquisition in Spanish, Gilda Socarras Pasaporte al Mundo Hispano: Segunda Edición, Samuel Anaya Guzman, Cristina Quintana Blanco and Angela Uribe de Kellett The Grammar Detective, Gillian Hanson Where Words Come From, Fred Sedgwick

¿Por qué? 101 ­Questions about Spanish Judy Hochberg

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Judy Hochberg, 2016 Judy Hochberg has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: PB: 978-1-4742-2791-9 HB: 978-1-4742-2792-6 ePDF: 978-1-4742-2793-3 ePub: 978-1-4742-2794-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hochberg, Judith Golden, author. Title: ¿Por que?: 101 questions about Spanish / Judy Hochberg. Other titles: 101 questions about Spanish Description: London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2016012308 (print) | LCCN 2016024044 (ebook) | ISBN 9781474227926 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474227919 (paperback) | ISBN 9781474227933 (epdf) | ISBN 9781474227940 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Spanish language–Grammar. | Spanish language–Handbooks, manuals, etc. | BISAC: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Historical & Comparative. Classification: LCC PC4111 .H623 2016 (print) | LCC PC4111 (ebook) | DDC 468.6/421–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012308 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

For Michael, who has made everything possible Y a la señorita Jewel Fewkes, quien llevará amarillo y rojo en el cielo

Contents Detailed table of contents

viii

List of tables

xiii

List of illustrations

xvi

List of boxes

xvii

Acknowledgments xviii Copyright acknowledgments

xx

Preface xxi

Part one  Spanish in context 1 Spanish today 3 2 From Latin to Spanish 38 3 Spanish and Romance 61 4 Spanish and other languages 82 5 Learning Spanish 109

Part two  Inside Spanish 6 Spanish vocabulary 131 7 The written language 161 8 The sounds of Spanish 182 9 Names, nouns, and pronouns 202 10 Where the action is: Spanish verbs 

230

11 Building sentences: The syntax of Spanish 

269

Notes 293 Bibliography 303 Index 322

Detailed table of contents Part one  Spanish in context 1 Spanish today 3 1 2 3 4 5

Who speaks Spanish? 4 Who’s in charge of the Spanish language? 11 Why is Spanish often called castellano?14 What are the different dialects of Spanish? Part I: Spain 17 What are the different dialects of Spanish? Part II: Latin America 20 6 What is the status of the minority languages of Spain? 23 7 What is the status of the indigenous languages of Latin America? 25 8 How is Spanish still evolving? 29 9 Can all Spanish speakers understand each other? 33 10 How important is Spanish on the Internet? 34

2 From Latin to Spanish 38 11 12 13 14 15 16

How old is Spanish? How did Latin become Spanish? Part I: Vocabulary How did Latin become Spanish? Part II: Phonology How did Latin become Spanish? Part III: The noun system How did Latin become Spanish? Part IV: The verb system How has Latin continued to influence Spanish?

41 45 47 52 54 57

3 Spanish and Romance 61 17 How have other Romance languages influenced Spanish? 18 Is it true that Portuguese speakers can understand Spanish but not the other way around? 19 How is Catalan different from Spanish?

62 67 68

Detailed table of contents

20 What is Ladino? 21 What other languages are related to Romance?

73 77

4 Spanish and other languages 82 Pre-Roman languages 22 If Basque isn’t related to Spanish, what is it? 23 What other languages were spoken in pre-Roman Spain? 24 How did the pre-Roman languages influence Spanish?

83 85 87

Post-Roman languages 25 How did the fall of the Roman Empire affect Spanish? 26 What impact did almost eight hundred years of Arabic occupation have on Spanish? 27 How have the native languages of Latin America affected Spanish? 28 How has English affected Spanish? 29 How is Spanish sign language related to Spanish?

91 93 96 100 105

5 Learning Spanish 109 Spanish as a first language 30 How do children learn Spanish? Part I: Sounds and words 31 How do children learn Spanish? Part II: Grammar 32 What kinds of mistakes do native speakers make in their Spanish? 33 Does speaking Spanish change the way you think?

110 114 118 121

Spanish as a second language 34 Is it too late for me to learn Spanish? 35 Is Spanish the easiest language for a speaker of English to learn?

123 126

Part two  Inside Spanish 6 Spanish vocabulary 131 The Spanish lexicon 36 37 38 39

How many words does Spanish have? 132 What are the most frequent words in Spanish? 134 Where does Spanish vocabulary come from? 137 Why does Spanish have so many charming derivational endings?142

ix

x

Detailed table of contents

Specific areas of vocabulary 40 Why do most Spanish negatives begin with n?146 41 Why does Spanish have two words that mean ‘to be’ (ser and estar) and two words that mean ‘to know’ (saber and conocer)?147 42 Why does Spanish have two words that mean ‘that’ (ese and aquel)?150 43 Why are Spanish prepositions unpredictable? 152 44 Why does Spanish have two words that mean ‘for’ (por and para)?157

7 The written language 161 The Spanish alphabet 45 46 47 48 49

What happened to ch and ll?163 Where does ñ come from? 164 Why does Spanish have both b and v?165 Why is h silent? 167 Why doesn’t Spanish capitalize days of the week and months of the year? 168 50 Is Spanish spelling phonetic? 170 Accents and diacritical marks 51 Why does Spanish have so many accent marks? 171 52 Why do some words keep an accent in the plural, some gain an accent, and some lose an accent? 174 53 Who invented the inverted exclamation and question marks?175 54 Why doesn’t Spanish use apostrophes? 176 Writing in the machine age 55 How do you write txt msgs in Spanish? 56 How do you write Spanish on a computer?

177 180

8 The sounds of Spanish 182 Vowels 57 Why does Spanish only have five vowels? 58 Why does Spanish have those five vowels?

183 185

Consonants 59 Why do Spanish speakers roll their r’s?187 60 Can all Spanish speakers roll their r’s?189

Detailed table of contents

61 Why do Spaniards use the th sound? (And what about z?)190 62 Where does the /x/ sound come from? 192 63 What are seseo, ceceo, and yeísmo?193 Words 64 Why is it hard for Spanish speakers to say Spain?194 65 Why does Spanish stress the last syllable of teneDOR ‘fork’ but the next-to-last syllable of cuCHIllo ‘knife’? 196 66 Is there a version of Pig Latin for Spanish? 199

9 Names, nouns, and pronouns 202 Names 67 Why are Spanish names so long? 203 68 Does Spanish have a ‘son of’ ending for last names? 204 69 Why are Pepe and Paco the nicknames for José and Francisco?205 Nouns 70 Why does Spanish have masculine and feminine nouns? 206 71 Are the same words masculine and feminine in all Romance languages? 208 72 Why do so many masculine nouns end in -a?210 73 Why is vacaciones plural? 214 Pronouns 74 75 76 77 78

Why doesn’t Spanish (mostly) have a word for ‘it’? 216 Why does Spanish have so many words for ‘you’? 217 How do Spanish dialects differ in their words for ‘you’? 220 What are leísmo, loísmo, and laísmo?222 How can su mean ‘his,’ ‘her,’ ‘their,’ and ‘your’? 227

10 Where the action is: Spanish verbs 

230

General considerations 79 Why does Spanish have -ar, -er, and -ir verbs? 80 Why conjugate? 81 Why does Spanish have so many irregular verbs?

231 233 235

The present tense 82 Why do only some verbs have the “boot” pattern? 83 Why do so many verbs have irregular yo forms in the present tense?

238 241

xi

xii

Detailed table of contents

The past tense 84 Why does Spanish have so many ways to talk about the past?  243 85 Why are there so many more irregulars in the preterite past tense than in the imperfect? 247 86 How can Spanish use the same word for was and went?249 The subjunctive 87 How can the subjunctive be used for actual events? 88 Why does Spanish have two past tense subjunctives? 89 Why does Spanish have a present and past subjunctive, but no future subjunctive? (a trick question) 90 Why is the subjunctive so irregular?

250 254 257 258

Other tenses and uses 91 Why are the future and the conditional different from other tenses? 260 92 Why are Spanish commands so complicated? 262 93 Why does Spanish have so many “backwards” verbs like gustar?264 94 How can hay mean both ‘there is’ and ‘there are’? 266

11 Building sentences: The syntax of Spanish 

269

95 Why is the basic word order of Spanish subject-verb-object?270 96 How can an adjective’s position change its meaning? 274 97 Why does Spanish have the “personal a”?278 98 Why are object pronouns sometimes placed before verbs, and sometimes after them? 280 99 Why does Spanish have the “la la” rule? (Or does it?) 285 100 Why does Spanish double mark indirect objects? 287 101 Why does Spanish have double negatives? 289

Notes 293 Bibliography 303 Index 322

List of tables 1.1 Spanish around the world

5

1.2 2001 Spanish census results on regional languages

24

1.3 Current changes in Spanish

31

1.4 Top ten languages of the Internet

36

2.1 How Latin became Spanish

40

2.2 Types of semantic change from Latin to Spanish

46

2.3 Principal sound changes from Latin to Spanish

48

2.4 Examples of sound loss and addition within words

49

2.5 Examples of sound change in the evolution of Spanish words

50

2.6 Repurposing ille ‘that’

54

2.7 The evolution of the Spanish verb system

55

2.8 The development of the present indicative -ar verb endings

57

2.9 Some Spanish “doublets”: Word pairs from the same Latin root

59

3.1 Examples of Romance borrowings across semantic domains

64

3.2 Some core vocabulary differences between Catalan and Spanish

70

3.3 Examples of borrowed vocabulary in Ladino

75

3.4 Examples of Hebrew words in Ladino and Yiddish

76

3.5 Branches of the Indo-European language family

78

3.6 The numbers one to ten in some Indo-European and nonIndo-European languages

80

4.1 Examples of Spanish words from indigenous American language families

98

4.2 Some existing Spanish words with added meanings from English

102

5.1 Some early words in children’s Spanish

112

xiv

List of tables

5.2

Basic milestones of verb development

116

5.3

Examples of acquisition errors that show rule knowledge

117

5.4

Examples of native Spanish speech errors

120

5.5

Categories of language difficulty at Defense Language Institute

127

6.1

The ten most frequent words in Spanish and English

135

6.2

Frequency rankings of irregular and regular Spanish verbs

136

6.3

Frequency rankings of Spanish and English subject pronouns

137

Sources of Spanish vocabulary in a random 500-word dictionary sample

140

Examples of category-changing derivational affixes in Spanish

143

6.4 6.5 6.6

Main uses of ser and estar, saber and conocer 148

6.7

Some examples of the three-way demonstrative contrast

150

6.8

Spanish prepositions in basic time expressions

155

6.9

Some Spanish de phrasal verbs (with English equivalents)

155

6.10 Some Spanish/English discrepancies in phrasal verbs of motion and perception

156

7.1

Some Spanish word pairs that differ only in b/v

166

7.2

Sources of silent h in Spanish

168

7.3

Some word pairs distinguished by stress

173

7.4

Singular and plural of words with regular and irregular stress

174

7.5

Examples of logographic texting

178

7.6

Examples of text messages shortened by eliminating letters 179

8.1

Vowel changes from Latin to Spanish in unstressed syllables 184

8.2

Some Spanish consonant changes of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries

191

8.3

The basic stress rules of Spanish

196

8.4

The evolution of Spanish stress patterns

198

8.5

Some examples of Latin American jerigonzas 199

9.1

Some Romance nouns with cognate gender differences

209

List of tables

9.2

The development of ‘you’ pronouns in Castilian Spanish

218

9.3

Le, lo, and la in standard Spanish

222

9.4

Some uses of le and lo in El poema de mío Cid 226

10.1

Sources of irregular verbs

235

10.2

Alternations in the present tense of e  ie and o  ue “boot” verbs

239

10.3

Alternation in the present tense of e  i “boot” verbs

240

10.4

Development of ver and creer from Old Spanish to Modern Spanish

242

10.5

Primary means of expressing the past tense in Spanish

244

10.6

Some irregular Spanish preterites from Latin strong perfects

248

10.7

Vowel alternations in the -ir preterite

248

10.8

The subjunctive in embedded sentences

251

10.9

The subjunctive after impersonal expressions

252

10.10 Indicative and subjunctive in adjective and adverb clauses

254

10.11 The roots of the Spanish imperfect subjunctives

256

10.12 Some irregulars of the present and imperfect subjunctive

259

10.13 Derivation of the future and conditional endings

261

10.14 Some common “backwards” verbs of Spanish

265

11.1

Examples of changes in adjective meaning before and after nouns

275

Examples of changes in adjective overtone before and after nouns

276

11.3

Object pronoun placement rules

280

11.4

Some examples of other pronoun types and pronoun combinations 281

11.5

Premodern pronoun phenomena in El poema de mío Cid and Don Quijote 283

11.2

xv

List of illustrations 1.1

Ceuta and Melilla

11

1.2

The seal of the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española

13

1.3

Minority language areas of Spain

17

1.4

Spanish colonial trade routes

21

1.5

Voseo and tuteo in Latin America

22

4.1

An Iberian lead plaque from Ullastret, Catalonia, Spain

87

4.2

‘Dog’ in lengua de signos española and catalana 106

6.1

Spanish negatives from compounds

6.2

Development of este, ese, and aquel 151

6.3

Six spatial relations expressed by en and their linguistic treatment in other languages

153

6.4

Relative frequencies of por and para over time

159

7.1

A retablo ex-voto

162

8.1

Tongue positions for Spanish vowels

186

8.2

Acoustic qualities of Spanish vowels

186

146

11.1 Overall syntactic structure of Don Quijote atacó un molino de viento; syntactic structure of molino de viento 271 11.2 Syntactic structure of Don Quijote atacó un molino de viento; and of hypothetical subject-object-verb sentence Don Quijote viento de molino un atacó 272 11.3 Clitic climbing transforms Puedo leerlo into Lo puedo leer 282

List of boxes 1.1

Christopher Columbus (Cristóbal Colón)

1.2

Simón Bolívar, El Libertador 9

7

1.3 The Reconquista 15 1.4

A north-to-south tour of today’s most common indigenous Latin American language families

26

1.5

Estimating the number of Spanish web pages

36

2.1

El Siglo de Oro: The Golden Age of Spain

43

2.2

How Latin -ēre and -ĕre verbs merged

56

3.1

Ladino lullabies

74

4.1

Pre-Roman toponyms (place names)

86

4.2

Who were the Moors?

93

6.1

Don Quijote 138

6.2

En as a crosslinguistic outlier

152

7.1

Accent marks: Spanish versus French

173

9.1

El poema de mío Cid 224

11.1 Clitic climbing

282

Acknowledgments Because ¿Por qué? 101 Questions about Spanish covers so many different topics, I could never have written it without the generous help of many expert colleagues. Crosslinguistic comparisons were supported by James Russell (Armenian), David Crystal, Philip Durkin, and Edward Finegan (English), Philip Dalgarno (French), Jack Hawkins and Marianne Washburn (German), Devin Naar (Ladino), Michael Weiss and Andrew Foster (Latin), Bonnie Wasserman (Portuguese), David Dalgarno (Scottish English), Lena Borise (Slavic), Steve and Dianne Parkhurst (Spanish sign language), L. Cothran (Swahili), and Marilyn Littman and Herbert Hochberg (Yiddish). I profited from the Spanish expertise of Fernando Barnuevo, Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Magda Doyle, Steven Dworkin, John Jensen, and Christopher Pountain. Feedback on specific linguistic topics came from Christian Bentz, Eve Clark, Berndt Heine, Geoffrey Nunberg, John Paolillo, Daniel Ross, and Marilyn Vihman. Members of /r/Spanish and other subreddits made valuable contributions across the board. José Ignacio Hualde, Arlene Levine, Dianne and Steve Parkhurst, Gerardo Piña-Rosales, Christopher Pountain, Flor Rivas, and David and Ana Vagi supplied several of the images used in the text. Carol Stix read every question as it was completed, as a perspicacious representative of the educated general reader. Philip Dalgarno also read the entire book, while Michael Weiss read several chapters with an eye toward Latin (and other) faux pas. Eve Clark, Aaron Mattis, Michael Mattis, Marilyn Vihman, and the members of the Hudson Writers Group Non-Fiction Writers Meeting also provided valuable feedback. I am indebted to the counsel I received from all the above, and of course I am alone to be blamed for the book’s flaws. Bill Croft, Leo Hoar, the late Tom Lathrop, Ricardo Otheguy, and Bonnie Wasserman gave helpful advice about publishing. Gurdeep Mattu at Bloomsbury Academic Press saw the book’s potential, turning it from a backburner project to a front-burner reality. Michael Mattis provided constant support and encouragement. Without him, the book would not exist.

Acknowledgments

Finally, I thank two scholars I have never met. Ralph Penny’s A History of the Spanish Language (2002) has been my Bible; its impact is felt throughout this book. Guy Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language (2005) and Through the Language Glass (2010) showed by example that it is possible to present complex linguistic topics in a way that both informs and entertains the general reader. I wish I knew as much as Dr. Penny and could write as well as Dr. Deutscher. To all the above, Gracias.

xix

Copyright acknowledgments “Christopher Columbus” (Box 1.1) courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, [LC-DIG-pga-01390]. “Simón Bolívar” (Box 1.2) courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin. “Juan de Herrera” (Box 2.1), by Gonzalo G. Espasandin, reproduced by permission from Grandes personajes del Siglo de Oro español, Ediciones Palabra. Data in Table 1.1 and Box 1.4 used by permission, © SIL, Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 18th Edition, online.

Preface ¿Por qué? 101 Questions about Spanish is for anyone who wants to understand how Spanish really works: students and teachers, linguists and linguaphiles, and native speakers. It is the book I wish I could have read when I was getting serious about Spanish. My textbooks and teachers had explained the “what” of Spanish, from pronunciation to grammar, but not the “why”— the ¿por qué? Years later, I decided to write the “why” book myself. My goal was to synthesize and share the most interesting things I have learned about Spanish from my experiences with the language as a student, as a linguistics researcher, and, coming full circle, as a Spanish instructor. The book’s 101 questions spring directly from these experiences. As a beginning Spanish student, I wondered about the basics of Spanish: its multiple words for ‘you,’ masculine and feminine nouns, near-synonyms like ser and estar (both meaning ‘to be’), silent h and rolled r, and all those verb conjugations. My curiosity deepened the more I learned about the language. Why does Spanish have double negatives? How could a word as basic as en ‘in’ also mean ‘on,’ and sometimes ‘at’? Why are so many verbs irregular, and why do the irregularities cluster in certain parts of the grammar? When I went on to study other languages, their own features made me question aspects of Spanish that I had previously taken for granted, such as the division of verbs into -ar, -er, and -ir categories, and the different flavors of the past tense. My own research concerned dialectal variation and language acquisition, two topics reflected herein. Finally, seeing my Spanish students struggle with features such as word order, spelling (especially accent marks!), and the missing z sound led me to a new set of questions. This book is therefore both academic—it is, in its own way, an introduction to Spanish linguistics—and personal. Other researchers would undoubtedly have chosen different questions, or emphasized different types of explanations. However, while the book’s topics arose from my own experience, I am optimistic that both questions and answers will be of general interest. Many of the 101 answers in ¿Por qué? were already familiar to me before I undertook this project; others are the result of research performed specifically for the book. This effort has tapped sources from 1741 to the present, including academic books and journals, newspapers, literature,

xxii

Preface

census reports, online corpora and databases, and etymological dictionaries. It has been an exciting process. ¿Por qué? is divided into two sections. Part one, “Spanish in Context,” places Spanish in its historical and psychological setting. Its questions tend toward “what” and “how” rather than “why.” Chapter 1, on the position of Spanish in the world, is followed by three chapters that explore the relationship between Spanish and other languages, including Latin and the other Romance languages. Chapter 5 then addresses the experience of learning and speaking Spanish as either a native or second-language speaker. “Spanish in Context” includes many topics not typically covered in Spanish or even linguistics textbooks, from infant speech perception to Spanish sign language to native speakers’ slips of the tongue. Part two, “Inside Spanish,” is the heart of the book. It contains the bulk of the 101 questions, and most of the “why” questions. It has chapters on Spanish vocabulary, writing, sounds, nouns, verbs, and syntax. Most answers begin with a description of the relevant aspect of Spanish, written in a way that assumes no prior knowledge of either Spanish or linguistics. The answers then mingle as many as three different types of explanation: ll

Linguistic: What linguistic logic underlies this aspect of Spanish? What makes it interesting?

ll

Historical: How did this aspect of Spanish evolve?

ll

Comparative: How does this aspect of Spanish compare to related phenomena in other languages?

Several themes—some contradictory—arise repeatedly in Part two. Questions relevant to each are listed in the Index under “themes.” ll

ll

ll

ll

ll

ll

Blame Latin! Latin is the source of many vital aspects of Spanish, such as noun gender. Don’t blame Latin! Several of the more complex aspects of Spanish, including most of its irregular verbs, are original to Spanish. Perfect storm. Some aspects of Spanish, such as command forms, result from a virtual conspiracy among multiple factors. Spanish is special. Some aspects of Spanish, such as the upside-down ¿ and ¡ marks, are unique. Spanish is normal. Many aspects of Spanish that plague English speakers, like its capitalization patterns, are common in other languages. Linguistic legends. This book debunks a small handful of myths often promulgated in Spanish classrooms and the Internet, such as the putative religious origins of the nicknames Paco and Pepe.

Preface

The book is punctuated by boxes that either introduce cultural topics, such as Don Quijote, or explore specific linguistic topics, such as accent marks in Spanish versus French, in depth. To ensure that ¿Por qué? is accessible to linguistic novices, I have followed the following conventions: ll

Technical terms, between “double quotes,” are kept to a minimum, and often deferred to a Question’s “To learn more” section.

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Phonetic symbols, between /slashes/, are used only when Spanish or English spelling cannot easily convey a pronunciation, and are always explained.

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All language items discussed (sounds, words, and phrases) are italicized regardless of the language they come from.

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Translations are in ‘single quotes.’

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Latin verbs are cited in their infinitive form, for example, audire ‘to hear.’ Long and short Latin vowels are marked with a macron (ō) and breve (ŏ) only when length is relevant.

Also please note that: ll

Translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

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Underlining indicates parts of a word or sentence that are referred to in the text and/or translation.

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The book uses some terms common to Spanish language instruction in the United States (such as “boot” verbs), always explained in context.

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An asterisk * indicates a reconstructed form, in the sense explained in Question 21.

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Most questions end with a “To learn more” section that suggests further reading in English and/or Spanish. Other references are cited in the text. All are keyed to the Bibliography at the end of the book.

Researching and writing ¿Por qué? has been this linguist’s dream come true. It is immensely satisfying to have found out the answers to all my favorite questions and assembled them into a single volume. I hope it answers your questions as well.

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Part one Spanish in context 1

Spanish today

2

From Latin to Spanish

3

Spanish and Romance

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Spanish and other languages

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Learning Spanish

Chapter 1 Spanish today

Chapter 1 Spanish today

Questions 1 Who speaks Spanish?  (p. 4) 2 Who’s in charge of the Spanish language?  (p. 11) 3 Why is Spanish often called castellano?  (p. 14) 4 What are the different dialects of Spanish? Part I: Spain  (p. 17) 5 What are the different dialects of Spanish? Part II: Latin America  (p. 20) 6 What is the status of the minority languages of Spain?  (p. 23) 7 What is the status of the indigenous languages of Latin America?  (p. 25) 8 How is Spanish still evolving?  (p. 29) 9 Can all Spanish speakers understand each other?  (p. 33) 10 How important is Spanish on the Internet?  (p. 34)

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We begin our exploration of the Spanish language with an overview of its status today, from its speakers to its Internet presence. Whether you’re just curious about Spanish, or already know the language well, this chapter is bound to hold some surprises for you. To take some of my favorite examples, did you know that: ll

almost as many people speak Spanish as a first language in the United States as in Spain?

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Spanish is an official language in parts of Africa?

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the United States has its own branch of the Real Academia Española, an international organization of scholars that oversees Spanish spelling, vocabulary, and grammar?

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hundreds of indigenous languages are still spoken in Latin America?

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piracy during the Age of Exploration is partly responsible for the distinctive nature of Argentinean Spanish?

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Spanish is still evolving?

¡Vámonos! ‘Let’s go!’

Question 1. Who speaks Spanish? I always start my beginning Spanish classes with a virtual tour of the Spanish-speaking world. Many of my students have chosen to study Spanish for its practical value, and they like to see how much linguistic bang they’re getting for their buck. This tour always affords some eye-openers, such as the facts listed just above. It also serves as a handy jumping-off point for early lessons in Spanish spelling and pronunciation. The word México, for example, illustrates the language’s written accent mark, its pure vowels, and its throat-clearing x (more often spelled j or g). This virtual tour also impresses students with the size of the linguistic community they are about to enter. Since 1492, Spanish has expanded exponentially from its starting point on the Iberian Peninsula. It is an official language in twenty-one countries and is widely spoken elsewhere as both a first and a second language. Its more than four hundred million first-language speakers make Spanish the second most spoken language in the world, ahead of English though behind Mandarin Chinese. Table 1.1 summarizes the number of first-language Spanish speakers by region and country. Like rings on a tree trunk, this distribution reflects the language’s history, which we can condense into four stages: development, empire, retrenchment, and modern migration.

Chapter 1 Spanish today

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Table 1.1  Spanish around the world

Region Europe

Country/Territory *indicates that Spanish is the/an official language (Number of people who speak Spanish as a first language) Language notes *Spain (38,400,000) Spain’s total population is over 46 million, but 14% of the population speaks Basque, Catalan, or Galician (see Question 4), which have co-official status in their respective regions. Andorra (27,600) Although Catalan is the official language of this tiny principality nestled in the Pyrenees Mountains between Spain and France, a third of Andorrans speak Spanish as their first language; French is also spoken.

Africa

*Equatorial Guinea (627,000) Equatorial Guinea is the only independent African nation with Spanish as an official language. 83% of the population speaks Spanish; French is a second official language, and indigenous languages such as Fang are also spoken. *Canary Islands (2,128,647 included in total for Spain) *Ceuta and Melilla (169,347 included in total for Spain)

Caribbean

*Cuba (11,200,000) More than 99% of Cubans speak Spanish as their first language, making this the world’s purest Spanish-speaking country. *Dominican Republic (8,510,000) The Dominican Republic shares the island of Hispaniola with French- and Creole-speaking Haiti. The frontier between the two countries, then colonies, was settled by the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick. *Puerto Rico (3,540,000) A U.S. commonwealth since 1952, Puerto Rico has a high degree of English bilingualism.

Central America

Belize (former British Honduras; 174,000) Although Spain lost Belize to Britain in 1854, Spanish is still spoken by half the population, making it the most widespread language in the country. English, the official language of Belize, is the first language of only 17% of the population. ¡Qué raro! *Costa Rica (4,050,000) *El Salvador (6,090,000) *Guatemala (7,270,400) Less than half of Guatemalans speak Spanish as a first language; most of the remainder speak a modern Mayan language such as K’iche’ or Mam.

(Continued)

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Region

Country/Territory *indicates that Spanish is the/an official language (Number of people who speak Spanish as a first language) Language notes *Honduras (5,900,000) *Nicaragua (5,310,000)

Some 30,000 Nicaraguans living along the Caribbean coastline speak English or Creole English, a legacy of former British colonization and an officially recognized language within the region. *Panama (2,550,000)

South America

*Argentina (38,800,000) Large-scale twentieth-century Italian migration contributed to the distinctive sound and vocabulary of Argentinean Spanish. *Bolivia (4,140,000) Less than 40% of Bolivians speak Spanish as a first language; the remainder speak an indigenous language. *Chile (15,000,000) *Colombia (41,000,000) Colombia boasts the second largest Spanish-speaking community in the world, behind Mexico but ahead of Argentina, Spain, and the United States. *Ecuador (13,500,000) *Paraguay (365,000) Most Paraguayans are bilingual in Spanish and Guaraní. *Peru (24,000,000) *Uruguay (3,170,000) *Venezuela (26,300,000)

North America

Canada (252,020)

* Mexico (103,000,000) Mexico has the world’s largest population of Spanish speakers. United States (37,579,787) The 12.8% of the U.S. population that speaks Spanish at home is the fifth largest group of Spanish speakers in the world, less than a million speakers behind Spain itself. Some Spanish speakers in New Mexico and Louisiana descend from Spanish colonial settlers, but the vast majority immigrated in the twentieth or twenty-first century, mostly from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Cuba.

TOTAL

400,727,807

Source: 2015 U.S. census, 2011 Canadian census, 2015 Spanish census (for Canary Islands, Ceuta, and Melilla). Other data courtesy of SIL’s Ethnologue database (Lewis, Simons, and Fennig 2015), accessed October 22, 2015.

Chapter 1 Spanish today

1. Development. Spain, where the language first developed, still has the fourth largest Spanish-speaking population in the world. It shares the Iberian Peninsula with its fellow Romance languages Portuguese, Catalan, and Galician, as well as Basque, an unrelated language (Question 22). 2. Empire. Because of Spain’s aggressive history of exploration and colonization, the majority of Spanish speakers today live outside of Spain, chiefly in the Americas. The various country names in Latin America nicely memorialize key aspects of this period. Colombia (for Christopher Columbus, see Box 1.1), Puerto Rico ‘rich port,’ Costa Rica ‘rich coast,’ Honduras ‘deep waters,’ and Ecuador ‘Equator’ hark back to the act of exploration

Box 1.1. Christopher Columbus (Cristóbal Colón)

Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) was a man with a mission. An accomplished Genoese navigator, he cobbled together his vision of a western passage to Asia from a mixture of ancient legends and travelers’ tales, accounts of strange driftwood and corpses washing ashore from Ireland to the Azores, and the work of medieval French and Italian geographers. Beginning in the early 1480s, he devoted himself singlemindedly to the pursuit of financial backing for his plan. He focused his efforts on the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, but also had substantial negotiations with the Portuguese crown and made overtures to England and France. Everything about Columbus was dramatic, from his first arrival on the Iberian Peninsula, swimming six miles from shipwreck to shore, to his religious zeal—he pitched his project to the Spanish monarchs as a way to both convert new souls to Christianity and finance a new

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crusade to the Holy Land—to his ambition. In his formal agreement with Ferdinand and Isabella, he insisted on being named not just an admiral (a hereditary title) but also governor of any territories discovered. He was entitled to a ten percent share of any treasure resulting from the expedition, whether it be “pearls, precious stones, gold, silver, spices, or any other things of any type, name, and manner that are bought, bartered for, found, or won.” His dramatic success was obvious, but his failures were also dramatic, including crew rebellions, more shipwrecks, jail time in both Santo Domingo and Spain, and the eventual loss of his lucrative governorship. While the United States celebrates Columbus as an Italian hero, the Spanish-speaking peoples clearly consider him to be part of their own heritage, for better or for worse. Columbus gave his name to the country Colombia, to the Costa Rican currency colón, and to at least one city, avenue, plaza, or park in every Spanish-speaking country. But the Hispanic world is naturally ambivalent about Columbus’s legacy because of the devastation his arrival unleashed on the indigenous population of America. No Spanish-speaking country celebrates a “Columbus Day” on October 12; they either ignore the day or reconceptualize it as a celebration of their national heritage, from the generic Día de la Raza to specific holidays like Spain’s Fiesta Nacional. Argentina and Venezuela have gone farther, pointedly renaming the holiday Día del Respeto a la Diversidad Cultural (Argentina) and Día de la Resistencia Indígena (Venezuela). For good measure, Venezuela renamed Paseo Colón, a major street in Caracas, to Paseo de la Resistencia Indígena, knocking down the statue of Columbus that formerly overlooked the street. A literal comedown, indeed. To learn more ll

Reston (2005) describes the genesis of Columbus’s plan and his quest for financial backing.

ll

Dugard (2005) summarizes Columbus’s first three voyages and describes the fourth in detail.

itself. Argentina (from Latin argentum, ‘silver’) reflects Spain’s hunger for treasure, and El Salvador ‘the savior’ and República Dominicana (from the Dominican order of monks) its religious fervor. The names Chile, Cuba, Guatemala, México, Paraguay, and Uruguay are generally believed to have Native American origins, although their exact etymologies are controversial

Chapter 1 Spanish today

(the guay in Paraguay and Uruguay probably comes from a Guaraní word meaning ‘from the river’). Finally, Bolivia is named for the revolutionary hero Simón Bolívar (see Box 1.2), who took a lead role in ending the Spanish Empire. Looking beyond the Americas, a relatively little-known vestige of Spain’s imperial past is the presence of Spanish speakers in Africa. Spanish is spoken

Box 1.2. Simón Bolívar, El Libertador

Simón Bolívar (1783–1830) is often called “the George Washington of South America” because of his dual role as a military and political leader. In both roles, his challenges surpassed Washington’s. South America’s battle for independence from Spain lasted for fourteen years, including periods during which Bolívar was forced into exile. And Bolívar’s political career was extraordinary. At various times, he served as president or dictator of his native Venezuela, Bolivia (which was named after him), Peru, and Gran Colombia (about which more below). Bolívar’s intellectual bent also suggests a comparison to Thomas Jefferson. Like Jefferson, Bolívar came from a wealthy colonial family and received a quality education. The two men were inspired by the same Enlightenment thinkers, especially Voltaire. Putting their education into action, Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, while Bolívar wrote the original constitution of Bolivia as well as many widely disseminated letters and speeches. And when it came to territory, both

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leaders thought big. Jefferson authorized the Louisiana Purchase; Bolívar proposed, helped found, and for more than ten years led Gran Colombia, a country that comprised Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama, and parts of adjacent states. For good measure, Bolívar was something of an Abraham Lincoln as well. Even though his own family’s wealth came from estates worked partly by slave labor, he opposed slavery and issued the America’ first Emancipation Proclamation in 1816. He acted personally on his principles by accepting and promoting military colleagues of African descent. Unlike Washington and Jefferson, who lived to see their dreams of a prosperous new country realized, Bolívar died in despair. His Gran Colombia was wracked with disunion and in fact survived him by only one year. A month before his death, en route to a fresh round of exile abroad, he wrote to a friend, “Nations are like children, who soon throw away what they have wept to attain. . . . America is ungovernable for us. . . . The only thing one can do in America is emigrate.” Bolívar would perhaps have died in peace had he known how revered he would be in modern South America. To learn more ll

Bolívar (2003) is a selection of his writings in English translation.

ll

Chávez (2010), a typical blog post by former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, demonstrates the continuing impact of Bolívar’s legacy.

in Equatorial Guinea, the Canary Islands (off the continent’s west coast), and Ceuta and Melilla, two small cities located some 140 miles apart on the northern coastline of Morocco (see Figure 1.1). Although Melilla has been Spanish since 1497, and Ceuta since 1668, Morocco still disputes Spain’s claim to them. This diplomatic problem flared up most recently in 2007, when the King and Queen of Spain visited Ceuta and Melilla, sparking celebrations in the two cities and protests elsewhere in Morocco (Burnett 2007; Faroceuta 2007). 3. Retrenchment. As the Spanish Empire collapsed, most of Spain’s American holdings remained Spanish-dominant, as did the African territories listed in Table 1.1. However, Spanish lost its official status in Belize when the territory was ceded to Great Britain in 1854. It also gave way to English in the United States (except for the remnants mentioned in Table 1.1): an astonishing loss, given that Spain started with an enormous territorial advantage. In other

Chapter 1 Spanish today

Figure 1.1  Ceuta and Melilla. CIA (2013).

former Spanish territories, Spanish is no longer spoken as a first language: the Philippines, Jamaica, Trinidad, Western Sahara, and Morocco beyond Ceuta and Melilla. 4. Modern migration. Migration for economic and political reasons is largely responsible for the ongoing increase in the Spanish-speaking population of the United States and Canada. Back in Europe, Spanish speakers have migrated into Basque, Catalan, and Galician territory, both within Spain and in Catalan-speaking Andorra.

Question 2. Who’s in charge of the Spanish language? The answer to this question depends on whom you ask. Ask a linguist, and you’ll undoubtedly hear the party line: that Spanish, like any language, belongs to its speakers, not to any individual or institution. The linguist might quote the pioneering Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure, who in 1915 described language as “a sort of contract signed by the members of a community.” Because language belongs to everyone and no one, linguists believe, it’s impossible to prevent language change or, as de Saussure put it, “the current that engulfs all languages.” In a similar vein— nautical metaphors apparently being obligatory when discussing language change—the great English lexicographer Samuel Johnson wrote in his 1755 Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language that “to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength.” Ask a Spanish teacher, however, or a knowledgeable speaker of Spanish, and you’ll get a different and very specific answer: that stewardship of the language belongs to the Real Academia Española. This institution, more properly known as the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, unites twenty-two member academies from around the world, each composed

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of professors, writers, journalists, and translators. Among other activities, the Real Academia publishes several dictionaries, grammars, and spelling guides; organizes conferences; grants scholarships; and maintains an online research corpus of Spanish text. The Real Academia was founded in 1713 under the authority of King Felipe V. Felipe was French by birth, and the institution was modeled on France’s then eighty-year-old Académie Française. In the next century, it moved to its current headquarters just behind Madrid’s Prado Museum. The member academies outside of Spain were founded between 1871 (Colombia) and 1973 (the United States). Today’s Real Academia is truly a pan-Hispanic institution. All member academies have equal voting rights, and one of its latest publications, the Diccionario de americanismos (ASALE 2010), is entirely devoted to New World vocabulary. The U.S. academy, called Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española (ANLE), is uniquely international; its members were born in Spain, Cuba, Argentina, and other countries, as well as the United States. Besides promoting scholarship, ANLE aims to provide linguistic guidance to the growing Hispanic minority in the United States through language manuals, television, newspapers, and the Internet. The motto of Uruguay’s academy—Vetera servat, fovet nova ‘Protect the old, promote the new’—nicely summarizes the Real Academia’s mission. The Academia might not be able to “stop the current” of language evolution, or “enchain the syllables” of Spanish, but it does try to guide the process, steering a middle course between conservatism and change (to continue the nautical theme). For example, it admits foreign borrowings only if they harmonize with existing Spanish vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation. Thus, the organization rejects the English noun abstract (meaning ‘summary’), given the existing Spanish words resumen and extracto. It accepts, in contrast, the French food terms choucroute and quiche, but—here’s that middle course again—only if adapted to Spanish norms, with the former spelled chucrut and the latter pronounced like English keychain (without an n), as per the rules of Spanish spelling. The cynical reader might doubt that anyone pays attention to such bureaucratic decisions. However, there’s plenty of evidence that people do notice. The Real Academia’s publications are standard references throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Its dictionary and grammar, first published in 1726 and 1771, are among the fifty best-selling Spanish reference books on Amazon.com, and its spelling manual, first published in 1741, is also a strong seller. The Real Academia’s online dictionary is the 3204th most popular website worldwide, and the 163rd most popular website in Spain. The Spanish-speaking world regularly follows the Academia’s dictates on spelling, including changes in the Spanish alphabet itself (see Question 45).

Chapter 1 Spanish today

Its ability to influence more fundamental aspects of the language can be seen in its selective suppression of leísmo, a blurring of direct and indirect object pronouns that has been common in parts of Spain since the Middle Ages. Beginning in the mid-1800s the Real Academia’s publications narrowed the context in which leísmo was officially sanctioned. This dictum, promulgated by teachers, leading writers, and printers, successfully altered the usage of leísmo in both written and (to a lesser extent) spoken Spanish over the course of the next 150 years (Question 77). Depending on one’s perspective, the Real Academia can come across as either stodgy or charmingly old-fashioned. I happen to get a kick out of details like the organization’s use of the formal titles Don and Doña for its members, its devotion to its own history—for example, member academies are listed in chronological order of their founding on the Academia’s websites and publications—and even the member academies’ seals—many of which, including that of the United States (Figure 1.2), feature the seventeenthcentury Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes rather than a local and/or contemporary figure. But this fondness is far from universal; many Hispanics perceive the Real Academia’s attitude and actions, including the recent alphabet reforms, as overbearing. Like Spanish and French, other internationally spoken languages (Arabic, German, and Portuguese) have officially sanctioned language academies.

Figure 1.2  The seal of the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española (ANLE). Courtesy of ANLE.

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However, eighteenth-century attempts to find an English language academy (or academies) never caught on.1 The Real Academia system is therefore a notable difference between Hispanic and English culture.

To learn more ll

Data on Internet usage are © 2015, Alexa Internet (www.alexa.com).

ll

Crystal (2003: 73, 81) reviews the failed attempts to start English language academies.

ll

Stewart (1999, chap. 2) compares the Real Academia with other Spanish-language authorities.

Question 3. Why is Spanish often called castellano? The word castellano ‘Castilian’ comes from the Spanish region Castile, in north-central Spain. Castellano essentially means español ‘Spanish,’ although it is often used to refer to Spanish as spoken in specific areas: ll

Spain (as opposed to Latin America)

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Central and northern Spain, including Madrid

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Castile itself

Castellano came to be largely synonymous with español because of the role that Castile played in Spanish history. After the Roman Empire conquered the Iberian Peninsula in the third century CE, Latin continued to evolve in every region of Spain, leading to a variety of regional Iberian Romance languages, including castellano. When the Moors—Muslim forces from Northern Africa (Box 4.2)—crossed the Strait of Gibraltar in 711 and swept northward to conquer most of the Peninsula, northern Spain, including Castile, remained Christian. Castile then took the lead in the Reconquista ‘Reconquest’ of the Peninsula over the next several centuries (Box 1.3). As the language of the conquering kings, castellano became the dominant form of Iberian Romance in Spain, and therefore the standard for first medieval, then modern Spanish. This history distinguishes Spanish from other major European languages whose standards were set by a long-established political and cultural capital (Lisbon, London, Moscow, Paris) or an important writer (Dante, Martin Luther).

Chapter 1 Spanish today

Box 1.3. The Reconquista

The Reconquista ‘Reconquest’ of Spain refers to the centuries-long military campaign by the Christian kingdoms of the northern Iberian Peninsula to take back the rest of the Peninsula from the Moors: Muslim forces from Northern Africa (Box 4.2). The Reconquista began soon after the initial invasion of 711 CE. It ended in 1492, when the forces of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella conquered the last Moorish stronghold in Granada. As discussed in the text, the Reconquista led to the establishment of castellano as the standard form of Spanish. This was far from its only consequence for Spanish culture. Because of its duration, its cost in human life, and its potent mixture of religious, ethnic, and political passions, the Reconquista is an essential part of the Spanish psyche, much like the story of Joan of Arc in France. More than five hundred years later, it is still sometimes invoked as a rallying cry by right-wing opponents of immigration to Spain, especially the immigration of Muslim and/or African peoples. Other cultural reflections of the Reconquista are: ll

The Spanish coat of arms, shown above, in which the symbols for four regions of Christian Spain (including a castle for Castile) appear above a pomegranate flower, the symbol of Granada.

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El poema de Mío Cid, an epic poem about a legendary military leader of the Reconquista, generally considered the first major Spanish literary work (Box 9.1).

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ll

Moros y cristianos, meaning variously: mm

an annual festival in several Spanish towns that re-enacts the Christian victory with elaborate pageantry—a major tourist draw in towns like Alcoy;

mm

a popular dish in some Hispanic countries that combines black beans and white rice;

mm

the Hispanic equivalent of playing Cowboys and Indians.

To learn more ll

Fletcher (1992) describes how the legend of the Reconquista has been adapted over the centuries to support political philosophies from the counter-Reformation to anti-Communism.

ll

Rosón and Dietz (2011) discuss the continued symbolic power of the Reconquista in Granada.

Today, choosing between the terms castellano and español can be tricky. The Spanish government is careful to refer to standard Spanish as castellano, rather than español, in order to emphasize that the other languages of Spain, such as Catalan and Basque, are equally Spanish (see next question). I’ve encountered some Latin Americans who refuse to call their language español, hearing colonial overtones in the word, while others insist on español because to them, castellano can only mean the Spanish of Spain. The fact that castellano was the basis for modern Spanish had significant linguistic consequences. Castile was a bit of a backwater. It was geographically remote from the active Roman trading ports on the Mediterranean coast, whose residents had frequent contact with speakers of Latin and of Romance varieties elsewhere in the Roman Empire. It was likewise far from Toledo, the city south of Madrid that became the capital of Visigothic Spain after the fall of Rome. This isolation meant that for several centuries speakers of castellano had little access to the prestigious, “correct” way of speaking that could be heard in the more cultured population centers. As a result, in every way that Iberian Romance differed from Roman Latin, whether in vocabulary, grammar, or pronunciation, these differences were more dramatic in castellano. The Castilian origin of Spanish thus helps explain why the language is—so Spanish.

To learn more ll

For more about the special linguistic status of Castilian, see Penny (2002: 8–20).

Chapter 1 Spanish today

Question 4. What are the different dialects of Spanish? Part I: Spain This is an endlessly rich question, involving history, geography, politics, and linguistic theory. We begin with a problem of terminology. Figure 1.3 highlights the regions in Spain where Basque, Galician, and Catalan are spoken in addition to Spanish. As will be discussed in Question 22, it’s clear that Basque, spoken in parts of northern Spain, is a separate language, completely unrelated to Spanish. But what about Galician, in the northwest, and Catalan, in the northeast, which evolved from Latin along with Spanish and Portuguese? Are they “just” dialects, or should they be considered separate languages as well? It would be grand if some objective tests could be applied to this question. Such a test would also be useful for other tricky comparisons like Serbian versus Croatian, or Macedonian versus Bulgarian. Unfortunately, the two standard quantitative measures of linguistic similarity—lexical overlap (the percentage of words in common) and mutual intelligibility (how well speakers understand each other)—aren’t too useful. Scientifically speaking, linguists have never been able to find a universally valid cut-off point between dialects and languages on either measure. And practically speaking, how languages

Figure 1.3  Minority language areas of Spain. Adapted from Martorell 2006.

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(or dialects) fare on these tests often doesn’t affect their perceived linguistic status. For example, even though speakers of Arabic from different countries can struggle or even fail to understand each other, it’s still normal practice to refer to “the Arabic language” as a single entity. The same could be said for different forms of Chinese. Time after time, then, linguists return to Max Weinreich’s (1945) dictum that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” This amounts to throwing in the towel on the scientific front, and recognizing that the distinction between dialects and languages is essentially cultural and/or political. By this standard, Galician and Catalan certainly possess enough clout to qualify as languages. Each has an established standard, encoded in dictionaries and grammar books and enforced by an academic body: the Institut d’Estudis Catalans for Catalan and the Real Academia Galega for Galician. More importantly (from the “army and navy” perspective), after decades of suppression during the Franco regime, the Spanish government now recognizes Catalan as a co-official language with Spanish in Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands, and Galician as co-official in Galicia (see Question 6). It remains to address the linguistic situation in the rest of Spain. This is clearly Spanish-language territory, but can it be separated into different dialectal areas? Fortunately, there is a well-established linguistic methodology for doing just this: 1 Identify aspects of pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar that vary across speakers of the language; 2 Identify the geographic boundary, called an “isogloss,” between variant forms for each of these aspects; 3 Look for “bundles of isoglosses”: geographic boundaries more or less uniformly associated with several aspects at once. To take an example that may be familiar to many readers, southern English in the United States is characterized by its pronunciation (the “southern drawl”), vocabulary (e.g., coke rather than soda or pop), and grammar (e.g., y’all meaning plural ‘you’). Technically speaking, the isoglosses for these three features—each a dividing line running east and west—roughly coincide. When we apply this process to Spain, a substantial “bundle of isoglosses” emerges that separates the central and northern part of the country, with Madrid as its main city, from Andalusia, the large, southernmost region in Spain whose capital is Seville. Northern (Castilian) and southern (Andalusian) Spanish aren’t uniform, but they are more different from each other than they

Chapter 1 Spanish today

are internally diverse. To use Penny’s phraseology (2000, chap. 4), Spain has a dialect division separating north and south, and each of these two areas has a dialectal continuum connecting east and west. Some prominent features of Andalusian Spanish are as follows: ll

Merger of the s and th sounds (Question 63). As an example, the word sazón ‘seasoning’ is pronounced sathón in the north, but sasón in most of Andalusia. In parts of the region, the merger favors th, so that sazón is pronounced thathón.

ll

Simplification of plural ‘you all’ (Question 76). Northern Spanish has two distinct pronouns with this meaning: informal vosotros, for addressing friends or family, and formal ustedes, for respected figures like police officers or teachers. In most of Andalusia, only ustedes is used, in both formal and informal circumstances. This simplification affects not just the ‘you all’ pronouns but also their associated verb forms.

ll

Resistance to leísmo (see Question 77). Speakers in northern Spain routinely expand the role of the indirect object pronoun le, but this phenomenon is uncommon in Andalusia.

ll

Weakening or loss of syllable- and word-final s. S can be weakened to h or even lost, so that este ‘this,’ for example, might be pronounced ehte, and libros ‘books’ pronounced libro.

ll

Merger of ll and y (Question 63). In Andalusia, as well as much of northern Spain, words like calló ‘he stopped talking’ and cayó ‘he fell down’ are pronounced alike.

Many readers will recognize these phenomena as also characteristic of Spanish in the Americas: the first three throughout the region, and the last two in many parts of it. This is no coincidence, for Andalusian Spanish played an outsized role in the formation of American Spanish. Historical research into the Spanish colonial period has shown that Andalusians constituted the plurality of Spanish colonists, and also a majority of both early and female colonists, which gave Andalusians an additional advantage in setting the linguistic character of the new settlements. The colonial dominance of Andalusia makes perfect sense given its location: Seville and its nearby port cities Huelva and Cádiz are a natural gateway to the Atlantic. Andalusian Spanish was likewise the main contributor to the Spanish of the Canary Islands, located off the west coast of Africa, which Spain conquered and settled in the fifteenth century. The Canary Islands were a convenient stopping-off point for ships en route from Andalusia to the New

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World. Together, Andalusia, the Canary Islands, and the Americas form one giant mega-dialect area in contrast with central and northern Spain.

To learn more ll

For more on the dialectal differences between Castilian and Andalusian/Canarian Spanish, and the role of Andalusian Spanish in populating the Canary Islands and the Americas, see Penny (2000: 118–31, 139–44) and Penny (2002: 21–26).

Question 5. What are the different dialects of Spanish? Part II: Latin America Within Latin America, history trumps geography. The overall patterning of Latin American dialects doesn’t follow national or even regional boundaries (e.g., Central vs. South America); instead, it reflects the trade and settlement patterns of the Spanish colonial period. As shown in Figure 1.4, direct contact between Spain and the New World was limited. Because piracy was rampant in this period, the Spanish crown required ships to travel in heavily armed convoys, or flotas, that sailed to and from Spain only a few times a year. American-bound flotas made for the Caribbean, and went on from there to either the Mexican port city of Veracruz or to Panama. Veracruz then served as a jumping-off point for Mexico’s interior, while Panama was the gateway to South America: cargo and passengers had to cross the Isthmus of Panama by mule train and board a new set of ships, specially built for Pacific waters, to continue south to Lima, Peru, Spain’s administrative and commercial hub in South America. As unlikely as it may seem today, contact with the South American interior and the Atlantic coast was primarily by land—across the formidable Andes mountains—until well into the 1700s. Until then, Buenos Aires, today one of the most sophisticated cities in South America, was a peripheral settlement with a “Wild West” flavor. This trade system had profound linguistic consequences (Penny 2000: 144–55). Areas along the trade routes—Veracruz and the Mexican highlands around Mexico City, Panama, parts of the Caribbean, and the north Pacific coastal area of South America (Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru)—received a steady influx of new settlers speaking northern and/or more modern varieties of Spanish. As a result, Spanish in these areas moved away from the Andalusian norm and toward that of northern Spain, and also continued

Chapter 1 Spanish today

Figure 1.4  Spanish colonial trade routes.

to reflect current linguistic trends back in Spain. In contrast, remoter areas— Mexico’s Pacific coast and the Yucatan, most of Central America, lesstrafficked parts of the Caribbean, and the Southern Cone of South America, including Argentina—remained more old-fashioned and/or Andalusian. A good illustration of this dialect pattern is voseo, the uniquely Latin American use of the pronoun vos instead of tú for informal ‘you’ (Question 76). When Spain colonized the Americas, tú and vos were both current; later, the norm in Spain shifted definitively in favor of tú. As shown in Figure 1.5, the principal trade destinations in the New World—Mexico, Peru, and the Caribbean—followed Spain’s lead in switching to tú. The remotest areas of South America—that is, the areas farthest from Lima—and the central portion of Central America did not. Regions in between still use both. A similar pattern is seen with the weakening and deletion of final -s, an Andalusian

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Figure 1.5  Voseo and tuteo in Latin America. Reproduced by permission from Pountain (2003), Figure 6.13.

feature described in the previous question, as well as variation in the final consonants -r, -l, and -n. Smaller dialect areas can be observed within this overall patterning. The following three areas, which span national borders, are relatively cohesive: ll

Rioplatense Spanish is spoken in and around Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the capital cities of Argentina and Uruguay, respectively, on opposite banks of the Río de la Plata. Besides voseo, Rioplatense Spanish is known for its sh or /ʒ/ (as in mirage) pronunciation of the y sound, whether spelled y as in yo ‘I’ or ll as in lluvia ‘rain.’ Heavy Italian migration in the area has affected local vocabulary and intonation (see Question 17).

Chapter 1 Spanish today ll

ll

Caribbean Spanish is spoken in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. Caribbean speakers have carried to an extreme the Andalusian tendency to pronounce final -s as -h or delete it (see previous question). Other consonants, especially d, are also weakened or even lost between vowels. The l and r sounds have many variations in this area, including the guttural sound that replaces the trilled r in Puerto Rico (Question 60). Andean Spanish is spoken along the western spine of South America, in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and western Argentina. As will be discussed in Question 27, Spanish-Quechua bilingualism has affected the vocabulary, pronunciation, and even grammar of Spanish in this region.

To learn more ll

Pharies (2007: 212–230) describes Rioplatense, Caribbean, and Andean Spanish in more detail, as well as the more diverse Spanish of Mexico and the American Southwest.

ll

Lipski (1994, 2008) provides a country-by-country summary of Latin American Spanish characteristics.

Question 6. What is the status of the minority languages of Spain? Spain is a multilingual country: Catalan, Galician, and Basque are spoken in addition to standard Castilian Spanish (recall Figure 1.3). According to the 2001 census, around six million Spaniards speak Catalan; around two million, Galician; and around one million, Basque. Unfortunately, more recent censuses have not collected language data. The Spanish government repressed these regional languages during the mid-twentieth-century Franco regime. Since then, however, it has come to officially promote both Castilian and the regional languages in the provinces, or Comunidades Autónomas ‘Self-governing Communities,’ where they are spoken. This policy is enshrined in Article 3 of the Spanish Constitution: 1 Castilian is the official Spanish language of the State. All Spaniards have the duty to know it and the right to use it.

2 The other languages of Spain shall also be official in the respective Selfgoverning Communities in accordance with their Statutes.

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3 The richness of the different linguistic modalities of Spain is a cultural heritage which shall be specially respected and protected.

The principle of co-official languages is reflected in Spanish education. By Spanish law, children must study both Spanish and their regional language, if any. To accommodate the extra language study in the bilingual regions, the percentage of class hours that schools are required to spend on basic subjects (math, reading, etc.) is reduced to 55 percent, compared to 65 percent in the rest of Spain. Galicia and the Basque-speaking territories interpret this national directive in a neutral fashion. Parents choose their children’s main language of instruction, and the other language is studied in what is essentially a foreign language and literature class. In Catalonia, on the other hand, Catalan is the language of instruction, and Castilian is always treated as foreign. The Spanish-speaking community has pushed back against this policy, launching lawsuits and legislative proposals to change the current system. The Catalan establishment, in turn, argues that the current system works, and that their language needs extra support in a Castilian-majority country. How are the official legal and educational policies reflected in linguistic practice? Do all Spaniards in the bilingual provinces speak their regional language? Do all Spaniards speak Castilian? As of 2001, Basque was spoken by less than half the residents of its territory, Catalan by about two-thirds, and Galician by almost all (see Table 1.2). The lower numbers for Basque were to be expected because, unlike Galician and Catalan, Basque is unrelated to Castilian and therefore difficult for other Spaniards to learn. (This difference also explains the larger percentages of Spaniards who could understand, though not speak, Galician and Catalan.) The higher percentage of Galicians who spoke the Table 1.2  2001 Spanish census results on regional languages

Spaniards 16 and older living in the relevant provinces

Language

Provinces

% who speak regional language

% who speak or understand regional language

Basque

País Vasco, Navarra

45

50

72 (País Vasco only)

Catalan

Catalonia, Valencia, Baleric Islands

62

91

69

Galician

Galicia

92

99.5

91

% born in region

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local language was probably attributable to demography: as shown in the last column of Table 1.2; most Galicians at the time were born in the region, and therefore grew up exposed to the language. The 2001 Spanish census didn’t ask about Castilian, apparently taking for granted that all Spaniards spoke the language. Pro-Castilian activists in Catalonia would dispute this assumption. They assert that many students complete school without ever attaining full bilingual competence, and that graduation tests showing Castilian-Catalan parity are “cooked” to inflate Castilian scores (e.g., Convivencia Cívica Catalana 2013). In Catalonia, the language question has taken on added urgency given the growing movement in favor of secession from Spain. Language is a potent symbol of cultural identity. The resurgence of Catalan has made secession seem more plausible, while in turn, the prospect of Catalonian independence is threatening to Castilian-speaking residents, and could even encourage their emigration. It will be interesting to see how this issue plays out in the upcoming years.

To learn more ll

Turell (2001) reviews the status of Catalan, Basque, and Galician in detail, as well as that of smaller minority languages such as Asturian.

ll

Links to the Spanish Constitution, national and regional education statutes, court decisions regarding the language controversy in Catalonia, and the 2001 census may be found in this book’s companion website.

Question 7. What is the status of the indigenous languages of Latin America? Official languages of the state are Spanish, and all the languages of its original indigenous peoples, which are the Aymara, Araona, Baure, Bésiro, Canichana, Cavineño, Cayubaba, Chácobo, Chimán, Ese Ejja, Guaraní, Guarasuawe, Guarayu, Itonama, Leco, Machajuyai-Kallawaya, Machineri, Maropa, Mojeño-Trinitario, Mojeño-Ignaciano, Moré, Mosetén, Movima, Pacawara, Puquina, Quechua, Sirionó, Tacana, Tapiete, Toromona, Uruchipaya, Weenhayek, Yaminawa, Yuki, Yuracaré and Zamuco. – Article 5 of the Bolivian constitution

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Contemporary Latin America is notable for its astonishing linguistic variety.2 Its approximately seven hundred indigenous languages are spoken as a first language by thirty million people, usually with Spanish as a second language. The Yucatan Peninsula, the Andes, and Paraguay in particular have high rates of bilingualism, capped by the 89 percent of Paraguayans who speak both Spanish and Guaraní (Escobar 2012: 75). The region’s indigenous languages belong to perhaps sixty-eight distinct language families, the most common of which are described in Box 1.4. Indigenous languages enjoy constitutional protection in most Latin American countries. Like Bolivia, whose language statute is quoted above, Colombia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela grant co-official status to one or more indigenous languages. Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico fall short of this mark, but nonetheless recognize their vernacular languages as “part of the cultural heritage of the Nation” (Guatemala) that “shall be the object of preservation, dissemination, and respect” (El Salvador), including “self-determination” (Mexico) and “bilingual and intercultural education” (Argentina).

Box 1.4. A north-to-south tour of today’s most common indigenous Latin American language families (with numbers of first-language speakers) The twelve language families described here, arranged approximately from north to south, are the most common in Latin America. Each family’s description includes the number of people who speak a language from that family as a first language (“L1”). The challenge of grouping Latin American languages into families has attracted much attention and controversy; see, for example, Campbell (2000) and Greenberg (1996).

1 The northern branch of the Uto-Aztecan family begins in the United States, with languages including Ute, Hopi, Shoshone, and Comanche, and crosses into Mexico to include Tarahumara, the language of the famed long-distance runners. The southern branch includes Nahuatl, the language of the ancient Aztec Empire. [1,890,000 L1 speakers]

2 The Tarascan (or Purépecha) language family is centered around Lake Pátzcuaro in the Mexican state of Michoacán, to the west of Mexico City. The ancient Tarascans were known for their rounded yácata pyramids and their rivalry with the neighboring Aztecs. [235,000 L1 speakers]

3 Heading east from Mexico City, Totonacan languages are spoken around Veracruz (on the Gulf of Mexico) and Puebla (en route

Chapter 1 Spanish today

to Veracruz). The ancestors of today’s Totonacan speakers are believed to have built Teotihuacán, the ancient city famous for the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon. [282,000 L1 speakers]

4 Moving south and east toward Central America, the Otomanguean family includes Zapotec and Mixtec, languages associated with Oaxaca and the important archaeological sites of Mitla and Monte Alban. [1,678,000 L1 speakers]

5 Speakers of ancient Mayan languages in southeast Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize developed the writing and astronomical systems seen in ancient sites like Chichen Itza and Tikal. Two widely spoken modern Mayan languages are K’itche (Quiché) and Mam. [6,522,000 L1 speakers]

6 Continuing into Central America, the best-known Misumalpan language is that of the Miskito people of Honduras and Nicaragua. [192,000 L1 speakers]

7 Speakers of Chibchan languages in Central America and Colombia include the Cuna islanders of Panama, famed for their colorful textiles. [306,000 L1 speakers]

8 Although the Taino language of the Caribbean died out in the early 1500s, surviving Maipurean (or Arawak) languages border the Caribbean from Belize to Venezuela, and extend southward into the heart of South America. [354,000 L1 speakers]

9 Moving deeper into South America, Quechuan is the most commonly spoken indigenous language family. Its modern varieties—most with names that include Quechua or Quichua—are related to the language of the ancient Inca Empire. They occupy much of the Empire’s former territory, running down South America’s Andean spine from Ecuador, through Peru and Bolivia, and into Argentina. [8,946,000 L1 speakers]

10 Aymara interrupts the Quechan trajectory at the junction of Peru, Bolivia, and Chile. [2,809,000 L1 speakers]

11 Guaraní, the primary indigenous language of Paraguay, is the dominant language in the Tupian family. [4,933,000 L1 speakers]

12 We end toward the southern tip of South America, with Mapadungun, the language of the Mapuche people, whose territory straddles Chile and Argentina. Mapadungun is an isolate: a one-language family. [261,000 L1 speakers] Source: Data from Ethnologue database (Lewis, Simons, and Fennig 2015); numbers rounded to nearest thousand.

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Latin America thus contrasts dramatically with Spain, where only Basque survived the Roman conquest. Likewise, in the United States and Canada, indigenous languages have been swamped by English and French. Latin America is different because Spain’s main goal was to exploit the land’s natural resources, not to colonize. Combined with the sheer size of the new territories, this meant that Spanish settlement was “limited, scattered, and heterogeneous,” and that early Spanish immigration was almost all male (Williamson 1992: 78, 83), setting the stage for large-scale mixed marriages— or at least, mixed relationships—between Spanish men and indigenous women. Although European immigration (of both sexes) increased enormously over the centuries, over half the population in most Latin American countries today is indigenous and/or mestizo (mixed): over eighty percent in Bolivia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, and Peru (CIA 2013). This ethnic continuity encouraged linguistic continuity. The relatively healthy state of Latin America’s indigenous languages today belies the harsh side of their past: the Spanish conquest was a disaster for the area’s languages, just as it was for its indigenous peoples. Between war, slavery, dislocation, and disease, the original population of Latin America was literally decimated, plunging from forty million to only four between 1492 and 1700 (Pharies 2007: 205–06). Likewise, the number of indigenous languages was more than halved from the estimated 1800 spoken before Columbus sailed (Sherzer 1991: 251). Demographic and linguistic losses began early, with the extinction of the indigenous peoples of the Spanish Caribbean islands “within a few decades of the initial encounter” with Spain (Whitehead 1999: 864). The losses continued for centuries. As recently as the 1880s, the Mapuche people, whose territory straddles the border between Chile and Argentina, suffered the appropriation of ninety percent of their Chilean lands, and the death, captivity, or forced resettlement of almost fifteen thousand Mapuche in Argentina (Albó 1999: 774). The close association between Spanish conquest and language loss helps to explain today’s Latin American language map. Essentially, areas whose geographic qualities attracted Europeans lost their native tongues, while less hospitable areas maintained them. Thus, the Caribbean islands, which suffered total language loss, were vulnerable to the Spanish onslaught because of their small size, their central location between North, Central, and South America, and their 360° ocean access. The two South American countries with the fewest speakers of indigenous languages, Uruguay and Argentina, are centered around the heavily settled Río de la Plata basin, a strategic location fought over by the Spanish, Portuguese, and British. In contrast, the two South American countries with the strongest ethnic and linguistic indigenous presence, Bolivia and Paraguay, are the only Latin American countries that lack sea access, making them less attractive to the Europeans conquerors and settlers.

Chapter 1 Spanish today

Argentina itself echoes this demographic pattern on a smaller scale. As noted above, the provinces in the desirable Río de la Plata basin are ethnically and culturally European; the city of Buenos Aires, in fact, is known as the “Paris of South America.” Indigenous populations remain only along the country’s landlocked western perimeter, far from the capital. Ironically, the continued survival of indigenous languages, in the face of Spanish immigration, now complicates emigration for speakers of these languages. Their usual destination is the United States, where educational and social support systems for immigrants are designed with Spanish speakers in mind. Latin American adults and children who arrive speaking no Spanish, or only a little, effectively have to master two languages at once (Semple 2014; Wang 2014).

To learn more ll

For an introduction to Native American languages, see Campbell (2000) or the less technical Sherzer (1991).

ll

Kaufman (2011a, b) provides detailed tables, with population statistics and locations, for every known language family of Meso-America and South America as of 1980, as well as detailed maps.

ll

AILLA (n.d.), an online archive of downloadable documents written in a variety of Latin American languages, also provides general information, references, and links.

ll

For the historical context that affected these languages, see Williamson (1992).

ll

The Ethnologue website (Lewis, Simons, and Fennig 2015) has current statistics on individual languages, language families, and language use by countries.

ll

The CIA World Factbook (CIA 2013) also provides country-bycountry linguistic and ethnic synopses.

ll

Latin American constitutions can be accessed (in English) at the Comparative Constitutions Project (n.d.).

Question 8. How is Spanish still evolving? Every living language continues to evolve, and Spanish is no exception. While describing several changes currently underway in Spanish, this question aims to also illustrate the mechanisms of language change—where change comes

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from, and how it spreads. We’ll see that few ongoing changes in Spanish are truly innovative. Many involve the spread of existing variations in pronunciation or grammar to new places and/or social groups. Others are logical outgrowths of well-established aspects of the language. In terms of their social context, we’ll see that most changes move their local variety of Spanish away from, not toward, established norms. Variations in pronunciation are the most likely to spread to new speakers. For example, as described in Question 4, Spanish speakers in southern Spain and much of Latin America have for centuries been weakening the s sound at the end of syllables and words, turning it into h or dropping it entirely. More recently, this speech pattern has been advancing northward in Spain, and also into new territory within Latin America (Penny 2000: 133, 149). Table 1.3 lists additional aggressive pronunciation variants, as well as some in grammar. Other grammatical changes listed in the table are nonstandard outgrowths of standard Spanish patterns. For example, variant verb forms like comistes ‘you ate’ and habían ‘there were’ (for comiste and había) are heard in all Spanish-speaking countries (Penny 2000: 220; Fábregas and Gallego 2014; see also Question 94). These are clearly inspired by the usual -s ending on ‘you’ forms and the plural -n ending (e.g., comes ‘you eat,’ comen ‘they eat’). Finally, almost all cases of pure innovation in Spanish today involve vocabulary, as Spanish continues to coin new words and also borrow from other languages. For example, chupi ‘Cool!,’ a youthful coinage, and nocaut (from English ‘knockout’), are two of the thousands of new words in the latest edition of the Real Academia Española’s dictionary (RAE 2014). With few exceptions, these changes go against the established “rules” of Spanish, as defined by the Real Academia (Question 2), taught by teachers, and, in general, modeled by the media. This pattern reflects the importance of language as a marker of identity. Studies by Labov (1972) and others have found that language change is driven by young people, in their teens or twenties, who adopt and even exaggerate the speech patterns of the group they identify with. If they aspire to fit into mainstream society, young people will adopt standard speech patterns, but if they wish to forge a separate identity, as is so often the case, they will seek linguistic alternatives. Linguists refer to the former pattern as “change from above,” and the latter as “change from below.”3 The history of yeísmo in Spain (Table 1.3) illustrates both types of change. As described by Penny (2002: 121), this southern merger of the ll and y sounds began to spread to Madrid in the nineteenth century. At first a marker of working-class speech, it eventually became standard in Madrid: a change from below. Once established as the norm in the prestigious capital, it spread to other cities in northern Spain—a change from above. The reduction in seseo in Granada (Table 1.3) is another interesting example. At first glance,

Chapter 1 Spanish today

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Table 1.3  Current changes in Spanish

Geographic or social spread of existing variants Pronunciation ll ll

ll

ll

ll

ll

Weakening or deletion of final -s (see text). In Spain, the tendency to merge syllable-final -r and -l (e.g., in arma ‘weapon’ and alma ‘soul’) has been spreading from rural to urban areas (Penny 2000: 127). The Castilian distinction between s and th is gaining strength in parts of Andalusia (like Granada) that previously followed the seseo pattern of merging the two sounds as s (Stewart 1999: 51). In Spain, yeísmo (the merger of the ll and y sounds; see Question 77) has taken over all but some rural areas in the North (Penny 2000: 121). In Puerto Rico, the tendency to pronounce the trilled r as a guttural (or “velar”) r has spread, for many speakers, from casual into more formal speech (Lipski 2008: 124; also see Question 60). Likewise, in Panama the tendency to pronounce final -n as -ng (common also in other parts of Latin America and in Spain) is gaining ground; Stewart (1999: 51) gives the example of jamong for jamón ‘ham.’

Grammar ll

ll

In Chile, the verb forms associated with the vos pronoun (see Question 76), though not the pronoun itself, are increasingly common (Stewart 1999: 125). In Latin America, the future tense using the verb ir ‘to go’ (as in voy a bailar ‘I’m going to dance’) has become so common that older forms (e.g., bailaré) no longer carry a future meaning (Stewart 1999: 101).

Outgrowths of standard features Pronunciation/Grammar ll

There is a natural tendency for vowels to change slightly if they are followed by a consonant, so that Spanish plurals are distinguished both by their -s ending and the vowel change it triggers. In parts of Andalusia that have lost -s; this vowel change remains, thus becoming a de facto plural marker, while increasing the number of vowels from five to eight (Penny 2000: 125).

Grammar: Verbs ll ll

Overgeneralization of -s and -n endings (see text). Spanish speakers in Latin America increasingly use the verb estar ‘to be,’ instead of its nearsynonym ser, to describe someone’s age, as in Estamos jóvenes ‘We are young’ instead of the expected Somos, from ser (de Jonge 1993). This is a logical extension of the use of estar for other transitory states, such as being wet or tired (Question 41).

Grammar: Nouns, pronouns, and adjectives ll

Contemporary Spanish speakers use the convention of feminine -a and masculine -o to create politically correct feminine versions of existing names for professions, such as jueza for a female judge (juez), and likewise masculine versions of words that are accidentally female, such as criaturo for a masculine baby (criatura) (Stewart 1999: 112). (Continued)

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ll

ll

ll

In parts of Spain and Latin America, redundant pronouns in sentences like La escuchaba a una mujer que cantaba tangos ‘He listened to her a woman who sang tangos,’ are increasingly common. As discussed in Question 100, they probably arose by analogy to those normally used in sentences like Le di el libro a María ‘I gave to her the book to Maria.’ In Latin American Spanish, possession is increasingly expressed with phrases like de ella ‘of hers’ instead of adjectives like su ‘her.’ As described in Question 78, this tendency probably started with the use of phrases like de ella to clarify the intended meaning of su, which can also mean ‘his,’ ‘their,’ and ‘you.’ A handful of Spanish adjectives double as adverbs; for example, rápido means both ‘rapid’ and ‘rapidly.’ In both Spain and Latin America, some speakers have begun to use other adjectives the same way, for example, using distinto to mean both ‘distinct’ and ‘distinctly’ (Stewart 1999: 112).

Vocabulary ll

Many new Spanish words are based on existing words. Two recent examples (RAE 2014) are the Latin American blend amigovio, from amigo ‘friend’ and novio ‘boyfriend,’ and basurita ‘eye irritant’: literally, ‘bit of garbage (basura).’

Innovations ll ll

ll

New vocabulary (see text). Spanish speakers in the Caribbean tend to use subject-verb word order in certain question types, as in ¿Qué tú quieres? ‘What do you want?’ and ¿Cómo usted se llama? ‘What is your name?,’ instead of standard ¿Qué quieres tú? and ¿Cómo se llama usted? (Lipski 2008: 112). Spanish has picked up indigenous structures in heavily bilingual areas of Latin America, such as commands based on the verb dar ‘to give’ (e.g., Dame trayendo el pan ‘Bring me the bread,’ literally ‘Give me bringing the bread’); see Question 27.

it appears to be a classic case of change from above, since speakers are adopting the Castilian norm. However, Stewart points out that speakers are simultaneously moving away from the local seseo norm, as epitomized in Seville, Andalusia’s capital and Granada’s rival, thus adding a rebellious “from below” nuance to the change (1999: 51).

To learn more ll

Penny (2000) and Stewart (1999) are indispensable sources for this topic. The individual dialect profiles in Lipski (1994, 2008) are also helpful.

Chapter 1 Spanish today

Question 9. Can all Spanish speakers understand each other? This question was inspired by my own experience with English: As a native speaker of American English, I sometimes find it hard to understand movies that feature other varieties, such as Australian or Scottish English. I often wish there were subtitles! But after a few minutes, my ear usually adjusts and I can understand without much trouble. The situation in Spanish is similar. A Spanish speaker from Madrid may have difficulty understanding Cuban or Argentine Spanish, just as I do Australian or Scottish English, but that’s as far as the problem goes. (In fact, Spanish speakers I have asked insist that the range of variation is smaller than in English.) Differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, and to some extent grammar can pose a challenge, but they aren’t dramatic enough to completely derail communication—or require subtitles. In face-to-face communication, people from different parts of the Spanishspeaking world can adapt their speech in order to facilitate communication. I experienced this firsthand when I lived next door to an Argentinean couple. When my neighbors spoke with me, I found their Spanish easy to understand. When they spoke with each other, it was another story: their Argentinean accent kicked in, and it was considerably harder for me to follow the conversation. Education plays a major factor in helping Spanish speakers around the world understand each other. Some dialectal features, like the weakening and loss of final -s discussed in the previous question, are associated with low socioeconomic status and lack of education. The speech of two educated Spanish speakers from different countries can therefore be more similar than that of two people from the same country, or even the same city, from opposite ends of the socioeconomic and educational spectrum. Moreover, an educated speaker has the advantage of being more aware of dialectal differences and therefore better able to understand and/or accommodate. Just as a sophisticated English speaker from the United States isn’t thrown off by British vocabulary (lift for elevator, lorry for truck, and the like), a Spaniard will understand that Argentineans often use vos instead of tú to mean ‘you.’ Alternatively, a linguistically minded Argentinean might adapt to a Spanish listener by using tú. Why is Spanish (like English) consistent enough that speakers around the world can understand each other, while varieties of Chinese and Arabic differ to the point of unintelligibility? This comparison is really a difference of scale. All modern dialects of Spanish, as discussed in Question 4, stem from two varieties of Spanish spoken in Spain in the sixteenth century:

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either castellano (standard Spanish, exemplified by the speech of Madrid) or Andalusian Spanish, exemplified by the speech of Seville. This was a small range of variation to begin with. Moreover, during the four hundred years or so that Spanish has been a world language, several factors—the existence of a language standard (as promulgated by schools and the Real Academia Española), increasingly widespread literacy, the availability of books and the mass media, and now the Internet—have provided centripetal ballast to the centrifugal force of language change. In contrast, the different forms of Chinese and Arabic that exist today evolved over a period of several centuries in geographical areas many times the size of Spain. Written Chinese and Classical Arabic serve as a lingua franca for their respective communities, but they coexist with the local varieties rather than bringing them together.

Question 10. How important is Spanish on the Internet? The Madrid lawyer checking her morning email, the Honduran college student downloading a professor’s podcast, and the Buenos Aires teenager logging on for a brisk session of World of Warcraft probably have no idea that the Internet that helps them communicate, learn, and play was first conceived of as a Cold War defensive strategy. Concerned that a Soviet first strike could cripple American command and control capabilities, the U.S. Department of Defense decided to implement a distributed computer communications system that could survive the loss of one or more significant pieces. Its first incarnation was the ARPANET, a Defense-sponsored network of university computer systems that first went “live” at 10:30 p.m. on October 29, 1969. The network grew, still mostly confined to American institutions, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with the Department of Defense playing an increasingly minor role in its expansion and maintenance. Multilingual capabilities were a low priority as long as the Internet was seen as an American resource. For example, the original ASCII table, which specified the computer-internal representation of written symbols like letters, numbers, and line breaks, had only the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet, with no provision for non-English features like accent marks. This bias continued as the Internet morphed into the World Wide Web in the late 1980s. Although the first browser was invented in Switzerland, its inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, was British, and its user community was CERN, a physics research center whose lingua franca was English. Berners-Lee’s browser therefore had an English language interface, using now-ubiquitous terms like window, quit, and links. The first widely available browser, Mosaic,

Chapter 1 Spanish today

was developed at the University of Illinois, and likewise implemented in English. As late as 1996 the New York Times recommended that “if you want to take full advantage of the Internet there is only one real way to do it: learn English” (Specter 1996). That was then, this is now. The “multilingual Internet” and “internation­ alization” are twenty-first-century buzzwords, both for economic reasons and for reasons of equity—that is, bridging the so-called digital divide between Internet haves and have-nots. Some signposts of the end of English dominance are the following: ll

Google’s Chrome browser, released in 2008, was the first browser designed with the multilingual web in mind. Chrome can automatically recognize and translate websites published in over a hundred different languages, from Afrikaans to Zulu, and its own interface is also customizable to the user’s language.

ll

In 2009, the United States agreed to relinquish its leadership role in ICANN, the nonprofit organization that coordinates URLs (Internet addresses). Modern URLs can even be displayed in non-Roman writing systems, such as Greek or Arabic.

ll

Sir Berners-Lee now heads the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international association of research and industry groups that is working “to make it possible to use Web technologies with different languages, scripts, and cultures.”

ll

The United Nations, through UNESCO, actively promotes languageneutral Internet access. Its activities have included a two-part “World Summit on the Information Society” in 2003 and 2005 and a conference on “Linguistic and Cultural Diversity in Cyberspace” in 2008.

As shown in Table 1.4, Spanish is one of the top four languages in today’s multilingual Internet, whether languages are ranked by web users, web pages (see Box 1.5), or usage of internationally popular websites. Rates of Internet usage within the Hispanic community mostly reflect population: Mexico, Spain, Colombia, and Argentina have the most Internet users. Economic development also plays a role; for example, Mexico has less than twice as many Internet users as Spain (according to InternetWorldStats), even though its Spanish-speaking population is almost three times as large. Government policy matters: Cuba is completely absent on Facebook because of official restrictions. Finally, local alternatives affect specific usage patterns. Spain is relatively underrepresented on Facebook because of competition from its homegrown social media site Tuenti, founded two years before Facebook added Spanish as its first non-English language in 2008.

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Table 1.4  Top ten languages of the Internet

Number of Internet users (A)

Number of web pages (B)

Views per hour of language-specific Wikipedias1 (C)

Facebook users active on a monthly basis (D)

1

English

English

English

English

2

Chinese

French

Spanish

Spanish

3

Spanish

German

German

Portuguese

4

Arabic

Spanish

Japanese

French

5

Portuguese

Italian

Russian

Persian

6

Japanese

Russian

French

Arabic

7

Russian

Portuguese

Chinese

Turkish

8

German

Polish

Italian

Vietnamese

9

French

Dutch

Portuguese

German

10

Malay

Japanese

Polish

Italian

Rank

This metric is reported here rather than the more obvious “number of Wikipedia pages” because many Wikipedia entries are generated by bots, pushing less common languages like Waray-Waray and Cebuano (two languages of Indonesia) into the top ten. 1

Source: (A) courtesy of InternetWorldStats.com (updated 12/31/13). (B) Google queries (see Box 1.5). (C) Zachte 2015. (D) Facebook ads manager. Columns B-D accessed September 25, 2015.

Box 1.5. Estimating the number of Spanish web pages Estimating the number of web pages in Spanish, or any other language, involves two key steps: constructing a data sample (i.e., deciding what web pages to count) and classifying web pages by language. The comparison in column B of Table 1.4 relies on the Google search engine for both steps. Its sample consists of all web pages found by Google that contain any numeral (hopefully a language-neutral criterion), and it uses Google’s own language classification of the web pages found. Research in this area has mostly focused on different data sampling techniques. While it’s expedient to rely on Google (or another search engine), this limits one’s sample to web pages that have been indexed by the search engine’s automated “crawler,” which constantly adds and updates page listings. It thus omits what researchers refer to as the “invisible web”: pages that crawlers can’t find because they are not linked to previously indexed pages. To avoid this limitation, researchers have tried techniques such as randomly sampling IP addresses (O’Neill, Lavoie, and

Chapter 1 Spanish today

Bennett 2003) or sampling pages from alternative indices, such as the Internet Archive, that strive to be more inclusive (Nunberg 1998). These researchers necessarily use their own software for language identification (e.g., Manning, Raghavan, and Schutze 2008, chap. 13). To learn more ll

Paolillo (2005) is an excellent introduction to the topic of measuring linguistic diversity on the Internet.

ll

The “invisible web” is also referred to as the “deep” or “hidden” web.

To learn more ll

Ryan (2010) is an engaging chronicle of the early years of the Internet.

ll

Haddad (2010) describes Facebook’s approach to internationalization.

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Chapter 2 From Latin to Spanish

Chapter 2 From Latin to Spanish

Questions 11 How old is Spanish? (p. 41) 12 How did Latin become Spanish? Part I: Vocabulary (p. 45) 13 How did Latin become Spanish? Part II: Phonology (p. 47) 14 How did Latin become Spanish? Part III: The noun system (p. 52) 15 How did Latin become Spanish? Part IV: The verb system (p. 54) 16 How has Latin continued to influence Spanish? (p. 57)

Chapter 2 From Latin to Spanish

Like the Holy Land, Spain is situated at a crossroads. The European country closest to Africa, it guards the Mediterranean to the East and the Atlantic to the West. To the North, the Pyrenees Mountains only partially buffer Spain from the rest of Europe. Thanks to its location, Spain was first subjected to waves of conquest from East, North, and South—by Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs, and Germanic tribes, among others—and then went on to conquer the New World. While each of these historical developments had linguistic consequences, the most significant by far was the Roman conquest. It established Latin as the majority language of Spain, displacing all pre-Roman languages but Basque. Rome had established a military presence in Spain even before it conquered the Iberian Peninsula, providing protection to Greek settlements along the Mediterranean coast. The key year of the conquest itself was 206 BCE. In a decisive battle of the second Punic War, Rome defeated a Carthaginian army in Ilipa, outside modern Seville. It thus gained control over most of the Iberian Peninsula relatively early in Roman history, before the Republic had become an Empire. This meant that Iberian Latin retained some vocabulary that eventually fell out of fashion in Rome, and likewise failed to adopt some new vocabulary that became popular in Rome and in areas conquered later, including today’s France, Romania, and Switzerland. For example, Spanish pierna ‘leg’ (Port. perna) came from Latin perna, while the later Latin word gamba ‘animal leg’ is the source of French jambe, Italian gamba, and Romanian gambă. Linguists refer to the everyday language of the Roman soldiers, and the colonists who followed them, as Vulgar Latin. Unlike the Classical Latin of Caesar and Cicero, Vulgar Latin was almost exclusively a spoken language. Our picture of the language is therefore mostly based on extrapolating backward from the modern Romance languages. For example, since every Romance language has a past tense based on the verb ‘to have’ (haber in Spanish), it’s reasonable to conclude that Vulgar Latin had already developed this structure, which did not exist in Classical Latin. Additional glimpses into Vulgar Latin come from bits and pieces of written evidence, such as graffiti in Pompeii and elsewhere, casual letters, early Christian writings, and colloquial speech as depicted in Roman theater. A particularly prized source of data is the Appendix Probi, a didactic fifth-century list of common Latin “errors” that prefigure many of the changes described below. The admonishment viridis non virdis ‘it’s viridis, not virdis’ documents the loss of unstressed vowels (the modern Spanish form is verde ‘green’), vinea non vinia shows the vowel change that would later trigger the shift to ñ in viña ‘vine,’ numquam non numqua shows the loss of final m (nunca ‘never’), and so on. This chapter presents a user-friendly overview of the dizzying array of developments that combined to transform Latin, via Vulgar Latin, into

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Table 2.1  How Latin became Spanish

Vocabulary (Question 12)

Phonology (Question 13)

Loss

Change

Innovation

Words becoming obsolete

Changes in word form due to phonological change

Borrowing

Changes in meaning

Other: proper names, onomatopoeia, blending, and so on

Consonant changes in context: palatalization, lenition

New sounds: ch, ñ, y, ll, /x/, trilled rr

Merger of b and v

Sounds added within consonant sequences (e.g., tendrá )

Sounds within words

Unstressed vowels Other deletions, mostly at ends of words and syllables Sound inventories

Long versus short vowels Double consonants The h sound

Noun system

Case system

(Question 14)

Neuter gender

Changes at beginnings of words (f > h, fl/pl/cl > ll) Vowel mergers; other vowel changes Diphthongization (e > ie, o > ue) Later consonant changes (loss of z, creation of th, /x/) Other changes in gender, and in endings to conform to gender

Newly uniform endings: plural -s; masc. -o, fem. -a

Ille ‘that’ repurposed as definite article and thirdperson pronoun

Usted and ustedes pronouns

Unus ‘one’ repurposed as indefinite article Verb system (Question 15)

Derivation, compounding

Pronoun positioning and interaction rules

Fourth conjugation class

Latin conjugations repurposed to form preterite, also imperfect and future subjunctives

Future and conditional (from haber)

Latin future tense, imperfect subjunctive

Movement of -er verbs into -ir class

Perfect tenses (from haber)

Passive conjugations

Changes in verb endings due to phonological change

New irregulars due to phonological change

Chapter 2 From Latin to Spanish

Spanish. As a useful simplification, we can say that some elements of the language were lost as it evolved into Spanish, some new elements were added, and some existing elements changed. Loss, innovation, and change affected different aspects of the language to different degrees. For vocabulary, the most important development was the addition of large numbers of new words. For phonology, it was the change of Latin sounds depending on their context. Development in the noun system revolved around loss, as the entire system of Latin case endings vanished, along with neuter gender. The verb system was the most balanced, as all three types of development played a major role. The core of this chapter examines these four aspects in turn— vocabulary, phonology, and the noun and verb systems—through the threepart lens of loss, innovation, and change. These four questions are bracketed by one about the chronology of this transformation and one on the continued impact of Latin on Spanish. The reader is encouraged to refer to Table 2.1 while digesting Questions 12 to 14. It summarizes the major developments in all four aspects of language. Technical terms in the table (such as “palatalization”), and further details (what conjugation class was lost?) will be addressed in each respective question.

To learn more ll

Penny (2002: 8–14) and Dworkin (2013: 44–64) explore the distinctive qualities of the Latin of Spain, the latter focusing exclusively on vocabulary.

ll

Posner (2002: 97–103) and Lathrop (2003: 13–16) discuss different sources of evidence for Vulgar Latin, including written evidence and inference (“reconstruction”) from modern Romance.

Question 11. How old is Spanish? Languages don’t have birthdays. No person—and no community—goes to bed speaking one language and wakes up speaking another. Languages evolve slowly and, for the most part, imperceptibly, as individual changes percolate across the permeable boundaries of age, class, and geography. Birth and other human milestones nevertheless provide a useful analogy when considering the lifespan of a language. Human lives have both biological milestones, like birth and puberty, and cultural milestones, like marriage and retirement. A language’s “biological” milestones are linguistic: the gain or loss of sounds, vocabulary, and grammar. Linguists, and often

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the speakers of a language, consider a language to have reached a new stage when a critical mass of such changes has occurred. A language’s cultural milestones include the creation of signal works of literature as well as metalinguistic achievements, such as a first dictionary or legal recognition.1 “Biological” and cultural criteria unite to suggest two answers to the question “How old is Spanish?” The first answer is that by the early centuries of the second millennium CE, a distinct form of Romance known today as Old or Medieval Spanish had evolved in the Castilian region of Spain, and was spreading throughout the Iberian Peninsula via the Reconquista (Box 1.3). Old Spanish was unmistakably not Latin. It had already undergone the dramatic losses described in the rest of this chapter, including those of case endings, entire verb patterns, and unstressed vowels. Old Spanish was also unmistakably Spanish. It had already acquired many of the language’s distinguishing features, including new sounds like ch and ñ, the vital distinctions of ser versus estar ‘to be’ and por versus para ‘for,’ and most of the verb patterns, both regular and irregular, still in use today. With some study and practice, a speaker of modern Spanish can read Old Spanish texts. In 1080, Pope Gregory VII convened a council of Spanish clergy and royalty in the city of Burgos to enforce the use of the Latin mass in place of the vernacular. This early cultural milestone was a tell-tale sign that Spanish Romance had already diverged enough from Latin to cause official concern.2 The language’s first literary milestone, the epic poem El poema de mío Cid (Box 9.1), came more than a century later. Old Spanish passed further cultural milestones in the following decades. Under King Fernando III (1230–1252), it began to displace Latin as the language of official documents. But it was his son King Alfonso X (1252– 1284), known as Alfonso el Sabio ‘Alfonso the Wise,’ who truly established Spanish as a national language of cultural significance. Himself a poet, the king supported, and personally collaborated with, a coterie of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish scientists, translators, and writers to publish Spanishlanguage treatises on subjects as diverse as history, astronomy, and games. In the process, King Alfonso took steps to standardize and refine the new language. The prologue to El libro de la ochava esphera, a scientific treatise from the Alphonsine group, famously states that the king “removed the expressions that he felt were superfluous or duplicated and that were not written in correct Castilian (castellano drecho), and he added others that were more appropriate; and regarding the language, he himself corrected it” (translation from Pharies (2007: 49)). The use of the term castellano as a language name is itself noteworthy. The second answer to “How old is Spanish?” is that by the late seventeenth century, the end of the so-called Spanish Golden Age (Box 2.1), Spanish had assumed its modern form. Linguistic landmarks of this transition include

Chapter 2 From Latin to Spanish

the compression of six Old Spanish consonants into modern th, s, and /x/, as in caza ‘hunt,’ casa ‘house,’ and caja ‘box’ (Questions 61 and 62), the proliferation of subject pronouns meaning ‘you’ (Question 75), the finalizing of Spanish’s complicated object pronoun placement rules (Questions 98 and 99), and the loss of the future subjunctive (Question 88). By this time, Spanish was spoken throughout Spain and Latin America, with a healthy amount of dialectal variation. The main literary milestone of modern Spanish was the 1605 publication of Cervantes’s novel Don Quijote (Box 6.1). It retains traces of Old Spanish grammar and vocabulary, but is readily understandable by modern

Box 2.1. El Siglo de Oro: The Golden Age of Spain

The “Golden Age” of Spain was essentially the Spanish Renaissance, a time of signal achievements in all forms of the arts. Its Spanish name, El Siglo de Oro, translates literally as “The Golden Century,” but the period lasted somewhat longer. Depending on which source one consults, it began as early as 1492 or as late as 1530, and ended between 1665 and 1681. The era’s greatest painter was Diego Velázquez, the official court painter of King Felipe IV; others included El Greco, Francisco de Zurburán, and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. These painters all learned from the broader Renaissance; El Greco trained in Venice and Rome before settling in Toledo, and Velázquez twice interrupted his court career to refine his technique in Italy. Golden Age sculpture is less well known and was normally confined to religious works. Siglo de Oro literature is amazingly rich. The most renowned novelist of the period was Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, author of Don Quijote (Box 6.1). Notable playwrights were Calderón de la Barca (author of La vida es sueño ‘Life is a dream,’ whose titular soliloquy is the Spanish equivalent

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of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”) and the prolific Lope de Vega. In poetry, standouts were Garcilaso de la Vega, Francisco de Quevedo, and Luis de Góngora. The composer Tomás Luis de Victoria was the most notable Golden Age musician, while architectural achievements included Madrid’s Plaza del Sol and the nearby Escorial, whose final architect, Juan de Herrera, is pictured above. The Siglo de Oro coincided with the zenith of the Spanish Empire. This was more than a temporal coincidence: the treasure flowing steadily from Spain’s New World possessions to the royal coffers made possible its generous patronage of the arts. But the Golden Age’s luster masked a darker reality. The very silver that funded beautiful new paintings and plazas was mined at the cost of thousands of Native American and African lives. The religious zeal that first impelled Columbus westward inspired Spain to evict its remaining Moorish population in 1609. Combined with the earlier expulsion of the Jews in 1492, this move inflicted long-term damage on Spain's economy, though the confiscation of hard currency from the refugees provided a short-term stimulus. Religious zeal also led Spain into a disastrous series of wars with Protestant countries (England and the Netherlands) that drained its treasury and eventually reduced its territory and prestige.

Spanish speakers. Its publication was shortly followed by that of the first monolingual Spanish dictionary, Sebastián de Covarrubias’s Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, in 1611. A century later Spanish-language scholarship became an official state endeavor with the founding of the Real Academia Española (Question 2), which published the language’s first official dictionary in 1726.

To learn more ll

For more on the historical events associated with these two stages in the development of Spanish, see Pharies (2007: 47–49 and 141–51).

ll

Wright (1982) examines the transition from Latin to Romance in Spain and beyond. He argues that until the second millennium, Romance speakers considered Latin to be the written form of their own language rather than a separate tongue.

Chapter 2 From Latin to Spanish

Question 12. How did Latin become Spanish? Part I: Vocabulary At the beginning of this chapter, we identified three ways in which Latin evolved into Spanish: loss of Latin elements, innovation of new elements, and change in existing elements (Table 2.1). Of these three, the most important development in Spanish vocabulary has been innovation: the addition of new words to the language. We will see in later questions that every language that has interacted with Spanish over the centuries, from the pre-Roman languages of the Iberian Peninsula to English, and including Latin itself, has contributed new vocabulary to Spanish. Spanish itself has been a second major source of new words, as existing vocabulary has served as the basis of new coinages. For example, derechista ‘rightist’ was derived from derecho ‘right’ and the -ista suffix, parabrisas ‘car windshield’ is a compound of parar ‘to stop’ and brisa ‘wind, breeze,’ and adultescente is a recent blend of adulto ‘adult’ and adolescente ‘teenager.’ Additional word sources have included onomotopoeia (e.g., zumbar, ‘to buzz’) and proper names, such as quijote for an impractical idealist, after Cervantes’s literary hero (Box 6.1). As new vocabulary has been added to Spanish, its original Vulgar Latin vocabulary has continued to evolve. The phonetic changes discussed in the next question have brought about transformations in word form. For example, Latin metus ‘fear’ evolved into Spanish miedo when stressed e became ie, t became d, unstressed u became o, and final -s was lost. Word meanings have evolved at the same time, following semantic pathways that have been observed in many languages. Some of these, each with a pair of Spanish examples, are presented in Table 2.2. Some of the most interesting changes in vocabulary have been chain reactions. When the conquistadors decided to use the word pavo (from Latin pavus) for the turkeys they encountered in the New World, the birds at home gained a new qualifier: a peacock is now a pavo real—literally, a ‘royal turkey.’ When Spanish borrowed a new word for ‘white’ from Visigothic (blanco), the existing Latin word albus acquired a specialized meaning: Spanish alba means ‘dawn.’ Likewise, as Spanish borrowed erudite words from Latin over the centuries, existing vocabulary from the same Latin roots generally took on a more specific meaning, as in newer fabricar ‘to fabricate’ versus older fraguar ‘to forge,’ or newer forma ‘form’ versus older horma ‘shoemaker’s last (foot form).’ Word pairs like these are discussed in more depth in Question 16. Compared to the addition of new words, loss has played a relatively minor role in the evolution of Spanish vocabulary, although many words have inevitably became obsolete. The underlined words in these lines from the thirteenth-century epic poem El poema de mío Cid (Box 9.1) illustrate

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Table 2.2  Types of semantic change from Latin to Spanish

A word’s meaning becomes

Examples

more negative

ramera ‘prostitute’ (originally ‘female innkeeper’) villano ‘crude’ (originally ‘rustic’) caballo ‘horse’ (originally ‘nag’)

more positive

casa ‘house’ (originally ‘hut’) pariente ‘relative’ (originally ‘parent’)

more general

compañero ‘companion’ (originally ‘fellow eater’) infante ‘prince’ (originally ‘child’)

narrower

cuero ‘leather’ (originally ‘skin’) extended via metaphor

fuente ‘source’ (originally ‘fountain’) araña ‘chandelier’ (originally (and still) ‘spider’)

extended via metonymy (part/whole relationship)

césped ‘lawn’ (originally ‘piece of turf’)

changed by real-world developments

coche ‘car’ (originally ‘coach’)

boda ‘wedding’ (originally ‘vow’)

tirar de la cadena ‘flush the toilet’ (literally ‘pull the chain’)

different shades of obsolescence. Arruenço, amidos, abiltado, migero, and segudar were lexical dead ends, while ondra and conplido have modern counterparts: honra and cumplido. moros en arruenço amidos bever agua (line 1,229) ‘Moors struggling (against the current) unwillingly drinking water’ En la ondra que él ha nós seremos abiltados (line 1,862) ‘By the honor he has we will be reviled’ siete migeros conplidos duró el segudar (line 2,407) ‘seven full miles (“milestones”) lasted the pursuit.’

Loss and innovation can combine to replace a word, a process that is sometimes inscrutable. No one knows, for example, why Latin usque ‘until’ fell out of vogue and was replaced by Arabic hasta (Question 26). Penny (2002: 306–07) gives a few examples of replacements that apparently started as euphemisms for older words that had acquired a negative or risqué connotation. Embarazada (originally ‘encumbered’) has almost entirely replaced preñada ‘pregnant.’ Zorra ‘fox’ (originally ‘lazy person, idler’) has mostly replaced raposa (from rabo ‘tail’), which itself replaced Latin vulpes.

Chapter 2 From Latin to Spanish

To learn more ll

For a detailed treatment of the Latin core in Spanish vocabulary, see Dworkin (2013, chap. 3).

ll

See Penny (2002: 302–17) for more on changes in word meanings.

ll

See Question 16 for later borrowings from Latin, and Question 38 for a quantitative analysis of Latin versus non-Latin sources of Spanish vocabulary.

Question 13. How did Latin become Spanish? Part II: Phonology Phonological change—change in sounds—is the bread and butter of historical linguistics. It is less dramatic than the acquisition of new words, or sweeping changes in grammar. Yet, like individual moves on a chessboard, small changes in sound combine to have a powerful impact on a language’s development. This question presents an overview of the phonological transition from Latin to Spanish within the chapter’s framework of language development as a combination of loss, innovation, and change (recall Table 2.1). The hallmark of this transition was changes in specific sounds—particularly consonants—in specific contexts. The fate of f is a good illustration. As shown in Table 2.3, Latin f, which usually occurred only at the beginning of a word, emerged as f, ll, or h in Spanish, depending on the following sound. Many specific changes in Latin consonants fell into  the general categories of “palatalization” and “lenition.” Roughly speaking, palatalization affects where in the mouth a consonant is formed, and lenition affects how. Palatalization is usually triggered by an adjacent sound, as in the change of t to ch before y in English Gotcha, from Got you. (You can feel the tongue moving backward in the mouth from t to ch if you say the word touch slowly.) In the two Spanish examples of palatalization shown in the table, the k of cera and circa moved forward in the mouth, and the n of vinea moved back: in both cases, toward the “hard palate” at the roof of the mouth. Lenition takes many forms. In the examples shown in the table, the vibration of the vocal cords needed to pronounce the vowels on either side of a consonant has “spread” onto the consonants. The same process explains the English pronunciation of t as d in words like writer. The table also illustrates sound changes that occurred in vowels in specific contexts, and in both vowels and consonants regardless of context. As a result of these and other changes, Spanish both added to and subtracted from Latin’s original inventory of sounds. Palatalization added ch, ñ, y, and

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Table 2.3  Principal sound changes from Latin to Spanish

Type Consonant changes in specific contexts

Examples (Latin > Spanish)

Change

f at beginning of word fl > ll

flamma ‘flame’ > llama

(No change before r, ue)

frigidus ‘cold’ > frío fortis ‘strong’ > fuerte

f > h otherwise (silent in modern Spanish)

ferrum ‘steel’ > hierro fumus ‘smoke’ > humo Palatalization

k > ch before e, i (s or th in modern Spanish)

cera ‘wax’ > cera circa ‘near’ > cerca

n > ñ before y

vinea ‘vine’ > vinya > viña Lenition

Vowel changes in specific contexts

Across-the-board consonant changes

p, t, k > b, d, g between vowels

lupus ‘wolf’ > lobo vita ‘life’ > vida securu ‘sure’ > seguro

long ī, ū > e, o in final syllables

Iovīs ‘Thursday’ > jueves manūs ‘hand’ > mano

short ŏ and ĕ > ue, ie when stressed

dormio ‘I sleep’ > duermo negas ‘you deny’ > niegas

a, e > e, i before i or y

veni ‘I came’ > vine area ‘threshing floor’ > arya > era

merger of v with b

vacca ‘cow’ (pronounced w) > vaca (same as b as in baca ‘roofrack’) Later changes

Across-the-board vowel changes

creation of th (Castilian)

marzo ‘March’ (pronounced ts in Old Spanish)

creation of /x/

Quijote (sh in Old Spanish)

merger of z with s

casa ‘house’ (z in Old Spanish)

h becomes silent

hierro, humo (above in table)

short ĭ > e short ŭ > o

pĭscare ‘to fish’ > pescar sŭspectare ‘to suspect’ > sospechar

Chapter 2 From Latin to Spanish

ll; other new sounds were /x/ and the trilled rr. The Latin distinction between long and short vowels was lost, and Latin’s doubled consonants merged with single consonants (e.g., Latin ossu ‘bone’ > hueso), often palatalizing in the process (e.g., annus ‘year’ > año). Sounds were also lost and added within words (Table 2.4). Sound loss was especially common at the ends of words, as is generally true in language change: Deutscher aptly describes it as a speaker “running out of steam” (2005: 88). As discussed in the following question, this type of loss had major consequences for Spanish grammar, contributing to the demise of Latin’s case system and its neuter gender category. Sounds added to words served mostly to make awkward consonant sequences easier to pronounce. For example, the added e- in esponja divided the Classical Latin sp cluster, so that the s now ends the first syllable, while the p starts the second (es.pon.ja). This repertoire of phonological changes may seem overwhelmingly complex, especially given that the presentation above doesn’t aim for completeness. It may help to keep three things in mind. First, phonological change is repetitive. Most individual changes from Latin to Spanish fit into a limited set of broader categories that affected large numbers of words. This repetition can be seen to some degree in the examples in Table 2.5, which shows three word histories of increasing complexity: over and over, vowels merge, final sounds are lost, and consonants palatalize. The more word histories one considers, the more patterns like these emerge. Second, most of the individual changes were not arbitrary; rather, they made sense from an Table 2.4  Examples of sound loss and addition within words

Loss

Sound lost or added

Examples (Latin > Spanish)

unstressed vowels

manica ‘sleeve’ > manga

final -m

iam ‘now’ > ya

final -e (after many consonants)

mare ‘sea’ > mar pane ‘bread’ > pan

Addition

n before s

mensa ‘month’ > mes

e before s-clusters

spongia ‘sponge’ > esponja

d, b to break up r, l clusters

tremulare ‘to tremble’ > temblar

(after loss of unstressed vowel)

Old Spanish tenerá ‘he will have’ > tendrá Old Spanish saliré ‘I will leave’ > saldré

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Table 2.5  Examples of sound change in the evolution of Spanish words

Latin > Spanish

Sound changes (in approximate chronological order)

Result

plōrāre > llorar

1. long ō and ā merge with o and a

plorare

‘to cry’

2. initial pl- becomes ll- (palatalization)

llorare

3. loss of final -e

llorar

focum > fuego

1. loss of final -m

focu

‘fire’

2. final -u merges with -o

foco

3. stressed o becomes ue (diphthongization)

fueco

4. c becomes g between vowels (lenition)

fuego

fīlium > hijo

1. loss of final -m

fīliu

‘son’

2. final -u merges with -o

fīlio

3. long ī merges with i

filio

4. i becomes y before another vowel (o)

filyo

5. initial f- becomes h-

hilyo

6. l absorbs palatal y, moving back in the mouth to become ll, then /ʒ / as in pleasure (palatalization)

hillo > hiʒo

7. loss of h (i.e., h becomes silent)

(h)iʒo

8. /ʒ / merges with sh, then moves back in mouth to become /x/ as in Geraldo

(h)isho > (h)ixo

articulatory standpoint. For example, the change of Latin e in veni ‘I came’ to i can be explained simply as the tongue already moving into the higher position needed for the final -i. This linguistic logic ensures that similar changes are found in languages around the world: nearby sounds affect each other, unstressed and final sounds are weakened and lost, and so on. Third, these changes took place over centuries. Although they added up to dramatic transformations over time, they felt incremental to each generation, taking place without interfering with communication. The complexity of the overall change in the system is only visible from our modern perspective. Phonological change is powerful, but not inexorable: it can be derailed. Some Latin words that were familiar to the general population, not just to scholars, wielded a conservative influence on their Spanish descendants. In the case of Spanish ángel ‘angel,’ the unstressed e of Latin angelum would normally have been dropped and the resulting gl cluster palatalized to produce, perhaps, anjo (as in Portuguese). Instead, general familiarity with angelum from its frequent repetition in the Catholic Mass apparently put the brakes on

Chapter 2 From Latin to Spanish

this change, though the final -um was lost. A well-known Latin model could even replace a form resulting from sound change: the ct of octubre ‘October’ was palatalized to ch in Old Spanish, but later reverted to the original Latin consonant sequence. More often, it was interaction among Spanish words that altered the expected course of phonological change. For example, the e of Spanish fregar ‘I scrub’ (from Latin fricare) alternates with the diphthong ie in forms like friego and friegas ‘I/you scrub,’ even though the expected forms were frego and fregas. This alternation arose in imitation of verbs like negar ‘to doubt’ (niego, niegas, etc.), whose ie diphthong was the normal outcome of the short e of Latin negare in stressed syllables (Table 2.3). Another example concerns verb forms with an -e ending, such as tiene ‘he has’ and quise ‘he wanted.’ Although final -e was lost elsewhere (as in mar and pan, Table 2.4), it survived in these forms because of the competing generalization that all conjugated verbs in Spanish have endings. Thanks to individual interactions like these, to some extent every Spanish word has its own history.

To learn more ll

Besides “palatalization” and “lenition,” other linguistic terms relevant to this question are “diphthongization” (i, o > ie, ue), “syncope” and “epenthesis” (dropping and adding sounds within a word), “metaphony” (vowel changes influenced by a neighboring vowel), and “analogy” (change via imitation, as in the fregar/negar example).

ll

Several changes discussed here are covered in more detail in Chapters 7 and 8. They also come up again in Chapter 10 because of their close connection with Spanish irregular verbs. Question 81 in that chapter also discusses the importance of analogy, as defined just above.

ll

For a comprehensive treatment of phonological change in Spanish, see Penny (2002, chap. 2). Penny closes his discussion with an ordered set of thirty-three phonological changes (108–10).

ll

For a briefer yet authoritative treatment, see Pharies (2007: 75–100 and 151–57), which includes an ordered set of twenty-nine changes (78, 152).

ll

Deutscher (2005: 73–114) discusses sound change, and its relationship to other aspects of language change, more generally.

ll

“Semi-learned” words like ángel and octubre, which show the influence of their Latin progenitor, are discussed by Pharies (2007: 93–94) and Penny (2002: 39–40).

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Part 1 Spanish in context ll

“Every word has its own history” has long been the rallying cry of linguists, typically dialectologists, who are particularly aware of apparent exceptions to phonological change; see, for example, Campbell (2013: 188–90).

Question 14. How did Latin become Spanish? Part III: The noun system In this chapter thus far, pride of place has gone to innovation in vocabulary and change in phonology. For the Spanish noun system, it goes to loss: most significantly, the loss of Latin’s case system (recall Table 2.1). As basic to Latin as verb conjugations, case endings marked the different roles that nouns can play in a sentence—subject, object, indirect object, and so on. A classic illustration, using the nouns puer ‘boy’ and puella ‘girl,’ is the two sentences below: ll

Puer puellam amat ‘The boy loves the girl’

ll

Puerum puella amat ‘The girl loves the boy’ (i.e., ‘The boy, the girl loves’)

Only the noun endings indicate who loves and is loved; that is, who is the subject (the “nominative case”) and who the object (the “accusative case”). The phonetic changes described above wreaked havoc with this system because many sound changes affected the ends of words. This eroded the case endings, making them harder to perceive and to learn. For example, the loss of final -m undermined the vital accusative marker in puellam and puerum. The loss of the case system made Spanish into a fundamentally different language. Word order is now vital in distinguishing subject and object, as in El niño ama a la niña ‘The boy loves the girl’ versus La niña ama al niño.3 Prepositions also play a larger role in Spanish than they did in Latin. For example, del niño ‘of the boy’ and al niño ‘to the boy’ replaced the Latin genitive pueri and dative puero. These changes raise an interesting chicken-and-egg question: did the weakening of the case endings make these alternatives necessary, or did their use encourage the loss of the case endings? The most likely scenario is that the two changes went hand in hand. In any case, the result was the total loss of the case system, a process already well underway in Vulgar Latin. The form that survived for each noun was almost always the accusative, probably because it had the clearest singular/plural distinction, with a reasonably uniform plural -s.

Chapter 2 From Latin to Spanish

The erosion of noun endings also made it harder to distinguish among Latin’s three noun genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. This triggered the second great loss in the noun system, that of neuter gender. Neuter nouns were folded into the masculine and feminine categories, usually on the basis of their final vowel. Thus, neuter collum ‘neck,’ which normal phonetic change turned into cuello, naturally became masculine because of its final -o, while the neuter plural opera ‘works’ became the feminine singular obra. Innovations in the Spanish noun system were not as impressive as these losses, but were still significant. For the first time, the language came to have uniform endings for masculine, feminine, and plural words: -o, -a, and -s. These innovations were another side effect of sound change. When the Latin word endings eroded, the case system fell apart, and the old accusative forms emerged as survivors, their singular -um and -am endings morphed into -o and -a, while their plural endings (-as, -es, and -os) caused -s to merge as a consistent plural. Two other innovations had to do with pronouns rather than nouns. Spanish developed the formal pronouns usted and ustedes ‘you,’ which contrast with the informal tú and vos(otros) inherited from Latin (Question 75). In addition, as the loss of the case system increased the importance of word order, an elaborate set of rules arose to govern the placement of object pronouns (Question 98). Loss and innovation in the Spanish noun system were also accompanied by changes in existing elements. The most dramatic of these was the multifold repurposing of the demonstrative ille ‘that,’ originally used in Latin phrases like ille liber ‘that book’ or just ille ‘that one.’ As shown in Table 2.6, various forms of ille developed into some of the most common function words in Spanish: the definite article ‘the,’ and subject and object pronouns like él ‘he,’ lo ‘him,’ and le ‘to him.’ As ille morphed in these various useful ways, Latin unus ‘one’ likewise took on a new role as the indefinite article, with the variants un, una, unos, and unas ‘a, some.’ All these developments followed well-trodden linguistic paths. Demonstratives are a common source of personal pronouns (Question 78). They are also the single most frequent source for definite articles, seen in languages as diverse as Basque, English, Haitian Creole, and Hungarian, while the number ‘one’ is a common source for indefinite articles (Heine and Kuteva 2002). Besides these large-scale changes, smaller changes took place in individual words, essentially mopping up some of the flotsam and jetsam left behind by the transition from three genders to two, and from six cases to one. Many nouns that lacked the newly uniform -o, -a, and -s endings fell in line with the new regime. Some examples are pájaro ‘bird,’ from Latin passare (masculine), suegra ‘mother-in-law,’ from Latin socrus (feminine), and templos ‘temples,’ from Latin templa (plural). Nouns that failed to acquire a helpful -o or -a ending, such as origen ‘origin’ and sal ‘salt,’ often fluctuated

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Part 1 Spanish in context

Table 2.6 Repurposing ille ‘that’

Latin masculine and feminine both listed if different Subject pronouns

ille, illa ‘that one’ illos, illas ‘those ones’1

Spanish él, ella ‘he, she’ ellos, ellas ‘they’ el, la ‘the’ (singular)

Definite articles2

los, las ‘the’ (plural) Direct object pronouns

Indirect object pronouns

illum, illam ‘that one’ (object form)

lo, la ‘him, her’

illos, illas ‘those ones’ (object form)

los, las ‘them’

illi ‘to that one’

le ‘to him, her, it’

illis ‘to those ones’

les ‘to them’

1 Illos and illas were accusative (object) forms, even though they developed into the subject pronouns ellos and ellas. As described in the text, the accusative was often the case that survived in Spanish because of its distinctive -s plural. 2 All four definite articles shrank from two syllables to one because they were (and still are) unstressed within sentences and therefore phonetically weak, whereas three out of four subject pronouns, from the same Latin source, retained both syllables. Likewise, the object pronouns were unstressed and therefore lost a syllable.

in gender before settling down as either masculine or feminine. Today, these words are the most likely to vary in gender among the Romance languages (see Question 71).

To learn more ll

Chapter 9 picks up the topic of the Spanish noun system, covering some of the subjects mentioned here in more detail.

ll

For a more in-depth treatment, see Penny (2002: 114–48) and Pharies (2007: 102–18).

Question 15. How did Latin become Spanish? Part IV: The verb system The Spanish verb system underwent a balanced set of developments as it evolved from Latin: loss, innovation, and change, our three chapter themes, all played a substantial role. The result was dramatic. As shown in Table 2.7, only four Latin verb tenses survived more or less intact.4 All forms of the

Chapter 2 From Latin to Spanish

55

Latin passive—past, present, and future—were lost, along with the basic Latin future tense and the imperfect subjunctive. Several other tenses survived, but with substantial changes in their usage. The most dramatic of these was the repurposing of the Latin perfect subjunctive (a past tense form) as the Spanish future subjunctive. Finally, Spanish added several new structures based on the verb haber ‘to have’: the ‘perfect’ tenses (e.g., he amado ‘I have loved’), a new future tense, and the conditional. To a large extent, these developments were cyclical, with new or repurposed Spanish tenses taking the place of existing Latin tenses that had served the same function. The new Spanish future (amaré ‘I will love’) replaced Latin’s amabo.5 The new imperfect subjunctives (amara and amase) replaced Latin’s amarem. The new perfect forms based on haber replaced Latin’s perfects (amavi, amaveram, amavissem, amavero, and amaverim). The only genuinely new tenses were the conditional (amaría ‘I would love’), the future subjunctive (amare), and the new preterite use of the old Latin perfect (amé ‘I loved’).

Table 2.7  The evolution of the Spanish verb system (examples from first-person singular ‘I’ form of amare > amar ‘to love’)

Latin

Spanish

Present indicative (amo)

Unchanged except for endings (amo, ame, amaba, ama)

Present subjunctive (amem) Imperfect indicative (amabam) Imperative (amā) Passive voice (all tenses)

Lost

Future indicative (amabo) Imperfect subjunctive (amarem) Perfect indicative (amavi)

 Preterite (amé)

Pluperfect indicative (amaveram)

 Imperfect subjunctive (amara, amase)

Pluperfect subjunctive (amavissem) Future perfect indicative (amavero)

 Future subjunctive (amare), now mostly obsolete

Perfect subjunctive (amaverim) Not present in Latin: all structures based on haber

Perfect tenses (he amado, había amado, etc.) Future (amare habeo > amaré) Conditional (amare habebam > amaría)

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Part 1 Spanish in context

Loss, innovation, and change also affected how Spanish verbs are conjugated. In terms of loss, the four Latin conjugation classes (-āre, -ēre, -ĕre, and -īre) were reduced to three when the -ēre and -ĕre classes combined to form the Spanish -er class (Box 2.2). In terms of innovation, phonological change unfortunately spawned a fresh crop of irregular verbs. As detailed in Chapter 10, most of the irregular patterns in Spanish that bedevil today’s first- and second-language learners, including “boot” verbs, -go verbs, -zco verbs, and vowel changes in -ir preterites, were created when phonological developments altered certain verb forms but not other, related forms. Finally, in terms of change, several verbs from the -er conjugation moved to the -ir class—two examples are decir ‘to say’ and pedir ‘to ask for,’ from Latin dicere and petere—and almost all existing verb endings changed as final consonants were lost, vowels merged, and so on. The present tense -ar endings (Table 2.8) are a good illustration.

To learn more ll

Chapter 10 picks up the topic of the Spanish verb system, covering many of the subjects mentioned here in more detail.

Box 2.2. How Latin -ēre and -ĕre verbs merged The merger of Latin’s -ēre and -ĕre conjugation classes into the -er class of Spanish is a textbook study of how changes in pronunciation can trigger a significant change in grammar. According to Penny (2002: 154), the main catalyst for this merger was a change in accentuation. Of the four Latin classes, only -ĕre verbs had a short vowel in the infinitive (e.g., bibĕre ‘to drink’) and in certain conjugated forms, such as bibĭmus ‘we drink’ and bibĭte ‘Drink!’. By the rules of Latin stress (Question 65), this short vowel could not be stressed, so stress fell instead on the syllable before it, as in bibĕre, bibĭmus, and bibĭte. This atypical pattern was lost as Latin transformed into Spanish, shifting stress to the right, and thus eliminating the most distinctive pronunciation difference between -ēre and -ĕre verbs. In addition, regular sound change blurred the differences between the -ēre and -ĕre endings. For example, the merger of Latin ĭ and ē into Spanish e (Question 57) meant that the -ēs ending of movēs ‘you move’ and the -ĭs ending of bibĭs ‘you drink’ both became -es in Spanish: mueves, bebes. The stress shift and the loss of distinctive endings eliminated the difference between -ēre and -ĕre verbs, creating the modern Spanish system of three, not four, conjugation classes.

Chapter 2 From Latin to Spanish Table 2.8  The development of the present indicative -ar verb endings (with relevant phonological changes)

Lat. amō > Sp. amo ‘I love’ ll

merger of long and short vowels

Lat. amās > Sp. amas ‘you love’ ll

merger of long and short vowels

Lat. amat > Sp. ama ‘he loves’ ll

loss of final -t

Lat. amāmus > Sp. amamos ‘we love’ ll

merger of long and short vowels

ll

merger of u and o

Lat. amātis > Sp. amáis ‘you all love’ ll

merger of long and short vowels

ll

consonant weakening between vowels (‘lenition’)

Lat. amant > Sp. aman ‘they love’ ll

loss of final -t

ll

For a detailed treatment of the development of the Spanish verb system, see Penny (2002: 152–241), Lathrop (2003: 155–98) is briefer but likewise comprehensive.

ll

For a comparison with other Romance languages, see Posner (2002: 175–81, 257–61, 297–301).

ll

The cyclical nature of language history, as seen in the replacement of older verb structures with new ones, is explored in depth by Deutscher (2005).

Question 16. How has Latin continued to influence Spanish? Having given birth to Spanish, metaphorically speaking, Latin remained intimately involved with its young offspring. Latin was the primary written language in Spain until the thirteenth century, and remained a cornerstone of Spanish education well into the nineteenth century as the international language of arts and sciences.6 In addition, until Vatican II in the 1960s, most Spaniards were exposed to Latin on a regular basis in the Catholic Church. This continued presence itself didn’t guarantee that Latin would influence Spanish. For that, we can look to the prestige that Latin enjoyed because of its age, literature, and international reach. From the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century, Latin was the go-to linguistic resource for educated Spaniards who wanted to write and speak more impressively, more expressively, or just better. This prestige ensured a constant stream of new Latin borrowings into Spanish, eventually amounting to approximately one-third of the Spanish lexicon

57

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Part 1 Spanish in context

(Question 38). This mass borrowing echoes and amplifies the earlier largescale importation of Greek vocabulary into Latin itself, which reflected the prestige of Greek culture. Latin influence surged in the early thirteenth century, when Spanish was first standardized (Question 11), and again in the late fifteenth century, with the invention of the printing press and the dawn of the Siglo de Oro (Box 2.1). In these two periods, Spanish scholars—whether writing new books or translating foreign ones—made a conscious effort to develop Spanish into a world-class language. Vocabulary was a large part of this effort, and included expressive as well as practical words. Latin borrowings into Spanish are therefore more grammatically diverse than those from other languages, including many adjectives and verbs as well as nouns. Once a new Latin borrowing had gained a foothold in the language, it “trickled down” into everyday Spanish when ordinary people came into contact with members of the intellectual elite—clergy, lawyers, doctors, and courtiers. Borrowed words also spread via popular theater and poetry. Later, literacy dramatically accelerated the diffusion of borrowings. Even so, not all borrowings have survived in modern Spanish. Some of the Latin words newly imported by writers and scholars filled gaps in Spanish vocabulary, while others served to expand the language’s expressive range. Many gaps were related to themes for which Latin culture was particularly relevant, such as religion (e.g., crucificado ‘crucified’ and bendición ‘blessing’), law (e.g., patrimonio ‘patrimony’ and defender ‘defend’), writing and the arts (e.g., poema ‘poem’ and purpúreo ‘color’), and science (e.g., cocodrilo ‘crocodilo’ and globo ‘globe’). Others were less thematic, yet clearly outside the realm of core vocabulary, such as sórdido ‘sordid’ or terror ‘terror.’ Several adjectival gaps were puzzling: why didn’t Spanish already have a word for puro ‘pure’ or próximo ‘next’ (Dworkin 2013: 173)? Leaving aside mere gap-filling, most new borrowings added lexical diversity, allowing Spanish speakers, for the first time, to either distinguir ‘distinguish,’ diferenciar ‘differentiate,’ separar ‘separate,’ or dividir ‘divide’ new and subtle shades of meaning (Dworkin 2013: 170). Modern Spanish freely mixes these Latin borrowings with its older vocabulary, based on the Vulgar Latin of the original Roman conquerors and colonists and transmitted orally from generation to generation. These two types of words can still be distinguished with a bit of linguistic detective work. Because the borrowings are newer, they remain similar to their Latin roots, while the older words have undergone substantial changes in pronunciation, and often of meaning as well. As the two vocabulary streams mixed, new borrowings frequently bumped up against existing Spanish words from the same Latin roots. Such encounters had three possible outcomes. The new word could replace the old:

Chapter 2 From Latin to Spanish

59

thus, historia ‘history, story’ replaced estoria, tóxico ‘toxic’ replaced tóssigo, and so on. More rarely, both words could survive as pure or near-synonyms, such as llama ‘flame’ and the newer flama (both from Latin flamma), or abertura ‘opening’ and the newer apertura (from the Latin verb aperire), which have slightly different uses.7 The most common outcome was for both words to survive—but with a substantial change of meaning in the older word. Spanish has hundreds of such pairs, known as “doublets” (Table 2.9). In most pairs the older word has a more specific meaning; fraguar/fabricar and mellizo/gemelo are good examples of this contrast. Doublets raise an interesting chicken-or-egg question. Did the older words shift in meaning, thus creating gaps that inspired the new borrowings, or did the pressure of the new borrowings push the older words into new semantic territory? In either case, the differences in pronunciation and meaning within doublets guarantee that the average speaker today has no idea that these word pairs are related. Latin borrowings have also had an impact on Spanish phonology, weakening its rules for syllable structure and word stress. As Spanish evolved from Latin, it reduced the set of consonants that could possibly occur at the end of a syllable. Thus, dubdar ‘to doubt,’ from Latin dubitare, became dudar, eliminating syllable-final b, Latin aptare ‘to tie’ became atar, eliminating syllable-final p, and so on. However, syllable-final consonants were accepted Table 2.9  Some Spanish “doublets”: Word pairs from the same Latin root

Latin root

Older Spanish word (divergent in form and meaning)

Newer Spanish word (closer to Latin root)

lynx ‘wildcat’

onza ‘snow leopard, cheetah’1

lince ‘wildcat’

forma ‘form’

horma ‘shoemaking form’

forma ‘form’

limpidus ‘clear’

limpio ‘clean’

límpido ‘clear, limpid’

fabricare ‘to fabricate’

fraguar ‘to forge’

fabricar ‘to fabricate’

fabula ‘story, fable’

habla ‘speech, language’

fábula ‘fable’

delicatus ‘delicate’

delgado ‘thin’

delicado ‘delicate’

bestia ‘beast’

bicha ‘bug’

bestia ‘beast’

gemellus ‘twin’

mellizo ‘fraternal twin’

gemelo ‘twin’

1 Corominas (1973) suggests that speakers reinterpreted the l- of lynx as belonging to the definite article el ‘the’ and therefore stripped it from the noun. This is the opposite of the common pattern seen in borrowings from Arabic, where Arabic al ‘the’ is attached to the beginning of a word (Question 26).

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Part 1 Spanish in context

in later Latin borrowings such as abstener ‘to abstain’ and aceptar ‘to accept.’ Likewise, borrowings such as dócil, límpido, and fábula violated the word stress rules of Spanish (Question 65). While these words still require a written accent mark to show that they are irregular, their very presence weakens the strength of these rules. In sum, the intimate relationship between Latin and Spanish was in a class by itself. Compared to languages considered in later chapters, from Arabic to English, Latin contributed vocabulary more continuously, copiously, deliberately, diversely, and impactfully. Lucky Spanish—it got a double dose of Romance.

To learn more ll

Dworkin (2013: 157–81) is the most thorough treatment of this topic.

ll

Penny (2002: 257–58) is considerably briefer, but includes substantial lists of borrowings from each period. Elsewhere, he addresses doublets (40) and syllable-final consonant restrictions (104–05).

ll

Pountain (2006b, 2010) considers possible evidence for Latin influence on Spanish syntax.

ll

Harris-Northall (1999) illustrates the introduction of new Latin borrowings by comparing in detail several different versions of a single Spanish text, from a thirteenth-century manuscript to its first printing, with substantial revisions, in 1503.

ll

Gutiérrez (1989), an entire book on doublets, focuses on cases where the newer Spanish word corresponds to two or more older words. It exhaustively reviews the phonological changes that distinguish older from newer words.

Chapter 3 Spanish and Romance

Chapter 3 Spanish and Romance

Questions 17 How have other Romance languages influenced Spanish? (p. 62) 18 Is it true that Portuguese speakers can understand Spanish but not the other way around? (p. 67) 19 How is Catalan different from Spanish? (p. 68) 20 What is Ladino? (p. 73) 21 What other languages are related to Romance? (p. 77)

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Part 1 Spanish in context

Spanish is by no means an only child. It is part of the large and flourishing Romance family that developed from Latin in much of the former Roman Empire. This chapter takes up a variety of Romance topics of interest to Spanish speakers and learners. The first question describes how other Romance languages have affected Spanish. Questions 18 and 19 concern Portuguese and Catalan, the two most widely spoken Iberian languages after Spanish. Question 20 describes Ladino, a historical offshoot of Spanish, while Question 21 steps back to place the Romance group within its broader historical context as a member of the Indo-European language family.

Question 17. How have other Romance languages influenced Spanish? Linguistic interactions, like car accidents, usually occur close to home. While the currents of history have brought Spanish into contact with languages as diverse as Arabic and Aymara (a language of the Andes), Spanish has also enjoyed an intimate and prolonged association with its less exotic Romance neighbors. These include Portuguese, French, and Italian as well as regional varieties: Catalan and Galician in Spain (Question 4), Provençal or Occitan in Southern France, and, for seven hundred years, the Mozarabic of Araboccupied southern Spain (Question 26). Inter-Romance contact has taken place not just in Europe, but in the New World as well. While trade, travel, and immigration have always provided a baseline level of contact between Spanish and the other Romance languages, additional factors have frequently turned up the dial. The most obvious of these have been unions, or at least alliances, between Spain and other countries. Large parts of modern-day Italy—Sicily, Sardinia, and the lower part of the “boot”—belonged to Spain from 1469 to 1713. Spain and Portugal were united as a single kingdom, under Spanish rule, from 1580 to 1640. Spain and France were ruled by two branches of the Bourbon family from 1700 to 1792, an alliance strengthened by formal pacts and by mutual enmity with Britain. In all these cases, new vocabulary had the opportunity to enter Spanish as documents and personnel, both official and unofficial, flowed across borders. This also happened, to a lesser degree, whenever a royal marriage linked Spain with another country. Paradoxically, Europe’s frequent wars fomented linguistic interaction as well. The Peninsular War of 1807–14, for example, flooded Spain with French speakers: tens of thousands of French troops were billeted throughout the country, while Napoleon’s brother Joseph headed a puppet government as the ersatz King of Spain.

Chapter 3 Spanish and Romance

Leaving aside these specific events, the single greatest factor determining linguistic influence within Romance has been prestige. In particular, prestige, more than alliances, marriage, or war, explains why French has contributed twice as many words to Spanish as any other Romance language (see Question 38). In medieval times, France played a large role organizing the Catholic Church, both in Spain and in Europe at large, even serving as the seat of the Papacy from 1309 to 1377. Early French literature provided a model for that of Spain (Hamilton, Perry, and Michael 1984: 13). In subsequent centuries, the prestige of French culture high and low, from the salon to the scullery, continued to catalyze borrowings. French influence accelerated in the Bourbon period mentioned above, to the point that it unleashed a backlash. When Madrid’s citizens were ordered to abandon their traditional capes and hats for French-style clothing, the city erupted in the Motin de Esquilache riots of 1766, a dramatic event captured by the painter Francisco Goya. The adjective afrancesado ‘Frenchified’ later became an insult during the reign of Napoleon’s “King” Joseph. Nevertheless, France’s lead role in both arts and sciences throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ensured that the language remained the main donor to Spanish until the baton passed to English (Question 28). Words from Spanish’s Romance siblings can be found in all semantic domains, and cluster in fairly predictable ways (Table 3.1). For example, French (along with Occitan) dominates borrowing in the area of food and clothing, Italian dominates the arts, and Portuguese (along with Galician) dominates seafaring—and fish! The less predictable clusters have cultural roots as well. The prominence of French (not Italian) in religious vocabulary stems from its medieval role in the Church, as discussed just above. The relative frequency of Portuguese/Galician words for emotions might seem random until one learns that this was the standard language of medieval lyric poetry, even in Castile (Penny 2002: 280). Some Romance loans had colorful origins. To give just a few examples, Portuguese imported Japanese biombo ‘folding screen,’ French contributed English esmoquin ‘tuxedo (smoking) jacket,’ and Italian served up Turkish café ‘coffee’—itself borrowed from Arabic. Most Romance loans, though, originally come from Latin. These loans raise an interesting methodological question: how can one distinguish them from words that descended directly from Latin to Spanish? The strongest clues are phonetic. For example, the Italian borrowing foso ‘trench’ (from Latin fossum) avoided the expected change of o to ue seen in Spanish words like nueve ‘nine’ (from novem); see Question 13. In fact, this very change appears in an older, non-borrowed version of ‘trench’—Old Spanish fuessa—that foso supplanted. Other clues can also make a case for borrowing. Timing matters: Dante used bizarro

63

chaveta ‘peg’ carroza ‘carriage’ sotana ‘cassock’ cortejo ‘entourage’ lápiz ‘pencil’ balcón ‘balcony’ ópera ‘opera’

estuche avión ‘airplane’ fraile ‘monk’ duque ‘duke’ clisé chimenea ‘chimney’ flauta ‘flute’

household items

technology

religion

social structure

art

architecture

music

literature

pantano ‘swamp’

ruiseñor ‘nightingale’

nature

Italian

corbata ‘tie’

blusa ‘blouse’

clothing

‘photo negative’

‘case, box’

remolacha ‘beet’

restaurante ‘restaurant’

food and drink

soneta ‘sonnet’

Italian

French/Occitan

French or Occitan

Dominated by

Examples

Semantic domain

Table 3.1  Examples of Romance borrowings across semantic domains

bicho ‘creature’

traje ‘suit’

caramelo ‘caramel’

Portuguese or Galician

64 Part 1 Spanish in context

batallón ‘batallion’ malaria ‘malaria’ bancarrota ‘bankruptcy’ estrafalario ‘eccentric’ tute piloto ‘pilot’ anchoa ‘anchovy’ feliz ‘happy’1

cadete ‘cadet’ desmayar garantía ‘guarantee’ salvaje ‘savage’ ruleta ‘roulette’ estribor ‘starboard’ arenque ‘herring’ enojar

military

medicine

business

characteristics

games/sports

seafaring

fish and seafood

emotions ‘to anger’

‘to faint’

‘Tute’ (card game)

tarantela ‘tarantella’

bailar

dance ‘to dance’

comediante ‘comedian’

debut ‘debut’

nightlife

‘high tide’

enfadarse

‘to get annoyed’

ostra ‘oyster’

pleamar

brincar ‘gambol’

sarao ‘soirée’

Source: Data from Penny (2002: 272–83), with some reworking of semantic categories

1

Penny (2002: 281) proposes this nonstandard etymology for feliz (and likewise infeliz and interés), which first appeared in Spanish with a final e, as in Italian.

Portuguese/Galician

French/Occitan and Italian

Chapter 3 Spanish and Romance 65

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‘gallant’ more than two centuries before the word appeared in any Spanish text. The disappearance of an existing word, like fuessa above, is indicative as well. Finally, contemporary documents can provide eyewitness evidence. A 1535 linguistic analysis of Spanish, for example, recommended the adoption of Italian words, including discurso ‘discourse,’ cómodo ‘comfortable,’ and fantasía ‘fantasy’; this proves that these words were not yet in the Spanish lexicon (Valdés 2010). Because the Romance languages are so similar, many borrowings have been in meaning only, as existing Spanish words have added foreign-inspired uses. Cambio ‘change’ took on the sense of a financial exchange (e.g., euros for dollars) in imitation of Italian. Café ‘coffee’ may have been extended to ‘coffee shop’ in imitation of French. The Spanish phrases palabra clave ‘key word’ and monte de piedad ‘charitable pawn shop’ are word-by-word translations of French mot clef and Italian monte di pietà. Borrowing has also  breathed new life into neglected Latinate suffixes. Spanish has a handful of nouns with the suffix -azgo (as in hallazgo ‘discovery’), from Latin -aticus, but many more with its cognate -aje, borrowed from French. The same goes for native -isco (as in morisco ‘Moorish’), from Latin -iskos, versus Italian -esco. In each case, Spanish borrowed a large handful of words with the ending before beginning to use it in fresh coinages. Thus, Spanish borrowed words like lenguaje ‘language’ and viaje ‘voyage’ from French before coining new words like pilotaje ‘piloting’ and molinaje ‘milling fee,’ and words like gigantesco ‘gigantic’ and pintoresco ‘picturesque’ from Italian before coining words like quijotesco ‘like Don Quijote’ and picaresco ‘picaresque.’ The interaction of Spanish with other Romance languages has continued in Latin America, leading to borrowings (as usual) and also in language blends. At different times, French words from Haiti have entered Dominican Spanish, Portuguese words have crossed into Spanish-speaking South American, and Italian words have percolated into Argentinian and Mexican Spanish (Dworkin 2013; Lipski 2007). These borrowings are not as plentiful as those seen in Europe, however, and most have failed to penetrate standard Spanish. Some successful examples are capo ‘boss’ and pasticho ‘confusion’ from Italian, and cachimba ‘pipe’ and degredo ‘hospital’ from Portuguese. Italian has also contributed more than a dozen word endings to the Spanish of the Argentina and Uruguay, such as the diminutive -eli (Italian -elli) of crudeli ‘a little underdone’ and pasadeli ‘a little overcooked’ (Sala 1995), as well as Italian-style intonational ups and downs within sentences (Pharies 2007: 214). Latin America is also home to two Romance blends: fronterizo, a Uruguayan mix of Spanish and Portuguese, and cocoliche, an Argentinian mix of Spanish and Italian.

Chapter 3 Spanish and Romance

To learn more ll

A good history of Spain, such as Phillips and Phillips (2010), can be useful in tracking the geopolitical changes that drove language contact in Romance Europe.

ll

Penny (2002: 272–83) presents extensive lists of Romance borrowings, organized by semantic category.

ll

Fronterizo is described by Penny (2000: 163–66), Pountain (2003: 255–57), and Stewart (1999: 186–87). For cocoliche, see Stewart (1999: 188–89).

ll

Word-by-word translations like monte de piedad are known as “loan translations” or “calques.”

ll

The above discussion of linguistic evidence for borrowing, and the different types of borrowing, is primarily based on Dworkin (2013, chaps. 6, 7, and 9). More on borrowings within Latin American can be found in the same chapters.

ll

Question 94 describes Catalan influence on the Spanish verb system in bilingual areas of Spain.

Question 18. Is it true that Portuguese speakers can understand Spanish but not the other way around? Like most Spanish speakers, I don’t speak Portuguese. When I need to communicate with a Portuguese speaker who doesn’t speak Spanish, we each speak our own language and hope for the best. Spanish and Portuguese are similar enough that we can more or less understand each other, but the “more or less” isn’t symmetrical. It’s inevitably easier for the Portuguese speaker to understand my Spanish than it is for me to understand his or her Portuguese. This isn’t just my own impression; ask any Spanish speaker, and you’re likely to hear the same thing. It’s also echoed in linguistic literature; Penny, for example, wrote that “speakers of Spanish understand at least some of what is said in Portuguese, and the Portuguese speakers will understand a good deal more of what is said in Spanish” (2000: 14). One research study has even addressed this question quantitatively (Jensen 1989). Portuguese and Spanish speakers from Latin America, none of whom “had extensive experience with the other language,” listened to passages in the other language, then answered comprehension questions in their own language. The Portuguese speakers

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were more successful than the Spanish speakers at interpreting what they heard, a difference that was slim (58 percent vs. 50 percent correct responses) yet statistically significant. Why the difference? One possible factor is the greater complexity of the Portuguese vowel system. Compared to Spanish’s economical system of five vowels (Question 57), Portuguese has more core vowels and also a set of nasalized vowels. For example, where Spanish has a single vowel o, Portuguese has three: o as in avô ‘grandfather’ (this is closest to Spanish o), /ɔ/ as in avó ‘grandmother’ (similar to the au of caught), and nasal õ as in onda ‘wave’ (the n is not pronounced). Spanish speakers can become confused if they fail to pick up on these subtle differences. A second factor is rhythmic. While Spanish is more staccato, with each word pronounced individually, Portuguese words are more connected. This makes it harder for Spanish speakers to pick out familiar words when heard in context.

Question 19. How is Catalan different from Spanish? Tourists flock to Barcelona for its beaches, its extraordinary modernist architecture, its museums, and its vibrant urban amenities: shopping, strolling, and eating. For the language-minded tourist, the beautiful Catalan language provides an additional incentive to visit. This ancient tongue, famed for its medieval love poetry and turn-of-the-twentieth-century modernist literature, has rebounded vigorously from its decades-long suppression under the fascist Franco regime. It is now the primary language for about 8 percent of the Spanish population, making it the predominant minority language of Spain, ahead of Galician and Basque. Catalan is a co-official language with Spanish not just in Catalonia (the region of which Barcelona is the capital) but also in Valencia and the Balearic Islands (Figure 1.3). It is the official language of Andorra, a small independent state nestled in the Pyrenees Mountains between Spain and France, and is also spoken in Alghero, a port city in Sardinia. Like Spanish (see Question 2), Catalan has an official language academy. It boasts modern periodicals, publishing houses, and universities. Catalan is similar enough to Spanish that speakers of the two languages can understand each other to a reasonable extent.1 Historically speaking, Catalan is probably even closer to the Occitan (or Provençal) language of Southern France, although the details of the Romance family tree are far from settled (Posner 2002: 196). For descriptive though not historical purposes it’s convenient to think of Catalan as a linguistic melting pot. Thanks to its

Chapter 3 Spanish and Romance

geographic proximity to Spanish, French, and Italian (by land and by sea), Catalan has elements of all three languages, as well as some that are unique. Catalan doesn’t look like Spanish. It lacks the Spanish letter ñ but adds the letter ç, used French-style for the s sound before a, o, or u (compare Catalan abraçada with Spanish embrazo ‘embrace’). Likewise, it lacks the Spanish inverted ¿ and ¡, but uses other punctuation marks seen in French and/or Italian: a hyphen in numbers like trenta–un ‘thirty-one,’ an apostrophe in various contractions (e.g., l’illa ‘the island,’ from la + illa), and a grave accent mark, as in arròs ‘rice.’ Unique to Catalan punctuation is the raised dot between two l’s, as in paral·lel. The dot indicates that the two l’s should be pronounced individually instead of merging into a single /ʎ/ sound as in pollastre ‘chicken’ (compare Spanish pollo). Also characteristically Catalan are various two-letter combinations, including ny for the ñ sound (thus, Catalan senyor ‘mister’ vs. Spanish señor), tx for ch (dutxa ‘shower’ vs. Spanish ducha), and ix for the sh sound of peix ‘fish.’ Catalan doesn’t sound like Spanish. It is softer because it has more of the breathy sounds that linguists call fricatives. To the s fricative of Spanish it adds z (spelled with an s in Catalan, as in casa ‘house’), sh as in shoe (e.g., peix ‘fish’), and /ʒ/ as in pleasure (e.g., pàgina ‘page’). The sh replaces the guttural Spanish /x/ in many words, further adding to the impression of softness (e.g., Catalan caixa ‘box’ vs. Spanish caja).2 Other non-Spanish sounds are ts (e.g., potser ‘maybe’), dz as in bids (e.g., dotze ‘twelve’), and /dʒ/ as in judge (spelled jutge in Catalan). French and Italian each have some of these softer sounds. French has z and /ʒ/ (e.g., maison ‘house,’ jardin ‘garden’), Italian has ts and dz (e.g., grazie ‘thank you,’ zucchero ‘sugar’), and both have sh (e.g., French chien ‘dog,’ Italian pesce ‘fish’). But because Catalan and Italian trill their r’s (as does Spanish; see Question 59) and lack the nasal vowels of French, Catalan sounds closer to Italian than to French overall. Catalan vocabulary is more grist for the melting pot metaphor. While the bulk of Catalan vocabulary is cognate with Spanish, many common Catalan words are related to French and/or Italian instead (see Table 3.2). This includes some core vocabulary for household objects, family relations, and the like. In most cases, the Catalan and Spanish words simply came from different Latin sources. In such pairs, the Spanish word usually reflects the older, more classical, variety of Latin that was spoken when Rome first conquered the Iberian Peninsula (between 200 and 17 BCE, relatively early in Roman history), while the Catalan word is more innovative (Penny 2002: 11–12). Because Catalonia is closer to Rome than the rest of the Peninsula, it also kept up better with ongoing changes in Latin vocabulary after the initial conquest. Other vocabulary differences reflect the geographical realities

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People

neveu, nipote coussin, cuscino

silla (Lat. sella) queso (Lat. caseus) mesa (Lat. mensa) ventana (Lat. ventus) primo (Lat. primus) sobrino (Lat. sobrinus) almohada (Ar. almuẖádda) hombro (Lat. humerus) tío (Lat. thius) mujer (Lat. mulier)

cadira (Lat. cathedra)

formatge (Lat. formaticu)

taula (Lat. tabula)

finestra (Lat. fenestra)

cosí (Lat. consobrinus)

nebot (Lat. nepote)

coixí (Lat. coxinum)

espatlla (Lat. spatula)

oncle (Lat. avunculus)

dona (Lat. domina)

chair

cheese

table

window

cousin

nephew

pillow

shoulder

uncle

woman

donna (It.)

oncle (Fr.)

épaule, spalla

cousin, cugino

fenêtre, finestra

table, tavolo

fromage, formaggio

chaise (Fr.)

bouillir, bollire

hervir (Lat. fervere)

bullir (Lat. bullire)

boil

Home

French, Italian cognates

Spanish

Catalan

Word

Domain

Table 3.2  Some core vocabulary differences between Catalan and Spanish (with Latin, Germanic, and Arabic origins)

70 Part 1 Spanish in context

sanar (Lat. sanare) rogar (Lat. rogare) alquilar (Ar. alkirá) querer (Lat. quaerere) azul (Ar. lāzaward) limpio (Lat. limpidus) feo (Lat. foedus) pájaro (Lat. passer) mañana (Lat. maneana)

guarir (Germ. warjan)

pregar (Lat. precare)

llogar (Lat. locare)

voler (Lat. velle)

blau (Gmc. blao)

net (Lat. nitidus)

lleig (Gmc. laid)

aucell (Lat. aucellus)

demà (Lat. de mane)

to heal

to pray, beg

to rent

to want

blue

clean

ugly

bird

tomorrow

Sources for etymologies: RAE 2014, Institut d’Estudis Catalans (n.d.)

Other

Adjectives

Verbs

demain, domani

oiseau, ucello

laid (Fr.)

net (Fr.)

bleu, blu

vouloir, volere

louer (Fr.)

prier, pregare

guérir, guarire

Chapter 3 Spanish and Romance 71

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of the post-Roman world. When the Visigoths and other Germanic tribes invaded the Iberian Peninsula, they came from the north; when the Moors invaded, they came from the south (see Questions 25 and 26). Germanic vocabulary therefore affected Catalan more than it did Spanish (e.g., guarir vs. sanar for ‘heal,’ lleig vs. feo for ‘ugly’), whereas the Arabic impact was greater for Spanish than for Catalan (e.g., coixí vs. almohada for ‘pillow,’ llogar vs. alquilar for ‘rent’). The two influences met in the middle for the word ‘blue’: Catalan’s Germanic blau and Spanish’s Arabic azul filled the gap left by Latin (Question 26). Finally, enormous tranches of Catalan vocabulary are superficially different from their Spanish counterparts—and, as usual, closer to French and Italian—because they escaped the dramatic sound changes that rocked the history of Spanish (Question 13). The change of Latin f to Spanish h at the beginning of a word, followed by its total loss, obscures the relationship between Catalan fill and Spanish hijo ‘son’ (cf. Latin filius, French fils, and Italian figlio). The change of Latin pl to Spanish /ʎ/ at the beginning of a word makes it hard to connect Catalan ple with Spanish lleno ‘full’ (cf. Latin plenus, French plein, and Italian pieno).3 And the diphthongization of Latin short vowels means that Catalan festa ‘party’ is closer to French fête and Italian festa than Spanish fiesta, while Catalan porta ‘door’ is closer to French porte and Italian porta than Spanish puerta. Most of Catalan grammar will be familiar to anyone who speaks or studies Spanish. Like Spanish, Catalan has masculine and feminine nouns, with obligatory agreement for adjectives and articles, and a battery of pronouns (including formal, informal, and plural ‘you’) to express grammatical subjects and objects. The verb system is as complex as in Spanish, with three verb conjugations (-ar, -er/-re, -ir), three tenses (past, present, and future), and verb forms for imperfect, subjunctive, imperative, and progressive moods. Two grammatical differences from Spanish stand out. The first has to do with the past tense. As in French and Italian, the Catalan simple past (El sol sortí ‘The sun rose’) has slipped into literary usage. A compound past using the verb haver ‘to have’ is used for recent events, as in Ha sortit el sol aquest matí ‘The sun has risen,’ the Catalan analog of Spanish El sol ha salido. To talk about more distant events, Catalan uses a distinctive compound tense based on the verb anar ‘to go’: Va sortir el sol fa tres dies ‘The sun rose three days ago.’ To Spanish (or English) eyes (and ears) this appears to express a future event—‘The sun is going to rise’—but its meaning is purely past tense. This so-called periphrastic preterite (passat perifràstic) based on the verb ‘to go’ is unique to Catalan within Romance and, according to one comprehensive survey, the languages of the world (Heine and Kuteva 2002). To understand it, it may help to keep in mind English structures like Now

Chapter 3 Spanish and Romance

you’ve gone and done it, where the gone and emphasizes the completed nature of the past activity. A second grammatical difference has to do with esser and estar, the Catalan equivalents of ser and estar (the two Spanish verbs for ‘to be’). As discussed in Question 41, splitting ‘to be’ into two verbs is characteristic of all (and only) Iberian Romance languages: not just Spanish and Catalan but also Portuguese and Galician. However, each of these languages manages the split differently. Crucially, Catalan uses estar much less than Spanish because esser, not estar, normally expresses location. The over-use of estar is therefore a stereotypical slip-up for Spanish speakers who haven’t completely mastered Catalan (Elcatalacomcal 2008).4

To learn more ll

The Catalan government publishes a useful summary, in Spanish, of the principal differences between the two languages, intended for newcomers to the area (Generalitat de Catalunya 2012).

Question 20. What is Ladino? Ladino, also called “Judeo-Spanish” or “Judezmo,” is the traditional language of the Sephardic Jews, whose ancestors were expelled from Spain in 1492 as a coda to the Reconquista (see Box 1.3). Ladino is clearly Spanish-like, yet not Spanish. It is spoken in scattered Jewish communities worldwide, chiefly in the United States, Israel, and Turkey. It offers a compressed and welldocumented example of the lifespan of a language in its split from Spanish, its subsequent evolution, and, unfortunately, its imminent extinction. The differences between Ladino and Spanish stem partly from Ladino’s origins and partly from its history in exile. The expulsion took place before modern Spanish had fully evolved (see Question 11). Ladino therefore retains many characteristics of Old Spanish, such as the soft sounds sh (as in shoe) and /ʒ/ (as in mirage), which would later merge into the modern Spanish /x/ of José (see Question 62); verb forms like so ‘I am,’ do ‘I give,’ and vo ‘I go,’ which became soy, doy, and voy (Question 83); and vocabulary like conducho ‘provisions’ and güerko ‘devil’ (related to Old Spanish huerco). Perhaps the most intriguing such feature is the Sephardic use of el ‘he,’ eya ‘she,’ and eyos/eyas ‘they’ as polite expressions of the pronoun ‘you.’5 (The polite Castilian pronouns usted and ustedes had yet to evolve when Ladino split from Spanish; see Question 25). Ladino also contains elements found in non-Castilian varieties of Spanish. These include mb sequences in words like palombika ‘little dove’ and lamber ‘to

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lick’ (compare Spanish paloma ‘dove’ and lamer), single vowels instead of vowel sequences in words like preto ‘black, dark’ and ponte ‘bridge’ (cf. Spanish prieto, puente), and explicitly feminine forms like granda ‘large’ and vozas ‘voices’ (grande and voces). Ladino continued to evolve after the Jews left Spain. Its lexicon reflects the geography of the Sephardic diaspora, with many borrowings from Turkish and a smattering from elsewhere around the Mediterranean (Table 3.3). Changes in Ladino pronunciation include the merger of the two types of Spanish r (Question 59) and the reversal of d and r in words like vedri ‘green’ and guadrar ‘to guard’ (compare Spanish verde, guardar). Grammar changes include a plural version (sen) of the reflexive pronoun se, as in Eyos devian ambezarsen a durmirsen ‘they had to learn to fall asleep,’ the Ladino equivalent of Spanish Ellos debían educarse a dormirse. For some examples of Ladino, please enjoy the traditional lullabies in Box 3.1.

Box 3.1. Ladino lullabies

These traditional Sephardic lullabies (kantes de kuna) are comprehensible to any speaker of modern Spanish, yet illustrate characteristic differences between Ladino and Spanish. The first lullaby illustrates the use of k instead of qu and c (kerido and kon for querido and con) and the suppression of silent h (ijo for hijo). Differences beyond spelling are the undiphthongized u and e in in durme and serra (cf. Spanish duerme and cierra) and the -iko diminutive in ijiko and ojikos (cf. Spanish hijito and ojitos).

Chapter 3 Spanish and Romance

Durme durme kerido ijiko

Sleep, sleep beloved little child

Durme sin ansia i dolor

Sleep without worries and pain

Serra tus luzios ojikos

Close your shining eyes

Durme durme kon savor

Sleep, sleep with pleasure.

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This second lullaby shows again the undiphthongized e, here in kere (cf. Spanish quiere).

Nani, nani,

A lullaby, a lullaby,

Nani kere el ijo

The child wants a lullaby

El ijo de la madre

Mother’s child

De chiko se aga grande.

He will grow tall.

This final lullaby shows the characteristic Ladino substitution of mue for Spanish nue at the beginning of a word (mueva for nueva). D’ande is equivalent to Spanish de donde. Like Rock-a-bye Baby, this lullaby closes with a nasty plot twist.

Durmete mi alma

Sleep, my soul.

Durmete mi vista

Sleep, my vision.

Ke tu padre viene

For your father is coming

D’ande la mueva amiga

From his new love.

To learn more ll

See Ovadia (2013) for a discussion of these and other traditional kantes de kuna; this is also the source of the -sen example above.

Table 3.3  Examples of borrowed vocabulary in Ladino

Ladino word

Source language

Original word form

abazur ‘lampshade’

French

abat-jour

furroje ‘rust’

Galician

furruje

palyadjir

Greek

paleos ‘old’

a la brachéta ‘arm-in-arm’

Italian

a braccetto

difetozo ‘defective’

Italian

difettoso

adjar ‘delay’

Portuguese

atrasar

eskara ‘grill’

Turkish

izgara

‘second-hand clothes dealer’

Source: Kohen and Kohen-Gordon (1999)

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Part 1 Spanish in context Table 3.4  Examples of Hebrew words in Ladino and Yiddish

Hebrew

Ladino

Yiddish

sechel ‘intelligence’

seheludo ‘intelligent’

seykhl ‘common sense’

chaver ‘friend’

haver ‘friend’

khaver ‘male friend, buddy’

mazal ‘luck’

mazaloso ‘lucky’

mazl ‘luck’

Ladino is obviously analogous to Yiddish, the traditional, German-based language of the Ashkenazi Jews, whose ancestors emigrated from the territory that is now Germany to Eastern Europe in the 1500s. Ladino and Yiddish were both originally written in Hebrew letters, though most modern Ladino texts use the Roman alphabet instead. Both languages enriched their vocabulary with Hebrew words, often adding native word endings and new shades of meaning; see Table 3.4 for a few examples. From a linguistic perspective, the most interesting difference between the two languages is their exceptionality, or lack thereof. Linguists believe that before the Jews left Spain their language was no different from that of their non-Jewish neighbors, whereas Yiddish was a distinctive Germanic dialect from the start. The biggest difference between Ladino and Yiddish, though, is their health. Yiddish has always dwarfed Ladino in terms of its number of speakers, literary output, and linguistic recognition, such as dictionaries, grammars, and university courses. Today, Yiddish is still robust: it is learned as a first language by Hasidic Jewish children in communities in Israel and the United States. Ladino, on the other hand, is dying. Ladino scholar Tracy Harris summed up the situation as follows (2011: 51, 58): The severe reduction in the number of Ladino speakers is due in large part to the Holocaust and the migratory movements of the Sephardim during and after the Second World War, as well as intermarriage with non-Ladino speakers. The age of the speakers also presents a problem for language preservation: the majority of competent Ladino speakers today are over seventy years old. . . . As of 2009, my guess is that there may be about three thousand speakers left in the U.S., with about eight thousand living predominantly in Israel and Turkey. However, their level of fluency is questionable and Ladino is not their primary or only language. In other words, Ladino is dying as a language of daily communication.

On the bright side, recent decades have seen increased academic interest in Ladino, with courses, conferences, research centers, and journals springing

Chapter 3 Spanish and Romance

up in Israel, the United States, and elsewhere (including Spain). In addition, communities with Sephardic roots often organize activities such as Ladino study groups and cultural events (concerts, film festivals, and the like). In an impressive act of reparation, the Spanish government has invited Jews with proof of Sephardic ancestry to apply for Spanish citizenship, while retaining their current nationality (España 2015). This is an intriguing next chapter in an already gripping saga.

To learn more ll

Díaz-Mas (1992) is a comprehensive introduction to Sephardic history, culture, and language.

ll

The above discussion of phonetic and grammatical differences between Ladino and Spanish is based on Penny (2000: 174–93).

ll

Pountain (2003: 220–28) is a briefer yet comprehensive description of Ladino that includes an analyzed text sample.

ll

Harris (2011) closes with a comprehensive list of modern Ladino resources around the world: organizations, conferences, academic departments, research centers, and publications. It functions as an update to Harris (1994).

ll

Alhadeff (2014) describes one community’s effort to maintain its cultural and linguistic Sephardic identity.

ll

See the companion website for information about the Sephardic diaspora.

Question 21. What other languages are related to Romance? The single most interesting fact that I wish more people knew about Spanish is the sheer magnitude of its extended family. Latin and the Romance languages, together with some extinct languages of Italy, such as Oscan and Umbrian, constitute just one branch of the enormous Indo-European language family. English is part of a second branch, Germanic; eight other branches include Slavic, Celtic, and Indo-Iranian (see Table 3.5). Spanish is therefore related to languages as disparate as Gaelic and Gujarati; to Sanskrit, Serbian, and Swedish; to Pashto, Persian, and Polish; and to Hindi and Hittite. Indo-European is one of hundreds of language families around the globe.

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Table 3.5  Branches of the Indo-European language family

Branch

Representative language(s)

Albanian

Albanian

Anatolian

Hittite (an extinct language of what is now Turkey)

Armenian

Armenian

Baltic

Latvian and Lithuanian

Celtic

Breton, Cornish, Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx

Germanic

English, Scots, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Frisian, German, Yiddish, Dutch, and Afrikaans

Greek

Greek

Indo-Iranian

Indian sub-branch: Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Sinhala, Marathi, Sanskrit, and Urdu Iranian sub-branch: Pashto, Kurdish, and Farsi

Italic

Latin and the Romance languages Oscan and Umbrian (extinct languages of Italy)

Slavic

Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian; Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Sorbian; Bulgarian, Macedonian, Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian

Tocharian

Tocharian A and B (extinct languages of western China)

As its name implies, the Indo-European language family extends from India to Europe. No written record exists of the original Indo-European language, referred to as “Proto-Indo-European.” But piecing together linguistic evidence from the modern Indo-European languages, written evidence from extinct Indo-European languages, and archaeological evidence, linguists now believe that the original Indo-Europeans lived three to four thousand years before the Common Era in the Pontic-Caspian steppes, or grasslands, north of the Black and Caspian Seas, spanning parts of modern-day Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan. From there it spread west through Europe, and southeast through Iran and Pakistan into India. In Europe the Indo-European conquest was neartotal: only Basque and three languages from the Uralic family (Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian) are not Indo-European. In India, Indo-European speakers penetrated deeply from the northwest, leaving some Dravidian languages such as Tamil in the south and some Sino-Tibetan languages such as Nisi in the northeast. In recent centuries, Indo-European has spread to Africa,

Chapter 3 Spanish and Romance

Australia, and the Americas, making it the largest language family in the world today in both its geographical extent and its number of speakers. The fact that all branches of Indo-European have related words for ‘yoke,’ ‘plow,’ ‘field,’ and the like tells us that the ancient Indo-Europeans already practiced agriculture. Similar analyses provide evidence for leaders, warriors, and slaves; for a patrilineal family structure with a bridewealth (like a dowry, but paid by the groom’s family); for reciprocal trade and hospitality; for lawsuits heard before judges with witnesses; for belief in an afterlife, and in multiple deities including sky, sun, and thunder gods and a dawn goddess; for wheels and horsemanship. The latter two are probably responsible for the successful spread of the Indo-European people. Many core linguistic features of Spanish reflect its Indo-European heritage. These include its large inventory of consonants, its rich verb system, and its use of noun gender. To pick a subtler example, Spanish is also typically IndoEuropean in its ability to fuse together multiple bits of meaning into single, compact word endings. For example, the -o ending of the verb hablo ‘I speak’ indicates the verb’s subject (‘I’), tense (present), and mood (indicative), while the -a ending of blanca ‘white’ indicates that the adjective is both feminine and singular. The features that Spanish doesn’t have are just as telling. For example, Spanish doesn’t use tone to distinguish otherwise identical words, classify nouns based on their shape, or have separate masculine and feminine verb forms.6 These features are found in a variety of non-Indo-European languages. The family resemblance among the Indo-European languages can be hard for a novice to recognize because so many alphabets are used across the Indo-European world: not just the Roman alphabet but also Cyrillic, Greek, Armenian, Hebrew (for Yiddish), Arabic (for Persian, Urdu, and other languages), and Devanagari (for Hindi and other languages of India). Nevertheless, the kinship among the languages emerges if one considers their core vocabulary and other factors. As a simple example, the numbers one to ten show a family resemblance, as seen in Table 3.6, which compares Spanish with languages from the four corners of the Indo-European world: Irish (from the west), Norwegian (north), Russian (east), and Marathi (south). The five non-Indo-European languages in the lower half of the table are markedly different. Further proof of the relationship among the Indo-European languages can be seen in regular correspondences between sounds across languages. For example, many Spanish words have a p where English has an f. Thus, Spanish padre corresponds to English father, Spanish pie corresponds to English foot, Spanish podrir ‘to rot’ is related to English foul, and so on. This correspondence is part of a larger pattern known as Grimm’s Law in honor of Jacob Grimm, a nineteenth-century linguist who was also one of the Grimm

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Table 3.6  The numbers one to ten in some Indo-European and non-Indo–European languages

Indo-European Branch (example language)

Italic (Spanish)

Celtic (Irish)

Germanic (Norwegian)

Slavic (Russian)

Indo-Iranian (Marathi)

1

uno

aon

en

odin

ek

2

dos

dó

to

dva

don

3

tres

trí

tre

tri

tin

4

cuatro

ceathair

fire

chetire

chaar

5

cinco

cúig

fem

pyat‘

paanch

6

seis

sé

seks

shest‘

sahaa

7

siete

seacht

syv

sem‘

saat

8

ocho

ocht

åtte

vosem‘

aath

9

nueve

naoi

ni

devyat‘

naoo

diez

deich

ti

desyat‘

dahaa

Basque/ Aquitanian (Basque)

AfroAsiatic (Hebrew)

Sino-Tibetan (Mandarin)

Uralic (Finnish)

Uto-Aztecan (Nahuatl)

1

bat

achat

yi

yksi

cē

2

bi

shtayim

er

kaksi

ōme

3

hiru

shalosh

san

kolme

ēyi

4

lau

arba

si

neljä

nāhui

5

bosst

chamesh

wu

viisi

mācuīlli

6

sei

shesh

liu

kuusi

chicuacē

7

zazpi

sheva

qi

seitsemän

chicōme

8

zortzi

shmona

ba

kahdeksan

chicuēyi

9

bederatzi

tesha

jiu

yhdeksän

chiconāhui

hamar

eser

shi

kymmenen

mahtlactli

10

Non-Indo-European Family (example language)

10

brothers of fairy tale fame.7 Historical linguists use such correspondences, along with vocabulary analysis, to decide which languages belong to which family and also to identify branches within families. Linguists even reconstruct lost languages such as Proto-Indo-European based on the characteristics of their known descendants. These techniques, collectively known as the “comparative method” because they depend on large-scale

Chapter 3 Spanish and Romance

comparisons among languages, were first developed to study Indo-European but have since been applied to other language families. In fact, the development of the comparative method, in parallel with the discovery of the Indo-European language family, ranks as one of the foremost intellectual achievements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Linguists had already noticed similarities among the European languages but had wasted time trying to prove that one of them, or even Hebrew (actually an Afro-Asiatic language), was the progenitor of the others. The British conquest of India was the unlikely catalyst that changed this dismal status quo forever. The discovery of another large group of languages clearly related to those of Europe revealed the weaknesses of the current half-baked theories. European scholars also found inspiration and instruction in India’s long and distinguished tradition of careful linguistic analysis, beginning with the work of the great Sanskrit grammarian Pāṇini centuries before the Common Era. Thanks to the new data and new ways of thinking, within a few decades of the first British incursion into India the scholar Sir William Jones hypothesized the Indo-European family. He famously wrote that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin must have “sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick [i.e. Germanic] and the Celtick . . . had the same origin with the Sanskrit” (Pedersen 1962: 18). A few decades later Grimm’s Law was formulated, exemplifying the comparative method, and the rest is history—or, at least, historical linguistics.

To learn more ll

Fortson (2010) explores Indo-European from both a linguistic and cultural/historical perspective.

ll

You can explore the Indo-European family online by visiting the Indo-European Lexicon (Slocum 2014) and the Ethnologue database (Lewis, Simons, and Fennig 2015), which includes 127 other language families as well.

ll

Pedersen (1962) tells the story of the early Indo-European scholars with authority and verve.

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Chapter 4 Spanish and other languages

Chapter 4 Spanish and other languages Questions Pre-Roman languages 22 If Basque isn’t related to Spanish, what is it? (p. 83) 23 What other languages were spoken in pre-Roman Spain? (p. 85) 24 How did the pre-Roman languages influence Spanish? (p. 87) Post-Roman languages 25 How did the fall of the Roman Empire affect Spanish? (p. 91) 26 What impact did almost eight hundred years of Arabic occupation have on Spanish? (p. 93) 27 How have the native languages of Latin America affected Spanish? (p. 96) 28 How has English affected Spanish? (p. 100) 29 How is Spanish sign language related to Spanish? (p. 105)

Chapter 4 Spanish and other languages

Chapter 2 described the defining and continuing relationship between Latin and Spanish, while Chapter 3 explored the Romance family more broadly. In this chapter, we pick up the change, as it were, examining the relationship between Spanish and the other languages it encountered before and after the Roman period. Two generalizations will emerge. The first is that for the most part, languages other than Latin have affected only the vocabulary of Spanish. Deeper changes are seen only in Latin American regions where another language has been spoken along with Spanish for generations. The second is that nonlinguistic factors have dictated each language’s impact. Like French culture (Question 17), both Arabic and English/American culture have been perceived as advantageous in certain ways, and therefore have contributed much vocabulary to the language. This was not the case with the native cultures of the Iberian Peninsula, nor with the “barbarian” cultures that brought down the Roman Empire.

PRE-ROMAN LANGUAGES Question 22. If Basque isn’t related to Spanish, what is it? Over the centuries, much ink has been spilled, by linguists both professional and amateur, over the origins of the Basque language. Basque is the first language of about half a million people in Spain and more than seventy-five thousand in France (Lewis, Simons, and Fennig 2015). Basque is obviously not a Romance language, nor any other kind of IndoEuropean language (Question 21). Its core vocabulary is decidedly alien: as a simple demonstration, recall its numbers one to ten in Table 3.6. Some strikingly non-Indo-European features of Basque pronunciation and grammar are the following. ll

Words cannot begin with p, t, d, r, or a sequence of consonants. The majority of Basque words (excluding borrowings) begin with a vowel.

ll

Consonants are constrained within a word as well. For example, Basque has two variants of the s sound (one spelled s, and one z); a Basque word cannot have both.

ll

Nouns do not have gender (masculine and feminine).

ll

There is no subjunctive.

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Part 1 Spanish in context ll

Verbs agree with objects as well as subjects.

ll

Main verbs are generally not conjugated; rather, verbs usually appear with an auxiliary verb that indicates tense, agreement, and so on.

Most research on the origins of Basque has therefore tried to link it to nonIndo-European languages or language families, from Berber in North Africa to the Caucasian languages of Eastern Europe. Of the various origin theories proposed, only one has withstood linguistic scrutiny: that Basque is closely related to Aquitanian, a pre-Roman language of southwestern France.1 Our knowledge of Acquitanian comes from about five hundred names of people and divinities that appear in Roman texts from this region. They are strikingly similar to Basque in all respects: vocabulary, sounds, and grammatical endings. Crucial support for a Basque-Aquitanian link comes from linguistic research on Basque itself. By considering evidence such as dialectal variation, medieval texts, and the forms taken by words borrowed into Basque at different times in its history, linguists (primarily the late Luis Michelena) have been able to reconstruct what the language must have been like two thousand years ago. The sound system reconstructed for this “pre-Basque” language is identical to that of Aquitanian. For example, p is rare in both languages, and m is only found before b. On this basis Trask (1997) concluded that “we can, for practical purposes, regard [Aquitanian] as being the more-or-less direct ancestor of Basque” (402). This relationship, combined with evidence that multiple languages shared Spanish Basque territory in pre-Roman times, suggests that “the traditional view that Basque is a language of Spain which has extended itself to the north of the Pyrenees has had to be revised: we now see Basque as a language of Gaul which has spread south and west” (Trask 1997: 38). As far as we know, Aquitanian/Basque was the only Western European language to survive the Indo-European onslaught, probably thanks to the Basques’ inhospitable mountain terrain. The linguistic antiquity of the Basque language is echoed in genetic research that has found differences between the Basque people and their neighbors, and in archaeological research showing uninterrupted human settlement in the area since the Paleolithic era. These intriguing findings further enhance Basque’s linguistic allure.

To learn more ll

For more on this topic, see Trask (1997). Its Chapter 6, which presents the evidence for the Basque-Aquitanian connection, is especially interesting. Trask critiques alternative Basque origin theories with a zest seldom seen in academic writing.

ll

Pereltsvaig (2015) discusses how research into Basque genetics can, somewhat paradoxically, clarify the origins of the Indo-Europeans who would later migrate into the Iberian Peninsula.

Chapter 4 Spanish and other languages

Question 23. What other languages were spoken in pre-Roman Spain? The linguistic picture in Spain before the Roman conquest was one of great diversity—and mystery. At least four different language families were represented. Basque/Aquitanian (see previous question) was spoken in the North. The Afro-Asiatic family was represented by Punic, or Phoenician, a Semitic language of North Africa spoken in Carthaginian settlements along the southern coast.2 The Indo-European family was doubly represented: Greek outposts dotted the northeast coast, while Celtic tribes settled across the peninsula’s north and center. Like Basque/Aquitanian, two remaining languages appear to be neither Indo-European nor from any other known linguistic group. Tartessian was spoken in the South and West, while Iberian was spoken in the East. Of course, pre-Roman Spain may have had other languages as well. However, these are the only ones that are attested, whether in contemporary accounts (e.g., Roman records), toponyms (place names, see Box 4.1), or inscriptions, as described below for Iberian. Of these different groups, the Celts were undoubtedly the last to arrive in Spain, crossing the Pyrenees around 500 BCE. The Carthaginians and Greeks predated them by a few hundred years, with the former arriving first, around 800 BCE. The Tartessians and Iberians, like the Basques, are believed to have more ancient roots in the peninsula. Nevertheless, only Basque outlasted the Roman conquest. As Anderson put it, “The Roman way was so thoroughly adopted in Spain and the fusion of the races so complete that before long, Romans born in Spain would rule over the Empire and the conquest of the Latin language . . . was as successful as the ultimate triumph of the Roman legions” (1988: 132). Like Crete’s Linear A and the Indus script of the Pakistan/India border, the copious written artifacts left by the Iberians remain among the world’s unsolved linguistic mysteries. Iberian writing has been found on coins, gravestones, ceramics, silver utensils, and thin lead plaques meant to be rolled like parchment (see Figure 4.1). The writing system first appeared after the Phoenicians and Greeks came to the Peninsula. It is unique, but shows clear influence from both of these cultures’ own writing systems, both in its letters and its directionality: it was written from right to left in the South, like Phoenician, but from left to right in the North, like Greek. Iberian writing was partially, and tantalizingly, deciphered in the mid-twentieth century: linguists are reasonably sure of what the Iberian texts sounded like, but not what they mean. The Tartessians left fewer written artifacts, and their language is even less understood.

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Box 4.1. Pre-Roman toponyms (place names) If there were a contest for the pre-Roman language with the biggest impact on the map of Spain, Phoenician would be the hands-down winner. A Phoenician expression meaning ‘land of rabbits’ is the most likely source of the toponym España, which entered Spanish via the Latin Hispania (Lapesa 1981: 15). Three important Mediterranean port cities all have Phoenician names: Cádiz (meaning ‘fortress’), Málaga, and Cartagena (after Carthage). Phoenician also contributed the name of the Balearic Island Ibiza, as well as that of Mahón, the capital of Minorca. Second prize would probably go to Iberian, simply because Barcelona comes from Iberian barkeno. Third prize would be a tie between Basque and Celtic. Basque toponyms abound, of course, in the País Vasco: Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa, and Azpeitia, to name a few. South of the País Vasco, toponyms such as Cihuri (originally Zufiuri), with the characteristic Basque suffix -uri ‘town,’ suggest a more widespread Basque presence in the past.3 Celtic toponyms are spread across the northern half of Spain, from Catalonia in the East (e.g., Besalú) to Galicia in the West (e.g., Lugo, from the Celtic deity Lug), echoing the Celtic migration outward from the Pyrenees. Like Phoenician Cádiz, many Celtic toponyms are built on a word meaning ‘fortress,’ either briga or dunum. Some examples are Segovia (originally Segobriga), Navardún, Berdún, Verdú, and Besalú. Greek would bring up the rear: the name of the northeastern town of Rosas comes from Rhodes. There is no evidence that any Spanish toponyms come from Tartessian. Examples like the above are exceptions: most pre-Roman toponyms beyond the País Vasco were lost during the waves of conquest and Reconquista that have punctuated Spanish history. Many pre-Roman towns were abandoned or destroyed, some leaving ruins of archaeological and touristic interest, such as the Greek town of Empúries (from emporium ‘marketplace’) and the Celtic town of Ulaca. Some were replaced by Roman towns: thus Roman Gracurris was built on top of Iberian Ilurcis, only to be itself renamed as modern-day Alfaro during the Muslim conquest (EIAG 2011). The location of some pre-Roman settlements, such as Greek Kallipolis (thought to be near modern-day Tarragona), is unknown. Finally, many pre-Roman toponyms survive in humbler form. What would the Celts make of Flaviobriga, a street in a small town in Cantabria, Nertobriga, a primary school near Zaragoza, or Deobriga, a variety of Rioja wine—and a driving school in Burgos? 3

Chapter 4 Spanish and other languages

To learn more ll

For Basque toponyms in the País Vasco and beyond, see Trask (1997: 39).

ll

For Greek and Phoenician toponyms, see Anderson (1988: 4–5).

ll

For Iberian and Celtic toponyms, a good place to start is Anderson (1988: 88–89, 132). A classic study, featuring an oft-reproduced set of maps, is Untermann (1984), revisited in García Alonso (2006). The Lugo etymology is from Alberro (2008).

Figure 4.1  An Iberian lead plaque from Ullastret, Catalonia, Spain. Courtesy of Papix 2006.

To learn more ll

This section is primarily based on Anderson (1988). This copiously illustrated introduction to the subject focuses primarily on the different writing systems evidenced in the peninsula.

ll

Trask (1997) discusses non-Basque languages of Spain in general (36), and explores in some depth (and rejects) the possibility of a Basque–Iberian linkage (378–88).

ll

Lorrio and Zapatero (2005) is a thorough introduction to the Celts of Spain, known collectively as the Celtiberians.

Question 24. How did the pre-Roman languages influence Spanish? Lurking behind this question is the deeper one of why the Romance languages differentiated: why Latin evolved into Spanish, French, Portuguese, and so on in their respective regions. One possible explanation, tantalizing in its simplicity, is that the local pre-Roman languages affected how Latin evolved

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in different parts of the Empire. This would fit a familiar pattern whereby an established (“substrate”) language affects a newly imposed (“superstrate”) language. In Ireland, for example, one hears English sentences such as It’s looking for more land, a lot of them are, meaning ‘A lot of them are looking for more land.’ This reversed structure is inherited from the Celtic (Irish) substrate (Filppula 1991). Later in this chapter, we’ll explore substrate effects in Latin American Spanish (Question 27). In order to avoid over-relying on substrate explanations, linguists generally turn to them only when other explanations fail. For Spanish, this means identifying features of the language that cannot be attributed to natural development from Latin, nor to other known sources, such as later borrowings from other languages. The goal is then to match these candidate substrate features with those of the various pre-Roman languages of Spain. This second step is more feasible for some languages than others. Linguists know much more about ancient Greek, Basque, Phoenician, and Celtic, which are related to living languages, than Iberian or Tartessian. As far as linguists can tell, given these restrictions, the pre-Roman languages have had only a minimal impact on Spanish. We’ll see below that substrate explanations have been proposed for some aspects of the vocabulary and sound system of Spanish, but the former are relatively few in number, and the latter controversial. This negative finding is remarkable. It took two centuries for Rome to conquer the Iberian Peninsula, giving Latin plenty of time to absorb substrate characteristics. The lopsided linguistic outcome in Spain, then, is probably the result of the overwhelming power and prestige of the Roman Empire. The Iberian Peninsula’s native inhabitants had much to gain by learning to speak like their Roman conquerors, while the latter were unmotivated to learn the local tongues. The strongest evidence for substrate influence in Spanish is in the domain of vocabulary. Linguists have identified over a hundred words—a minor fraction of the Spanish lexicon—that apparently came from pre-Roman languages. These words fit a predictable semantic profile: Almost all the Spanish words of pre-Roman origin that entered local varieties of Latin are nouns that refer to the concrete physical realities of life in the Iberian Peninsula: physical features of the terrain, meteorological phenomena, plants, tree names, domesticated and wild animals, foodstuffs, clothing, social practices. Cross-linguistic studies have shown that often in cases of military invasions, the language of the conquerors often borrows, from the speech of the subjugated, words in these specific concrete semantic fields. (Dworkin 2013: 30)

Linking these words to specific pre-Roman languages has proved difficult. None appear to be Greek or Phoenician; this is to be expected, since these

Chapter 4 Spanish and other languages

languages were spoken on the Mediterranean coastline, whereas Castilian Spanish developed in the interior. (Tartessian, spoken in southwestern Spain, can safely be ruled out as well.) Only a few words are believed to come from Basque. Trask (1997: 415–21) has argued persuasively that only one Spanish word—izquierda ‘left,’ which replaced Old Spanish siniestro (from Latin sinister)—can definitively be ascribed to Basque, though a small handful of additional words are also plausible: zarza ‘blackberry,’ chamorro ‘closecropped,’ laya ‘gardening fork,’ and pizarra ‘chalkboard.’4 Celtic contributed more words than Basque, though still not many. Researchers’ lists of Celtic vocabulary, such as Corominas (1972), generally include one or two dozen words from the semantic areas mentioned above, such as álamo ‘poplar’ and serna ‘plowed field.’5 This leaves several dozen candidate substrate words unaccounted for. Presumably, they either came from Iberian, which was also spoken in the peninsula’s interior, or from other, unattested pre-Roman languages. It’s also possible that the first step in the analysis is wrong, and some of these words aren’t pre-Roman after all. Two possible cases of substrate influence beyond the lexicon have been discussed extensively in the linguistic literature; both concern changes in phonology (sounds) from Latin to Spanish. The first case is a set of sound changes referred to as consonant lenition, or weakening (see also Question 13). Lenition affects different consonants in different ways: a useful example is the change of Latin t to Spanish d between vowels. Latin vita ‘life,’ for example, became Spanish vida. Lenition affected other Western Romance languages as well, giving vida in Portuguese and Catalan, and going even further in French vie: there, the d weakened until it was completely lost. Lenition has often been attributed to the Celts who lived in pre-Roman Spain, Portugal, and France because lenition is part of the Celtic system of “consonant mutation.” For example, in modern Welsh t changes to d in phrases like coffi neu de ‘coffee or tea’ (from te) and ei dafarn ‘his pub’ (from tafarn). The main problem with a substrate explanation in this case is that Spanish could easily have undergone lenition on its own. Lenition is a phonetically plausible phenomenon common to many languages: consider, for example, the pronunciation of t as d in English writer. In other words, ascribing the change to a Celtic substrate violates the “last resort” principle mentioned above. Another problem is geographic: the presence of lenition doesn’t neatly correspond with exposure to Celtic. Latin graffiti in Pompeii spelled triticum ‘wheat’ as tridicum. Some (Celt-free) Sardinian dialects show lenition, while some Romance dialects of the Pyrenees (in both French and Spanish territory) avoid it. The second possible case is the change of Latin f to Spanish h at the beginnings of words (e.g., filius ‘son’ > hijo), often ascribed to the lack of an f sound in Roman-era Basque. Although this hypothesis is prominent in

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the linguistic literature, it has been “almost completely discredited” (Posner 2002: 242). Trask debunks it on several grounds (1997: 425–26). One telling argument is that Basque borrowings from that era, such as boronde ‘forehead’ from Latin fronte (cf. Spanish frente), adapted the f sound as b, not h. Another is that, as with Celtic lenition, the f  > h change occurred in parts of the Roman Empire with no Basque substrate, including parts of Italy and the Balkans. If Iberian were better understood, or if something were known of other pre-Roman languages, perhaps one could identify more convincing cases of substrate influence on Spanish phonology, or even Spanish grammar. But since decades of research have failed to do so conclusively for Celtic and Basque, it’s simplest to assume that substrate influence was limited to the smallish set of vocabulary discussed above, and possibly lenition and/or the change from f to h. It seems that Latin effectively smothered the pre-Roman languages of Spain. The lack of substrate influence from Basque is particularly striking. Although Basque was not spoken in Castile during the formative years of Hispanic Latin, it has coexisted first with Latin, then with Spanish, for two millennia. In addition, as mentioned in the previous question, there is toponymic evidence that at an earlier point in Basque history, Basque territory was larger than it is now, extending down into La Rioja and even to Burgos, the very cradle of Castilian. Nevertheless, as described above, its influence on Spanish has been practically nil. In fact, the linguistic tide between Basque and Spanish has run completely in the opposite direction. Trask estimates that over half of modern Basque vocabulary comes from Latin or Spanish (1997: 249). This includes daily vocabulary, not just esoterica: some examples are putzu ‘well’ (cf. Spanish pozo), denbora ‘time’ (from Latin tempora, cf. Spanish tiempo), and liburu ‘book’ (cf. Spanish libro). Borrowing has gone beyond simple words, into the realm of morphology, including prefixes like re- ‘again’ and des- ‘un-’ and suffixes like -dad(e) ‘-ty.’ Southern varieties of Basque, which are geographically closest to Spanish, show grammatical contamination as well. These varieties distinguish between the two verbs izan and egon, both meaning ‘to be,’ in analogy to Spanish ser and estar (Question 41), and likewise between the verbs -du and -eduki ‘to have,’ in analogy to Spanish tener (used for possession) and haber (as in había comido ‘I had eaten’). The scope of these borrowings illustrates the continuing and lopsided power advantage of superstrate over substrate in Spain.

To learn more ll

Trask (1997) discusses the possible influence of Basque on Spanish (415–29), and of Spanish on Basque (249–61, 292–93).

Chapter 4 Spanish and other languages ll

Posner (2002: 234–37) discusses the possible Celtic role in Romance lenition. A classic article on the subject is Martinet (1952).

ll

Dworkin (2013: 18–43) discusses the role of the pre-Roman languages in shaping Spanish vocabulary.

ll

Fernández-Ordóñez (1994) proposes that Basque influence may also have contributed to the rise of leísmo (the extended use of indirect object pronouns, see Question 77) in Castilian Spanish.

POST-ROMAN LANGUAGES Question 25. How did the fall of the Roman Empire affect Spanish? Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it didn’t fall in a day, either. Weakened by plague, corruption, and wars both civil and external, the Roman Empire began its slow decline in the middle of the third century CE. From then on, Roman history reads as a series of schisms, enemy incursions, failed peace treaties, and territorial concessions. Rome’s antagonists were a mixture of Germanic tribes, primarily the Vandals and Goths (western Visigoths and eastern Ostrogoths), and the Hun and Alan tribes from Central and Eastern Europe. Their piecemeal assault on the Empire continued over the next few centuries, culminating in the triple sacking of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 CE, the Vandals in 455, and the Ostrogoths in 546. Like the rest of the Empire, Spain slipped from Roman control gradually. In 409, it was invaded by the Alans, Vandals, and Suevi (another Germanic tribe). Rome recruited the Visigoths to make war against these aggressors, and in return—apparently having excused them for sacking Rome just eight years earlier—granted the Visigoths territory in southwestern Gaul (part of today’s France) in 418. This did not stop the Visigoths from invading Spain themselves later in the century, establishing complete control over the Peninsula by 475. They ruled Spain, with Toledo as their capital, until the Muslim invasion of 711. Linguists agree that these dramatic events had but a minor impact on Spanish, confined to the domain of vocabulary. Only around 2 percent of Spanish words come from early Germanic languages (Question 25), and the majority of these appear to be indirect borrowings that entered Spanish via Latin or Old French (Dworkin 2013: 70–73).6 These can be identified

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because they have cognates (related words) in other Romance languages. For example, Spanish guerra ‘war’ corresponds not only to Germanic werra but also to French guerre and to guerra in Italian, Portuguese, and Catalan. This suggests that Latin borrowed werra and passed it on to all five Romance tongues. Fewer than two dozen Spanish words of Germanic origin are found only in Spanish (and usually Portuguese), implying that they were directly introduced into the language by the country’s Germanic invaders. Three factors combined to reduce the impact of Germanic on Spanish. The first is linguistic: after two generations lived among Gaul’s Latin speakers, the Visigoths must have already become bilingual, or have even abandoned their ancestral language. The second factor is numerical: the invaders were outnumbered by Spain’s Latin-speaking population. The third is cultural: the greater prestige of Latin, compared to the Germanic tongues, gave the invaders an incentive to learn Latin, rather than the reverse. In particular, the Germanic languages lacked a written form, giving Latin a tremendous advantage in both private and public spheres. Latin was also the dominant language of the Christian faith that both peoples had adopted. Words from the early Germanic languages, however they entered Spanish, show some thematic coherence. Not surprisingly, many are warrelated, including guerra itself, tregua ‘truce,’ yelmo ‘helmet,’ bando ‘faction,’ and robar ‘to rob.’ Another subset pertains to cavalry, or at least to horsemanship, such as látigo ‘whip,’ espuela ‘spur,’ and estribo ‘stirrup.’ Many other words have to do with everyday life, such as rico ‘rich,’ blanco ‘white,’ ganso ‘goose,’ and espeto ‘roasting spit.’ Germanic gave Spanish some names for people, both male and female, including Fernando, Alfonso, and Elvira. It is also the most likely source of the occasional adjectival suffix -engo, as in mujerengo ‘effeminate’ (from mujer ‘woman’) and abadengo ‘pertaining to an abbey,’ and, indirectly, the -ez ‘son of’ suffix, as in Rodríguez (originally, ‘son of Rodrigo’) and Martínez ‘son of Martin’ (Question 68).

To learn more ll

Nicols’s (2014) map of the Germanic/Roman conflict proves that a picture is indeed worth a thousand words.

ll

For a thorough examination of Germanic vocabulary in Spanish, see Dworkin (2013, chap. 4.)

ll

Two briefer but still helpful descriptions of the Germanic period, less specifically focused on vocabulary, are Penny (2002: 14–16) and Pharies (2007: 37–40).

Chapter 4 Spanish and other languages

Question 26. What impact did almost eight hundred years of Arabic occupation have on Spanish? The “almost eight hundred years” of this question began in 711, when the Moors (Box 4.2) first crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, within a few years penetrating deeply into Visigothic Spain. The conquest of Spain marked the northwestern apogee of the meteoric Muslim expansion that followed the death of Mohamed. The occupation ended in 1492, when the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel captured the last Moorish stronghold of Granada. This was the culminating victory of the Reconquista, a centurieslong campaign to retake the peninsula (Box 1.3).

Box 4.2. Who were the Moors?

  The Alhambra

The terms Moors, Muslims, and Arabs are often used interchangeably to refer to the invaders of Spain in 711 and beyond, as are the adjectives Moorish, Muslim, and Arabic. None of these terms is entirely satisfactory. Arab is simply incorrect; most of the invading forces, at least initially, were Berbers: tribesmen from the North African region, west of Egypt, known as the Maghreb, who spoke a language (Berber) distantly related to Arabic. The Berbers had themselves been conquered by the Arabs in the preceding century. Moor and Muslim are more accurate, but inadequate.

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Moor simply means North African, but doesn’t specify ethnicity, and has a somewhat derogatory connotation. Muslim certainly describes the invaders (the Berbers had been forcibly converted to Islam) but is much more general. A more correct, though burdensome, description of the invaders would be “an Arab-led Berber army.” It was a Berber general, Tariq ibn Ziyad, who first commanded troops into Spain, thus giving his name to Gibraltar (from Jebel Tariq ‘Tariq’s Rock’). However, it was the Arab governor of North Africa, Musa ibn Nusayr, who ordered the attack. Musa himself led a second, larger force into Spain shortly thereafter, sacking the Visigothic capital of Toledo and then passing command to his son Ábd al-Aziz. Although Berbers outnumbered Arabs in the initial invasion, they were treated as second-class citizens. In particular, they were awarded less desirable property when the spoils of war, especially land, were divvied up. Subsequent arrivals were more likely to be Arab, and Arabic soon overtook Berber as the language of Muslim-held Spain. The decline of Berber influence was partly due to a wide-scale Berber revolt, beginning in 740, against their Arab overlords. Arabs from other Muslim countries came to Spain to put down the local portion of the insurrection, and many stayed. There are few contemporary sources of information about the Arab/ Berber invasion, and many questions remain. How many Arabs (and Berbers) settled in Spain? Was Arabic the dominant language of Muslim Spain, or was it Mozarabic, the local version of Hispanic Romance? Did the invading forces eventually bring women with them, in full-fledged colonial style, or did they only intermarry? Why were they able to conquer Spain so quickly? (In comparison, it took Rome two hundred years.) Was it because the Visigothic kingdom was centralized, so that the fall of Toledo brought down the whole country? Or, to the contrary, because most power rested with local chieftains who could be individually conquered—or co-opted? To learn more ll

The most useful historical reference on this topic is Fletcher (1992, chaps. 1 and 2). It is the source of the two possible explanations mentioned above for the rapid pace of the conquest.

The nature of the Moorish occupation could lead one to predict either a minimal or maximal impact of Arabic upon Spanish. Geography argues for a minimal impact. Recall that the variety of Hispanic Romance that would eventually become modern Spanish had its genesis in Castile, a region north of Arab-held Spain (Question 3). Opportunities for direct contact between Arabic and Castilian Spanish were limited to interactions such as commerce

Chapter 4 Spanish and other languages

and treaty-making, and, increasingly, to the continued presence of Arabic speakers in territories retaken in the Reconquista.7 On the other hand, the gradual absorption of Mozarabic (the form of Spanish spoken in occupied Spain) into Castilian Spanish provided a mechanism for indirect contact between the languages. The centuries-long duration of the occupation, and the cultural, military, and scientific prestige of Arabic, undoubtedly gave additional impetus to the language’s influence. As it turns out, both predictions are true. Arabic influence on Spanish was limited to a single sphere—vocabulary—but this influence was sizable, especially compared to that of the Visigoths they displaced (see previous question). Arabic is one of the largest sources of borrowed vocabulary in Spanish, responsible for around 4 percent of the Spanish lexicon (Question 38; Dworkin (2013: 83) puts its relative contribution even higher). The vast majority of borrowed words were nouns, most falling into semantic domains that evoke the Arab impact on Spanish culture. These include civil administration (e.g., alcalde ‘mayor’), the military (alcázar ‘fortress’), architecture (azotea ‘terrace roof’), agriculture (zanahoria ‘carrot’), skilled trades (albañil ‘builder’), commerce (aduana ‘customs’), clothing (albornoz ‘bathrobe’), music (guitarra ‘guitar’), and food (jarabe ‘syrup’). A few verbs and adjectives (e.g., halagar ‘to flatter’ and loco ‘crazy’) come from Arabic, as does the -i ending used in adjectives of nationality like israelí ‘Israeli.’ Two words of some grammatical importance are Arabic: the preposition hasta ‘until’ (one of the most frequent words in Spanish; see Question 26) and ojalá ‘I wish/God willing’ (based on Arabic allah ‘God’), which is a common trigger for the subjunctive, as in Ojalá que llueva ‘God willing, it will rain.’ Many of these words begin with al, which means ‘the’ in Arabic. It was often borrowed along with a noun, just as English borrowed Spanish el lagarto ‘the alligator’ as alligator.8 For example, alcalde comes from Arabic qadi, and albañil from banni. The l of al was sometimes dropped, or adapted to a following consonant; thus aduana comes from diwan and azotea from suteah. Another telltale sign of Arabic origin in Spanish is an h between vowels, as in zanahoria ‘carrot,’ almohada ‘pillow,’ and alfahar ‘potter.’ Of course, many non-Arabic Spanish words just happen to begin with al- or have an h between vowels (alondra ‘lark,’ alce ‘elk,’ and alegre ‘happy’; buho ‘owl’ and vehículo ‘vehicle’). But, especially for al- words, these patterns make Arabic a solid first guess. Many Arabic borrowings replaced existing Latinate words, such as almohada ‘pillow’ for Latinate façuerelo and taza ‘cup’ for copa. Dworkin suggests that such replacements were motivated by a “preference for Arabic goods” (2013: 96); as noted earlier, prestige is often a major factor in borrowing. The replacement of Latin usque ‘until’ with hasta ‘until,’ from Arabic ḥáttà, is a wider Romance mystery. Only French jusqu’à retained

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usque in some form; Portuguese até, like hasta, comes from ḥáttà, Italian fino  a comes from Latin fini ‘end,’ and Romanian până comes from Latin paene ‘almost.’ Arabic borrowings that filled gaps in Spanish vocabulary, rather than replacing Latinate words, are associated with technologies or crops introduced by the Moors, such as adobe bricks, alcachofas ‘artichokes,’ and naranjas ‘oranges.’ One of the most interesting gaps was the color ‘blue,’ which lacked an everyday word in Latin.9 While Spanish borrowed azul from Arabic, French and Italian borrowed bleu and blu from Germanic, and Romanian derived albástru from the Latin word for ‘white’ (Academia Română 2009). A final note: in the lexical dance of Arabic and Spanish, other partners often took a turn. Many words borrowed by Spanish from Arabic originated in other languages. Azul and aduana originally came from Persian, guitarra and alambique ‘still’ from Greek, quintal ‘quantity of one hundred’ from Latin, and so on. Conversely, many Arabic words passed through other languages before joining the Spanish lexicon. For example, estragon ‘tarragon’ passed through French, recamar ‘to embroider’ through Italian, and álgebra through Latin itself.

To learn more ll

The prime reference for this topic is Dworkin (2013, chap. 5).

ll

Pharies (2007: 44) and Penny (2002: 266–71) offer useful lists of Spanish borrowings from Arabic, organized by semantic category. Penny’s account also describes how Spanish adapted these words to its sound system.

ll

Pharies (2007: 42) provides an overview of Mozarabic, including a brief sample text, while Penny (2002: 271–72) lists some vocabulary borrowed from Mozarabic into Spanish.

ll

Pountain (2006b) reviews and refutes some suggested cases of Arabic influence on Spanish syntax.

Question 27. How have the native languages of Latin America affected Spanish? On all the islands they have many canoas ‘canoes,’ a kind of rowboat. –Christopher Columbus’s first report on America, February 15, 1493

Chapter 4 Spanish and other languages

Until 1492, Spanish appeared unstoppable. As discussed in earlier questions, having swamped the indigenous languages of the Iberian Peninsula (save Basque), the developing Spanish language continued to dominate the Peninsula, resisting the onslaught of early Germanic languages and Arabic after the fall of Rome. In the medieval and early modern eras, French and other Romance languages (as well as Latin) enriched Spanish rather than competing with it. A different picture emerged, however, in Latin America, where tens of millions of Latin Americans still speak indigenous languages more than four centuries after the Spanish conquest (Question 8). A majority live in the Yucatan Peninsula, the Andes, and Paraguay, and speak Mayan languages, Quechua, or Guaraní, respectively, as well as Spanish. The impact of the indigenous Latin American languages on Spanish has therefore been twofold. Like Arabic, French, and the other languages mentioned above, they have contributed to Spanish vocabulary. A Spanish speaker who curls up in a hamaca ‘hammock’ to eat a snack of fried papas (or patatas) ‘potatoes,’ perhaps with some tomates ‘tomatoes’ on the side, enjoys the linguistic fruit of the Americas as well as its products. But the indigenous languages have additionally affected Spanish phonology (pronunciation) and grammar—in the specific regions with a high degree of bilingualism. These changes have not filtered through to standard Spanish. Most of the indigenous American words that Spanish borrowed describe the exotic objects encountered in the New World (Table 4.1). The earliest borrowings were from the languages of the Caribbean, where Columbus first landed. The next tranche came from Nahuatl and Quechua, the languages of the two Spanish colonial capitals of Mexico City and Lima. Languages spoken farther afield, despite their millions of speakers, have contributed fewer words, and at a later date, to the Spanish lexicon. Besides borrowing vocabulary, an alternative strategy for describing new concepts was to adapt existing words. Thus, Spanish piña ‘pine cone’ was extended to also mean ‘pineapple,’ while the meaning of pavo shifted from ‘peacock’ to ‘turkey.’ A peacock therefore had to be rebranded as a pavo real—literally, a ‘royal turkey.’ Some words in Table 4.1 illustrate variations on the borrowing process. Ananás, widely used in Argentina and Uruguay, and guajolote, from Mexico, are examples of words that have not spread widely in standard Spanish (piña and pavo, mentioned above, are much more common). Dictionaries of Latin American Spanish such as ASALE (2010) list thousands of such local borrowings. Tiza has a contrarian history: it is the standard word for ‘chalk’ everywhere but in its native Mexico, which prefers gis, from the Latin word gypsum. Finally, ananá(s) and tiburón are examples of words that passed into Spanish via Portuguese.

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aguacate ‘avocado’ cacahuete ‘peanut’ cacao ‘cocoa’ chile ‘chili’ chocolate ‘chocolate’ nopal ‘prickly pear’ tomate ‘tomato’ coyote ‘coyote’ guajolote ‘turkey’ ocelote ‘ocelot’ sinsonte ‘mockingbird’ zopilote ‘buzzard’ hule ‘rubber’ tiza ‘chalk’

chicle ‘chewing gum’ galpón ‘shed’ jícara ‘chocolate cup’ petaca ‘tobacco pouch’ petate ‘palm matting’

ají ‘chili’ batata ‘sweet potato’ caoba ‘mahogany’ maguey ‘agave’ maíz ‘corn’ maní ‘peanut’ yuca ‘cassava’

comején ‘termite’ guacamayo ‘macaw’ iguana ‘iguana’ loro ‘parrot’ mico ‘monkey’

cayo ‘low island, key’ huracán ‘hurricane’ sabana ‘savannah’

cacique ‘chief, boss’ caníbal ‘cannibal’ canoa ‘canoe’ curare ‘curare’ enaguas ‘petticoat’ hamaca ‘hammock’

Flora

Fauna

Other nature words

Culture

Source: Examples adapted from Penny (2002: 275–77); years of attestation from Corominas (1973)

Nahuatl (1570)

Arawak, Carib (1519)

Word type

cancha ‘field’ guano ‘guano’ mate ‘drinking gourd’ pampa ‘prairie’

alpaca ‘alpaca’ cóndor ‘condor’ llama ‘llama’ puma ‘puma’ vicuña ‘vicuna’

coca ‘coca(ine)’ palta ‘avocado’ papa ‘potato’

Quechua (1570)

Source of borrowing (with median year of first attested use)

Table 4.1  Examples of Spanish words from indigenous American language families

jaguar ‘jaguar’ ñandú ‘rhea’ tapir ‘tapir’ tiburón ‘shark’ tucán ‘toucan’

ananá(s) ‘pineapple’ mandioca ‘manioc’ tapioca ‘tapioca’

Tupian/Guaraní (1743)

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Chapter 4 Spanish and other languages

In parts of Latin America that have been heavily bilingual for generations, indigenous influence extends beyond borrowed vocabulary, into phonology (pronunciation) and grammar (Escobar 2010, 2012). Speakers in the Andes tend to change Spanish e and o, which do not exist in Quechua, to i and u (as in siñur for señor ‘sir’). They have also preserved the ll (/ʎ/) sound, avoiding the yeísmo merger (Question 63) found in most of the Spanish-speaking world (Penny 2000: 147). Speakers in the Yucatan tend to change final n’s to m’s at the ends of words (as in jamóm for jamón ‘ham’), since Mayan languages allow m but not n in this position. The best example of Guaraní influence on pronunciation is more subtle. Spanish speakers normally glide smoothly from one vowel in a sequence to the next, both between words (tu ojo ‘your eye’) and within (e.g. in caí ‘I fell’). This is not possible in Guaraní, which imposes a short consonant called a glottal stop (a linguist’s /ʔ/) between vowels. (You can hear a glottal stop at the beginning of out if you pronounce Go out clearly.) Paraguayans tend to impose the glottal stop in their spoken Spanish as well, pronouncing tu ojo, for example, as /tuʔoxo/, and caí as /kaʔi/. Indigenous influence in grammar takes two forms: using borrowed grammatical elements, and echoing native speech patterns using Spanish words (a process known as a “calque”). An example of the former is the use of the Guaraní word pa to mark questions, as in ¿Entendi(s)te, pa? ‘Did you understand?’ (Granda 1980: 62). A widely cited Quechua-inspired calque is the use of the verb dar ‘to give,’ along with the gerund (‘-ing’) form of a verb, to form a command. Some examples are Dame trayendo el pan ‘Bring me the bread’ (literally, ‘Give me bringing the bread’) and Dame haciendo tal cosa ‘Do that for me’ (literally, ‘Give me doing that thing’) (Pountain 2006b; Sala 1995: 35). In these uses, which directly echo a Quechua command structure, what is given is the desired action itself, thus transforming dar into a kind of auxiliary verb. One Guaraní-based calque is the use of the word todo ‘all,’ often in combination with ya ‘already,’ to indicate a completed action. Some examples are Tu hijo creció todo ya ‘Your child is all grown up’ and Mañana compraré todo para tu ropa ‘Tomorrow I will finish buying your clothing’ (Granda 1979: 273). The nonstandard words, pronunciation, and grammar that have emerged in these regional varieties of Spanish set them apart from standard Spanish. In fact, after reviewing the wide range of Guaraní grammatical elements that have been incorporated into Paraguayan Spanish, Granda concludes that the Spanish used by Paraguayans in lower socioeconomic groups, particularly women, is best described as a “mixed language” (1980: 67). One could certainly imagine these regional varieties evolving into independent languages within a few generations were it not for the centralizing pull of education, the media, and geographic mobility.

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To learn more ll

A good starting point for learning more about this topic is Escobar (2012). Two other general treatments relate the topic to broader themes: to variation within Spanish (Escobar 2010) and to contact between Spanish and other languages, beginning with the preRoman languages (Salas 1995). All three readings provide extensive additional examples of phonological and grammatical transfer from the indigenous languages, in addition to vocabulary.

ll

Pountain (2003: 160–61; 2006b) and Sala (1995) discuss the challenge of determining which grammatical features of Latin American Spanish stem from indigenous languages.

ll

Granda’s pioneering work on Paraguayan Spanish (1979, 1980) is widely cited in the works listed above.

ll

Pharies (2007: 219–20) discusses the indigenous influence in Andean Spanish.

ll

Focusing purely on vocabulary, Penny (2002: 275–77) provides extensive lists of borrowings, while Dworkin (2013: 200–11) discusses certain aspects of the borrowing process in detail, including etymological controversies, and how new words reached Spain.

ll

See “To learn more” in Question 77 for sources that discuss a possible indigenous role in Latin American leísmo.

Question 28. How has English affected Spanish? English is a relative Johnny-come-lately in the linguistic ambit of Spanish. Although English and Spanish have rubbed elbows for centuries in both the Old World and the New, it wasn’t until after the Second World War, when the United States became the dominant geopolitical power in the West, that English surpassed French as the language with the greatest contemporary influence on Spanish. Today’s Spanish speakers are exposed to English through education, popular culture, tourism, and business relations. As in the heyday of French influence (Question 17), the breadth and depth of this exposure has inspired a pushback, with language pundits warning that Spanish is “in danger of death,” or “a linguistic colony of English” (Pratt 1980: 245). This fear is unwarranted: English influence been limited to vocabulary—except, possibly, in Puerto Rico—following in the footsteps of languages from Celtic to Arabic to French.

Chapter 4 Spanish and other languages

A trickle of English borrowings entered Spanish before the twentieth century. Cuáquero ‘Quaker,’ pingüino ‘penguin,’ and ron ‘rum’ are some confirmed examples from the eighteenth century, and dandy, bistec ‘beefsteak,’ club, and turista ‘tourist’ from the nineteenth century. Modern loan words are concentrated in the domains of technology, sports, economics and business, communications, fashion, and science. Some have filled niches for which no Spanish word existed—cuácero and pingüino are good examples—while others have encroached on existing Spanish words, such as mánager (from English manager) for gerente ‘boss.’ Spanish has adapted many English borrowings to its own pronunciation norms, affixing an e- to words like esnob ‘snob’ and esplín ‘spleen,’ silencing h (as in hamburguesa ‘hamburger’) or pronouncing it with the /x/ of José (as in hobby or hippy), and changing the z sound to s (as in clóset, pronounced clo-set, with a true s). In other ways, English borrowings have extended the boundaries of Spanish pronunciation: for example, no native Spanish words end in c or b, but borrowed words like bistec and club are tolerated. This is reminiscent of the absorption of Latin words with un-Spanish consonant clusters like the pt of aceptar (Question 16). English has further affected Spanish vocabulary by adding new shades of meaning to existing Spanish words. Already in the nineteenth century, Simón Bolívar (Box 1.2) used papel ‘paper’ in the English sense of ‘newspaper,’ and americano ‘American’ to mean someone from the United States, rather than the American continents more generally—a usage that is anathema to many contemporary Hispanics. Pratt (1980) lists close to 250 such words; see Table 4.2 for a few examples. In most cases the Spanish and English words involved were cognates (e.g., modelo and model, both from Italian modello), but in other cases, they were connected only by meaning (e.g., mariposa and butterfly). As with the whole-word borrowings described above, some of the added meanings, such as ‘program’ in the computer sense, filled vocabulary gaps in Spanish, while others, such as emergencia in the sense of ‘emergency,’ have competed with existing Spanish vocabulary, in this case urgencia ‘emergency.’ Redundant borrowings like these testify to the linguistic dominance of English; in fact, by the 1980s emergencia surpassed urgencia in popularity.10 There is little evidence that English has substantially affected any aspect of standard Spanish beyond its vocabulary. Pountain, who has written most extensively about this topic (e.g., 1994, 1999, 2006b), describes several phenomena in Spanish syntax that linguists have attributed to English syntax, such as nouns used as adjectives in compound forms like hora punta ‘rush hour.’ He concludes that they are extensions of existing Spanish practice, rather than innovations, and are often restricted to specific styles of language usage. Puerto Rican Spanish may be an exception to this general pattern

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Table 4.2  Some existing Spanish words with added meanings from English

Spanish word

Original meaning (still used)

Additional meaning (from English)

Spanish and English words are related anfibio ‘amphibious’

amphibious creature

amphibious vehicle

área ‘area’

field, piece of land

region, zone

blanco ‘blank’

white

blank space to fill in

cebra ‘zebra’

striped animal

striped crosswalk (British usage)

complejo ‘complex’

group

psychological problem

congelar ‘freeze’

to freeze a substance

to freeze a salary or price

emergencia

emergence

emergency

modelo ‘model’

exemplar

fashion model

programa ‘program’

agenda, plan, performance

computer program

prohibitivo ‘prohibitive’

forbidding

too expensive

Spanish and English words are not related mariposa ‘butterfly’

insect

swimming stroke

estrella ‘star’

heavenly body

celebrity

paloma ‘dove’

bird

antiwar

cumbre ‘summit’

of a mountain

as in “summit meeting”

Source: Pratt (1980: 161–69 and 172–73)

because it has experienced several generations of widespread bilingualism. Vaquero de Ramírez (2011: 31–32) describes a half dozen aspects of Puerto Rican Spanish that show English influence. Most have to do with expanded use of verb forms like latiendo ‘beating’ or comparando ‘comparing’ (the “gerund”), which are used less in standard Spanish than in English. However, Lipski (2008: 123) disputes such claims, arguing that English influence in Puerto Rican Spanish “rarely goes beyond simple lexical borrowing.” English has had a limited impact on Spanish in the United States itself, despite the intense contact between the two languages there. To be sure,

Chapter 4 Spanish and other languages

Hispanic immigrants, and even more so their children and grandchildren, borrow English words and word meanings voraciously, in an accelerated echo of the widespread borrowings described above. English influence can also be heard in many of the mistakes that U.S.-born Spanish speakers make in their Spanish, such as using possessive adjectives with body parts (Me pegó a mí en mi brazo ‘He hit me in my arm,’ where el brazo ‘the arm’ is standard), putting adjectives before nouns (machucado español ‘choppedup Spanish’), omitting the required que ‘that’ in sentences like Yo creo que inventaron el nombre ‘I think they made up the name,’ or overusing subject pronouns, as in Creo que yo tengo bastantes problemas con la gramática ‘[I] believe that I have lots of grammar problems’ (Silva-Corvalán 2001; Lipski 2008). However, researchers interpret these errors as part of a crossgenerational process of language loss, rather than the creation of a new and stable variety of English-flavored Spanish. Silva-Corvalán (2001) points out that the same speakers show a general reduction in their Spanish repertoire: they use fewer tenses, make mistakes conjugating irregular verbs, and eliminate structures like hypotheticals (como si . . . ‘as if’) and complex adjectives (bien empacaditas ‘really stuffed’). None of these changes are related to specific features of English. At the same time, U.S.-born speakers maintain distinctly non-English features of Spanish such as object pronouns and the distinction between the preterite and imperfect past tenses. Because of its extensive bilingualism, the United States is an ideal place to study “code-switching,” a communication style in which speakers fluidly switch back and forth between two languages. At its simplest, this means punctuating sentences with interjections from the other language (like y’know or pues ‘well’), which are empty of meaning, and/or alternating languages between sentences. Code switching is of greatest linguistic interest when it involves meaningful words and phrases within a sentence. For example, consider the following: Después yo hacía uno d’esos concoctions: the garlic con cebolla, y hacía un mojo, y yo dejaba que se curara eso for a couple of hours. (Poplack and Sankoff, in López Morales 1989: 171) Afterward I made one of those concoctions: the garlic with onion, and made a marinade, and I let it cure for a couple of hours.

This example is typical because the switched units are either entire phrases (the garlic and for a couple of hours) or content words (concoctions), as opposed to function words like Spanish yo ‘I’ or English the. Moreover, the switches occur without violating the rules of either language; for example, se is not separated from its following verb, curara. Code switching, especially in rapid speech, therefore requires skill in both languages. For this reason, it

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acts as a social signal of group membership and solidarity within the Hispanic community. We end with a paradox. As described at the beginning of this chapter, a language’s prestige and power generally determines the impact it has on other languages. This explains why English has contributed so much to Spanish vocabulary. At the same time, the very prestige of English limits its ability to have a deeper impact on Spanish in the United States. If the two languages were to coexist for several generations, English pronunciation and grammar would have the opportunity to penetrate Spanish, as has happened with indigenous languages in heavily bilingual parts of Central and South America (see previous question). However, current data suggest that Spanish-speaking immigrant families lose their maternal tongue within two or three generations, just like previous waves of immigrants speaking Italian, Yiddish, Japanese, and other languages. In other words, for U.S.-born Hispanics, English is overpowering Spanish too quickly to create a lasting impact. Only the ongoing waves of fresh Hispanic immigration give English a continuous second chance.

To learn more ll

The linguistic term for English words borrowed into Spanish is anglicismos ‘anglicisms.’ The term “Spanglish” is often used (though rarely by linguists) to refer to code switching or to U.S. Spanish in general.

ll

Penny’s treatment of anglicisms (2002: 277–79) is brief but packed with examples.

ll

Dworkin’s section on the same topic (2013: 212–29) is the most thematically comprehensive. It includes a history of anglicisms and a review of negative reactions to them, including the many attempts to replace the word fútbol ‘soccer/football.’

ll

Pratt (1980), an entire book on anglicisms, has a detailed breakdown of different categories of borrowings.

ll

Lipski (2008) is a book-length treatment of Spanish in the United States, covering different varieties (Cuban, Mexican, etc.) as well as the topics addressed above. Other good starting points are SilvaCorvalán (2001: 308–30) and Stewart (1999: 190–98).

ll

See Pountain (2003: 251–55) and Lipski (2008, chap. 13) for more on code switching.

ll

English has also interacted with Spanish in Gibraltar, where it is one of the contributors to the local Llanitos variety of Spanish (Gibbons 2009).

Chapter 4 Spanish and other languages ll

Silva-Corvalán (2008) compares Spanish contact with English, Basque, Quechua, and Otomi.

ll

Lipski (2013) analyzes several demographic factors that contribute to the loss of Spanish in immigrant families in the United States.

Question 29. How is Spanish sign language related to Spanish? It’s actually more accurate to refer to Spanish sign language in the plural— Spanish sign languages—because every Spanish-speaking country has its own sign language, and sometimes more than one. Although some Spanish sign languages are related, deaf people from around the Spanish-speaking world can’t communicate with each other nearly as easily as hearing people. None of these sign languages is merely a signed version of Spanish. While Spanish speakers use sounds, words, word endings, and syntactic structures to communicate, signers use hand shapes and movements that they sequence, overlap, and supplement with physical postures and facial expressions. The basics of Spanish grammar—verb endings, masculine and feminine nouns, pronouns—don’t carry over naturally into this alien modality. Different tools, different rules. This disconnect applies as well to American Sign Language (ASL) and English, French Sign Language and French, and so on. The proliferation of Spanish sign languages underscores the fact that sign language is neither universal nor self-explanatory. One might naively assume the contrary: that the gestures used in different sign languages are similar, or at least easy to understand, because many of them have mimetic roots. For example, the gesture for ‘dog’ in ASL mimics how one calls a dog: patting one’s hip and snapping one’s fingers. But this gesture is specific to ASL; consider, for example, the gestures for ‘dog’ in Spanish and Catalan sign language shown in Figure 4.2. The Spanish sign symbolizes a dog’s snout, and the Catalan sign a dog’s bark (the hand opens and closes like a jaw). Also keep in mind that sign languages, like spoken languages, evolve over time. This means that even gestures with the same mimetic origin in two signed languages are likely to diverge. The variety of Spanish sign languages is a natural consequence of the way sign languages usually begin. Like all languages, they are a social construct. A deaf child born into a hearing family typically develops a small system of signs for rudimentary communication. When a critical mass of deaf people has the opportunity to spend extended time together—often, in a school for the deaf—they pool their individual versions of signos casera (‘homesign’)

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   Figure 4.2  ‘Dog’ in lengua de signos española and catalana. Courtesy of Parkhurst and Parkhurst 2007.

and begin to expand them to meet the full range of communicative needs. The result is a nascent sign language, one that will continue to expand and evolve as more learners join the signing community. The sign languages of several Spanish-speaking countries, including Spain, appear to have been created this way. According to the preamble to Spain’s sign language law (España 2007), “In the nineteenth century, with the establishment in Spain of the first schools for deaf-mutes and the blind, it became possible for them to have a formal education, and thereby linguistic and social interaction, so that they began to develop in a systematic way the ‘protolanguages’ of Spanish and Catalan sign language.”11 Other countries whose sign languages have local roots include Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Nicaraguan sign language has given researchers a rare opportunity to observe the genesis of language firsthand. Its deaf community only coalesced in 1977, when a special education school opened in Managua, soon joined by a vocational center attended by many of the school’s graduates. Within six years enrollment in the two institutions had topped four hundred: a critical mass. By 1986, the idioma de señas de Nicaragua (ISN) had taken shape and linguists had begun to document its progress. Today’s Nicaraguan deaf community includes the full spectrum of ISN signers, from children learning ISN as a first language to middle-aged Nicaraguans who participated in its creation. It’s an exciting population to study. Once created, sign languages often spread from one country to another. Venezuelan sign language is largely derived from Spain’s lengua de signos española, and Mexican sign language from French sign language, simply because their first schools for the deaf were founded by teachers from Spain and France, respectively. Mexican sign language is therefore a genetic cousin

Chapter 4 Spanish and other languages

of ASL, which also descends from French sign (Lane 1987). ASL itself has spread to many Spanish-speaking countries, including El Salvador, Bolivia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, often displacing an earlier, native-grown sign language. In Puerto Rico, it has been imported twice. American nuns first brought ASL to the island in the early twentieth century, where it evolved into Puerto Rican Sign Language. More recently, educators, immigrants, and travelers have reintroduced ASL afresh, promoting it to the point where Puerto Rican Sign Language—ASL’s own progeny—is on the point of dying out. The future of Spanish sign languages is uncertain. On the one hand, many countries, like Spain, are recognizing the validity of sign language, and the right of deaf people to use it in education and other public spheres. On the other hand, several trends in deaf education endanger these languages’ continuation. These include “oralism” (teaching deaf children to speak), mainstreaming, and the use of cochlear implants to reduce or eliminate deafness itself. The debate on these issues is not confined to Spanish-speaking countries, of course, but is particularly poignant in Latin America, whose deaf communities have only recently come into their own.

To learn more ll

Sématos (2009) is an online video dictionary of Lengua de signos española and Lengua de signoas catalana.

ll

Vallverdú (2001) explores in detail the status of sign language and the deaf community in Spain.

ll

The Gallaudet Encyclopedia of Deaf People and Deafness (Van Cleve 1987) is a useful resource, though somewhat dated given the brisk pace at which the sign language scene has evolved. Articles of particular value concern Ecuador (Montero 1987), Mexico (Berruecos Tallez 1987), Peru (Mukarker 1987), Puerto Rico (Frishberg 1987), and Spain (Pinedo Peydró 1987a, b).

ll

Gallaudet University also maintains an online list of references on sign languages around the world, including Spanish-speaking countries (Gallaudet 2014).

ll

Another useful resource is the SIL Electronic Survey Reports for various countries (SIL 2014). Reports of particular value concern Bolivia (Holbrook 2009), Chile (Parks, Parks, and Williams 2011), the Dominican Republic (Williams and Parks 2010), Ecuador (Eberle et al. 2012), Guatemala (Parks and Parks 2008), Nicaragua (Parks 2012), Peru (Parks and Parks 2009), Puerto Rico (Williams and Parks 2012b), Spain (Parkhurst and Parkhurst), and Venezuela (Williams

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and Parks 2012a). The report on Spain includes an interesting analysis of Spanish sign language dialects. The report on Nicaraguan sign language has an excellent summary of the language’s creation, including a full bibliography (see also Polich 2000). The report on Puerto Rico is particularly interesting for the dramatic change in ASL usage it describes since the publication of Frishberg 1987. ll

See Soundy (2014), Cruz Roja (2014), and Colombia aprende (n.d.) for sign language in El Salvador, Argentina, and Colombia.

ll

Woodward (2011) analyzes the relationship between ASL and various Costa Rican Sign languages using lexicostatistics, an interesting application of this technique.

ll

Rodríguez González (2003) has several examples of regional sign language differences in Spain.

Chapter 5 Learning Spanish

Chapter 5 Learning Spanish

Questions Spanish as a first language 30 How do children learn Spanish? Part I: Sounds and words (p.110) 31 How do children learn Spanish? Part II: Grammar (p.114) 32 What kinds of mistakes do native speakers make in their Spanish? (p.118) 33 Does speaking Spanish change the way you think? (p.121) Spanish as a second language 34 Is it too late for me to learn Spanish? (p.123) 35 Is Spanish the easiest language for a speaker of English to learn? (p.126)

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Like most Americans who learned Spanish in a classroom, I began to study the language when I was twelve, years after any linguistically defensible starting point. This has made me more sympathetic to my own students, but also jealous of the hundreds of millions of people who learned the language as children. This chapter delves into both ways of learning Spanish: as a first language, or as a second (or third) learned later in life. Along the way, we’ll consider the speech errors and thought patterns that characterize native speakers, and assess the difficulty of learning Spanish (compared to other languages) for speakers of English.

Spanish as a first language Question 30. How do children learn Spanish? Part I: Sounds and words Children learn Spanish the same way they learn any other language. As infants, they attend to the speech that surrounds them; as older babies and toddlers, they learn by interacting with their parents and other caretakers. By their second birthday, children have built a small vocabulary and are beginning to master the rules of Spanish, from stress placement to verb conjugations, by abstracting regularities from the examples they hear and learn. This question focuses primarily on how babies learn sounds and words, and the next question on how they then learn grammatical rules. Language acquisition begins before infants speak their first words, or even babble their first syllables. Laboratory studies of infant speech perception offer a remarkable window into this early stage (Werker and Tees 2005). By recording changes in heart rate, sucking, and gaze, in response to changes in sounds or words, linguists have shown that tiny infants can already perceive many contrasts that are important in language, such as the difference between p and b. During their first year of life, infants learn not to pay attention to contrasts that are irrelevant to their mother tongue. The most famous demonstration of this phenomenon comes from babies learning Japanese; between the ages of six and twelve months, they “unlearn”—that is, cease responding to—the difference between l and r. A parallel example for Spanish concerns the sounds b and v, which do not contrast in Spanish (for instance, botar ‘to throw’ and votar ‘to vote’ are pronounced the same). Babies learning either Spanish or English respond to the difference between the syllables ba

Chapter 5 Learning Spanish

and va when they are six months old; however, Spanish-learning babies lose this ability before their first birthday (Pons et al. 2009). The same difference is found in Spanish-speaking and English-speaking adults. As babies in Spanish-speaking families “unlearn” unneeded contrasts like b versus v, they also pick up on patterns that are relevant to the language, such as the placement of syllable stress within words. Spanish stress is variable: it falls on one of the last three syllables of a word, with its placement mostly determined by syllable structure (Question 65). Between the ages of six and nine months—before they speak their first word—babies learning Spanish grasp that stress matters. They begin to react to changes in stress patterns in words that they hear, while babies learning French—a language without variable stress—do not (Skoruppa et al. 2013). Nine-month-olds even show Spanish-style sensitivity to syllable structure, paying closer attention to nonsense words in which the stressed syllable ends in a consonant (Pons and Bosch 2010). Observation, of course, is not enough—no baby ever learned to talk by watching television! Rather, children learn through interaction with caregivers. The caregivers’ own speech provides children with meaningful examples of vocabulary and grammar. Their questions encourage children to talk, while their repetitions and expansions provide feedback and more encouragement. Interactions between children and their caregivers also set the stage for increasingly complex language. This aspect of interaction is typified by a Spanish-learning child studied by Macken (1978). Before he was able to combine words, he typically responded to zapato ‘shoe’ with Chuchi (a family nickname), thus expressing the intention of “Chuchi has a shoe” or “Chuchi’s shoe.” Likewise, he typically responded to casa ‘house’ with mamá, to express “Mother is at home.” Interactions like these have been termed “vertical constructions”: sequences of individual words that foreshadow the early word combinations children produce weeks or months later (Scollon 1976). Children obviously cannot master all at once the sounds and words of Spanish; rather, they learn step by step. The interesting question then arises: what do children learn first, and why? Is the order of acquisition universal, or do the characteristics of individual learners and of Spanish itself play a role? Research suggests that all three factors—universal, individual, and languagespecific—are involved. Universal, even commonsense principles of simplicity and communicative importance help to explain which Spanish sounds and words are acquired first. Phonetic simplicity explains why the first consonants that children master in Spanish, as in other languages, tend to be “stop consonants” like p, m, and t, which involve a complete closure of the oral tract with the lips or the tongue. Stop consonants are better suited to young children’s rudimentary motor

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skills than consonants mastered later, such as s, f, l, and r, which require finer control. Perceptual simplicity helps to explain why these early consonants tend to be produced in the front of the mouth, not the back (compare t and k). Front-of-the-mouth consonants spoken by adults are easier for babies to see, and therefore to imitate: studies of blind children’s acquisition of consonants, accordingly, show less favoring of front sounds (Pérez Pereira and ContiRamsden 1999). Communicative importance largely accounts for the nature of children’s early vocabulary. Whether they are learning Spanish or another language, children’s first words overwhelmingly refer to the objects, people, and actions that play a prominent role in their small lives; see Table 5.1 for examples. These universal trends notwithstanding, children show considerable variation in how they learn to talk, just as in how they learn to walk. There is evidence from the acquisition of English that children differ in which sounds they produce first in babbling, and that these differences carry over into their early words: they target words whose sounds they have already mastered (McCune and Vihman 2001). Individual differences in learning Spanish come through in children’s early words (Lleó 1996). Some children aim for quantity

Table 5.1  Some early words in children’s Spanish (Mexican Spanish, ages one year, three months to two years, seven months)

Word type

Examples

People

bebé, niño/a ‘child’; mamá, papá; names of family members

Body parts

boca ‘mouth,’ mano ‘hand,’ panza ‘tummy,’ ojo ‘eye’

Food and drink

galleta ‘cookie,’ papas ‘potatoes,’ leche ‘milk,’ frijoles ‘beans’

Animals/noises

caballo ‘horse,’ cuacuá ‘quack,’ bee ‘baa,’ mosca ‘fly,’ pipé ‘beep-beep’

Other objects

calcetín ‘sock,’ pelota ‘ball,’ cama ‘bed,’ mamila ‘pacifier’

Exclamations

¡Am! ‘Yum,’ ¡Ay! ‘Ouch,’ ¡Pum! ‘Pow,’ ¡Sh! ‘Shh’

Descriptions

caliente ‘hot,’ fuchi ‘yucky’

Actions

baño ‘bath,’ vámonos ‘Let’s go,’ besitos ‘kisses,’ dónde está ‘peekaboo’

Social interactions

gracias ‘Thank you,’ más ‘more,’ mía ‘mine,’ sí/no ‘yes/no,’ hola/adiós

Pointing words

allá ‘there,’ aquí ‘here’

Source: Jackson-Maldonado et al. (1993)

Chapter 5 Learning Spanish

over quality: they try to produce all of a word’s syllables, though inaccurately (e.g., datito for gatito ‘kitty’). Others truncate words but pronounce them more accurately (e.g., gadi for gatito). Some children adjust the consonants in a word to make them more similar: either pure duplicates, as in tota for toca ‘he plays,’ or close relations, as in ditada for guitarra ‘guitar’ (d and t are both pronounced with the tongue tip just behind the upper teeth). Other children take the opposite tack, making consonants less similar: thus, hupa for pupa ‘boo-boo, owie.’ Another child studied by Macken (1979) restricted her early words to those in which the first consonant was pronounced with the lips, and the second with the tongue behind the teeth. In some cases, this was closely related to the word’s adult pronunciation: thus mana for manzana ‘apple’ and patda for pelota. Other cases required major word surgery, as in wanno for Fernando and pwata for sopa. Finally, the path of language acquisition is affected by the characteristics of the language being learned. In learning sounds, children master hard-topronounce consonants earlier in languages where they are more frequent. For example, the ts combination is learned earlier in Cantonese, where it is relatively common, than in Greek, where it is relatively rare (Edwards and Beckman 2008). In this light, it’s intriguing that many research studies have found that in Spanish, b is acquired relatively late for a front consonant (Bedore 1999: 182). Perhaps this is because b has two different pronunciations in Spanish: soft between vowels, as in iba ‘I went’ (the sound /β/), and hard elsewhere, as in bien ‘well’ or ambos ‘both.’ The specific dialect of Spanish being learned matters, too. Children throughout the Spanish-speaking world replace r with easier-to-pronounce consonants, but the substitute consonant depends on the dialect. In most dialects, it is a sound produced in the front of the mouth, such as d, since r is usually pronounced with the tongue tip in Spanish. But in Puerto Rico, where r is often pronounced in the back of the mouth (see Question 60), a common childish substitute is h, also a back-ofthe-mouth sound (Anderson and Smith 1987). A logical consequence of step-by-step acquisition is that the elements learned first play an outsize role in early language. Many children substitute stop consonants for more difficult sounds (e.g., topa for sopa ‘soup’) and front consonants for back sounds (e.g., tama for cama ‘bed’); note that these two effects “conspire” to favor front stops like t. Early words, especially nouns, are often exploited to cover a wide range of related meanings. Macken’s (1978) subject was a voracious extender, using manzana for other fruits and round objects, and agua ‘water’ for other liquids as well as waterrelated objects (boats and bubbles). Early words are also pressed into service to express a variety of communicative intentions before grammar develops (Jackson-Maldonado 1992). The simple utterance Pelota ‘Ball,’ for instance,

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might mean “This is a ball,” “I want the ball,” “Throw the ball,” “Look at the ball,” or “Where is the ball?,” depending on context. As they approach their second birthday, children learning Spanish have already made much progress. They have learned to focus their attention on sound contrasts that matter in Spanish while filtering out those that are irrelevant. They have learned to pronounce the basic sounds of Spanish and to form multisyllabic words, processes in which their individual preferences have played an important role. They have learned words for the important objects and actions that surround them; many have begun to combine these into primitive sentences that express the same relations already apparent in their “vertical constructions.” It is time to begin learning Spanish grammar, a process addressed in the next question.

To learn more ll

Bedore (1999) is a succinct and comprehensive introduction to this topic, with an extensive bibliography.

Question 31. How do children learn Spanish? Part II: Grammar We tend to think of grammar as something that has to be learned explicitly, perhaps by studying a textbook and practicing with flashcards. Native speakers of a language, however, know its grammatical rules implicitly: they can produce new forms at will. A native speaker of Spanish, for instance, can make any singular noun plural, change any verb from present tense to past, turn any sentence into a question, and so on. By their second birthday, most children learning Spanish have begun to gradually acquire the same facility, following a general course of development seen also for other languages. Research on children’s acquisition of Spanish grammar has focused on the rules that modify verbs, nouns, and other words to indicate features like tense, number, and gender. This research shows that children act like little linguists, first gathering data by learning individual word forms, then formulating rules based on the patterns they observe. In the first stage, children typically learn a single form of each word they acquire. For example, children tend to learn the verb mirar ‘to look at’ in the command form (¡Mira! ‘Look!’), the verb romper ‘to break’ in the past tense (Rompió ‘It broke’), and the verb estar ‘to be’ in the present tense (Está ‘It is’) (Rojas Nieto 2003; Gathercole, Sebastián, and Soto 1999). These associations are not only logical, given the nature of small children’s play, but also closely correlated with maternal

Chapter 5 Learning Spanish

verb uses (Rojas Nieto 2003). Likewise, for nouns and adjectives, Mariscal (2008) described children who first learned the adjectives fría ‘cold’ and mala ‘bad’ in their feminine forms because of their frequent appearance with the feminine nouns agua and madrastra ‘stepmother.’ At this stage, there is no evidence that children have analyzed words into their grammatical components, such as the past tense -ió ending of rompió, or the feminine -a ending of fría and mala. Indeed, children’s grammatical errors at this stage are reminiscent of the clumsy overextension errors they make with their first sounds and word meanings (see previous question). The single form of the word is used, willy-nilly, in both valid and invalid contexts. Cayó ‘it fell’ may be used even when more than one object has fallen, and comes ‘you eat’ when ‘I’ am eating1. Masculine malo ‘bad’ may describe a bruja ‘witch,’ and masculine roto ‘broken’ a feminine caja ‘box’ (Mariscal 2008). When children do use more than one form of a word at this stage, their use is not systematic. The same child who described the caja as roto described a campana ‘bell’ (feminine) as both roto (masculine) and rota (feminine) within the same time period. Errors like these are inevitable if children are to express themselves before they have mastered grammar. Around their second birthday, children begin to notice regular patterns in the words they have learned. They start to use these patterns—essentially, primitive grammatical rules—to create contrasting forms of verbs and nouns in appropriate contexts: present versus past, singular versus plural, masculine versus feminine, and so on. The expansion of their grammatical repertoire proceeds in a piecemeal fashion—perhaps “baby steps” is a more appropriate term. As in the acquisition of sounds and words (see previous question), the order of acquisition is determined by universal, individual, and language-specific factors. Children learning Spanish follow the universal pattern of learning simple rules at a younger age; this explains why positive commands like ¡Come! appear earlier than negative commands like ¡No comas! ‘Don’t eat!,’ which use the hard-to-conjugate subjunctive form (Rojas Nieto 2003; Gathercole, Sebastián, and Soto 1999). Gathercole, Sebastián, and Soto (1999) observed individual differences in children’s learning of verb conjugations; one of two children studied first experimented with present versus past tense (e.g., cae/ha caído ‘it falls/fell’), while the other child contrasted different subjects within the present tense (e.g., veo/ ve ‘I see/he sees’). The language—and dialect—being learned also affects rule learning. The plural is learned sooner in Spanish than in German, where it is notoriously complicated, while the Spanish verb system, riddled as it is with irregulars, takes longer to learn than that of Turkish, which is entirely regular (Mills 1985; Aksu-Koç and Slobin 1985). Children learn the Spanish compound past tense (as in he hablado ‘I have spoken’) earlier if they live in

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Spain, where this structure is more common, than in Latin America (Slobin and Bocaz 1988; see also Question 84). On average, children learn Spanish verb tenses in the order shown in Table 5.2. Gender and number marking on nouns and the words that accompany them, such as adjectives, is in place before age three (Mariscal 2008; Marrero and Aguirre 2003). Once children learn rules, they begin to overapply them, wrongly “correcting” irregular words (Table 5.3). This is equivalent to an English-learning child saying goed for went or mouses for mice. Such mistakes, along with the other error types shown in Table 5.3, are prime evidence of rule learning. The error types in Table 5.3 will ring a bell for anyone familiar with the history of Spanish. Many verbs that were irregular in Latin or Old Spanish, including prestar ‘to loan’ and temer ‘to fear,’ have become regular (Question 82). Some Greek words ending in -a, such as calma ‘calm’ and broma ‘joke,’ were assigned feminine gender when they were borrowed into Spanish (Question 72). The -ar verb category absorbed words from other Latin verb classes and is the go-to class for new borrowings and coinages (Question 79). Historical overmarking of gender can be seen in Spanish adaptations like pájaro ‘bird’ (from Latin passare) and suegra ‘mother-in-law’ (from socrus; Question 14). All of this is not to say that children’s errors are the source of language change—they are inevitably outgrown within a few years—but rather that children’s linguistic systems reflect the preference for regular patterns that often drives language change.

Table 5.2  Basic milestones of verb development

Age (years) Before 2.5

Acquisition infinitive (hablar ‘to speak’) present tense

(hablo ‘I speak’)

preterite past tense

(hablé ‘I spoke’)

imperative (habla ‘Speak!’)

2.5 to 3

3.5 to 4.5

present progressive

(estoy hablando ‘I am speaking’)

in Spain: present perfect

(he hablado ‘I have spoken’)

imperfect past tense

(hablaba ‘I was speaking’)

immediate future

(voy a hablar ‘I’m going to speak’)

subjunctive (hable ‘I would speak’) in Latin America: present perfect

(he hablado ‘I have spoken’)

Source: Bedore (1999), Rojas Nieto (2003), Gathercole, Sebastián, and Soto 1999

Chapter 5 Learning Spanish Table 5.3  Examples of acquisition errors that show rule knowledge

Evidence for rule learning

Adult form

Child form

Children “correct” irregular verbs

sé ‘I know’

sabo

ponlo ‘Put it!’

pónelo

abierto ‘opened’

abrido

hiciéramos ‘would open’

haciéramos

juega ‘plays’

juga

Children “correct” nouns with irregular gender: here, using the article (la) that matches the noun’s apparent gender (feminine)

el fantasma ‘the ghost’

la fantasma

Children overextend the endings of -ar verbs (the most common verb type) to -er and -ir verbs.

salió ‘opened’

saló

crecer ‘to grow’

crezar

teniendo ‘having’

tengando1

Children overmark gender, adjusting noun and adjective endings to the standard feminine -a and masculine -o.

flor ‘flower’

fola

mujer ‘woman’

mujala

mano ‘hand’

mana

papel ‘paper’

papelo

tierra azul ‘blue earth’

tierra azula

The form tengando combines -ar endings with a teng base that obviously comes from the irregular form tengo ‘I have’. Clark (1985) and Bedore (1999) present many other examples of children overextending irregular forms, for example, saying juegamos ‘we play’ (based on irregular juego, juegas and so on) in place of jugamos. These overextensions represent an alternative strategy for coping with Spanish irregular verbs, compared to the overcorrections shown earlier in Table 5.3, such as sabo and juga. 1

Source: Clark (1985), Bedore (1999), Pérez Pereira (1991), Mariscal (2008), Gathercole, Sebastián, and Soto (1999), Slobin and Bocaz (1988).

As children learn grammar rules, they learn other types of rules as well. By age four they master the rules that govern Spanish stress placement within a word, occasionally “correcting” words with irregular stress, such as changing LÁMpara ‘lamp’ to lámPAra (Hochberg 1988). Children approach the complicated semantic rules that divide, for example, por and para ‘for,’ ser and estar ‘to be,’ or subjunctive and indicative, by initially restricting their use of each form to a single meaning. Thus multifunction por is first used only in a spatial sense, as in describing a camera’s location as por ahí ‘over there’ (Castro Yánez and Sandoval Zúñiga 2009; Peronard 1985). Gathercole, Sebastián, and Soto (1999) describe the striking contrast between

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a boy who uses the verb estar only to describe location, while his mother, in the same tape-recorded sessions, uses the verb for location and four other meanings. The subjunctive is first used only for commands, such as Dile que venga ‘Tell him to come’ (Pérez-Leroux 1998). At the other end of the acquisition process, school-aged children are still working on the finer points of these contrasts, such as the use of ser (not estar) to describe the location of an event, and the use of the subjunctive to describe nonexisting entities (Sera 1992; Pérez-Leroux 1998). By mastering the sounds, words, and grammar of Spanish, the “little linguists” have become full-fledged speakers of Spanish within a few years: acquisition is mostly complete by age four. Later in this chapter we’ll consider how adults attempt to achieve the same goal.

To learn more ll

As with the previous question, Bedore (1999) is an excellent overview of this topic.

ll

Clark (1985) and Bedore (1999) provide many examples of children’s overregularization errors.

ll

Pérez Pereira (1989) examines older children’s command of some rule types not discussed here, including the formation of diminutives.

Question 32. What kinds of mistakes do native speakers make in their Spanish? Muchas tardes, buenas gracias. ‘Many afternoons, good thanks.’ (Mendizábal 2004)

Everyone gets a kick out of speech errors, or slips of the tongue. In Spanish they’re sometimes called piquiponadas, after Joan Pich i Pon, an error-prone early-twentieth-century Catalan politician. His legendary catalog of gaffes includes Es que ahora hago una vida sedimentaria ‘I’m living a sedimentary life’ (instead of sedentaria ‘sedentary’) and ¿Verdad que parezco un radiador romano? ‘Do I really look like a Roman radiator?’ (instead of gladiador ‘gladiator’). Pich i Pon was the counterpart of the Oxford professor William Archibald Spooner, whose specialty was the “metathesis” (switching) of initial consonants to produce such gems as shoving leopard for loving shepherd.

Chapter 5 Learning Spanish

For linguists, speech errors are serious linguistic evidence: a natural window into the speech production process. For example, the Muchas tardes example above only makes sense if the speaker had the entire sequence Buenas tardes, muchas gracias in mind when he or she began to speak. Further evidence that speakers plan largish chunks of speech, rather than individual words, comes from the additional metathesis errors shown in Table 5.4 (errors 1–3), as well as the accidental anticipations and repetitions in errors 4–7. A speaker who switches, anticipates or repeats a sound, syllable, or word must have more than one word in mind at the start. Speech errors like those in Table 5.4 also suggest that: ll

Speakers organize and access vocabulary in multiple ways. Substitutions involve words related in meaning (ciegos and sordos in error 8) or sound (cómicos and cómodos in error 9), and also by part of speech (nouns and adjectives, respectively).

ll

Speakers are implicitly aware of both sounds (errors 1, 7, 11) and syllables (errors 5, 10).

ll

Speakers are implicitly aware of syllable structure; the metathesized sounds in error 1 occupy identical syllable positions.

ll

Speakers are linguistically self-aware: they monitor and repair their own speech, sometimes explicitly (errors 11, 12).

ll

Within the speech production process, grammatical agreement takes place at the last moment, after a user has assigned words to their final positions within a sentence. This explains why in errors 2 and 3, esos agrees with coches (not rueda), la with rueda (not coches), and acerque with fuego (not niños).

Given the richness of speech errors, it’s unfortunate that their sporadic nature makes them hard to study. Researchers generally keep a pen and paper handy to jot down errors whenever they hear them. This is a slow process: for example, it took Hoyos, a colleague, and their students five years to build a corpus of 1,500 errors. These linguistic truffles, if you will—savory treasures gleaned from the wild—can be supplemented by speech errors cultivated in the research laboratory. Hoyos complemented her corpus with additional errors recorded as research subjects narrated an action-packed cartoon video. Forced to speak quickly and under pressure, they produced an average of ten errors per session. Native Spanish speakers occasionally make the same kinds of gender, number, and verb errors that plague second-language learners. Some 10 percent of the errors in Hoyos’s corpus are of this type, and examples come up in other published research as well. According to Hoyos, gender

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ruedas, coche los niños, el fuego zapatos amenazadora manera punto sordos cómodos semejante clásico traíamos

2. Esos coches están en la rueda. (M)

3. ¡Cuidado con el fuego, no se acerque a los niños! (V)

4. Llevaba unos botones de ante negro con botones de colorines. (V)

5. Traía una amenazalladora estrella de tres puntas. (H)

6. Con tu mirada coqueta, con tu mirada de hablar. (H)

8. Los ciegos aprenden muy bien a leer los labios. (V)

10. Es una danza sejante a la que . . . (H)

11. El cásico, el clásico caso de no recibir el recibo de la luz y luego te la corten. (H)

12. Trajíamos unos vasitos desechables, ¿Dije trajíamos? Bueno, traíamos muchas cosas . . . (H)

9. Lo bueno que son muy cómicos. (H)

Source: H = Hoyos 2009; V = del Viso 2002

Construction

Omission

Substitution

Repetition

7. El Fiscal del Estado está a funto de . . . (V)

callar, escuchar

1. ¡A cachar y a escullar! (V)

Metathesis

Anticipation

Intended word(s)

Erroneous utterance (error in boldface)

Error type

Table 5.4  Examples of native Spanish speech errors

‘We bringed some disposable cups. Did I say bringed? Well, we brought many things . . .’

‘The classic case where you don’t receive the utility bill and they cut you off.’

‘It is a similar dance to the one that . . .’

‘Deaf people learn to read lips really well.’ ‘The good thing is that they are very comfortable.’

‘The district attorney is about to . . .’

‘With your coquettish look, your manner of speaking’

‘It had a threatening three-pointed star.’

‘She wore some black suede shoes with colorful buttons.’

‘Watch out for the kids, they mustn’t get close to the fire!’

‘Those wheels are on the car.’

‘Be quiet and listen!’

Intended meaning of utterance

120 Part 1 Spanish in context

Chapter 5 Learning Spanish

errors, such as la sustancia activo ‘the active substance,’ where feminine activa is expected, are particularly common (2009: 138–39). However, these errors are swamped by the more typical variety illustrated in Table 5.4. Moreover, I have seen no published examples of other errors that are notorious among second-language learners, such as confusing ser and estar, saber and conocer, and por and para (Questions 41 and 44), or forgetting the personal a (Question 97) or the a needed with verbs like gustar (Question 93). These differences reflect an essential difference between first- versus second-language speech errors. First language errors arise unconsciously during fluent and otherwise correct speech. Secondlanguage errors arise during self-conscious and usually hesitant speech, and often show the interference of a first language. I’ll take my hat off to any second-language speaker who is fluent enough to produce native-style slips of the tongue.

To learn more ll

Fromkin (1973) is a classic introduction to the topic of speech errors, with data from English.

ll

Hoyos (2009: 66–81) reviews Spanish speech error research from 1982 to 2007.

ll

See companion website for more examples.

Question 33. Does speaking Spanish change the way you think? The idea that language affects thought has long been something of a black sheep within linguistic theory, a research area that, like the late Rodney Dangerfield, gets no respect. To a surprisingly large extent, this is because of its close association with a single spurious claim: that Eskimos have an extraordinary number of words for snow, reflecting—and even contributing to—an unusually rich conceptual structure. This linguistic urban legend sprang from a 1940 article in the MIT alumni magazine that was short both on details—it didn’t refer to a specific Inuit language, or cite specific Inuit words—and on accuracy (Whorf 1940). In fact, Inuit languages have no more words for snow than other languages, as evinced by the English words snow, flake, flurry, pack, powder, drift, and slush, to name a few examples. Furthermore, there is no evidence that speakers of Inuit languages think differently about snow than anyone else.

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Fortunately, recent research has addressed the language-thought connection—or “linguistic relativity”—more scientifically. A striking example is that of Kuuk Thaayorre, a Paman language spoken in the Cape York Peninsula in Queensland, Australian. Kuuk Thaayorre speakers use cardinal (compass-like) directions exclusively, instead of relative directions. For example, they would say that someone is standing ‘to my west’ instead of ‘to my left.’ This means that Kuuk Thaayorre speakers need to be aware of cardinal directions at all times. As a result, they have a better sense of direction than speakers of languages like English, which favor relative directions. For example, regardless of his or her current location or visibility, a Kuuk Thaayorre speaker can accurately point in the direction of any distant, unseen landmark—the equivalent, perhaps, of pointing toward Canterbury while walking through an unfamiliar Underground station in London. Research on linguistic relativity in Spanish has focused on its so-called se accidental construction, and on grammatical gender. The se accidental allows speakers to describe unintended events without assigning responsibility. ‘Pepe forgot his homework’ can be expressed as Se le olvidó la tarea a Pepe (‘The homework forgot itself to Pepe’), and ‘Maria broke the cup’ as Se le rompió la taza a María (‘The cup broke itself to Maria’). Because Pepe and Maria appear in these sentences as indirect objects, not subjects, of their respective verbs, they are seen as affected by the mishaps rather than causing them. Japanese has a similar construction. In laboratory settings, when speakers of Spanish, Japanese, and English are asked to describe and, later, recall, accidental events that they see on videos, Spanish and Japanese speakers are much less likely to mention and remember who was responsible for the actions. The se accidental structure (and its Japanese equivalent) is the logical source of this difference. Grammatical gender likewise affects native Spanish speakers’ thinking. All Spanish nouns are masculine or feminine, and their gender is matched in other words that accompany them, as in la mesa roja ‘the red table’ (feminine) versus el sillón rojo ‘the red armchair’ (masculine). Laboratory studies have shown that Spanish speakers internalize gender, attributing masculine qualities—strength, size, low voice, etc.—to objects that happen to be masculine in Spanish, and feminine qualities—beauty, tranquility, high voice, etc.—to feminine objects. In the case of the se accidental and Kuuk Thaayorre cardinal directions, language influences thought but does not absolutely determine it. Of course English speakers have a sense of direction, and Spanish speakers recognize that people can cause accidents. The linguistic patterns just make certain thought patterns more natural. However, grammatical gender adds a sensibility that scarcely exists in English, in which a ship is she but all other inanimate objects are sexless. We will return to this issue in Question 70.

Chapter 5 Learning Spanish

To learn more ll

Linguistic relativity is often referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after Whorf and his mentor, the linguist Edward Sapir.

ll

Pullum (1991: 159–71) surveyed the roots and repercussions of Whorf’s claim.

ll

For a survey of modern research on linguistic relativity, including Kuuk Thaayorre directions and the se accidental, see Boroditsky (2011).

ll

See Deutscher (2010: 194–216) for more on the cognitive and affective impact of gender, including a research review.

Spanish as a second language Question 34. Is it too late for me to learn Spanish? It’s never too late to learn Spanish, or another language. To be sure, the ideal time to start is in childhood: for adolescent or adult learners (I’ll say “adults” as a shortcut), one’s age and first language can get in the way. But adults can learn effectively if they address these two factors head-on, minimizing their disadvantages and maximizing their advantages. Let’s start with the bad news: it’s clear that children generally learn a new language better than adults. Studies of long-term immigrants to the United States, Israel, and Sweden have found a consistent drop-off in language skills for learners who were first exposed to their second language after puberty (Johnson and Newport 1989; Slabakova 2013). This finding is generally attributed to a change in the brain upon maturation. The left hemisphere’s specially adapted role in learning language ends, leaving later acquisition up to general-purpose learning mechanisms (Werker and Tees 2005). Situational factors can play a role as well. Unlike young children, many adults approach language learning with fear or embarrassment. It doesn’t help when their mistakes are met with criticism rather than tolerance or amusement. Motivation is another factor: academic obligation, curiosity, and practical goals like travel or career advancement can’t compete with a child’s inner drive to master his or her environment. A final factor is time. For young children, learning Spanish as a first language is a full-time job; those learning Spanish as a second language in a bilingual environment also have extensive contact with the language. An adult’s exposure may be as minimal as a few hours a week.

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Another piece of bad news is that language habits set in childhood are difficult to overcome. Pronunciation, the first element of language acquired by children, is the hardest to change; it’s rare for an adult learner to completely eliminate his or her foreign accent. When it comes to grammar, aspects of Spanish that are completely alien to one’s first language are particularly hard to learn. For English speakers, the best example is perhaps the untranslatable “personal a” seen in sentences like Pablo ayuda a Ernesto ‘Paul helps Ernest’ (Question 97). It’s just plain hard to remember that the a is necessary. Also difficult are aspects of Spanish that are present in one’s first language, but with significant differences. For example, object pronouns always follow verbs in English (Tell me, I ate it) but can either follow or precede verbs in Spanish (Dígame, Lo comí; see Question 98). English speakers readily understand what Spanish object pronouns are for, but must learn to use them in a new way. The good news is that a determined adult learner can counteract most of these difficulties: ll

Attitude. As much as possible, adults should try to emulate children’s positive attitude toward language learning, seeing the process as mind-opening rather than intimidating. A relaxed and supportive environment in which learners feel free to make mistakes is essential.

ll

Motivation. Adult learners should seek, and teachers provide, active and even entertaining classroom activities, creative projects, cultural materials relevant to their own interests, and interaction with native speakers. Travel is the ultimate motivator.

ll

Exposure. The most positive step that adult learners can take is to spend more time with Spanish. Language classes should be conducted in Spanish: the standard recommendation in language pedagogy is to use the “target language” in at least 90 percent of instruction and interaction (ACTFL 2010). Adult learners should spend time talking with Spanish speakers if at all possible. They should also harness their single greatest advantage as language learners: literacy, in the broadest sense of the word. Whether they are taking Spanish classes or not, adults can improve their Spanish by reading, listening to music and talk shows, watching television, movies, or videos, and using study materials of all sorts. Technology is the adult learner’s best friend in seeking more exposure to Spanish. Some of the tools it provides are: mm

Reading material, from newspapers to blogs, from around the world.

mm

Music, videos, television shows, and movies, often with subtitles in Spanish and/or English.

Chapter 5 Learning Spanish

ll

mm

Flashcard apps that enable users to upload their own vocabulary and/or use preloaded “decks” of cards.

mm

Websites for arranging face to face or online “conversation exchanges” with native speakers, conducted partly in Spanish and partly in the learner’s native language.

mm

Spanish-learning programs, both commercial and free.

mm

Instructional websites and videos posted by individual language teachers.

mm

Websites that offer individual online tutoring from native Spanish speakers.

mm

Social networking websites in which advanced students, teachers, or native speakers answer learners’ questions.

mm

Reading devices that translate words or phrases on demand.

Language differences. Adult can use their mature intellect—their second advantage, besides literacy—to tackle the challenge of language differences. For pronunciation, understanding how Spanish sounds are articulated is key. For grammar, it’s essential not only to grasp how Spanish grammar works, but to accept that it offers a legitimate alternative to one’s native language. For example, the inscrutable personal a turns out to be vital, and efficient, in distinguishing between questions like ¿Quién ayudó a Ernesto? ‘Who helped Ernest?’ and ¿A quién ayudó Ernesto? ‘Who(m) did Ernest help?’ Of course, intellectual understanding must be reinforced with practice. For grammar, the challenge is to find activities that exercise specific aspects of language in a meaningful context, perhaps (for the personal a) by a student’s describing who helps whom, who listens to whom, and so on, within the class. Learning does not end with a single cycle of explanation and practice; challenging aspects of Spanish need to be periodically reviewed and repracticed.

In sum, the task of learning Spanish as an adult can be viewed with either pessimism or optimism. The pessimist focuses on neurological changes at puberty, and on the sad fact that many late learners never acquire enough Spanish to have a conversation or read simple texts. The optimist focuses on the variety of tools that adults have at their disposal, especially in the Internet age. It is also encouraging to keep in mind that adults have a dramatic head start: they can produce correct Spanish from day one, while it takes babies months to learn their first word, more than a year to combine words, and three or four years to form fully grammatical sentences. With the right motivation, time commitment, and tools, adults can attain reasonable goals within a similar timeframe.

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To learn more ll

Most literature on second-language acquisition of Spanish focuses either on specific areas of difficulty in learning the language (e.g., object pronouns), or on the general pedagogical issues raised in this question, such as motivation. Geeslin (2014) is a full overview.

ll

In linguistic literature, the idea that there is a biological basis for easier language learning in early childhood is called the “critical period” (or “optimal period”) hypothesis.

ll

Besides reviewing the literature on age effects on second-language learning, Slabakova (2013) surveys other topics of current research interest.

Question 35. Is Spanish the easiest language for a speaker of English to learn? Whether or not Spanish is the easiest language for an adult speaker of English to learn, it’s definitely one of the easiest. An authoritative source on this topic is the U.S. Department of Defense, whose Defense Language Institute offers intensive language classes in Monterey, California for its personnel. The Institute divides languages into four categories based on how long it takes students to achieve basic proficiency. As shown in Table 5.5, Spanish and the other Romance languages are in the easiest learning category. Indo-European languages beyond Romance (see Question 21) generally fall into categories 2 and 3, while non-Indo-European languages are generally in categories 3 and 4.2 Based on how long they take to learn, the category 4 languages are more than twice as hard as Spanish. I don’t know of any objective data on the relative difficulty of the various Romance languages. But my personal impression, from learning and teaching both Spanish and French, is that the terrain shifts as one’s studies progress. French pronunciation and spelling challenge the newcomer, but the complexities of Spanish verbs and pronouns challenge the intermediate student. This can be a rude awakening for the student who has chosen Spanish assuming that it’s easier! In the end, a student’s motivation and level of effort in language study are far better predictors of success than a language’s inherent ease or difficulty. Someone who falls in love with the tones of Chinese or the swirls of written Arabic, and is inspired to spend hours talking with native speakers or watching

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Table 5.5  Categories of language difficulty at Defense Language Institute

Category

Weeks to proficiency

1

Language/Language family Indo-European

Non-Indo-European

26

French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish

(none)

2

35

German

Indonesian

3

48

Indo-Iranian: Dari, Hindi, Persian Farsi, Punjabi, Urdu

Hebrew, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Uzbek

Slavic: Russian, Serbian/Croatian 4

64

Pashto

Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean

Source: DLIFLC 2012.

videos, will soon surpass the Spanish student who never opens his or her textbook. So please: when picking a language to learn, follow your heart.

To learn more ll

For a lighthearted look at this topic that includes several less-studied languages, see Economist (2009).

Part two Inside Spanish 6

Spanish vocabulary

7

The written language

8

The sounds of Spanish

9

Names, nouns, and pronouns

10

Where the action is: Spanish verbs

11

Building sentences: The syntax of Spanish

Chapter 6 Spanish vocabulary

Chapter 6 Spanish vocabulary

Questions The Spanish lexicon 36 How many words does Spanish have? (p. 132) 37 What are the most frequent words in Spanish? (p. 134) 38 Where does Spanish vocabulary come from? (p. 137) 39 Why does Spanish have so many charming derivational endings? (p. 142) Specific areas of vocabulary 40 Why do most Spanish negatives begin with n? (p. 146) 41 Why does Spanish have two words that mean ‘to be’ (ser and estar) and two words that mean ‘to know’ (saber and conocer)? (p. 147) 42 Why does Spanish have two words that mean ‘that’ (ese and aquel)? (p. 150) 43 Why are Spanish prepositions unpredictable? (p. 152) 44 Why does Spanish have two words that mean ‘for’ (por and para)? (p. 157)

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Vocabulary poses a linguistic paradox. On the one hand, it is fundamental to language. Early humans undoubtedly developed words before grammar, and children do the same when they learn to speak. Vocabulary is do-or-die knowledge for second-language learners: one can communicate with badly conjugated verbs or scrambled syntax, but not without words. Vocabulary is also essential in linguistics research. When investigating a newly discovered language, a linguist’s first task is to build a list of core vocabulary. Words are also the portal through which linguists approach other aspects of language, from sounds to grammatical structures to the historical and cultural relationships among languages. On the other hand, it is these other aspects, not the words themselves, that truly define a language. Some hallmarks of Spanish, for example, are its compact and stable five-vowel system, its masculine and feminine nouns, and its arsenal of options for expressing the past tense (Questions 57,70, and 84). For Spanish to add a new vowel,1 a new gender, or a new tense would be a startling development. But because word meanings are arbitrary—it’s just historical accident that casa means ‘house’ and not, say, ‘dog’—vocabulary is always subject to change. The Spanish-speaking community is constantly discarding old words, and coining or borrowing new ones, all without changing the essence of the language. This chapter addresses two different types of questions about Spanish vocabulary. The first four questions explore the overall contours of the Spanish lexicon. The remaining questions address specific vocabulary areas of interest within the language, from negatives to por and para, the two Spanish words meaning ‘for.’

THE SPANISH LEXICON Question 36. How many words does Spanish have? It’s impossible to answer this question exactly because a language’s vocabulary is a moving target. While the sounds and structures of language change slowly, new words are constantly being coined and older words becoming obsolete. How long should a new word be used, or an old word forgotten, before the former is counted and the latter is not? For a widely spoken language like Spanish, geography is another challenge. Should

Chapter 6 Spanish vocabulary

words used in all varieties of Spanish be counted, or only those in an agreed-upon common core? Together, these two dimensions of time and space define an important preliminary question: What version of Spanish are we analyzing? The obvious place to look for a plausible answer is the canonical dictionary of the Spanish language, the Diccionario de la lengua española maintained by the Real Academia Española since 1726 (Question 2). With respect to the “what version of Spanish?” question, the dictionary is both current and comprehensive. The twenty-second edition (RAE 2001), the most recent edition for which statistics are available, added almost ten thousand words, deleted almost 2,500 archaic words, and more than doubled its selection of words from the Americas to almost 15 percent of the entire dictionary. (New words from the Americas are added if they are used in at least three countries.) It contains 88,431 lemas ‘headwords,’ or separate dictionary entries. Since the lemas collapse homonyms like bajo ‘short,’ bajo ‘bass guitar,’ and bajo ‘bass singing voice,’ a better measure of the size of the dictionary is its 161,962 acepciones ‘meanings,’ plus 28,619 formas complejas (phrasal uses, such as por bajo de ‘under’), for a total of 190,581 distinct lexical items. It’s tempting to compare this number with English. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary has over 450,000 lexical items. (The Oxford English Dictionary has even more, but it includes both modern and archaic vocabulary.) Unfortunately, this comparison compounds the uncertainty of a single-language word count. Webster’s and the Diccionario were compiled at different times, by different teams of lexicographers dealing with different, though overlapping, issues. We’re definitely talking apples and oranges—or pears and apples (peras y manzanas), to use the Spanish equivalent. On the other hand, the disparity between the English and Spanish numbers is so dramatic that we must surely concede a lexical advantage to English. And here we come to a deeper issue: Does it matter? Even an educated individual probably knows no more than about seventyfive thousand words (Crystal 2003: 123). If a man’s legs just need to be long enough to reach the ground (to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln), then a language’s vocabulary just needs to be big enough to supply such an individual with words. By this metric, both Spanish and English make the grade with room to spare.

To learn more ll

Crystal (2003, chapters 8 and 9) discusses these lexical issues from an English language perspective.

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Question 37. What are the most frequent words in Spanish? The ten most frequent words in Spanish, shown in Table 6.1, are the definite and indefinite articles (el and un), the prepositions de, a, en, the sentential building blocks y, que, and no, the verb ser, and the pronoun se. These are all such basic words that it’s hard to imagine constructing more than a sentence or two without using at least one of them. For comparison’s sake, Table 6.1 also shows the ten most frequent words in English. There is substantial overlap between the two sets; we’ll explore some of their differences below. Besides their utility, what stands out about these “top ten” Spanish words is their age. We’ll see in the next question that only about a third of modern Spanish vocabulary descended directly from Vulgar Latin; most words are later borrowings from either Latin itself or other languages. Yet all ten of the most frequent words are from Vulgar Latin. Likewise, the English words in Table 6.1 all descend from Old English. The dominance of original vocabulary continues beyond the Spanish top ten. Among the one hundred most frequent Spanish words, the only word not from Vulgar Latin is hasta ‘until’ (#54), from Arabic ḥáttà (Question 26). At #122, we find tomar, ‘to take’ (of uncertain origin), and at #133 país, ‘country,’ from French pays. From then on one sees progressively more borrowed words. The most frequent words show their age. Of the ten words in Table 6.1, only de and se descended intact from Latin. The others lost sounds or even syllables (sedere > ser being the sharpest reduction), and/or underwent a vowel change. Beyond phonology, the most dramatic change reflected in the top ten is the creation of the definite and indefinite articles. It’s startling to realize that the most common word in Spanish—el, and its feminine and plural counterparts—didn’t exist in Classical Latin. Spanish and the other Romance languages crafted their definite articles from the Latin demonstrative adjectives, and the indefinite articles from the Latin number ‘one.’ Other changes in meaning in the top ten include the expanded use of se and the shift of sedere from sitting to being (ser). It’s worth noting that ser, the most frequently used verb in Spanish, is also the most irregular. Frequency and irregularity are associated more generally in Spanish. As shown in Table 6.2, the dozen most frequent verbs in Spanish are all irregular. The first regular verb (llegar, ‘to arrive’) appears more than halfway through the top one hundred words, and irregulars remain common throughout. This is a familiar pattern: in general, only the most frequent verbs are able to resist the tendency for irregular forms to become regular over time. The English verbs be and have are likewise both irregular and frequent, ranking #2 and #8, respectively (recall Table 6.1).

Chapter 6 Spanish vocabulary

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Table 6.1  The ten most frequent words in Spanish and English

Spanish Frequency rank

Word

1

el/la/los/las ‘the’

ille, illa, illos, illas ‘this, that, those’

the

2

de ‘of, from’

de

be

3

que ‘what, that, which’

quid

and

4

y ‘and’

et

of

5

a ‘to’

ad

a

6

en ‘in’

in

in

7

un/una/unos/unos ‘a, some’

unus, una ‘one’

to (infinitive) e.g., To err is human.

8

ser ‘to be’

sedere ‘to sit’

have

9

se

se

to (preposition) e.g., Go to Madrid!

‘himself, herself, etc.’ ‘to him, to her,’ etc.’ 10

no ‘no’

Latin root Meaning (if different)

‘himself, herself, etc.’

non

English

it

Source: Davies (2006), Davies and Gardner (2010)

In fact, these two core English verbs are even more frequent than their Spanish equivalents, because Spanish divides the meaning of ‘to be’ between ser (#8 in Spanish) and estar (#17; see Question 41), and ‘to have’ between tener (#18) and the auxiliary haber, as in Había comido ‘I had eaten’ (#11). If we were to look further down the two lists, we would also find that subject pronouns are more frequent in English than in Spanish (Table 6.3). This reflects the Spanish reliance on conjugation rather than pronouns to identify the subject of a verb (see Question 80). Finally, Spanish ello is used much less than English it for reasons described in Question 74. The above discussion shows that word frequency analysis can be of linguistic interest, here highlighting the core importance of Vulgar Latin vocabulary, the seismic changes in pronunciation as this vocabulary evolved, the endurance of irregular but frequent verb patterns, and some key differences

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Part 2 Inside Spanish Table 6.2  Frequency rankings of irregular and regular Spanish verbs

Verb (frequency ranking) Irregular

Regular1

#8 ser ‘to be’ #11 haber ‘to have’ (auxiliary) #17 estar ‘to be’ (location, condition) #18 tener ‘to have’ #25 hacer ‘to make, to do’ #27 poder ‘to be able’ #28 decir ‘to say, to tell’ #30 ir ‘to go’ #37 ver ‘to see’ #39 dar ‘to give’ #46 saber ‘to know’ #57 querer ‘to want’ #66 llegar ‘to arrive’ #67 pasar ‘to pass’ #75 deber ‘to owe, should’ #77 poner ‘to put’ #81 parecer ‘to seem’ #89 quedar ‘to stay’ #91 creer ‘to believe’ #92 hablar ‘to speak’ #93 llevar ‘to carry, to wear’ #94 dejar ‘to leave behind’ #97 seguir ‘to follow’ #100 encontrar ‘to find, to meet’ 1 Llegar and creer require spelling changes in certain forms (e.g., llegué ‘I arrived,’ creyó ‘he believed’). However, these should not be considered irregularities because they are completely predictable, given the rules of Spanish pronunciation and spelling.

Source: Davies (2006)

between Spanish and English. Frequency analysis also has a practical side. It can be helpful to Spanish learners and teachers: within Spanish family vocabulary, for example, abuelo ‘grandfather’ (ranked #1,740) and tío ‘uncle’ (#1,755) are clearly higher classroom priorities than nieto ‘grandson’ (#2,615) and sobrino ‘nephew’ (#3,593).2 Knowledge of word frequencies can help language professionals, such as cryptographers, translators, and interpreters, correctly interpret ambiguous or garbled speech and text.

Chapter 6 Spanish vocabulary Table 6.3  Frequency rankings of Spanish and English subject pronouns

Spanish

English

yo: #52

I: #11

tú (informal, singular): #654

you: #14

vosotros (informal, plural): #4,132 usted, ustedes (polite): #269 él/ellos (he, they (m.)): #41

he: #15

ella/ellas (she, they (f.)): #69

she: #33 they: #21

nosotros: #191

we: #25

ello: #343

it: #10

Source: Davies (2006), Davies and Gardner (2010)

The most important use of word frequency analysis, however, is automated language processing. Software for applications including spell checking, optical character recognition, machine translation, and speech recognition relies on frequency data gathered from massive quantities of speech and/ or text. When combined with data on which words tend to occur together, frequency data is a powerful tool for accurate language processing.

Question 38. Where does Spanish vocabulary come from? En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme ‘Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I choose not to recall.’ This first line of the 1605 novel Don Quijote de La Mancha (Box 6.1) is probably the most famous bit of Spanish prose. It derives its vigor in part from the simplicity and authenticity of its vocabulary. All twelve words are what linguists call “popular” vocabulary: they passed directly from Classical Latin to Vulgar, or spoken Latin, then to Old Spanish, and finally to the modern language. The passage from Don Quijote is thus analogous to Dickens’s “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” and Melville’s “Call me Ishmael.” With the exception of Hebrew Ishmael, these famous first lines rely on core,

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Box 6.1. Don Quijote

The career of the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547– 1616) is an inspiration to any late bloomer. In 1605, at the age of fiftyeight, Cervantes published his most famous work, the novel El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de La Mancha. Although he had previously published a novel and various plays, Cervantes had never been able to make a living as a writer. In the early 1600s, he served a prison sentence in Seville for financial irregularities; according to his prologue for Don Quijote, the novel captured the bizarre flights of fancy that provided him a mental respite from the harsh reality of prison life. Don Quijote made Cervantes successful, though not rich, and over the next decade he published a sequel as well as several novellas. He died on April 23, 1616, the same day as William Shakespeare. Don Quijote satirizes the chivalrous novels popular in Spain at the time. Its protagonist is an aging country gentleman who loses his grip on reality after over-immersing himself in this literature. Convinced that he is a knight errant, he equips himself with a comically ill-suited set of chivalrous accoutrements—rusty armor, an old nag, a paunchy squire, and a once-glimpsed peasant girl as his true love—and has a series of adventures around the dusty plains of La Mancha. Don Quijote paints a vivid panorama of contemporary Spanish life as it addresses themes of imagination versus reality, idealism versus pragmatism, and loyalty versus betrayal. It's hard to overestimate Don Quijote's impact on Spanish and world culture. Its unrefined characters and psychological insights made it the first modern novel. Certainly one of the best-selling novels of all time, it has been translated into dozens of languages and has inspired works of visual art, theater, opera, and cinema. It has contributed to language: most famously, the word quijotesco ‘quixotic’ and the idiom luchar contra molinos de viento ‘to tilt at windmills.’ And it remains a terrific read.

Chapter 6 Spanish vocabulary

To learn more ll

González Echevarría (2009) is an engaging historical and literary introduction to Don Quijote.

ll

See Gutiérrez Cuadrado (1998) for a summary of the language of Don Quijote.

“popular” English vocabulary, descended from Anglo-Saxon through Old and Middle English to Modern English, rather than later French and sundry additions. We’ll see just below that “popular” Spanish words like lugar, mancha, and nombre make up only about a third of Spanish vocabulary. Nevertheless, because this category includes the most frequent words in Spanish (see previous question) it dominates Spanish usage in general, not just in Don Quijote. In a sampling of prose from a contemporary Spanish novel, almost two-thirds of the words used were in the “popular” group. Many other words in this sample also came from Latin, but entered Spanish later, via the written language, not oral transmission, as described in Question 16. Putting these two groups together, in this modest experiment more than nine out of ten words were from Latin.3 A different picture emerges when we turn our attention from Spanish usage, which favors high-frequency words, to the full spectrum of Spanish vocabulary. A random sampling of five hundred words from a standard etymological dictionary (Table 6.4) shows a considerably smaller majority of Latin words, accounting for two-thirds of the data.4 Most of the remaining word origins in Table 6.4 mirror the course of Spanish history. Spanish borrowed from the languages that predated Latin in the Iberian Peninsula, from the Germanic languages and Arabic that penetrated the Peninsula after the fall of Rome, from Greek (these are akin to the later, learned additions from Latin), from its sister European languages, and from the languages it encountered as it spread around the globe. The relatively low percentages of words borrowed from Spain’s Germanic and Arabic invaders stand in dramatic contrast with the lexical makeup of English, which borrowed approximately a third of its vocabulary from French, beginning with the Norman conquest of 1066.5 This linguistic contrast has historical roots. The Germanic invaders of the Iberian Peninsula quickly blended into Latin culture and may have already been speaking Latin by the time they crossed the Pyrenees. Arabic heavily influenced the local Romance dialect spoken in the occupied portion of the Peninsula (Mozárabe), but it was the northern Castilian dialect, forged with minimal Arabic influence, that

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Table 6.4  Sources of Spanish vocabulary in a random 500-word dictionary sample

Source Latin

Number of words 337

Percentage of total (%)

Example (from sample)

67

“Popular” words (from Vulgar Latin)

169

pecho ‘chest’

“Learned” words (later additions)

168

penitencia ‘penance’

Pre-Roman languages

6

1

Celtic

1

berrendo ‘antelope’

Other

5

nava ‘type of valley’

9

2

guardín ‘nautical cable’

Arabic

22

4

tabique ‘partition’

Other Romance

53

10

Early Germanic

French

23

dama ‘lady’

Catalan

11

confitero ‘candymaker’

Italian

9

carnaval

Portuguese/Galician

7

caramelo ‘caramel’

Occitan/Provençal

2

barriga ‘belly’

Mozarabic1

1

alpiste ‘type of grass’

Greek Other Indo-European

28

6

6

1

anemia

English

2

metodismo ‘Methodism’

German

2

burgomaestre ‘burgomaster’

Romani

2

postinero ‘show-off’

Farther afield

7

1

Native American

6

oca ‘type of root vegetable’

Japanese

1

quimono ‘kimono’

Chapter 6 Spanish vocabulary

Source

Number of words

Other sources

19

Onomatopoeia or “Creative expression”

13

Names for people and places Unknown

Percentage of total (%)

Example (from sample)

4

farfalloso ‘stammering’ tontura ‘foolishness’ calañés ‘type of hat’ (after town of Calañas)

6

18

141

4

tomar ‘to take’

1 Mozarabic was the Romance language spoken by the Christians living in Arabic-dominated Spain between 711 and 1492.

Source: Corominas (1973). Words with uncertain or non-Latin origins were checked against the etymologies in Corominas and Pascual (1980) and the latter accepted in cases of disagreement.

eventually became the Spanish standard. Unlike the Germanic conquerors of Spain, the Normans imposed their culture on the native population of Britain; unlike the Arabs, their legacy was never overwritten. One can argue that Table 6.4 understates the influence of Greek on the Spanish lexicon. Greek is the immediate source of 6 percent of the five hundred Spanish words in the sample, mostly medical and technical terms like anemia and semáforo ‘semaphore.’ However, even more Greek vocabulary entered Spanish through Latin. This includes popular words like tío and tía ‘aunt and uncle’ and bailar ‘to dance,’ learned words like rombo ‘rhombus,’ and derivational suffixes like -ismo and -ista (see next question). Greek words also passed into Spanish via Arabic (e.g., alquimia ‘alchemy’). If we added indirect borrowings to the Greek total in Table 6.4, the Hellenic contribution would rise to 14 percent. Other lexical crosscurrents reflected in the sample bring to mind not quite a melting pot, but perhaps a leaky composed salad. Arabic borrowed vocabulary from around the Mediterranean (including Rome) and the Middle East before passing it on to Spanish. Catalan, Italian, and especially French borrowed greedily: from each other and from Arabic, various Germanic languages, and Celtic. The Age of Exploration catalyzed further linguistic interaction. Words like oca and quimono entered Spanish from the New World and Asia. English borrowed the animal name mandrill (at least the drill part) from Africa and passed it on to Spanish as mandril. Finally, a substantial minority of words in the sample have either unconventional or unknown origins. Unconventional sources include names and sounds (onomatopoeia). Words with unknown origins may be as obscure

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Part 2 Inside Spanish

as carcoma ‘woodworm’ and poa ‘bluegrass,’ or as common as tomar ‘to take’ and barato ‘inexpensive.’ Possible explanations for such words can vary wildly. For example, the word cuy ‘guinea pig’ has been variously attributed to onomatopoeia, to Quechua (a Native American language), and to Basque. It’s humbling, yet exciting, that even a language as well-researched as Spanish still presents such etymological mysteries.

To learn more ll

Dworkin (2013) is the most comprehensive treatment of Spanish word origins. Pharies (2007: 169–89) is a good summary; while anecdotal, Taylor (2007) is an enjoyable introduction.

ll

See Penny (2002: 302–17) for more on changes in word meanings.

ll

Several other questions in this book look deeper into vocabulary from different sources: Latin (Questions 12 and 16), other Romance languages (Question 17), and non-Latin languages in Chapter 4.

Question 39. Why does Spanish have so many charming derivational endings? In life, endings are either happy or sad. In language, they are either inflectional or derivational. Inflectional word endings, or suffixes, are the workhorse of Spanish grammar: they mark number, gender, tense, subject, and other features on nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Examples are the feminine plural -as of españolas ‘Spanish women’ and the future ‘we’ -emos of hablaremos ‘We will speak.’ Derivational suffixes are less omnipresent than inflections, but more powerful: they create new words. The -dor of tostador ‘toaster’ turns the act of toasting (tostar) into an appliance; the -ismo of zapatismo turns Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary, into the movement he inspired. Spanish has derivational prefixes as well as suffixes, such as the con- of convivir ‘to live with’ and the in- of inesperado ‘unexpected.’ This pattern of affixes—suffixes for inflection, both suffixes and prefixes for derivation—is the most common arrangement worldwide. Derivational affixes have three outstanding properties. First, although affixes can create nouns from nouns (Zapata/zapatismo), verbs from verbs (vivir/convivir), and adjectives from adjectives (esperado/inesperado), many change a word’s grammatical category along with its meaning. The

Chapter 6 Spanish vocabulary

example above of the noun tostador, from the verb tostar, illustrates this process. Table 6.5 lists some other category-changing affixes in Spanish; note than most are suffixes, not prefixes. Second, more than one affix can be packed onto a word, creating dense but efficient mega-words. A dramatic example is impermeabilización ‘the act of making something impermeable.’ This word has at its core the verb permear ‘to permeate.’ It is transformed via the negative prefix im- and a sequence of three suffixes: -able (to create the adjective impermeable), -izar (for the verb impermeabilizar ‘to make impermeable’), and finally -ación (to produce the final noun). Affixes with the same meaning can be doubled up for a greater effect; thus chiquitillo ‘very little boy’ combines chico ‘boy’ with two diminutive endings, -ito and -illo. A final outstanding property of derivational affixes is their quantity. While inflection is limited by the number of grammatical categories in a language, the uses of derivation range as broadly as human cognition itself. (English -gate, meaning a scandal, is a striking example.) Spanish is particularly devoted to derivation; Penny tallies a few dozen prefixes and almost a hundred suffixes (2002: 285–98). Most derivational affixes express basic concepts, such as profession (a cajero ‘cashier’ mans the caja ‘cash register’), nationality (guatemalteco ‘Guatemalan’), and abstraction (pureza ‘purity,’ from puro). However, as suggested in this question’s title, a substantial subset can reasonably be characterized as “charming”: they add spice and often humor to everyday language. This description certainly fits the language’s many diminutive and Table 6.5  Examples of category-changing derivational affixes in Spanish

Change

Example(s) (prefix or suffix underlined)

Noun  Adjective

sabor ‘flavor’  sabroso ‘flavorful’

Noun  Verb

grupo ‘group’  agrupar ‘to group’ favor ‘favor’  favorecer ‘to favor, support’

Adjective  Noun

bello ‘beautiful’  belleza ‘beauty’

Adjective  Verb

gordo ‘fat’  engordar ‘to fatten’ pálido ‘pale’  palidecer ‘to turn pale’

Verb  Noun

estudiar ‘to study’  estudiante ‘student’

Verb  Adjective

mirar ‘to look’  mirón ‘nosy’

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augmentative affixes, which are added to nouns (and sometimes other words) to express small or large size. Cafecito ‘small cup of coffee’ and minifundio ‘small farm’ are diminutives; buenísimo ‘very good,’ requeteguapa ‘really attractive,’ and exitazo ‘smash hit’ are augmentatives. The -(c)ito diminutive ending often conveys an affectionate nuance—think mamacita or mamita, loving twists on mamá ‘mom’—as does -ín in words like pajarín ‘sweet little bird.’ Other diminutives have the opposite effect, implying an insult of the “measly” variety. Thus an abogadillo is a third-rate lawyer, a tipejo is an odd or nasty guy, and a reyzuelo is an unworthy king, a pretender. Augmentatives are even more likely to cast aspersions. A novelón isn’t just a long novela ‘novel’; it’s long and boring; an animalote is either a large animal or a brutish ignoramus. A related set of endings is purely insulting: a casucha is an ugly house (casa); latinajo is botched Latin. Spanish affixes that express extremely specific meanings are also standouts. My long-time favorite in this category is -azo, meaning a blow with something.6 There are so many different ways to strike a blow: not just with one’s fist (a puñazo ‘punch,’ from puño ‘fist’), knee (rodillazo), or elbow (codazo), but with a fan (abanicazo), a book (librazo), or really anything. Few people could manage an elefantazo (hitting someone with an elephant), but if they did, they could easily boast about it in Spanish. The -ía ending for a store is also delightful: when running one’s errands, it sounds more appealing to visit a pescadería, a quesería, and a zapatería than a fish store, cheese store, and shoe store. The agricultural endings -al/ar and -o elegantly express places (cafetal ‘coffee plantation,’ olivar ‘olive grove’) and plants (manzano ‘apple tree,’ cerezo ‘cherry tree’), respectively. Spanish came by most of its derivational affixes the same way lucky people come by their money: via inheritance—that is, from Latin. Greek and other languages have contributed as well. Latin passed many Greek suffixes on to Spanish, including -ía, -ismo, and -ista, while Greek prefixes including micro-, auto-, and proto- have entered the language more recently, via English. The lone Spanish affix not from Latin or Greek is -í, an Arabic suffix of nationality (israelí, iraní). Other foreign contributions have been subtler. Several Latin affixes, including super- (as in superabundante), -aje (reciclaje ‘recycling’), and -ísimo (buenísimo) were not actively used in Spanish until the language had borrowed a critical mass of words containing these affixes from English, French, and Italian, respectively. Contact with English and French, which use re- to indicate a repeated action, has altered the meaning of Spanish re- from its traditional use as an augmentative. This change can be seen in the two meanings of the verb recalentar: the older ‘to overheat’ and the newer ‘reheat.’ Other developments in Spanish affixes have taken place without foreign influence. The use of -o versus -a to denote fruit trees versus fruit (e.g.,

Chapter 6 Spanish vocabulary

manzano ‘apple tree’ vs. manzana ‘apple’) could already be seen in a few Latin word pairs but became both systematic and widespread in Spanish (Pountain 2005). The contrast between -dor and -dora for hand tools versus machines is newer, less well established, and 100 percent Spanish (Pountain 2006a). The augmentative requete-, another unique Spanish creation, preserves and amplifies the traditional Spanish usage of re-. Some Spanish words that contain derivational prefixes or suffixes have changed so much over time that their origin is no longer obvious. Few modern Spanish speakers would connect degollar ‘to slit someone’s throat’ with collar ‘neckband, necklace’ or cuello ‘neck,’ given the change from c (pronounced k) to g and the specific meaning the verb has acquired. Many diminutives and augmentatives have drifted away from their special meanings; thus bolsillo ‘pocket’ and tazón ‘bowl’ originally meant ‘little bag’ and ‘big cup.’ A derived word whose meaning changes can even replace its original source. Mantequilla ‘butter,’ originally a diminutive, has replaced manteca. Likewise, the -eja of oveja ‘sheep,’ oreja ‘ear,’ and abeja ‘bee’ was originally a diminutive attached to the Latin words ovis, auris, and apis. Spanish speakers consciously embrace derivation, so that it crops up throughout Hispanic culture. Costa Ricans call themselves ticos, from the diminutive ending they famously favor. Cervantes deliberately composed Don Quijote’s name, with its insulting -ote ending (similar to -ucha and -ajo), to bolster his novel’s satirical theme (Box 6.1). Word play with affixes is a natural fit for children’s songs, from Aserrín, aserrán, to Luna, lunera, to Pancho Panchito (who loses his sombrerito). In sum, derivation in Spanish is more than just charming. It is simultaneously historic and innovative, expressive and informative. It is a vital part of the language and the culture, a source of linguistic pleasure and identity for all Spanish speakers.

To learn more ll

Penny (2002: 284–301) offers a full treatment of this topic.

ll

Also useful, with a pedagogical slant, is Gordon and Stillman (1999: 375–84); Stewart focuses on today’s most used affixes (1999: 64–78).

ll

Santana et al. (2004) approach derivation from a computational standpoint. Their frequency lists and their diagram of the many words derived from permeable are particularly useful.

ll

Pharies (2002) is a special-purpose dictionary devoted entirely to Spanish suffixes.

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SPECIFIC AREAS OF VOCABULARY Question 40. Why do most Spanish negatives begin with n? Most Spanish negative words, from no ‘no’ to nunca ‘never,’ begin with the sound n. Does this mean that they are related, as is clearly the case with English words like nobody and nowhere? The answer is both yes and no: the Spanish n– negatives fall into two distinct groups of related words. Some can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European negative *ne, and some, more surprisingly, to the Latin word nascor ‘to be born.’ These groups illustrate two historical processes that have created additional Spanish negatives as well as negatives in other languages. The first of these processes is compounding: the creation of a new word from two or more independent words, such as lavaplatos ‘dishwasher.’ As shown in Figure 6.1, no, ni ‘neither/nor,’ and nunca all began as Latin compounds based on *ne. These compounds became shorter over time, developing into Classical Latin non, nec, and numquam, the direct ancestors of the equivalent Spanish words. Such shrinkage is common in highfrequency compounds; another Spanish example is the evolution of vuestra merced ‘your mercy’ into the formal pronoun usted ‘you’ (Question 75). A second round of compounding in Old Spanish later produced ninguno. Nada ‘nothing’ and nadie ‘nobody’ illustrate a completely different linguistic process, one common enough to have its own name: Jespersen’s cycle, in honor of Otto Jespersen, the Danish linguist who first wrote about it in 1917. The cycle takes place when a positive element reinforces, and eventually replaces, an existing negative. It’s as if the English expression a bit, which reinforces the word not in sentences like I’m not a bit hungry, were to become negative itself. In the case of nadie and nada, the cycle began with the Latin expressions non homines nati ‘no people born’ and non res nata ‘nothing born,’ which were roughly equivalent to English ‘not a soul’ and ‘nothing

Figure 6.1  Spanish negatives from compounds.

Chapter 6 Spanish vocabulary

on Earth.’ As Latin evolved into Spanish, instead of these phrases becoming compounds, the adjectives nati and nata became stand-alone negatives, in the process undergoing the slight phonetic changes that produced nadie and nada.7 The two historical processes combined to produce the two remaining Spanish negatives. Jamás ‘never’ (a synonym of nunca) started as a compound of ya más ‘any more,’ and tampoco ‘either’ as a compound of tanto poco ‘so little.’ Jespersen’s cycle then turned jamás and tampoco into negatives. For examples in other languages, one need look no further than English and French. Nobody, nowhere, and nothing are compounds based on no, while none comes from Old English nān, a compound of ne ‘not’ and an ‘one.’ Jespersen’s cycle has been extremely active in French, whose negatives from rien ‘nothing’ to personne ‘nobody’ for the most part began as positives. In fact, rien comes from the same root as the res in res nata. Jespersen’s cycle has continued to operate in modern Spanish, where en absoluto has emerged as a new negative term meaning ‘not at all.’ It initially served as a reinforcer in sentences like No voy a ir a la fiesta en absoluto ‘I am absolutely not going to the party’ but has taken on an intrinsic negative meaning. In other words, En absoluto voy a ir a la fiesta no longer means ‘I am absolutely going to the party,’ but its opposite. Likewise, en modo alguno ‘in some way’ has come to mean ‘in no way.’ It’s déjà vu all over again!

To learn more ll

Posner (2002: 302–05) discusses Jespersen’s cycle in Romance, though not by name. Deutscher relates it to the general linguistic processes of erosion and reinforcement of meaning, again, not by name (2005: 97–101).

ll

See Penny (2002: 147–48) and Corominas (1973) for more on the origins of the Spanish negatives, including alternate forms seen in earlier stages of the language.

Question 41. Why does Spanish have two words that mean ‘to be’ (ser and estar) and two words that mean ‘to know’ (saber and conocer)? Spanish teachers have to spend a lot of time explaining and drilling distinctions that exist in Spanish but not English. Besides other distinctions explored in this chapter (por and para for ‘for,’ ese and aquel for ‘that’), Spanish has two simple past tenses (Question 84), two moods (indicative and subjunctive,

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see Question 87), masculine and feminine nouns (Question 70), and multiple words for ‘you’ (Question 75). Two of the most common of these distinctions involve verbs. Spanish divides the concept ‘to be’ into ser, used to describe fundamental characteristics like appearance or personality, and estar, for locations and temporary states (emotions, health, cleanliness, etc.). And it divides ‘to know’ into saber, which applies to knowledge of information or skills, and conocer, which connotes familiarity with people, places, or fields of knowledge. Some examples of the four verbs are shown in Table 6.6. Looking at these verbs, and keeping in mind the other contrasts mentioned earlier, it’s tempting to jump to some grand conclusion about the nature of the Spanish language. Perhaps Spanish is fundamentally more expressive than other languages or “cares” more (in some anthropomorphic sense) about fine distinctions in meaning. It’s best to avoid this temptation, for Spanish itself lacks many distinctions that are present in other languages. The Spanish verb hacer expresses both ‘to make’ and ‘to do,’ the possessive su can mean ‘his,’ ‘her,’ ‘your,’ and ‘their’ (Question 78), and the singular verb form hay means both ‘there is’ and ‘there are’ (Question 94). More examples emerge if we widen the playing field beyond distinctions found in English. Arabic’s dual plural, reserved for pairs of people or objects, is completely alien to Spanish. German has two verbs that mean ‘to go’: gehen refers to transportation by foot (this is more Table 6.6  Main uses of ser and estar, saber and conocer

Ser ‘to be’ (fundamental characteristics) La catedral es aburrida. ‘The cathedral is boring.’

Estar ‘to be’ (condition, location)1 Los niños en la catedral están aburridos. ‘The kids in the cathedral are bored.’ La catedral está en la plaza. ‘The cathedral is in the plaza.’

Saber ‘to know’ (information, skills)

Conocer ‘to know’ (people, places, etc.)

Yo sé donde baila. ‘I know where he dances.’

No conozco al bailador. ‘I don’t know the dancer.’

Sabe bailar flamenco. ‘He knows how to dance flamenco.’

Conoce el flamenco. ‘He knows about flamenco.’

To make things more interesting, ser is used for the location of events, as in La fiesta es en mi colegio mayor ‘The party is in my dorm.’

1

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general than laufen ‘to walk,’ a cognate of English lope), and fahren to other means of transportation. Again, Spanish doesn’t make this distinction; it just has ir. The list could go on and on. As it turns out, the most interesting aspects of the ser/estar and saber/ conocer contrasts are historical. First, while the distinction between saber and conocer goes back to Latin, the ser/estar contrast is a uniquely Iberian innovation. It is found in Portuguese, Galician, and Catalan as well as Spanish, though with some variations in usage, making it an important hallmark of this language group. Second, like the prepositions discussed in Question 43, three out of the four verbs aptly illustrate the universal linguistic tendency for word meanings to expand, over time, from physical to more abstract domains: ll

Estar comes from the Latin verb stare ‘to stand.’ The verb’s original meaning has been completely lost; to express it, modern Spanish speakers must say estar de pie ‘to be on foot.’ The use of estar as a general-purpose locative (as in La catedral está en la plaza) is a simple extension of the verb’s original meaning, that is, from standing somewhere to being somewhere. Its use in sentences like Los niños en la catedral están aburridos shows a metaphorical extension from physical position to a wider range of conditions; compare English uses like standing firm. Likewise, the related word estado ‘state’ is used to describe conditions such as an estado de ansiedad ‘state of anxiety’ in both languages. The metaphorical transition from ‘standing’ to ‘being’ has been documented in other languages, from New Guinea to Angola (Heine and Kuteva 2002: 282).

ll

Ser is an amalgam of two Latin verbs: esse ‘to be’ and sedere ‘to sit.’ Esse, a highly irregular verb, is the source of most forms of the modern Spanish verb, while sedere gave Spanish the infinitive ser ‘to be’ as well as subjunctive forms like sea ‘I would be’ and seamos ‘we would be.’ As with estar, the metaphorical transition from ‘sitting’ to ‘being’ is well documented worldwide (Heine and Kuteva 2002: 278); compare English uses like sitting pretty.

ll

Saber comes from Latin sapere, which itself derives from the IndoEuropean root *sep- ‘to taste, perceive.’ Saber has, in fact, preserved this original meaning, so that it does double duty as ‘to know’ and ‘to taste.’ Saber’s primary meaning, ‘to know,’ represents a metaphorical leap from physical to cognitive perceptions. As a nice parallel, the German verb wissen ‘to know’ comes from the root *wid- ‘to see’ (the source of the Spanish verb ver).

ll

Conocer is the most stable verb of the four verbs considered in this question; it can be traced back to the Indo-European root *gnō‘to know.’8

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Ser, estar, and saber are among the fifty most frequent words in Spanish (conocer is #124). The average Spanish speaker probably uses each of these verbs several times a day, all the while unaware of their historical twists and turns. In this way, these speakers accidentally personify the difference between knowing a language (saber) and knowing its history (conocer).

Question 42. Why does Spanish have two words that mean ‘that’ (ese and aquel)? This question is literally about ‘this’ and ‘that.’ Spanish, like English, distinguishes between these meanings in its pointing words, or “demonstratives.” Este ‘this’ refers to something that is closer to the speaker, while ese ‘that’ refers to something farther away. The same distinction holds in the plural, between estos ‘these’ and esos ‘those.’ Spanish, of course, also has female variants, both singular (esta and esa) and plural (estas and esas). Like a substantial minority of languages, Spanish takes demonstratives one step further. It has a three-way distinction between este, ese, and also aquel, which again means ‘that,’ but refers to something far away. It is akin to the obsolete English demonstrative yonder (as in Romeo’s What light through yonder window breaks?). It has a plural, aquellos, as well as the feminine forms aquella and aquellas. Some examples of all these demonstratives are in Table 6.7. There’s a certain linguistic logic to this three-way system, one that might ring a bell for anyone who has ever conjugated a Spanish verb. Because este, ese, and aquel refer to something close to the speaker, away from the speaker, and farther away, they are analogous to the grammatical first person (‘I’ and ‘we’), second person (‘you’), and third person (‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘it,’ and ‘they’). As described in Question 78, there is often a historical connection between aquel-type demonstratives and third-person pronouns. Table 6.7  Some examples of the three-way demonstrative contrast

Este (this/these)

Ese (that/those)

Aquel (that/those—far away)

esta noche ‘tonight’

ese muchacho ‘that boy’

aquel país ‘that far-away country’

estos libros ‘these books’

esas flores ‘those flowers’

aquellas ventanas ‘those far-away windows’

Chapter 6 Spanish vocabulary

Figure 6.2  Development of este, ese, and aquel.

In particular, the Spanish pronouns él, ella, ellos, and ellas (‘he,’ ‘she,’ and ‘they’), are direct descendants of the various forms of the Latin demonstrative ille ‘that.’ The evolution of the Spanish este/ese/aquel triplet resembles a complex round of musical chairs, or perhaps three-card monte. Latin already had a three-way demonstrative distinction: hic ‘this,’ iste ‘that,’ and ille ‘that (distant).’ Hic dropped out of use, probably because it was too short to hold up to phonetic change over time, and iste was repurposed as ‘this’ to fill the gap. Ese, which took the place of iste, came from ipse, which originally had an intensive meaning; Caesar ipse would mean ‘Caesar himself’ (or perhaps ‘that guy Caesar,’ with a negative undertone). As ille was in the process of becoming the pronoun él ‘he,’ its original demonstrative usage was reinforced with a variant of the dramatic pointing word Ecce ‘Behold!’ (as in the biblical Ecce homo). These convolutions are summarized in Figure 6.2. As mentioned above, two- and three-member demonstrative systems are both common. Other variations are also possible, though less frequent. Colloquial German, for example, has a single demonstrative dieser, which does double duty as ‘this’ and ‘that.’ German jener (akin to yonder) is used only in writing and in formal speech. At the other end of the spectrum, some languages have four or five degrees of demonstratives. Hausa, for example, distinguishes nân (near the speaker), nan (near the hearer), cân (away from speaker and hearer), and can (far away from both).

To learn more ll

Penny (2002: 143–44) describes the history of este, ese, and aquel in more detail.

ll

The crosslinguistic data are from Diessel (2013). He reports 127 languages with two degrees of demonstratives (like English), eightyeight languages with three degrees (like Spanish), seven with a single demonstrative (like German), eight with four degrees (like Hausa), and four with five degrees.

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Deutscher (2005: 227–31) explores demonstratives from a crosslinguistic perspective: both their origin, and their eventual exploitation in grammar, for example, as pronouns.

Question 43. Why are Spanish prepositions unpredictable? It’s easy to overlook prepositions—but please don’t. These humble little words encode spatial relations such as in, under, and around: “anywhere a mouse can go,” as my second-grade teacher helpfully explained. But while a Spanish ratón, a British mouse, and a German Maus are equally nimble, the behavior of prepositions in different languages can vary greatly. Spanish en, for example, corresponds to English in, on, and sometimes at. This means that this summer’s hottest mystery novel may be found en una silla en la casa en la playa ‘on a chair in the house at the beach.’ The strong tendency for prepositions to leap from literal to figurative domains makes them even less predictable. Why should a Spanish speaker soñar con hacer algo ‘dream of doing something’—literally, ‘dream with’—but consentir en hacer algo diferente ‘consent to do something else’—that is, ‘consent in?’9 Focusing first on purely spatial uses of prepositions, Spanish en turns out to be an outstanding example of crosslinguistic variation. Its broad range of meanings make en not only different from English in, but a genuine crosslinguistic oddity (Box 6.2). It’s easy to find other, less dramatic cases in which Spanish and other languages divide up the spatial world in slightly different

Box 6.2. En as a crosslinguistic outlier How unusual is the Spanish use of en to express both ‘on’ and ‘in?’ More generally, to what degree do languages vary in their treatment of simple spatial relations? In one widely cited study, Bowerman and Pederson (1992a) divided semantic relations of the ‘on’ and ‘in’ variety into a series of more specific relations, ranging from support from below to full inclusion (Figure 6.3). They then asked speakers of thirty-eight languages to describe these relations using their own language. The pictures shown in the figure (among others) were used as stimuli. Only speakers of Spanish and Portuguese used a single term (en in Spanish) to describe the entire continuum. The English solution—in for

Chapter 6 Spanish vocabulary

full inclusion (Column F), and on for everything else—was shared by many unrelated languages including Hebrew, Hungarian, and Mayan. Other solutions were remarkably diverse. Speakers of languages like Japanese restricted the equivalent of on to cases of support from below (Column A). For the other on-ish relations (Columns B to E), they fell back on a vague term—analogous to English at, but broader—that merely indicates the presence of a spatial relation. Speakers of Dutch divided the on/in spectrum into three rather than two prepositions, while the equivalents of in and on in languages like Berber were both used to express the relations in Columns B and C. Other language differences exceeded the boundaries of this figure: Japanese speakers, for example, combined the concepts of ‘on’ and ‘above’ a supporting surface, like the table in Column A. However, no language violated the ordering shown in the figure, combining, say, Columns B and D alone into a single preposition. This suggests that, to some extent, people around the world share a perceptual model of spatial relations that is independent of language.

Figure 6.3  Six spatial relations expressed by en and their linguistic treatment in other languages. Adapted by permission from Bowerman and Choi 2001; illustration courtesy of Bowerman and Pederson (1992b).

A later study (Levinson et al. 2003), which looked at a wider range of spatial relations, did not include Spanish but confirmed that its merger of ‘on’ and ‘in’ is anomalous.

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ways. Spanish de expresses both a part/whole relationship and point of origin, as in Uno de mis amigos viene de Madrid ‘One of my friends is coming from Madrid.’ On the other hand, Spanish uses separate prepositions to describe exterior and interior location, as in Construyeron un muro alrededor de la ciudad ‘They built a wall around the city’ and El turista deambuló por la ciudad ‘The tourist meandered around the city.’ It’s no wonder, then, that spatial prepositions are a major headache for language learners. Spanish speakers, for instance, have to learn where to draw the dividing line between English on and in, while English speakers inevitably say a la playa (literally ‘to the beach’) instead of en la playa ‘at the beach.’ These mistakes are all the more frustrating for being unexpected: prepositions don’t look difficult! Using the wrong preposition while focusing on known hazards, such as irregular verbs, is like getting a tick bite while scanning the woods for large predators. Languages naturally exploit the power of metaphor to extend spatial terms to more abstract domains; this enables us to talk about taking sides in an argument or bringing down a dictator. Other spatial metaphors are equally plausible: if I take my friend’s side, I also have her back or hold her hand, while a dictator who has been brought down is also overthrown or dethroned. The flexibility of metaphor adds an extra layer of unpredictability to prepositions that venture out of their original spatial domain. A good example is the variety of prepositions used in basic Spanish time expressions. As shown in Table 6.8, en ‘in’ is reserved for relatively long periods of time: weeks or longer. Shorter periods of time are marked by other prepositions or by no preposition at all. There is no logical connection between each time interval and its associated preposition (if any); each row in the table represents an equally plausible metaphorical mapping from space to time. It’s not surprising, then, to find dialectal variation: in Latin America, por la mañana (and related expressions) are often replaced by en la mañana or, less commonly, a la mañana. Spanish often combines verbs with a metaphorically extended preposition, usually de, a, en, or con. The choice of preposition in these so-called phrasal verbs again illustrates the additive unpredictability of metaphor.10 The preposition de in Spanish phrasal verbs, for example, can correspond to a variety of English prepositions—or to none—including its core meanings ‘of’ and ‘from’ (Table 6.9). The point of this table is not so much to show the differences between English and Spanish, but rather to underscore that each metaphorical extension of de has equally valid prepositional alternatives. Enamorarse de ‘to fall in love with’ could just as easily be expressed with the preposition con ‘with,’ as in English—or, for that matter, with something else. Why not fall in love to someone (a), or on them (en)? Along these lines, phrasal verbs in other languages employ metaphors that sound exotic

Chapter 6 Spanish vocabulary Table 6.8  Spanish prepositions in basic time expressions

Unit of time

Preposition(s)

Examples

Week or longer

en ‘in’

en una semana ‘in a week’ en julio ‘in July’ en el verano ‘in the summer’ en 1492 ‘in 1492’ en el siglo veinte ‘in the twentieth century’

Day of the week

el/los ‘the’ instead of preposition

el domingo, los domingos ‘on Sunday/s’ literally ‘the Sunday/s’ el fin de semana ‘on the weekend’ literally ‘the weekend’

de ‘of’ (a.m./p.m.)

Part of the day

por ‘through’

las diez de la mañana ‘10:00 in the morning’ literally ‘of the morning’ por la mañana ‘in the morning’ literally ‘through the morning’

a ‘to’

Time of day

a las dos ‘at 2:00’ literally ‘to 2:00’

Table 6.9  Some Spanish de phrasal verbs (with English equivalents)

Spanish

English

quejarse de

‘complain about’

maravillarse de

‘marvel at’

aburrirse de

‘be bored by’

librarse de

‘escape from’

cambiar/variar de

‘vary in’

aprovecharse de

‘take advantage of’

vivir de

‘live on’

despedirse de

‘say goodbye to’

enamorarse de

‘fall in love with’

salir de

‘leave’ (no preposition)

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to both English or Spanish ears: in Hebrew, one doesn’t choose something, but chooses in it, and isn’t afraid of something, but from it. While Spanish phrasal verbs do fall into some recurring patterns—for example, many de phrasals have negative connotations—my usual advice to students is to memorize each one as a single vocabulary item. Spanish lacks the phrasal verbs like go up and look for, so common in English, that are based on high-frequency verbs of motion and perception, and expresses their meanings with simple verbs instead (see Table 6.10). On the other hand, dozens of Spanish phrasal verbs can do something no English phrasal can: precede another verb. In sentences like Tratemos de entender la lección ‘Let’s try to understand the lesson,’ tratar ‘to try’ is conjugated, entender ‘to understand’ is in the infinitive, and the preposition de is entirely lost in translation.11 A more literal but awkward translation would be ‘Let’s try of to understand the lesson.’ These differences between Spanish and English have historical roots. Phrasal verbs like those in Table 6.10 are common in Germanic languages besides English, while phrasal verbs before infinitives are found in almost all Romance languages, though not in Classical Latin (Posner 2002: 163; Bastardas Parera 1953: 167). Most phrasal verbs that precede infinitives use the same small set of prepositions—a, con, de, and en—as those discussed earlier (like quejarse de), which normally precede nouns. It’s possible to identify some recurring patterns in their usage. For example, many a and de phrasals describe the beginning and end of an action, respectively (e.g., empezar a, acabar de). This is a logical metaphorical extension of the original spatial meanings of a ‘to’ and de ‘from.’ Likewise, a phrasals that describe helping or teaching bring someone metaphorically closer ‘to’ a goal. However, some phrasal verbs, like soñar con ‘dream of,’ stand outside the usually recognized patterns, while others defy them. For example, negarse a ‘refuse to’ means Table 6.10  Some Spanish/English discrepancies in phrasal verbs of motion and perception

Verb type

Spanish (simple)

English (phrasal)

Motion

subir

go up

sentarse

sit down

sacar

take out

tirar

throw away

buscar

look for

mirar

look at

escuchar

listen to

Perception

Chapter 6 Spanish vocabulary

that the relevant action won’t begin, and tratar de ‘try to’ expresses intention rather than termination. Again, my usual advice to students is to memorize each verb with its preposition. We have seen that a variety of factors combine to make Spanish prepositions unpredictable. Like all languages, Spanish has its own, somewhat idiosyncratic division of spatial relations into linguistic terms, with en as an outstanding example. The use of these prepositions becomes even less predictable when they are metaphorically extended into nonspatial domains, such as time. Their behavior as part of phrasal verbs is shaped both by metaphor and by historical trends in larger language families. “Anywhere a mouse can go” turns out to be an intricate maze, indeed.

To learn more ll

Batchelor and Pountain (2005) present a detailed compendium of Spanish prepositional uses, including phrasal verbs.

ll

Deutscher (2005) discusses the role of metaphor in semantic change in a variety of languages (115–43), including, specifically, the extension of spatial terms to time expressions (133–35).

ll

The following question discusses por and para, two prepositions with a multiplicity of spatial and nonspatial uses.

ll

Schulte (2007) analyzes in detail the rise of the Romance pattern of phrasal verbs before infinitives and compares Spanish usage with both Portuguese and Romanian.

ll

See companion website for an expanded version of Table 6.9, and more examples of phrasal verbs.

Question 44. Why does Spanish have two words that mean ‘for’ (por and para)? The distinction between por and para, the two Spanish words that mean ‘for,’ stubbornly defies generalization. Both words have multiple senses. Para often expresses directionality, whether geographic, chronological, or interpersonal: El tren salió para Madrid. ‘The train left for Madrid.’ La tarea es para el viernes. ‘The homework is for Friday.’ El regalo es para ti. ‘The gift is for you.’

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In a metaphorical sense, one can also see directionality in the use of para, with a following verb, to designate the purpose of an action or object: Fui a la tienda para comprar azúcar. ‘I went to the store to buy sugar.’ El lápiz es para escribir. ‘The pencil is for writing.’

But in other contexts—that is, before nonverbs—the same meaning is conveyed by por: Fui a la tienda por azúcar. ‘I went to the store for sugar.’ ¿Por qué fuiste a la tienda? ‘Why [= for what purpose] did you go to the store?’

Para is also used in comparisons, a context that has nothing to do with directionality: Habla bien para un norteamericano. ‘He speaks well for an American.’

Of the remaining senses of por, several involve an exchange or substitution: Le di mi carro por el suyo. ‘I gave him my car for his.’ Pagué $20 por el sombrero. ‘I paid $20 for the hat.’ Gracias por el regalo. ‘Thank you for the gift.’ Hoy enseñó otra profesora por la normal. ‘Today a different teacher taught for (instead of) our regular teacher.’

But other senses are as diverse as period of time, location, and means: Trabajé por la mañana. ‘I worked in the morning.’ (time) Estará por aquí. ‘It must be around here’ (location) Ganó por esfuerzo. ‘She won through effort.’ (means)

To a large extent, the complications of por and para are the direct result of their history. Por merged the two Latin prepositions per and pro, each of which already had multiple senses, thus creating one mega-preposition with a wide range of uses. Spanish (and Portuguese) then split off the directional uses of por into the new preposition para, formed in Old Spanish by compounding por with a ‘to.’12 Its original form pora was replaced by para in the late thirteenth century, possibly in imitation of the exclamatory par, as in ¡Par Dios! ‘By God!’ Over time, para has gained ground at por’s expense as it has taken on new meanings, such as comparison. Figure 6.4 illustrates this shift. The multiple and somewhat overlapping meanings of por and para present a genuine challenge for Spanish students, inspiring innumerable lesson plans, websites, and review chapters. Here, a college instructor from Madrid describes some evasive techniques that foreign students adopt to sidestep the problem: Quite often, in the beginning and intermediate levels the preposition disappears entirely because the student doesn’t know it, or doesn’t know

Chapter 6 Spanish vocabulary

Figure 6.4  Relative frequencies of por and para over time. Data courtesy of RAE 2013, consulted April 30, 2014.

its meanings. But the problem is also found in students at the advanced and superior levels who, in speaking, try to mask the preposition by saying it in a low tone of voice, which shows their awareness of the problem. In written Spanish, avoidance results in the appearance of complex and even convoluted wording which aims to replace the preposition, or, failing that, changes it to another expression in which it does appear, but incorrectly. (Silverio 1997)

When students do use por and para correctly, they simplify the task by initially restricting each preposition to a limited set of uses: typically, beneficiary (as in para ti) and purpose for para, and time for por (Zyzik 2013). Children learning Spanish as a first language follow a similar strategy, except that their first uses of por invariably describe location, not time (Castro Yánez and Sandoval Zúñiga 2009; Peronard 1985).13 This can plausibly be explained by the simple fact that children’s conversations center around manipulative play, such as trains that go through tunnels, dolls that go through doorways, and the like. On the other hand, college students are more likely to talk about when

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things happen and how long they take, such as taking a class in the morning, living in Madrid for six weeks, and so on. In either case these first meanings provide a first foothold within a complex system that can only be mastered over time.

To learn more ll

The history of por and para above is based on Penny (2002: 243).

Chapter 7 The written language

Chapter 7 The written language

Questions The Spanish alphabet 45 What happened to ch and ll? (p. 163) 46 Where does ñ come from? (p. 164) 47 Why does Spanish have both b and v? (p. 165) 48 Why is h silent? (p. 167) 49 Why doesn’t Spanish capitalize days of the week and months of the year? (p. 168) 50 Is Spanish spelling phonetic? (p. 170) Accents and diacritical marks 51 Why does Spanish have so many accent marks? (p. 171) 52 Why do some words keep an accent in the plural, some gain an accent, and some lose an accent? (p. 174) 53 Who invented the inverted exclamation and question marks? (p. 175) 54 Why doesn’t Spanish use apostrophes? (p. 176) Writing in the machine age 55 How do you write txt msgs in Spanish? (p. 177) 56 How do you write Spanish on a computer? (p. 180)

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By way of introduction to this topic, consider the Mexican retablo ex-voto shown in Figure 7.1. It is part of a tradition of folk paintings on tin plates that commemorate divine intervention after an accident or illness. As in most retablos, the accompanying text is full of spelling mistakes: El dia 15 de Enero de 1930 le acontecio la desgracia que viniendo en su burro el Sr. José Santarrosa lo hecho por tierra y quedo todo lastimado en este acontecimiento inboco a la milagrosa imagen de Sr. de la Clemencia y en pocos dias recupero su salud en agradecimiento de este milagro coloco este retablo y hace publica esta gracia recibida. The 15th day of January of 1930 the misfortune occurred that while coming on his burro, Señor José Santarrosa was thrown to the ground and sustained many injuries. In this incident he prayed to the miraculous image of the Lord of Clemency and in a few days he regained his health. In appreciation for this miracle he hung this retablo and makes public the gift he received.

These errors—the confusion of b and v in inboco (for invocó), the misplaced h of hecho (for echó), and the missing accent marks on all the underlined words—exemplify the challenges that Spanish spelling can pose for native speakers. People who learn Spanish as a second language mostly face a different set of problems: They often pronounce those silent h’s, forget to use ¡ and ¿, confuse n and ñ, add apostrophes (ʼ), and capitalize too many words. And everyone has trouble with accents!

Figure 7.1  A retablo ex-voto. Courtesy of David and Ana Vagi.

Chapter 7 The written language

In this chapter, these topics are divided into two general categories: the alphabet, and accents and punctuation. Two final questions address how Spanish is written in the machine age. We begin with a question about an internationally controversial moment in the history of the Spanish alphabet. Seriously.

THE SPANISH ALPHABET Question 45. What happened to ch and ll? In 1994, and again in 2010, the Spanish alphabet made the New York Times. On May 1, 1994, under the headline “In Spanish, Two Fewer Letters in Alphabet,” the Times reported that “the world’s more than three hundred million Spanish speakers now have two fewer letters in their alphabet, a mostly bookkeeping move that won almost unanimous support but disturbed some traditionalists.” The two “letters” eliminated were actually the two digraphs—that is, two-letter combinations—ch and ll. Thus the verb chillar ‘to shout, shriek’ was considered to have five letters before 1994 (ch, i, ll, a, and r), but seven letters thereafter (c, h, i, l, l, a, and r). While the change in the alphabet didn’t affect how Spanish words are written, it did have several practical effects. It changed how the alphabet is taught throughout the Spanish-speaking world, and forced a large-scale reprinting of Spanish dictionaries. Most importantly—and this is the effect that motivated the change—it simplified language processing software. Before 1994, software routines that relied on alphabetical order needed to make exceptions for Spanish, since all Spanish words with c were alphabetized before those with ch, and likewise for l and ll. For example, culebra ‘snake’ was considered alphabetically prior to chico ‘boy,’ and luchar ‘to fight’ prior to llano ‘flat, plain’—a bizarre phenomenon from a non-Spanish perspective. With ch and ll eliminated as separate letters, Spanish no longer required special computational handling. That this change happened at all, and that it took place uniformly across the Spanish-speaking world, illustrates the power of the Real Academia Española, which first codified the Spanish alphabet in 1726 (Question 2). In 1994, after a year-long committee study, the twenty-one member academies voted to follow Spain’s lead in eliminating ch and ll. Interestingly, Nicaragua, Panama, and Uruguay abstained from the vote, and Ecuador voted against the change because its representative personally opposed it (C. Mena, p.c.).

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The change attracted much more attention in 2010, when the Real Academia published a completely revised, eight-hundred-page edition of its Ortografía, or spelling manual, to great fanfare throughout the Spanishspeaking world (RAE 2011). As the New York Times reported on November 25 of that year, not all the attention was positive. The most colorful reaction was that of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who complained that he would have to change his name to Avez. The journalist Jorge Covarrubias, the general secretary of the U.S. branch of the Real Academia, compared this hullabaloo to the reaction when Pluto was demoted to a dwarf planet. Given the Academia’s power, the most ardent partisans of ch and ll, like fans of planet Pluto, had to accept the change and move on.

To learn more ll

The proceedings of the X Congreso of 1994, including the vote on the alphabet, were published as RAE 1998.

Question 46. Where does ñ come from? The Spanish letter ñ is pronounced like the n in onion. This sound developed from Latin n in a variety of contexts: ll

double nn: annus  año ‘year’

ll

mn: damnum  dannum  daño ‘harm’

ll

before i or e: Hispania  España, aranea  araña ‘spider’

ll

after g: signalis  señal ‘sign’

The double nn itself is the source of the letter ñ: the tilde ~ is a stylized rendition of an n, so ñ reads as “n over n,” a shorthand form of nn. The ñ was already in use by medieval times and has come to be a recognizable and beloved symbol of the Spanish language. In 1991, when a European Community report recommended that Spain repeal a regulation that required an ñ key on all computers sold there, protests came from Spain’s Foreign Ministry, from the Real Academia Española (Question 2), and even from Colombia’s Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez, who released the following statement: It is scandalous, to say the least, that the European Economic Community has dared to propose that Spain eliminate the letter ñ of our alphabet, and even worse, only for reasons of commercial convenience. The

Chapter 7 The written language

authors of such abuse and arrogance should know that the ñ is not an archaeological relic, but the reverse: a cultural leap by one Romance language that left the others behind, expressing with only one letter a sound that in other Romance languages continues to be expressed with two. Therefore, the logical thing is not for Spain to renounce a letter that even forms part of its own name, but that the other languages of the European paradise modernize themselves by adopting the ñ. (El País, May 15, 1991)

More recently, when users of Reddit (a social networking website) formed the /r/Spanish “subreddit” in 2009, they incorporated the ñ into their logo. This is further proof of ñ’s broad and lasting appeal in the Hispanic community.

To learn more ll

Penny discusses the evolution of ñ in the context of the Spanish consonant system as a whole (2002: 64, 70, 71, and 81).

ll

For more on the European Community ñ incident, see Riding (1991).

Question 47. Why does Spanish have both b and v? Spanish b and v could well be combined into a single letter, though this merger is unlikely. The two letters are pronounced the same. At the beginning of a word, as in burro ‘donkey’ and vaca ‘cow,’ or after m or n, as in ambos ‘both’ and enviar ‘to send,’ both b and v sound like English b as in boy. In other contexts—that is, after other consonants, as in alba ‘dawn’ and olvidar ‘to forget,’ or between vowels, as in abajo ‘down’ and oveja ‘sheep’—the pronunciation of b and v combines elements of English b and v. The lips come together as for a b, but the sound is soft, as in a v, creating a sound that linguists call a voiced bilabial fricative, transcribed as /β/. The shared pronunciation of b and v causes different problems for speakers of English and for native Spanish speakers. English speakers are tempted to always pronounce b and v as in English. An English b fails when /β/ is expected, and an English v is never correct: this sound doesn’t exist in Spanish at all. In contrast, Spanish speakers can have trouble with b and v in writing, not in pronunciation. When Spanish-speaking children learn to

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write, they must memorize which words are arbitrarily spelled with a b and which with a v. (This isn’t a problem for English speakers, who are guided by spelling from the start.) Confusion of b and v, as in the retablo ex-voto shown in Figure 7.1, is therefore a classic sign of lack of education. And even educated adults ask ¿V de vaca o b de burro? ‘Cow or donkey?’ when spelling an unfamiliar word or name. As you might expect, some Latin b’s and v’s have been conflated over the course of Spanish history. Spanish maravilla ‘marvelous,’ for instance, comes from Latin mirabilia, while Spanish abuelo ‘grandfather’ comes from Latin avus. It would certainly simplify Spanish writing if Spanish were to eliminate one of the two letters b and v—probably v, since b is more frequent. This would conflate a number of word pairs whose spelling differs only in the choice of b and v, such as those in Table 7.1. These pairs are few and far between—it was hard to come up with those in the table, though others must exist—and tend to involve obscure words. A more serious consequence is that a b/v merger would create a drastic before-and-after schism in the spelling of thousands of individual Spanish words. The elimination of ch and ll (Question 45) was already controversial, and this merely changed alphabetical order in Spanish, not actual spelling. For this reason, even the various spelling reform proposals that have been floated from time to time in the Hispanic world (see Question 49) have been content to leave b and v alone.

Table 7.1  Some Spanish word pairs that differ only in b/v

Spelled with b

Spelled with v

baca ‘car roof rack’

vaca ‘cow’

bacilo ‘bacillus’

vacilo ‘I vacillate’

bate ‘bat; he beats’

vate ‘bard, poet’

Beto [proper name]

veto ‘I veto’

savia ‘sap’

sabia ‘wise’

bello ‘beautiful’

vello ‘down, fuzz’

bazo ‘spleen’

vaso ‘glass’

botar ‘to throw’

votar ‘to vote’

Chapter 7 The written language

Question 48. Why is h silent? Why not? The h sound is weak from an articulatory perspective. Other, stronger consonants are formed with complete or partial closure of the lips, teeth, and/or tongue. Thus, we close the lips completely to make a p, or create friction between the tip of the tongue and the roof of the mouth to make an s. For the sound h, the vocal tract is completely open; the sound merely comes from air moving through the open vocal cords. The weakness of h can be seen in several languages. In formal varieties of English, h can behave like a vowel at the beginning of a word, so that one says a book, but an apple and an historian. Some dialects of English go further, dropping the h altogether (much to the fictional dismay of ʼEnry ʼIggins). Hebrew drops h to form the contractions la ‘to the’ (from l ‘to’ and ha ‘the’), and ba ‘in the’ (from b ‘in’ + ha). Turkish speakers drop h before s (and in certain other contexts) in rapid speech, for example, pronouncing tahsil ‘education’ as [ta:sil], with the long [a:] as an echo of the deleted consonant. H bears the ignoble distinction of having been lost twice in the history of Spanish, writ large. It was not pronounced in spoken Latin, except in the upper class (Weiss 2009, 62). This means that words with h that came into Spanish from Latin, such as those in the first row of Table 7.1, had a silent h from the get-go. As Latin evolved into Spanish, Latin f generally turned into h at the beginning of a word, as shown in the second row of Table 7.2 (see also Question 13). In the sixteenth century, this fresh crop of actual h’s also became silent. Many instances of silent h in Spanish therefore correspond to f in its sister Romance languages. Thus, hambre corresponds to French faim, hijo to Italian figlio, hoja to Portuguese folha and so on. The h sound has never had a comeback in Spanish, so that h’s in modern borrowings are either silenced or converted to the /x/ sound of José. Hamburguesa is thus pronounced amburguesa, and hobby pronounced /xobi/. Because h is silent, native speakers of Spanish sometimes make mistakes with h in their writing, confusing, for example, honda ‘deep’ and onda ‘wave.’ One such mistake can be seen in the retablo ex-voto illustrated at the beginning of the chapter (Figure 7.1). Some mistakes of this sort have entered standard Spanish, such as the words in the last row of Table 7.2, which are spelled with an h- in Spanish even though their Latin roots began with a vowel.1 Spanish also has also a handful of words whose spellings have

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Part 2 Inside Spanish Table 7.2  Sources of silent h in Spanish

Source

Examples

Latin h (already silent)

hombre ‘man’

(Lat. homine)

haber ‘to have’

(Lat. habere)

invierno ‘winter’

(Lat. hibernum)

huésped ‘guest’

(Lat. hospes)

hambre ‘hunger’

(Lat. famis)

hijo ‘son’

(Lat. filius)

hoja ‘leaf’

(Lat. folia)

hinchar ‘to swell’

(Lat. inflare)

hombro ‘shoulder’

(Lat. umerus)

horón ‘type of basket’

(Lat. aeronis)

Latin f

Silent h added in Spanish

huevo ‘egg’

(Lat. ovum)

húmedo ‘humid’

(Lat. umidus)

lost an h, such as oboe (from French hautbois), ormino ‘meadow sage plant’ (from Latin hormīnum), and orzuelo ‘sty’ (Lat. hordeolus). Even though h is silent, it still has a lot to say!

To learn more ll

Penny (2002: 90–94) describes in detail the change of f to h and its interaction with the loss of h.

Question 49. Why doesn’t Spanish capitalize days of the week and months of the year? Spanish spells days of the week and months of the year with lowercase letters, as in miércoles, el 2 de mayo ‘Wednesday, May 2.’ From an English perspective this usage appears odd, but from a broader linguistic perspective, it’s normal. Many writing systems don’t use capital letters at all, and those that do tend to capitalize like Spanish rather than like English. The more sensible question is really why English is such a prolific capitalizer, and further, why Spanish and other languages capitalize at all.

Chapter 7 The written language

The core use of capitalization is to highlight the first word in a sentence as well as proper nouns—that is, names of people, places, and organizations. Other aspects of capitalization vary, with Spanish always following the majority trend, and English being more aggressive. Days of the week and months of the year are just the tip of the iceberg: Spanish also follows the pack in using lowercase letters for nationalities (Soy español ‘I am Spanish’), religions (Soy católica ‘I am Catholic’), languages (Hablo español ‘I speak Spanish’), titles of books and other works (Spanish only capitalizes the first word), and geographic categories (el río Guadalquivir ‘the Guadalquivir River’). The simplest explanation for the English capitalization style is the language’s Germanic roots. German capitalizes all nouns, and noun capitalization was likewise common in eighteenth-century English, as in the beginning of the United States Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility.” So English capitalization has actually become less Germanic and more mainstream over time, though not as mainstream as Spanish. Turning to the question of why Spanish capitalizes at all, it’s clear that while capitalization is typographically useful in calling attention to proper names and sentence boundaries, it’s by no means necessary. In fact, only four writing systems capitalize: Roman (the alphabet used for Spanish and English), Cyrillic (used for Russian and other languages), Greek, and Armenian. Greek and Roman scribes developed capital and lowercase letters for different media: the former for inscriptions chiseled on stone, the latter for handwriting. Cyrillic capital letters are merely larger versions of its lowercase letters. The mixing of capital and lowercase letters within a single text began in certain scholarly styles of handwriting in the Middle Ages. It was popularized by Renaissance typesetters, including Gutenberg, who printed his Bible in a gothic type style, and the Italian typesetters whose “roman” style is the basis for modern printing. Had the early typesetters made different choices, it’s possible that this book would be printed, like an obnoxious email message, in all capital or all lowercase letters. All other writing systems function just fine without capitalization. These include the various East Asian writing systems (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, or Hangul) as well as a large group of writing systems derived from ancient Aramaic, including Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Burmese, and Devanagari (used for Hindi and other Indian languages). Some of these writing systems could easily accommodate capitalization. The Hebrew alphabet, for example, only has twenty-two letters. And the Cyrillic solution (using larger letters as capitals) could theoretically be applied to writing systems with a larger inventory of characters, even Chinese and Japanese. However, the fact remains that capitalization never spread beyond the small set of alphabets

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mentioned above. The bottom line, then, is that whether Spanish capitalizes days, months, or nothing at all is purely a matter of convention, not of logic or necessity.

To learn more ll

Sampson (1985) describes the history of writing, including the use of capital letters.

ll

Guar (1992) describes and illustrates a wide range of early and/or obsolete writing systems in addition to those in use today.

Question 50. Is Spanish spelling phonetic? The notion of “phonetic spelling,” more common sense than linguistic theory, implies a regular correspondence between pronunciation and spelling. In a purely phonetic system, a word’s spelling would completely determine its pronunciation, and vice versa. English, for example, isn’t purely phonetic because one written form can have two pronunciations (read can be pronounced like red or like reed), and one spoken form can be written in two ways (e.g., I and eye). Spanish spelling is perfectly phonetic when you read it but imperfectly phonetic when you write it. In other words, spelling determines pronunciation, but pronunciation doesn’t entirely determine spelling. We’ve already seen two nonphonetic aspects of Spanish spelling: silent h and the redundancy of b and v (Questions 47 and 48). While the pronunciation of a word with h, b, or v is always straightforward, the only way to know which words are written with or without an h, and which are written with a b versus a v, is through memorization. The letters g and c also violate the principle of phonetic spelling—but only before the letters e and i. In this context g and c have what is often called a “soft” pronunciation. The letter g before e and i is pronounced /x/, like a German or Scottish ch, a sound that Spanish also spells with a j. So there’s no way to know, short of education, which words with this sound are spelled with a g, like gemelo ‘twin,’ and which with a j, like jefe ‘chief.’ The letter c before e and i is pronounced like s in most of the Spanish-speaking world, though like th in parts of Spain. Therefore, most Spanish speakers have to learn, one word at a time, which words with the s sound are spelled with an s, like sima ‘chasm,’ and which with a c, like cima ‘summit.’ Finally, in large parts of the Spanish-speaking world, the sounds of y and ll have

Chapter 7 The written language

merged so that, for example, vaya ‘go’ and valla ‘fence’ are indistinguishable (Question 63). Again, this adds up to a spelling system that is perfectly phonetic when you read it but imperfectly phonetic when you write it. Spanish remains significantly easier to read and write than English, as well as French and Hebrew, to name a few other languages I know well, and on a par with German. No spelling system is perfectly phonetic, but Spanish is probably about as good as it gets. This hasn’t stopped occasional attempts at wholesale Spanish spelling reform. Most notably, in 1826 the Venezuelan linguist Andrés Bello proposed a radical reform that included eliminating silent h and avoiding the hard/soft issue by substituting j for soft g and q for hard c (Bello 1826). A participant in the South American revolutionary process, and a teacher of Simón Bolívar (Box 1.2), Bello saw spelling reform as an important step in encouraging literacy, and hence general advancement, in the continent. But like the various proposals for English spelling reform that have been floated over the years by thinkers as distinguished as Benjamin Franklin, Bello’s ideas were rejected. The only successful reforms have been the gradual changes endorsed by the Real Academia Española, such as the elimination of ch, ll, and unnecessary accent marks (see Questions 45 and 51).

ACCENTS AND DIACRITICAL MARKS Question 51. Why does Spanish have so many accent marks? I love Spanish accent marks. This attachment is partly personal: years ago, I researched how children learn the Spanish stress system (the spoken counterpart of the written accent), and I still have sentimental memories of the Mexican-American children I worked with (Hochberg 1988). It’s also a professional fondness. Like most language teachers, I’m a bit of a ham at heart, and I love to bang on a desk or stamp my foot to demonstrate how an accent mark changes a word’s pronunciation. Finally, there’s a humanitarian factor. Over the years, I’ve found that native speakers’ top question about their own language is when to use accent marks. The topic is clearly a source of great confusion and frustration. So whether you’re a punctuation purist, a stymied student, or a nonplussed native speaker, this question’s for you.

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Written Spanish certainly has a lot of accent marks: in contemporary prose, roughly one out of eight words is accented.2 However, how Spanish uses accent marks is relatively limited, especially when compared with other languages, such as French (Box 7.1). In Spanish, an accent mark always and only acts as an indication of irregular or heightened stress—meaning relative emphasis, or loudness—within a syllable, word, or sentence. Let’s look at these three levels in turn. ll

Within a syllable, the norm in Spanish (simplifying somewhat) is to stress the second of two vowels occurring in sequence, as in fuI·mos ‘we went,’ nuE·ve ‘nine,’ or diA·blo ‘devil’ (here I use a capital letter to show the stressed vowel, and a dot to show syllable boundaries). A written accent signals a deviation from this pattern, as in flÚ·i·do, con·ti·nÚ·e ‘continue’ or co·mÍ·a·mos ‘we were eating,’ that incidentally splits the affected syllable into two.3

ll

Within a word, the norm in Spanish is to stress the last syllable if a word ends in a consonant, like mu·JER ‘woman,’ and the next-to-last syllable if it ends in a vowel, like HOM·bre ‘man’ (see Question 65). (Final s and n don’t count as consonants, since they’re used to form plurals.) Any violation of this pattern requires a written accent mark, as in te·LÉ·fo·no, ca·FÉ ‘coffee,’ or a·ZÚ·car ‘sugar.’ This is the most frequent reason for accent marks in Spanish, accounting for almost half of the cases in contemporary prose.

ll

Finally, a written accent mark distinguishes otherwise identical words such as sí ‘yes’ and si ‘if’; see Table 7.3 for other examples. In every case, the accent mark is found on the member of the pair that usually receives greater stress within a sentence. The contrast can most easily be heard in sentences that happen to contain both words, such as Sí, vendré si puedo ‘Yes, I’ll come if I can,’ or Él lee el periódico ‘He reads the newspaper.’ The accented member of the pair is also the one that can stand alone, or nearly alone, in a sentence or question.

The take-home message, for Spanish neophytes and native speakers alike, is that every Spanish accent mark has a purpose. In fact, the Real Academia Española (Question 2) periodically purges accent marks that it deems superfluous. A good example is the accent formerly placed on the word o ‘or’ between numbers, as in 8 ó 9, to ensure it would not be read as the number 0. This accent was eliminated in the Real Academia’s most recent spelling guide on the grounds that the majority of written Spanish these days is typeset, not hand-written, and therefore unlikely to be misread (RAE 2011: 270).

Chapter 7 The written language Table 7.3  Some word pairs distinguished by stress

Stressed

Unstressed

sí ‘yes’

si ‘if’

él ‘he’

el ‘the’

tú ‘you’

tu ‘your’

qué ‘what?’

que ‘that/who’

dónde ‘where?’1

donde ‘where’

más ‘more’

mas ‘but’

1 All other Spanish question words carry accent marks as well, and all have non-accented counterparts.

Box 7.1. Accent marks: Spanish versus French The simplicity of the Spanish system of written accent marks is easily appreciated in comparison to French. Consider the French phrase fête d’élèves ‘student party.’ As in Spanish, only vowels are accented, but that is the only common ground between the two languages. The French phrase has three different accents: acute (é), grave (è), and circumflex (ê); Spanish only has the acute accent. The word élèves has two accented letters— even more are possible, as in répété ‘repeated’—while Spanish allows only one per word. And the French accent marks affect the pronunciation of individual letters: the é sounds roughly like ai in English bait, the ê and è like e in English bet, and the unaccented e’s at the ends of the words are silent. Such differences never occur in Spanish. Finally, the circumflex accent in fête additionally serves as a mini-lesson in the history of French, here memorializing the loss of an s from Latin festus (compare Spanish fiesta). In contrast, as described in the text, every Spanish accent mark has a contemporary purpose.

Once you understand the system, accents will become livable—even if not loveable. ​

To learn more ll

The Academia’s current spelling guide (RAE 2011) devotes fully sixty-five pages to the topic of accent marks. This is technical reading, but pure pleasure for a grammar glutton.

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Question 52. Why do some words keep an accent in the plural, some gain an accent, and some lose an accent? Upon closer inspection, this seemingly bizarre pattern turns out to be an elegant demonstration of the systematic workings of the Spanish spelling system. It exists because the simple principles of word stress described in the previous question sometimes interact with an equally simple rule of Spanish pronunciation: whenever possible, stress the same syllable in related forms, such as singular and plural.4 Most words with regular stress, like hombre, habla, and mujer in Table 7.4, are also regular in the plural. No accent is needed in either form. Likewise, most words with irregular stress in the singular, like café and fácil in Table 7.4, stay irregular in the plural. Both singular and plural therefore require an accent. Only words whose singular forms end in s or n require an accent change in the plural (see the last row of Table 7.4). As mentioned in the previous question, s and n don’t “count” as consonants for purposes of stress placement because they are used to form plurals. Words of this type with regular stress, like joven ‘young,’ become irregular when plural -es is added, with stress now falling on the third-to-last syllable (just as in fáciles), and so requiring a written accent. The reverse happens with words with irregular stress, like jamón ‘ham’ or inglés ‘English.’ These become regular in the plural, with Table 7.4  Singular and plural of words with regular and irregular stress

Regular stress in singular

Irregular stress in singular

Final sound

Singular

Plural

Singular

Plural

Vowel

HOM·bre ‘man’

HOM·bres

ca·FÉ ‘coffee’

ca·FÉS

HA·bla ‘he speaks’

HA·blan

(still irregular)

(still regular) Consonant (not s or n)

mu·JER ‘woman’

s or n

JO·ven ‘young’

mu·JE·res

FÁ·cil ‘easy’

(still regular)

FÁ·ci·les (still irregular)

JÓ·ve·nes

ja·MÓN ‘ham’

(now irregular)

in·GLÉS ‘English’

ja·MO·nes in·GLE·ses (now regular)

Chapter 7 The written language

stress now falling on the next-to-last syllable (just as in hombres or mujeres), so that the written accent is no longer necessary. Elegant, ¿no?

Question 53. Who invented the inverted exclamation and question marks? The inverted question mark (¿) and exclamation mark (¡) are unique to Spanish. They represent a rare example of successful innovation by committee—but this success required thirteen years of fine-tuning. As recounted in Question 2, the Real Academia Española published its first spelling manual in 1741. In this first edition, titled Orthographía española, the academicians proposed putting the regular mark (not an upside-down one) at the beginning of a question or exclamation as well as the end. They gave as examples: ?quien me llama? ‘Who calls me?’ !que misericordioso es Dios! ‘How merciful is God!’ (RAE 1741: 266–67)

The Real Academia’s justification for adding the initial mark wasn’t clear until the following edition, in 1754, which rightly observed that readers don’t always recognize that a question or exclamation is underway until they are well into it. The purpose of the initial mark is therefore to give the reader a heads-up (RAE 1754: 126–29). By the time the Real Academia published the 1754 edition (with the more up-to-date title Ortografía), its scholars had concluded that doubling up the regular marks was confusing, and came up with a better alternative: The hard part was deciding on a punctuation mark. If we were to employ one already used for accents or other purposes, it would be confusing; to invent a new mark would be risky, and perhaps not accepted. Therefore, after long consideration, it occurred to the Academy that we could use the question mark itself, putting it upside down before the first word of the question, as well as right side up at its end. . . . [In the case of exclamations] we will use the same exclamation mark (Nota de Admiración), putting it upside down before the first word of the exclamation. (ibid.)

This Plan B has been in steady use in Spanish ever since, though it unfortunately has never been adopted by other languages.

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To learn more ll

The 1763 edition of the Ortografía (RAE 1763) uses the same wording as the breakthrough 1754 edition, but is more legible; the relevant pages are 139–42.

Question 54. Why doesn’t Spanish use apostrophes? The apostrophe is a versatile bit of punctuation. It can indicate plurals (x’s and y’s), possessives (the book’s title), or abbreviations (sec’y for secretary, A’dam for Amsterdam). In the Guarani language of Paraguay it serves as a full-fledged letter of the alphabet. The apostrophe’s most common function, though, is to indicate, in print, that a sound is omitted in pronunciation. This is often a vowel dropped when two words form a contraction, such as the dropped i of English it’s (from it is), the dropped e of French j’ai (from je + ai, ‘I have’), and the dropped a of Italian l’automobile (from la automobile). Other cases occur within a word, such as the dropped d of English ma’am (from madam) and the dropped i of German wen’gen (from wenigen ‘few’). Spanish doesn’t use apostrophes simply because the idea of dropping sounds runs counter to the language’s tendency to fully pronounce all sounds, even double vowels as in leer ‘to read’ or cooperar. Dialectal variations that involve dropping sounds (like final -s in Andalusian and Caribbean Spanish; see Question 4) tend to be looked down on. The only accepted exceptions are the two contractions al ‘to the,’ from a + el, and del ‘from the,’ from de + el. Because these contractions are mandatory, the lost sound doesn’t even register. For good measure, Spanish proactively short-circuits situations that might tempt speakers to form contractions: that is, cases where identical sounds come into contact at a word boundary. Thus the word o ‘or’ changes to u before a word beginning with o, as in siete u ocho ‘seven or eight’ (compare to seis o siete ‘six or seven’). Likewise, y ‘and’ (pronounced like Spanish i) becomes e before a word beginning with i, as in bonita e inteligente ‘pretty and smart’ (compare to bonita y alta ‘pretty and tall’). A different strategy applies to the word la ‘the’ when it precedes a feminine word beginning with a. Here, the Spanish solution is to substitute the masculine form el, as in el agua ‘the water.’ The three cases of u for o, e for y, and el for la are akin to the English substitution of an for a before a vowel, as in an umbrella (compare to a raincoat): again, a change performed to keep the two words from running together.

Chapter 7 The written language

By the way, possessives have the opposite word order in English and in Spanish: Mary’s book is expressed as el libro de María—no apostrophe required.

WRITING IN THE MACHINE AGE Question 55. How do you write txt msgs in Spanish? Text messaging is immensely popular in the Spanish-speaking world; in fact, a 2008 survey identified Latin Americans as the world’s most prolific texters (Nixon 2008). Like texters in English, Spanish-language texters abbreviate their messages in order to communicate faster, and to stay within the 160-character limit imposed by the industry. For example, writing saludos ‘greetings’ as salu2 saves two characters. Salu2 is an example of “logographic” or “rebus” writing: substituting single characters for soundalike character sequences (Table 7.5). Logograms may be used alone (e.g., c for sé) as well as in longer words. Another texting technique is to shorten words by eliminating letters, as shown in Table 7.6; this is actually more common than substitution, though less eye-catching. English words often infiltrate Spanish text messages, both as standard text abbreviations (thx for thanks, instead of gracias) and as logograms. The 2 of ers2, for eres tú ‘It’s you,’ is pronounced like English two, not Spanish dos. Some features of Spanish text messages are specific to the language. The loss of special characters is notable: texters habitually omit the upside-down ¡ and ¿ as well as accent marks, the tilde (~) on ñ, and diaeresis (as in ü). Time intervals are doubled to form plurals—thus aa, dd, and mm for años ‘years,’ días ‘days,’ and meses ‘months.’ This is perhaps a carryover from the standard Spanish use of doubled letters in plural acronyms like EE. UU. for Estados Unidos ‘the United States’ and FF. AA. for Fuerzas Armadas ‘Armed Forces.’ The letter h, which it is silent in Spanish, is often omitted in texts, as in ems for hemos and aora for ahora (Table 7.6). The letter k is often substituted for c, as in nka for nunca ‘never’ or kntm for cuéntame ‘tell me.’ This substitution clarifies pronunciation, since Spanish c is sometimes pronounced like k and sometimes like s or th, depending on dialect. At least in Spain, k for c also lends an antiestablishment flavor to a message. Another common spelling substitution is y for ll, as in eys for ellos ‘they’; recall that ll and y are pronounced the same in most areas (Question 63).

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Table 7.5  Examples of logographic texting

Examples Character

pronunciation

Text

Meaning

dos ‘two’

salu2

saludos ‘greetings’

a2

adiós ‘Goodbye’

prpar2

preparados ‘prepared’

t2

todos ‘all’

Numbers 2

3

tres ‘three’

es3

estrés ‘stress’

7

siete ‘seven’

b7s

besitos ‘kisses’

100

cien ‘one hundred’

100pre

siempre ‘always’

ce

c c

sé ‘I know’ se (reflexive and object pronoun)

ac

hace ‘he makes’

Letters c

g

ge

gf

jefe ‘chief’

k

ka

kro

caro ‘expensive’

kpaz

capaz ‘capable’

comunikr

comunicar ‘to communicate’

s

ese

s

ese ‘that’

x

por ‘times’ (the multiplication sign)

x

por ‘for’

xa

para ‘for’

xfa

por favor ‘please’

xq

por qué, ‘why’; porque ‘because’

Other +

más ‘plus’ (the addition sign)

Source: Crystal (2008) and online listings

+

más ‘more’

+ticar

masticar ‘to chew’

Chapter 7 The written language Table 7.6  Examples of messages shortened by eliminating letters

Technique

Text version

Truncation to first letter

b

beso ‘kiss’

q

qué, que ‘what, that’

b

bien ‘well’

gr

gracias ‘thank you’

dir

dirección ‘address’

pers

personas ‘people’

hab

habitación ‘room’

tq

te quiero ‘I love you’

asdc

al salir de clase ‘after class’

hl

hasta luego ‘See you later’

pf

por favor ‘please’

finde

fin de semana ‘weekend’

Truncation to first letters or first syllable

Acronyms

Compression

Original word

hl

hola ‘hello’

nd

nada ‘nothing’

exclnt

excelente ‘excellent’

ems

hemos ‘we have’

aora

ahora ‘now’

bss

besos ‘kisses’

Source: Crystal (2008) and online listings

These techniques represent a menu of options rather than a prescription. Texters use, combine, or ignore them according to their personal preferences and the circumstances of a given message. A texter is more likely to abbreviate when texting a peer, when time is of the essence, or when context reduces the potential ambiguity of a terse message. Texting gets bad press for its alleged effect on Spanish spelling. The conclusion of one Spanish journalist, after hearing the complaints of college faculty from around the country, was typical: today’s students use “a language corrupted (viciado) by text messages” (Silió 2013). Looking beyond anecdotal accounts, academic research on texting (yes, it exists) paints a different picture. Texting habits don’t filter into other forms of writing. In fact, because texting can get students excited about writing, and increases their awareness of spelling, it can even have a positive effect on spelling and literacy (Crystal 2008: 157–63; García and Peces 2014). In any

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case, this debate may soon be moot. Modern smartphones have larger screens and sophisticated word completion software, both of which make it easier to read and type unabbreviated messages. At the same time, an increasing number of texters pay a flat monthly fee for their mobile service, so that they no longer save money by sending shorter messages. These market-driven changes, more powerful than academic opprobrium, may turn today’s trendy texting shortcuts into tomorrow’s technological dinosaur.

To learn more ll

Crystal (2008), a full-length book about texting, focuses on English but includes some data from Spanish. It summarizes the literature exculpating texting from any negative effect on writing.

ll

The Spanish government’s Instituto de la Juventud devoted a full issue of its monthly research magazine to cell phones and texting (Lorente Arenas 2002).

ll

Panckhurst (2010) compares texting strategies in French, Spanish, and Italian.

ll

Betti (2006) analyzes Spanish texting and presents both positive and negative reactions to it from academics and the media.

Question 56. How do you write Spanish on a computer? The interesting aspect of this question is the range of different solutions to this technological challenge. In Spanish-speaking countries, computers are sold with Spanish-ready keyboards that include keys for ñ, ¡ and ¿. To produce accent marks and diereses (as in ü), typists use the apostrophe key in sequence with other keys; for example, “apostrophe + u” produces an ú, while “shift + apostrophe + u” produces an ü. Because U.S. keyboards lack all Spanish special characters, typists must use key sequences for ñ, ¡, and ¿ as well as accents and diereses. PC users (but not Mac users) must first activate an optional keyboard setting, called the “U.S. International Keyboard,” that is included with every PC. Other solutions exist, though none as efficient as the key sequence approach. All Microsoft Office software has an “Insert Symbol” command that includes Spanish characters as well as other symbols ranging from mathematical signs to emoticons. Likewise, many websites catering to Spanish students have a menu of accented characters that can be clicked on or dragged into position.

Chapter 7 The written language

PC users also have the option of typing the “Alt” key followed by a variety of four-digit codes to get the desired symbols. As a last resort, some users keep a document with all the Spanish characters open on their computer desktop, and cut and paste from it as needed. This takes less planning, but is even more cumbersome than the “Insert Symbol” or “Alt” methods. As is often the case with technology, there’s a trade-off between time invested in learning a new technique, and time saved in the long run. Every user must decide which approach makes sense given his or her needs.

To learn more ll

A useful summary of options for typing Spanish characters on a U.S. keyboard is at http://www.studyspanish.com/accents/typing.htm.

ll

In 1991, the ñ key was the subject of a heated trade dispute between Spain and the rest of the European Economic Community (Question 46).

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Chapter 8 The sounds of Spanish

Chapter 8 The sounds of Spanish

Questions Vowels 57 Why does Spanish only have five vowels? (p. 183) 58 Why does Spanish have those five vowels? (p. 185) Consonants 59 Why do Spanish speakers roll their r’s? (p. 187) 60 Can all Spanish speakers roll their r’s? (p. 189) 61 Why do Spaniards use the th sound? (And what about z?) (p. 190) 62 Where does the /x/ sound come from? (p. 192) 63 What are seseo, ceceo, and yeísmo? (p. 193) Words 64 Why is it hard for Spanish speakers to say Spain? (p. 194) 65 Why does Spanish stress the last syllable of teneDOR ‘fork’ but the next-to-last syllable of cuCHIllo ‘knife’? (p. 196) 66 Is there a version of Pig Latin for Spanish? (p. 199)

Chapter 8 The sounds of Spanish

This is a relatively short chapter because—let’s face it!—Spanish pronunciation is a gift. In fact, the ease of pronouncing Spanish is one reason it’s such a popular language to study. Think of all the difficult sounds that the language doesn’t have. No nasal vowels, as in Portuguese São Paulo or French bon ‘good.’ No rounded vowels as in German fünf ‘five.’ No tones, as in Chinese or the African language Hausa. No multi-way consonant contrasts as in Hindi pal, phal, bal, and bhal (‘to take care of,’ ‘knife edge,’ ‘hair,’ and ‘forehead’). Just five vowels and a reasonable set of consonants, of which the only truly challenging one is the trilled r. One theme of this chapter, then, is the simplicity of Spanish phonology— not just its inventory of vowels and consonants, but how it puts them together to make words. Besides r we’ll also delve into other characteristic Spanish sounds like the /x/ of ajo ‘garlic,’ and discuss important dialectical differences in pronunciation. The chapter’s closing question, on Spanish Pig Latin, shows how a fun topic can provide serious linguistic evidence. As elsewhere in the book, normal spelling will be used whenever possible, and phonetic notation (like /x/, above) explained in context.

VOWELS Question 57. Why does Spanish only have five vowels? For this question to make sense, please keep in mind that vowels are sounds, not letters. The five letters a–e–i–o–u in the Roman alphabet represent an enormous variety of vowel sounds in different languages. English, for example, uses them to express twelve distinct vowel sounds: those heard in beet, bit, bait, bet, bat, bot, bought, boat, book, boot, and but, plus the unstressed first syllable of baton. Spanish is stingier. It has only a five-way contrast, shown in the word set pira ‘pyre,’ pera ‘pear,’ para ‘for,’ pora ‘leek,’ and pura ‘pure.’ In fact, a few words in Spanish manage to use all five vowels. My favorite examples in this group are abuelito ‘grandfather’ and murciélago ‘bat.’ Five-vowel systems like that of Spanish are very common; together with six-vowel systems, they account for over half of vowel systems worldwide. Large vowel inventories like that of English are less common, and inventories of two to four vowels still rarer. Interestingly, many languages with either few or many vowels clump together geographically even if they are genetically

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unrelated. Many Australian languages have four or fewer vowels, and the middle of Africa (running east-to-west) has a preponderance of languages with seven or more vowels. This is a nice example of what linguists call an “areal feature” that has spread by contact, not by genetic descent (Campbell 2006). Spanish arrived at its five-vowel set by halving Latin’s set of ten, which included five long vowels and five short. The long vowels were similar in pronunciation to their short counterparts but were held twice as long (Wheelock 2005: xxxvi). Instead of just collapsing long and short vowels, Spanish also merged certain vowels in certain contexts, just as some varieties of English have merged the vowels of Mary, merry, and marry, or of pin and pen. The Spanish mergers are most easily seen in unstressed syllables (Table 8.1). At the end of a word, long ī and ū also fell in with e and o. This affected, for example, the final ī of vēnī ‘I came’ (vine in Spanish) and the final ū of cornū ‘horn’ (cuerno in Spanish), and explains why in modern Spanish, the only words ending in i and u are borrowings like hindú and israelí. In stressed syllables, vowel outcomes differed in one key respect from those in Table 8.1: short Latin ŏ and ĕ became the Spanish diphthongs (twovowel sequences) ue and ie. Thus, Latin pŏrta ‘door’ led to Spanish puerta, Latin fĕsta ‘party’ to Spanish fiesta, and so on. While this change may seem like a dry technicality, it is actually one of the defining features of Spanish. Diphthongization separates Spanish from the other Romance languages: it is Table 8.1  Vowel changes from Latin to Spanish in unstressed syllables (Note: macrons (–) indicate long vowels, breves (˘) short vowels)

Latin

Spanish

Example

ī

i

hībernum ‘winter’ > invierno

ĭ ē

pĭscare ‘to fish’ > pescar e

ĕ ū

u

ŭ ō

ă

mūtare ‘modify’ > mudar sŭspectare ‘to suspect’ > sospechar

o

ŏ ā

patrēs ‘father’ > padre sĕniore ‘sir’ > señor

cantō ‘I sing’ > canto cŏrtecia ‘skin, rind’ > corteza

a

jurās ‘you judge’ > juras părietis ‘door’ > pared

Chapter 8 The sounds of Spanish

entirely absent in Portuguese, and in Italian and French only affected Latin syllables that ended in vowels, such as Italian buono ‘good’ and French pierre ‘stone,’ from Latin bo·num and pe·tram (cf. Spanish bueno and piedra1). Diphthongization also explains the behavior of a large set of irregular verbs in which e alternates with ie and o with ue (Question 13). Without these diphthongs, Spanish truly wouldn’t sound Spanish.

To learn more ll

To hear native Spanish pronunciations of the example words in the first paragraph, visit Forvo (n.d.).

ll

Maddieson (2013c) is packed with useful information about vowel systems worldwide.

ll

For a much fuller account of the evolution of the Spanish vowel system, see Penny (2002: 44–60).

Question 58. Why does Spanish have those five vowels? In the previous question, we saw how the five vowels of Spanish evolved from Latin’s ten. Of course, many other evolutionary outcomes were possible. To name just two possibilities, perhaps Latin ŭ, ō, and ŏ could have merged as /ɔ/ (as in bought) or /ʊ/ (as in book) instead of o (as in boat), or Latin ā and ă could have merged as /æ/ (as in rather) instead of a (as in father). Are the five actual Spanish vowels somehow optimal? Indeed they are. The five vowels of Spanish are often referred to as the “cardinal vowels,” a set of vowels that takes advantage of both the physical properties of the mouth and the acoustical properties of sound waves. Because of this dual phonetic advantage, most five-vowel languages have something close to the Spanish vowel set (Crothers 1978). In order to understand why, we need to delve lightly into articulatory and acoustic phonetics—the twin sciences of how sounds are produced and transmitted. Let’s look first at vowel articulation. Simply put, a vowel is a sound produced with the vocal tract open, so that air flows unobstructed from the larynx up through the lips. This is why doctors ask their patients to say Ah: a is the canonical vowel, articulated with the jaw dropped and the tongue low. The tongue is at its highest vowel position when pronouncing i and u; in addition, the tongue thrusts forward for i and pulls back for u. You can feel the tongue moving up if you say ah eeh or ah ooh (the jaw helps make

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this happen), and moving back if you say eeh ooh. (For u the lips are also rounded, but this is considered secondary in both Spanish and English.) We can now begin to see why the Spanish vowel system is optimal. Just as an interior decorator arranges furniture to make maximal use of a room, Spanish disperses its vowels to make maximal use of the mouth. The three vowels i, u, and a form a triangle that covers the full range of tongue positions, from high to low and from front to back. (For this reason, almost all languages include these three “core vowels.”) The other two Spanish vowels flesh out the triangle: e is a front vowel, midway in height between i and a, and o is a back vowel, between u and a. Figure 8.1 summarizes this pattern. This vowel arrangement not only makes the fullest possible use of the mouth, but also ensures that each of the five vowels is acoustically distinctive. The acoustic profiles of the Spanish vowels (after the consonant p) can be seen in the speech spectrogram below (Figure 8.2). The dark bands running across each vowel, called formants, show the frequency levels that contain the most energy within the complex sound wave. The first two formants, labeled F1 and F2 in the figure, are the most useful in identifying vowels, and correlate strongly with tongue position. As shown in the figure, F1 is highest when the tongue is low (a) and lowest when the tongue is high (i and u). F2 is

Figure 8.1  Tongue positions for Spanish vowels.

Figure 8.2  Acoustic qualities of Spanish vowels (after the consonant p). Adapted with permission from Hualde (2005), Fig. 7.1.

Chapter 8 The sounds of Spanish

highest when the tongue is front (i) and lowest when it is back (u). Thus the three core vowels i, u, and a exploit the widest possible range of F1 and F2 values, with the other vowels occupying an acoustic middle ground. No other set of five vowels would be as acoustically distinctive. As with a well-constructed piece of furniture, the simplicity and optimality of the Spanish vowel system has made it remarkably stable. The vowels haven’t changed since Old Spanish and show little dialectal variation. This is in marked contrast to the tremendous variation seen in the more complex set of Spanish consonants, as discussed in the following questions. It is also the inverse of the situation in English, whose complex vowel set has been the locus of most historical change and dialectal variation. These differences illustrate the linguistic axiom that more complex systems are more susceptible to variation and change.

To learn more ll

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what about a video? Ladefoged and Disner (2012) show an X-ray of a tongue moving through the sequence i-e-a-o-u (in English).

ll

For animations of the five Spanish vowels, see University of Iowa (n.d.).

ll

Hagiwara (2009) is a useful tutorial on how to make and interpret speech spectrograms.

CONSONANTS Question 59. Why do Spanish speakers roll their r’s? When we talk about Spanish speakers “rolling their r’s,” we usually have in mind the lovely, liquid, indefinitely prolongable trill in words like carro ‘cart, car.’ The tip of the tongue, raised to make light contact with the roof of the mouth just behind the front teeth, vibrates as air passes forcefully though the mouth. This aerodynamic wonder clocks in at an average speed of twentyfive vibrations per second (Lindau 1985)! Besides words spelled with double rr, Spanish also trills single r at the beginning of a word, as in real ‘real.’ Single r elsewhere, as in caro ‘expensive,’ is pronounced with a different kind of r: a single rapid, light tap

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of the tongue tip behind the front teeth. This tap (also called a flap) is close to the American English pronunciation of d as in rider. I’ve taught native Spanish speakers who even misspell r as d. Although these two r sounds challenge many Spanish learners, neither is exceptional. Worldwide, trills and taps are the most common tongue movements used to make an r, and the point of contact behind the front teeth is likewise the most common (Maddieson 2009: 78–81). The gliding English r, with a point of contact further back in the mouth, is far more exotic. Even the fact that Spanish has two distinct types of r isn’t bizarre: of languages that have r (not all do), fully a quarter have more than one variant. As in Spanish, these normally have a common point of contact for the tongue but a contrasting tongue movement. Spanish spelling gives us a strong hint as to the origin of the tap/trill contrast. Latin not only had short and long vowels (see Question 57) but also had short and long consonants. Thus, the difference between Latin carus and carrus (the forerunners of caro and carro) wasn’t the nature of the r, but how long it was held. When the contrast in length was lost over time, Spanish compensated by substituting one of tongue movement. This is consistent with a larger pattern: except for short m versus long mm, which simply merged, Spanish found a substitute for all of Latin’s short/long consonant contrasts. For example, nn became ñ (annus ‘year’ > año) and ll became /ʎ/ (gallus ‘rooster’> gallo). Whatever treatment was applied to long consonants was generally applied also to consonants at the beginning of a word. This explains why words beginning with r (like real) are trilled, even though they had a short r in Latin and are still spelled with a single r. What fascinates linguists about r, in Spanish and elsewhere, is the simple fact that it has so many variations. Every other sound is defined by where and how it’s pronounced. But r can be articulated either in the front of the mouth (as in Spanish), in the back (Hebrew, French, and German), or in between (English). The tongue’s movement in making the sound also varies, from the tap of caro, to the trill of carro or French robe ‘dress’ (the latter in the back of the mouth), to the glide of English rah. This heterogeneity makes r a most curious critter! For this reason, linguists generally define r—and only r—as a group of sounds that play a recognizable role in language regardless of their specific articulation. For example, any version of r can act as a buffer between a vowel and another consonant, as in both the Spanish and English versions of the phrase truco de cartas ‘card trick.’ Members of the r group are also interconnected in language evolution, borrowing, and learning. Thus, the front-of-the-mouth r of Latin realis evolved into the back-of-the-mouth trill of French reel, which was borrowed into English as the mid-mouth glide of

Chapter 8 The sounds of Spanish

real, which interferes when English-speaking students try to pronounce the front-of-the-mouth trill of Spanish real. An r is an r is an r.

To learn more ll

Lindau (1985) and Wiese (2001) both wrestle with the issue of how to define r in the absence of articulatory common ground.

Question 60. Can all Spanish speakers roll their r’s? I wish I could roll my r’s. I know the correct tongue position, and have no problems with the tapped r of caro. But I’ve never been able to fully master the trilled r of carro: this is an endless source of personal frustration. At least my misery has plenty of company, for the trilled r challenges even native speakers. It’s the last consonant that most Spanish-speaking children learn to pronounce correctly. Many children don’t learn it until age six (Bedore 1999: 182), and almost 6 percent are still working on the sound in their ‘tween’ years (Perelló Gilberga 2002: 284). Some substitute a tap for the trill, others a d or a g. Some produce a trill, but ‘cheat’ by trilling the back of the tongue, French-style, instead of the tongue tip, or muddy the sound by involving other articulators (lips, cheeks, etc.) along with the tongue. Mispronunciation of r is the most common reason that Spanish-speaking children seek speech therapy, and is also the hardest problem to eradicate. For this reason, therapists typically take a multipronged approach. They might have clients accelerate into a trill by repeating words with t or d faster and faster (English speakers often repeat the phrase ‘put it up’). Another possibility is to gradually morph an easier type of tongue vibration toward the Spanish norm, for example, working forward from a French trill or backward from a “Bronx cheer.” Therapists also use a variety of props, including mirrors, tongue depressors, and electric toothbrushes, to help their clients find the correct tongue position and movement. If untreated, an r problem can persist into adulthood. A particular striking example is that of separated-at-birth twins in Colombia who both had problems with trilled r as children. The twin who grew up in Bogota had speech therapy; the twin who grew up in the countryside did not, and never licked the problem (Dominus 2015). It’s a different matter entirely when a Spanish speaker uses a nonstandard r that is a local pronunciation. This is most famously the case in parts of

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Puerto Rico, where it’s common to hear a French-style, back-of-the-tongue, unusually long r in place of the Spanish norm. Puerto Ricans see this pronunciation as a distinctive marker of island identity, and therefore a source of either shame or pride—or both. One writer described this love/ hate relationship with the local r as follows, transcribing it as egjjrre to emphasize its guttural quality: Above all other aspects of correct pronunciation, our family insisted that we use the proper erre [the tongue-tip trill]. ‘Don’t say egjjrre, like a peasant, say erre.’ . . . When we wanted to vex our family we reverted proudly to the egjjrre, which was improper, which was for peasants and which, incidentally, was the erre of my father, who somehow never fit into the household . . . He always used that guttural egjjrre, ancient and prolonged, that we never heard in lessons at school or at home. That egjjrre tied him to his hometown of Salinas and to his soldier buddies. When I feel close to Spanish, the language that is my inheritance and my passion, it’s not Spanish itself, but our satisfying Puerto Rican tongue. . . . [It’s] the egjjrre, as much a renegade as the Puerto Rican nation has had to be to survive for five hundred years, the egjjrre of my father. (García Ramis 2011: 17–18, 37–38)

To learn more ll

See the companion website for resources on learning how to roll the r.

ll

Fernández Bedia (2014) is a review of r problems and therapies, intended for primary school teachers in Spain.

ll

Penny (2000: 157–58) discusses other dialectal variants of r.

Question 61. Why do Spaniards use the th sound? (And what about z?) The use of the sound th (as in thing) is perhaps the most striking feature of Castilian Spanish—that is, Spanish as spoken in central and northern Spain (see Question 4). It is the standard Castilian pronunciation of the letter z, and also the letter c before e or i. Spanish speakers from southern Spain (Andalusia) and Latin America use the sound s instead. For example, cereza ‘cherry’ is pronounced theretha in Castilian Spanish and seresa elsewhere. Note that the letter z is nowhere pronounced with the sound z.

Chapter 8 The sounds of Spanish

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To ears accustomed to English, the th sound can give Castilian Spanish a lisping quality. This put-down is both unfair—the consonant is accepted Spanish, not a speech defect—and ironic, since English and Spanish are among the small set of languages that have this sound at all.2 The th sound is considered to be in the same category of ‘unusual consonants’ as the clicks used in African languages such as Zulu (Maddieson 2013a). It’s pronounced with the tongue thrust forward between the upper and lower teeth. The th is not only unusual; it’s also a relative latecomer to Spanish. It replaced two Old Spanish consonants, ts and dz, as part of a seismic phonological change in the Spanish consonant system that took place during the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries (see Table 8.2; seseo and ceceo, included in the Table, are discussed in Question 63). Ts, spelled with a c or ç, was found in words such as março ‘March’ and braço ‘arm.’ Its voiced counterpart dz, spelled with a z, was found in words such as dezir ‘to say’ and pozo ‘well.’ By the sixteenth century, these two sounds had merged into a single consonant /s̪ /: this was similar to an s, but pronounced with the tongue further forward in the mouth, pushed against the upper teeth. At the same time, two other Old Spanish consonants, s (spelled ss, as in passo ‘step’) and z (spelled s, as in casa ‘house,’ but pronounced as in English zoo), merged into s. (This is why modern Spanish has no z sound.) Because /s̪ / and s were similar enough to be easily confused, the former moved even further forward to become the modern Castilian th. Although ts, dz, and z were all lost in the transition from Old to Modern Spanish, you can still hear them in other Romance languages: for example, the ts of Italian pizza, the dz of Catalan dotze ‘twelve,’ and the z of French maison ‘house.’ Table 8.2  Some Spanish consonant changes of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries

Old Spanish ts dz s z sh /ʒ/ (as in mirage)

Castilian Spanish

Seseo (most of southern Spain and Latin America)

Ceceo (coastal southern Spain)

/s̪/ > th

s s

sh > x

th

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To learn more ll

For more detail on the evolution of th, see Penny (2002: 98–101).

ll

Pharies (2007: 155) debunks the linguistic legend of the “lisping king,” sometimes proposed as an explanation for the Spanish th sound.

Question 62. Where does the /x/ sound come from? This question is impossible to phrase in English without using phonetic notation because our language lacks the /x/ sound. It’s the sound of Spanish j as in José ‘Joe,’ and also of g before e or i as in genio ‘genius’ or Geraldo. It’s found in scores of other languages including German (ach), Scottish (loch), and Hebrew (melech ‘king’). It’s pronounced with the back of the tongue raised to meet the roof of the mouth. The history of /x/ is exactly parallel to that of th (see previous question, and refer to Table 8.2). It started with the merger of two Old Spanish consonants: sh, spelled with an x in words like Quixote, and /ʒ/ (the sound of g in mirage), spelled with j or g in words like fijo ‘son’ and mugier ‘woman.’ As with th, the two sounds merged into one—in this case, sh—that was deemed to be perilously similar to s: sh is articulated with the tongue just slightly further back in the mouth. (You can feel this small difference yourself if you say see-she.) To create a more distinct sound, sh migrated even farther back to become /x/. This development, coupled with the changes that led to th, resulted in a drastic reduction in the consonants of Old Spanish. Six consonants (ts, dz, s, z, sh, and /ʒ/) gave way to three: th (in Castilian Spanish), s, and /x/. They are maximally distinct, with the tongue between the teeth (th), behind the teeth (s), or raised to the back of the mouth (/x/). It’s interesting to observe that these three consonants are all voiceless, produced without vibration of the vocal cords. (You can feel this difference in sue-zoo or thin-the.) This is part of a more general favoring of voiceless consonants in Spanish phonology: the language also has f but not v, and ch but not /dʒ/ (as in Joe). It’s a curious asymmetry.

To learn more ll

For more detail on the evolution of /x/, see again Penny (2002: 98–101).

Chapter 8 The sounds of Spanish

Question 63. What are seseo, ceceo, and yeísmo? In our look at the five vowels of Spanish (Questions 57 and 58), we saw that this simple and balanced set of sounds has been remarkably stable, both over time and across dialects. The same cannot be said of Spanish consonants. So far in this chapter, we have looked at the historical mergers that created the consonants th (in Castilian Spanish), s, and /x/ (Questions 61 and 62), and the dialectal pronunciation of trilled r in Puerto Rico (Question 60). We now turn to three other well-known dialectal differences: seseo, ceceo, and yeísmo. Seseo and ceceo are alternative outcomes of the mergers that created th and s. Recall (Table 8.2) that th came from Old Spanish ts and dz, and s came from s and z. In southern Spain there was a more drastic merger, with all four consonants (ts, dz, s, and z) collapsing into one, either s or, in some regions, a sound close to the Castilian th (see last two columns of Table 8.2). The former pronunciation pattern is called seseo, and the latter ceceo (pronounced thetheo). In either case, the four-way merger paralleled the Castilian development rather than following it. That is, southern Spanish never had (and lost) a contrast between s and th. Today, seseo is standard in most of southern Spain and also Latin America, while ceceo is heard only in the coastal areas of southern Spain. Yeísmo refers to yet another consonant merger. Old Spanish had two l sounds, both still preserved in parts of Spain: a regular l and also /ʎ/, pronounced with the tongue further back in the mouth, as in the ll of English million.3 This further-back tongue position is close to that of the y of Spanish yo ‘I’ or English you. It is therefore not surprising that in most of the Spanishspeaking world y and /ʎ/ have merged. The sound y emerged as the ‘winner,’ perhaps because it is more basic, occurring in more languages than /ʎ/ worldwide. The spelling of the sound with a y gave rise to the term yeísmo. Yeísmo is more widespread than either seseo or ceceo; only some rural areas of northern Spain, parts of the Canary Islands, and the Andes have resisted the merger. Within yeísta territory, the pronunciation of y varies from the gliding y itself, to a soft sh or /ʒ/ (as in mirage) or even a ch. Since ts, dz, s, and z were frequent sounds in Old Spanish, their merger in seseo and ceceo regions has led to many ambiguous word pairs. There is no audible difference between common words such as cocer ‘boil’ and coser ‘sew,’ cien ‘one hundred’ and sien ‘temple (side of head),’ or caza ‘hunt’ and casa ‘house.’ (In Castilian Spanish, the former member of each pair would be pronounced with a th.) Likewise, yeísmo wiped out the former /ʎ/ ~ y contrast in word pairs like calló ‘he was quiet’ and cayó ‘he fell,’ halla ‘he finds’ and

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haya ‘that there be,’ or pollo ‘chicken’ and poyo ‘bench.’ Fortunately, such pairs are rare. Incidentally, the terms seseo, ceceo, and yeísmo illustrate the charming Spanish practice of assigning onomatopoetic, and therefore self-explanatory, names to linguistic phenomena (see also leísmo, loísmo, and laísmo in Question 77). Along with the adjective yeísta used above, Spanish also has the adjectives seseante and ceceante, and the verbs sesear and cecear.

To learn more ll

See Penny (2002: 101–03) for seseo and ceseo, and p. 106 for yeísmo; also see Penny (2000: 118–21).

WORDS Question 64. Why is it hard for Spanish speakers to say Spain? A foreign accent is a like a canary in a phonological coal mine: a warning sign of differences between two languages’ sound systems. Most differences involve individual sounds. For example, a Spanish speaker may mispronounce the English word rid as reed, because Spanish lacks the /ɪ/ vowel of rid, and also trill the r. Differences in prosody (rhythm or pitch) also contribute to the impression of a foreign accent; a Spanish speaker’s English may sound unduly staccato. At a micro level, nonnative speakers may disregard the subtle ways that adjacent sounds affect each other. Thus a Spaniard speaking English may fail to pronounce a t as a d-like “flap” between vowels (as in writer or tomato) or as a ch before r (as in train or true), changes that an American speaker makes without thinking. The characteristic Spanish mispronunciation of Spain as eSpain, and likewise stupid as estupid, school as eschool, and so on, stems from another difference between Spanish and English phonology: in Spanish, the implicit rules that govern how sounds combine to form syllables and words are stricter than they are in English. English allows long sequences of consonants at either the beginning or the end of a syllable: the single syllable of strengths, my favorite example, begins with three consonants (s, t, and r) and ends with four (/ŋ/, k, th, and s). Spanish allows only a limited set of two-consonant sequences. At the beginning of a syllable, sequences must consist of a hard

Chapter 8 The sounds of Spanish

consonant (or f) plus l or r, as in de·pri·mir ‘to depress,’ blan·co ‘white,’ tres ‘three,’ and fri·to ‘fried.’ At the end of a syllable, sequences must end in s, as in the ns of trans·por·tar ‘to transport.’ Consonant sequences never occur at the end of a word. Spain is hard for Spanish speakers to pronounce, then, simply because their own language doesn’t allow a syllable to begin with sp. Adding an e to turn Spain into eSpain solves the problem by turning the word into the two syllables es·pain, with s ending the first syllable instead of beginning the second. It’s an elegant solution that not only crops up in individual mispronunciations of English words but also has been canonized in words borrowed from English, such as esnob ‘snob’ and esmoquin ‘smoking jacket, tuxedo.’ The added vowel was already common in Vulgar Latin, as seen from Roman graffiti like ispose ‘spouse’ for spōnsae (cf. Spanish esposa) or Ismurna for Smyrna, apparently the name of a Pompeiian prostitute.4 It explains the difference between many Spanish words and their Classical Latin ancestors, such as esposo ‘spouse,’ from Latin sponsus, and escuela ‘school,’ from scola. In French, the troublesome s was eventually deleted, creating words like époux ‘spouse’ and école ‘school.’ As with so many areas where Spanish and English differ, when we look at a variety of languages we see that Spanish syllable structure rules are fairly typical, and those of English more unusual. In one survey (Maddieson 2013b), more than half the languages surveyed were like Spanish, allowing only a limited set of short consonant sequences. Languages like English, with longer and looser sequences, represented about a third of the data. The smallest group consisted of languages like Hawaiian, which completely lack consonant sequences. These languages tend to compensate by have long words as a kind of compensation, like humuhumunukunukuāpuaʻa (a kind of fish). When languages with simpler phonology borrow complex words from English, they adapt them to their own rule systems, just as Spanish did snob and smoking. That’s how Japanese ended up with words like aisukurimu for ‘ice cream’ and biru for ‘beer.’

To learn more ll

The linguistic term for the rules governing syllable structure is “phonotactics.”

ll

For more examples of added i- in Vulgar Latin, see Weiss (2009: 511) and Lathrop (2003: 21).

ll

For outcomes of s clusters in other Romance languages, see Posner (2002: 290–91).

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For a more detailed account of the phonetic justification for the added vowel, see Penny (2002: 43).

ll

See Pountain (2003: 31) for a chart summarizing possible structures for Spanish syllables.

Question 65. Why does Spanish stress the last syllable of teneDOR ‘fork’ but the next-to-last syllable of cuCHIllo ‘knife’? This question is worded deliberately, to refer to “the last syllable of teneDOR” instead of “the third syllable,” and “the next-to-last syllable of cuCHIllo” instead of “the second.” (In this question, stressed syllables are capitalized.) This is because Spanish stress placement is figured from the end of a word, not the beginning. Specifically, words that end in a consonant, like teneDOR, are stressed on the last syllable, while those that end in a vowel, like cuCHIllo, are stressed on the penultimate (next-to-last) syllable. These rules apply regardless of a word’s length (Table 8.3). The sounds s and n don’t “count” as final consonants in these rules because they are frequently added to make words plural. Thus, both HEcho ‘fact’ and HEchos ‘facts’ have penultimate stress, and likewise both partiCIpa ‘she participates’ and partiCIpan ‘they participate.’ Words that end in consonants add -es for a plural, so that stress placement magically remains regular as teneDOR ‘fork,’ for instance, becomes teneDORes ‘forks.’ Spanish words with irregular stress come in two flavors. Some, like PÁjaro ‘bird,’ LÁpiz ‘pencil,’ and iMÁN ‘magnet,’ are simply irregular: given

Table 8.3  The basic stress rules of Spanish

Number of syllables

Stress the last syllable if a word ends in a consonant

Stress the next-to-last syllable if a word ends in a vowel

2

feLIZ ‘happy’

HEcho ‘fact’

4

elemenTAL ‘elemental’

partiCIpa ‘she participates’

6

estereotiPAR ‘to stereotype’

todopodeROso ‘all-powerful’

8

inconstitucionaliDAD ‘unconstitutionality’

desafortunadaMENte ‘unfortunately’

Chapter 8 The sounds of Spanish

the Spanish stress rules, they should be pronounced paJAro, laPIZ, and Iman. In other cases, irregular stress has a grammatical purpose. For example, many verb tense endings, such as the -ó of empeZÓ ‘he began’ and the -é of viviRÉ ‘I will live,’ carry final stress. Adding pronouns to the end of a verb can lead to antepenultimate stress (stress on the third-to-last syllable), as in diCIÉNdolo ‘saying it,’ pre-antepenultimate stress, as in DÍgamelo ‘tell me it,’ or even stress on the fifth-to-last syllable, as in CÓmetemelo ‘eat it all up for me.’ The two simple rules in Table 8.3 account for stress placement in over 80 percent of Spanish words.5 While thus short of complete consistency, they nevertheless dominate the language enough to have psychological import. Children learning Spanish show evidence of acquiring rules rather than simply memorizing stress placement on a word-by-word basis (Hochberg 1988), and adults pay attention to stress patterns as well as individual sounds when recognizing spoken words (Soto-Faraco et al. 2001). At the same time, perhaps because the rules have so many exceptions, Spanish and Spanish speakers are tolerant of stress patterns in other languages. Spanish speakers learning English do not impose their own stress patterns (Mairs 1989). Likewise, foreign words borrowed into Spanish generally preserve their original stress, even if it is irregular by Spanish standards. In fact, yesterday’s borrowings are a major source of today’s irregulars. Many Spanish words with antepenultimate stress, such as límpido and fábula (in Table 8.3), were borrowed from Latin in the Middle Ages or later. Words with final stress on a vowel come from several languages, including sofá ‘sofa’ (from French), bambú ‘bamboo’ (from India via Portuguese), and maní ‘peanut’ (from Taino, an indigenous Caribbean language). The stress rules of Spanish can reasonably be described as “vanilla” by crosslinguistic standards. In some languages, such as Japanese, every syllable has equal stress. But of those that have differential word stress, more select the stressed syllable with respect to the end of a word, as in Spanish, than from the beginning. This is true both for languages with uniform stress— such as French, where stress always falls on a word’s final syllable—and languages with variable stress, such as Spanish. For languages with variable stress, a common pattern is for syllables that are “heavy” in some sense to attract stress. “Heaviness” may refer to a long vowel, a vowel sequence, or a consonant that closes a syllable—as in Spanish final syllables like the -liz of feLIZ, the -tal of elemenTAL, and so on. The “Why?” of our question could therefore be a “Why not?” The Spanish stress system developed in a straightforward way from that of Latin. While regular Spanish stress is always final or penultimate, Latin stress was penultimate or antepenultimate. Stress usually stayed on the same syllable as the language evolved. However, sounds in unstressed syllables tended to erode, causing Latin words to drift toward the Spanish

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Spanish result

Latin origin

Example

Final stress

Penultimate stress

debEre > deBER ‘to owe’

Penultimate stress

Penultimate stress

moLInu > molino ‘mill’

(word ends in vowel)

(word ends in vowel)

(word ends in consonant)

Penultimate stress

FOcum > FUEgo ‘fire’

(word ends in consonant) Antepenultimate stress

VIridis > VERde ‘green’

Source: Examples from Penny (2002: 41)

stress patterns. For example, final stress, which was impossible in Latin, emerged in Spanish when Latin words like deBEre lost a final vowel. Spanish words with penultimate stress evolved from a variety of Latin word types, including words with antepenultimate stress like VIridis, which lost its middle i. Going further back in time, in Proto-Indo-European the most prominent syllable in each word was not marked with greater stress, but with higher pitch (tone). The Latin shift from pitch accent to stress accent had several consequences: ll

As described above, sounds in unstressed syllables were ripe for erosion and loss, such as the final e of debere, the m of focum, and the middle i of viridis in Table 8.4.

ll

Consonants brought together by vowel loss often changed. For example, the g and l of Latin tegula ‘roof tile,’ brought into contact by the loss of the unstressed u, morphed into the /x/ of Spanish teja.

ll

An unstressed e or i often turned into a y sound, which triggered other changes. Thus, mm

the n of Latin vinea ‘vine’ became the ñ of Spanish viña (via an intermediary vinya);

mm

the l of meliore ‘better’ became the /x/ of mejor (via melyore).

Stress therefore played a major role in shaping the overall sound of Spanish.

Chapter 8 The sounds of Spanish

To learn more ll

See Questions 51 and 52 for a discussion of accent marks, the written correlate of irregular stress.

ll

See Question 13 for more on the phonetic changes described in the final paragraph.

ll

See (Weiss 2009: 108–09) for more on the loss of pitch accent.

ll

Hualde (2005: 239–45) discusses the phonetic characteristics (pitch, duration, and loudness) of Spanish stressed syllables.

ll

For crosslinguistic data on stress patterns, see Goedemans and van der Hulst (2013a, b, c).

Question 66. Is there a version of Pig Latin for Spanish? There isn’t a Spanish version of Pig Latin per se, but Spanish does have several language games of its own, called jerigonzas, a word related to the English word jargon. Like most English language games, Spanish jerigonzas insert extra syllables into a word. Consider, for example, the examples in Table 8.5. Dots show syllable boundaries, and inserted syllables are underlined. The three jerigonzas differ in where the extra syllables are inserted, and what vowels they use. In the Peruvian jerigonza, the syllable cha is inserted before each syllable. In the Colombian jerigonza, the sound p is inserted after each syllable, followed by the syllable’s main vowel. (Note that both n’s in canción change to m, which makes them easier to pronounce before p.) The Table 8.5  Some examples of Latin American jerigonzas

Jerigonza origin Word

Peru

Colombia

Costa Rica

can·ción ‘song’

cha·can·cha·cion

cam·pa·ciom·po

ca·pan·cio·pon

ma·es·tro ‘teacher’

cha·ma·cha·es·cha·tro

ma·pa·es·pe·tro·po

ma·pa·e·pes·tro·po

pá·ja·ro ‘bird’

cha·pa·cha·ja·cha·ro

pa·pa·ja·pa·ro·po

pa·pa·ja·pa·ro·po

Source: Piñeros (1998: 61)

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Costa Rican jerigonza also inserts p plus a vowel, but in the middle of each syllable, with any leftover consonants attached after the pV. You can see this difference most clearly in the middle es syllable of maestro, whose jerigonza form is es pe in Colombia (the pV follows the entire syllable) but e pes in Costa Rica (the pV splits the syllable). For syllables that end in a vowel, Colombian and Costa Rican jerigonza are identical. Other jerigonzas use alternative inserted syllables, like fV instead of pV, a popular variation often called Idioma F. Some, like this jerigonza based on kVmV, add more than one syllable: ll

canción  cankama cionkomo

ll

maestro  makama eskeme trokomo

ll

pájaro  pakama jakama rokomo

Language games delight linguists because they prove that syllables are more than an abstract concept. Speakers must be able to break a word into syllables in order to produce proper jerigonza forms. Furthermore, for a game like Costa Rican jerigonza, in which the pV interrupts a syllable, speakers must be implicitly aware of syllables’ internal structure. Language games can therefore be a useful tool for testing hypotheses about syllabification. For example, the syllable boundaries shown in Table 8.5, which keep cion as a single syllable but split maes into two, follow the somewhat arcane syllabification rules set by the Real Academia Española (Question 2) These are the rules a Spanish copy editor, or word processing program, would consult when deciding where to insert a hyphen at a line break. To investigate whether average speakers implicitly “know” these rules (just as they “know” to add -s to make a plural), one could easily conduct a linguistic experiment that elicits jerigonza forms of a variety of words with two-vowel sequences. With any luck, Spanish speakers would be consistent in which vowel sequences they keep intact and which they break. It would be interesting to see if the Real Academia’s rules hold up in practice.6 Another appeal of language games for linguists is that so many involve infixing—that is, adding material to the middle of a word instead of its beginning (prefixing) or end (suffixing). (Goose  geese is an English example.) Infixing is fairly unusual in languages, yet common in language games. For this reason, any linguist who wants to research infixing is inevitably required to become an expert on language games. More broadly, because language games involve both word structure and individual sounds (like the varying vowel of jerigonza pV), they provide useful data for any linguist who is interested in the intersection of these two levels of linguistic analysis. For the rest of us, they’re just plain fun.

Chapter 8 The sounds of Spanish

To learn more ll

The description of kVmV jerigonza is from Jones (1994), an excellent source of information on language games in a variety of languages.

ll

See López (2009) for a video clip of a rapper singing in Idioma F.

ll

For a general treatment of language games and linguistic theory, focusing on infixing, see Yu (2007).

ll

Linguists sometimes call language games “ludlings,” from the Latin root ludere ‘to play.’

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Chapter 9 Names, nouns, and pronouns

Chapter 9 Names, nouns, and pronouns Questions Names 67 Why are Spanish names so long? (p. 203) 68 Does Spanish have a ‘son of’ ending for last names? (p. 204) 69 Why are Pepe and Paco the nicknames for José and Francisco? (p. 205) Nouns 70 Why does Spanish have masculine and feminine nouns? (p. 206) 71 Are the same words masculine and feminine in all Romance languages? (p. 208) 72 Why do so many masculine nouns end in -a? (p. 210) 73 Why is vacaciones plural? (p. 214) Pronouns 74 Why doesn’t Spanish (mostly) have a word for ‘it’? (p. 216) 75 Why does Spanish have so many words for ‘you’? (p. 217) 76 How do Spanish dialects differ in their words for ‘you’? (p. 220) 77 What are leísmo, loísmo, and laísmo? (p. 222) 78 How can su mean ‘his,’ ‘her,’ ‘their,’ and ‘your’? (p. 227)

Chapter 9 Names, nouns, and pronouns

In the Bible, as in the dictionary, language comes before love. Adam’s first task in the Garden of Eden was to invent nouns by naming the animals; only then did God conjure Eve. Nouns really are that important; without them, we couldn’t talk about the world we live in, the objects around us, or the people we love. They account for a majority of a child’s first words, and are among the only vocabulary that parents drill explicitly with their children (Where’s your nose?). To use Spanish nouns correctly, one must distinguish between masculine and feminine, and, in some contexts, between human and nonhuman. But these factors pale before the complexity of the Spanish pronoun system. Spanish has four sets of pronouns (subject, reflexive, direct object, and indirect object), with up to ten pronouns per set. It’s not surprising that pronouns are the aspect of Spanish grammar with the most dialectal differences. In this chapter, we’ll consider the history and logic behind these aspects of nouns and pronouns. For good measure, we’ll begin by exploring some interesting aspects of names (proper nouns) as well.

Names Question 67. Why are Spanish names so long? Spanish names are a mouthful! Starting with some impressive examples from officialdom, Spain’s current king is Felipe Juan Pablo Alfonso de Todos los Santos, and one of its top diplomats is Juan Pablo de Laiglesia y González de Peredo. Moving to popular culture, the full names of the Colombian singers Juanes and Shakira are Juan Esteban Aristizábal Vásquez and Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll. Clocking in at four elements each, Juanes’s and Shakira’s names are actually quite typical. The main reason for the generous length of Spanish names is that Hispanics use two last names (apellidos): one from the father’s side, and one from the mother’s. The father’s apellido is primary. It comes first, it’s used to sort names into alphabetical order, and it’s the only apellido passed down to the next generation. For example, if Juanes and Shakira were to marry and have a son named Pedro, his full name would be Pedro Aristizábal Mebarak; the maternal apellidos Vásquez and Ripoll would be dropped. It’s an oldfashioned custom to join the two apellidos with a y ‘and,’ but the norm is to leave them plain.

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Other factors can make Spanish names even longer. Many Spanish speakers, especially those with common first names like José or María, have a combined name, like José Luis or María Elena. (Juanes’s stage name is a combination of Juan Esteban.) An apellido can be hyphenated, like the paternal apellido of Spain’s current minister of Foreign Affairs, José GarcíaMargallo y Marfil. Other apellidos include a de, like the maternal apellido González de Peredo mentioned above. (In such cases, a y between the paternal and maternal apellidos helps to demarcate them.) And although women don’t change their name when they get married, they can add their husband’s last name to their own with the de possessive marker. Shakira’s married name, were she to marry Juanes, would be therefore be Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll de Aristizábal—a mouthful indeed. Since the father’s apellido is primary, it can stand by itself. A José García Martínez would typically introduce himself as José García or Sr. García. This isn’t an iron-clad rule, however: some people opt to use both apellidos, or just their mother’s name, though the paternal name would be required on legal documents. This approach can spice up the name of an individual with a bland paternal apellido. Pablo Picasso usually ignored his paternal apellido, the common name Ruiz, and the former prime minister of Spain, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, likewise goes by the more distinctive Zapatero.

Question 68. Does Spanish have a ‘son of’ ending for last names? Spanish doesn’t use the word hijo ‘son’ to form last names along the lines of Josephson or Martinson in English, or Ben Yehuda or Ben David in Hebrew (ben meaning ‘son’). However, many Spanish last names end in -ez or -es. This suffix is believed to have originated in certain Germanic names adapted into Old Spanish, for example, Ruy ‘Roy’ versus Ruiz ‘(son) of Roy’ (Penny 2002: 16). It was then extended to mean ‘son of’ in other names, such as Martínez ‘son of Martin,’ Gonzáles ‘son of Gonzalo,’ and so on. Like English -son, -ez/-es is no longer used actively. Rafael, a hypothetical son of a Martín García, would be named Rafael García, not Rafael Martínez.1 By the same token, not every -ez last name corresponds to a contemporary first name. Gutiérrez and Gómez, two common Hispanic last names, come from the obsolete first names Gutiérre (Spanish for Walter) and Gome (with variants Gomo and Gomesano). Finally, some last names only coincidentally end in -ez/-es. The common last name Chavez doesn’t mean ‘son of Chavo’— chavo just means ‘guy’—but rather is borrowed from the Portuguese word for ‘keys.’

Chapter 9 Names, nouns, and pronouns

Question 69. Why are Pepe and Paco the nicknames for José and Francisco? Thereby hangs a linguistic legend. Most Spanish nicknames are formed with the diminutives -ito and -ita, like Miguelito ‘little Michael,’ from Miguel, or Sarita ‘little Sara,’ from Sara. Others originated in abbreviations such as Mabel for María Isabel and Nando for Fernando. Two common nicknames, though, are genuine puzzlers: Pepe, the nickname for José ‘Joseph,’ and Paco, the nickname for Francisco ‘Francis.’ When I studied in Barcelona one summer, I was delighted to read in our textbook that both these nicknames have religious origins. The explanation went something like this: In the New Testament, Joseph was Mary’s husband, but not Jesus’s father: only his putative (“so-called”) father, or padre putativo in Spanish. Abbreviate this as p.p., give it a Spanish pronunciation (the letter p being pronounced pe), and you get Pepe. As for Paco: Saint Francis founded the Franciscan order of monks and was therefore the father of the Franciscan community, or pater communitatis Latin; its first syllables combined to form Paco.

After that summer, I often saw this explanation mentioned as fact in various websites about Spanish names, but couldn’t find any scholarly validation of it. So I turned to the ultimate source, querying the Real Academia Española (Question 2) through their website. The answer was unabashedly negative: The nickname Pepe comes, in reality, from the Italian Beppe, itself a nickname for Giuseppe. . . . In the case of Paco, none of the data on names that we have at our disposal support the etymology of pater comunitatis.

We are left with a secular origin for Pepe, and a mystery for Paco.

To learn more ll

See RAE (2011: 625–29) for a thorough discussion of Spanish first names and nicknames, including the above-mentioned etymologies of Mabel, Nando, and Pepe.

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Albaigès (1984: 195) suggests an alternative, though phonetically implausible, etymology for Paco.

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Nouns Question 70. Why does Spanish have masculine and feminine nouns? Los niños siempre serán niños y las niñas serán niñas ‘Boys will be boys and girls will be girls.’ In Spanish grammar, the gender divide applies not only to boys and girls—and likewise fathers and mothers, priests and nuns, stallions and mares, and even, poetically, the sky and the earth—but to all nouns, including the vast majority that refer to truly sexless objects like rocks and toasters. Noun gender is at the heart of Spanish grammar, on a par with verb conjugation and the many words for ‘you’ (Questions 80 and 75). Every Spanish noun is either masculine or feminine, and its gender is echoed in adjectives, articles, and pronouns, a system known as gender agreement.2 Thus, el periódico ‘the newspaper’ (masculine) is aburrido ‘boring,’ so No lo leo ‘I don’t read it,’ but la revista ‘the magazine’ (feminine) is divertida ‘entertaining,’ so La leo ‘I read it.’ Grammatical gender usually conforms to natural, or biological, gender, when present, but there are exceptions. For instance, pistilo ‘pistil,’ the female part of a flower, is masculine, and a víctima ‘victim’ is feminine even if a man. The ubiquity of grammatical gender makes it an early priority for children learning Spanish as a first language; it is mastered before age three (Question 31). Paradoxically, the same ubiquity makes gender a daunting challenge for second-language learners. For speakers of languages that lack grammatical gender, learning to keep it in mind is like walking through a minefield: every noun, adjective, article, and pronoun must be carefully considered and controlled. Speakers of other gendered languages, on the other hand, can be tripped up by nouns that have a different gender in their native tongue. (This happens even within the Romance language family, as described in the following question.) Gender therefore requires constant practice and correction for beginners and remains a source of errors even for advanced second-language speakers of Spanish. From a historical perspective, the “Why?” of Spanish gender has a simple answer: Latin inherited a three-way gender system (masculine, feminine, and neuter) from Proto-Indo-European (Question 21), but lost neuter gender in the transition to Romance languages.3 This was part of the drastic simplification of the Latin noun system described in Question 14. As Latin neuter nouns became either masculine or feminine in Spanish, some masculine and feminine nouns changed gender as well. For example, Spanish sangre ‘blood’ became

Chapter 9 Names, nouns, and pronouns

feminine, while pez ‘tar’ and prefacio ‘preface’ became masculine. Spanish also tidied up the Latin system to some extent by imposing its standard -o and -a masculine and feminine endings on confusing Latin nouns. Most famously, Latin socrus ‘mother-in-law’ and nurus ‘daughter-in-law’ had the typically masculine ending -us (the forerunner of Spanish -o), even though they were grammatically feminine; in Spanish they were regularized to suegra and nuera. Likewise, infanta ‘princess’ and señora ‘lady’ gained their explicit feminine endings as they evolved from Latin infante and seniore. These changes are reminiscent of some well-intentioned errors that children make when learning Spanish as a first language (Question 31). From a crosslinguistic perspective, Spanish noun gender reflects a widespread linguistic impulse to divide nouns into classes, perhaps as a way to impose a conceptual structure on the enormous variety of entities in the world. About 45 percent the languages examined in the World Atlas of Language Structures have gender agreement: usually, as in Indo-European, with a masculine/feminine distinction as its core (Corbett 2013a,b). These include language families as diverse as Semitic (Arabic, Hebrew, etc.) and Dravidian (Tamil, Kannada, etc.), spoken in southern India. Agreement systems that ignore the masculine/feminine distinction are typically based on higher-level concepts of the “animal, vegetable, or mineral?” variety. For example, Bantu languages like Swahili have up to thirteen noun classes representing humans, animals, body parts, plants, abstract nouns, places, and so on. Finally, some 20 percent of languages lack an agreement system but categorize nouns when they occur in number expressions like three sheets of paper and one stick of gum (Gil 2013). In languages like Chinese and Thai, numerical classifiers like sheet and stick are required in every expression of quantity. It’s as if English speakers had to say three sheets of placemat or one stick of pencil. From a practical perspective, gender promotes clarity. El capital europeo and la capital europea both mean ‘European capital,’ but Spanish leaves no room for ambiguity: the first, masculine version refers to money, and the feminine to a city. Likewise, if I tell a shopping companion that I prefer la roja ‘the red one’ (feminine), there can be no doubt that I’m talking about the falda ‘skirt’ (feminine) and not the vestido ‘dress’ (masculine). Gender is also efficient: it doubles the possible expressive power of any phonetically plausible Spanish word. This capability underlies a handful of idiosyncratic word pairs like el/la frente ‘the front/forehead’ and el/la papa ‘the pope/potato.’ But Spanish has also put the power of gender to work in more systematic ways. Many fruits are feminine and their trees masculine: thus, manzana ‘apple’ versus manzano ‘apple tree,’ or naranja ‘orange’ and naranjo ‘orange tree.’ A more recent (and less consistent) contrast pairs masculine words for professions or hand tools with feminine words for related machines. Some

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examples are registrador ‘registrar’ (a profession) versus registradora ‘cash register’ and secador ‘hair dryer’ (a hand tool) versus secadora ‘laundry dryer’ (Pountain 2006a). A final “why” of gender is less tangible but equally real. Just as color and smell enrich our appreciation of a world that we mostly perceive through size, shape, movement, and sound, gender adds an extra dimension to our conception of the objects around us. There’s no question that Spanish speakers internalize grammatical gender even though it’s usually arbitrary: in laboratory studies, they have been shown to ascribe masculine or feminine characteristics (size, strength, voice, etc.) to objects according to their grammatical gender (Question 70). This dimension adds an expressive kick to Spanish poetry. As Deutscher points out, “[in] Pablo Neruda’s ‘Ode to the Sea,’ in which the (masculine) el mar strikes a stone (una piedra) and then ‘he caresses her, kisses her, drenches her, pounds his chest, repeating his own name’—the English ‘it caresses it, kisses it, drenches it, pounds its chest’ is not quite the same” (2010: 215). The average Spanish speaker isn’t a poet, but sees the world a little more vividly than someone whose language lacks the lens of gender.

To learn more ll

See Penny (2002: 119–27) for a more detailed discussion of Latin gender outcomes in Spanish.

ll

Fortson (2010) traces gender outcomes in many branches of the IndoEuropean family.

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The World Atlas of Language Structures chapters on gender (Corbett 2013a,b) and numerical classifiers (Gil 2013) are excellent sources of crosslinguistic data.

Question 71. Are the same words masculine and feminine in all Romance languages? The previous question drew a distinction between grammatical gender— masculine versus feminine nouns, adjectives, and so on—and natural, or biological gender. One consequence of this disconnect is that a noun can be masculine in one language but feminine in another, even within a single language family such as Romance. For example, Latin sanguis ‘blood’ was masculine, as are its French and Portuguese/Italian descendants sang

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and sangue, but their Spanish cognate (related word) sangre is feminine. If grammatical gender were tied to natural gender, surely the gender of ‘blood,’ perhaps inspired by its physical properties, would have remained consistent within this tightly knit group. Instead, sangre joined the plentiful ranks of gender-bending Romance nouns, some of which are listed by their Spanish forms in Table 9.1. The other Romance languages have their own anomalies; for example, many French nouns that end with -eur and -ode are feminine but have masculine cognates in other Romance languages. For example, la couleur ‘color’ and la méthode ‘method’ in French correspond to el color and el método in Spanish. The majority of these gender-bending nouns, marked with an asterisk in Table 9.1, derive from Latin nouns from the third of the language’s five “declension classes,” which determined the nouns’ endings. Only the third declension included nouns of every Latin gender—masculine, feminine, and neuter—often with identical endings. For this reason, masculine and feminine nouns of the third declension were the most likely to shift in gender as the Romance languages evolved. Likewise, neuters of the third declension could become either masculine or feminine in Romance.4 Other sources for gender variation within Romance are: ll

Variation in Latin: Spanish párpado (see Table 9.1) comes from *palpetrum, a masculine variant of the Classical Latin palpebra, which was feminine.

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Internal derivation: Equipo, crucero, duda, vacuna and their Romance cognates were derived within each language from existing words (in Spanish, equipar ‘to equip,’ cruz ‘cross,’ dudar ‘to doubt,’ and vaca ‘cow’) and were therefore free to vary in gender.

Table 9.1  Some Romance nouns with cognate gender differences (Nouns from Latin’s third declension marked with asterisk*)

Masculine in Spanish (fem. elsewhere)

Feminine in Spanish (masc. elsewhere)

Masculine in Spanish, Portuguese (fem. elsewhere)

Feminine in Spanish, Portuguese (masc. elsewhere)

centinela ‘sentry’

leche* ‘milk’

banco ‘bank’

duda ‘doubt’

equipo ‘team’

legumbre* ‘vegetable’

crucero ‘cruise’

frente* ‘forehead’

origen* ‘origin’

miel* ‘honey’

pavor* ‘fear’

serpiente* ‘snake’

párpado ‘eyelid’

nariz* ‘nose’

pez*

vacuna ‘vaccine’

sal* ‘salt’

prefacio* ‘preface’

sangre* ‘blood’

puré ‘puree’

‘tar, pitch’

víscera*

‘inner organ’

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Change in borrowing: Banco, centinela, and puré are masculine in Spanish but were feminine in their original Germanic (bank), Italian (sentinella), and French (purée).

Some words that vary in gender within Romance also vary within Spanish. For example, the neuter Latin mare ‘sea’ gave rise to feminine mer in French but masculine nouns in the other Romance languages, including Spanish mar. However, the gender of Spanish mar fluctuated in the past, and the word is still treated as feminine in marine and poetic contexts. It also appears as a fossilized feminine in expressions like pelillos a la mar ‘Let bygones be bygones’ (literally, ‘trifles in the sea’) or la mar ‘much/many’ (e.g., Nos divertimos la mar ‘We had a lot of fun’). A different type of variation is shown by frente (Table 9.1). Spanish inherited this feminine noun directly from the Latin third declension feminine noun frōns, but in the twentieth century also coined an identical masculine noun, frente ‘front (military or climate),’ in imitation of the masculine French front.

To learn more ll

The listing of variant-gender Romance nouns in Stoll (2007), assembled by a translator, is the most comprehensive I’ve found, though the etymologies are not always accurate. I’ve borrowed Stoll’s use of the term “gender-bending.”

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Etymologies in this question are based on Corominas (1973).

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The discussion of variant uses of mar is based on RAE (2005).

ll

Posner (2002: 55–69) discusses the Romance outcome of Latin gender in some detail, including cases of ambiguous gender.

ll

See Penny (2002: 119–27) for a more detailed discussion of gender outcomes in Spanish.

Question 72. Why do so many masculine nouns end in -a? Noun gender is one of the more user-friendly aspects of Spanish grammar because it is usually predictable. In particular, most nouns that end in -o are masculine (e.g., libro ‘book’), and most that end in -a are feminine (e.g., casa ‘house’). Exceptions to these rules are curiously asymmetrical: masculine words that end in -a greatly outnumber feminines that end in -o. There is no single explanation for this disparity. Rather, a “perfect storm” of historical and cultural forces has brought about the relative large numbers of -a masculines. The following is a rogue’s gallery of illustrative examples.

Chapter 9 Names, nouns, and pronouns

The most frequent—and interesting—example: día ‘day’ Día is the most frequent -a masculine in Spanish, part of the everyday greeting Buenos días. Its Latin progenitor, dies, had ambiguous gender. It was usually treated as masculine because of its origin: dies came from Indo-European *diéus, meaning both ‘Sky-god’—a masculine deity—and ‘daytime sky.’ (*Diéus was related to Indo-European *deiuós ‘God,’ the source of Latin deus and thus Spanish dios, thus making día and dios linguistic cousins.) However, dies was treated as feminine when used in the sense of ‘appointed day, deadline.’ The evolution of Latin dies into Spanish día both simplified and complicated its gender status. On the one hand, its usage became exclusively masculine. On the other hand, its ending changed from -es to the feminine -a as an accidental side effect of a historical Spanish trend to generalize the feminine word ending -a (see Question 14). Other Latin nouns that resembled dies, such as materies ‘wood,’ rabies ‘madness,’ and species ‘kind, type,’ were all feminine, and for them, the change from -es to -a made sense. As materies evolved into Spanish materia ‘matter, substance’ (and also madera ‘wood’), rabies into rabia ‘rage,’ species into especia ‘spice,’ and so on, dies followed suit, thus creating the conflict between the noun’s gender and its ending.

A poetic example: trompeta ‘trumpet player’ The extension of the feminine noun trompeta ‘trumpet’ from the instrument to its player (whether masculine or feminine) is an example of “metonymy”: one word’s substitution for another with a related meaning. Metonymy is ubiquitous not just in poetry, but in everyday usage, such as the title of the popular Mexican soap opera Mi corazón es tuyo ‘My heart is yours,’ that is, ‘I am yours’ (as opposed to my physical heart). Metonymy has inspired a host of other -a masculines, including: ll

players of other feminine instruments, for example, corneta ‘bugler,’ and batería ‘drummer’;

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users of feminine tools, for example, cámara ‘photographer’ and espada ‘swordsman’;

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workers with jobs based on other feminine nouns, for example, cura ‘priest’ (charged with the cura ‘care’ of his flock), policía ‘police officer’ (member of la policía ‘police force’), and cabecilla ‘leader’ (from cabeza ‘head’);

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varieties of alcohol including champaña ‘champagne,’ tequila, and rioja; these take their names from their regions of origin, but are masculine in accordance with the words vino ‘wine,’ alcohol, and licor ‘liquor’;

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caza ‘fighter plane,’ derived from avión de caza (literally, ‘plane of hunting’).

Ultra-typical examples: atleta, zarista, and clima The single largest source of -a masculines in Spanish is Greek. Dozens of words from atleta ‘athlete’ to zarista ‘czarist’ use the Latinate endings -ta and -ista, derived from Greek -tes and -istes, to describe professionals and believers, both male and female. Thus, Rafael Nadal is un atleta (masculine), and Arantxa Sánchez Vicario is una atleta (feminine). The Greek ending -ma, seen in scientific nouns like clima ‘climate’ as well as abstract and philosophical terms, was (and is) neuter: neither masculine nor feminine. Most Greek -ma nouns remained neuter when borrowed into Latin, then became masculine in Spanish. Words like planeta, which were already masculine in Greek, deepened the association of -a masculines with Spanish scientific terminology. The fate of Greek -ma words in Spanish was hardly uniform. Some that entered the lexicon relatively early were adopted as feminines because of their final -a; examples are asma ‘asthma,’ broma ‘prank,’ and calma ‘calm.’5 These joined several feminines of pure Latin origin that happened to end in -ma, such as dama ‘lady,’ fama ‘fame,’ and llama ‘flame.’ When Spanish began to import large amounts of Greek vocabulary, mostly via Latin, during the Siglo de Oro (see Question 11), scholarly awareness that Greek -ma words were not feminine ensured that most were borrowed as masculines. At this point, several -ma words of Greek origin whose Spanish gender had previously fluctuated became consistently masculine as well. (The gender of some words, such as esperma ‘sperm’ and reúma ‘rheumatism,’ is still ambiguous.) Examples of early feminine usage of modern masculines include: ll

Cervantes’s reference to la enigma de Galatea ‘the enigma of Galatea’ in his 1585 novel La Galatea;

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Lope de Vega’s question about the New World, ¿es la clima ardiente o fría? ‘Is the climate hot or cold?’ in his 1604 novel El peregrino en su patria;

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The title of Juan Rufo’s 1596 book Las seiscientas apotegmas ‘600 maxims.’

Chapter 9 Names, nouns, and pronouns

The scientific flavor of masculine -a explains a handful of word pairs that differ only in gender. Two examples are coma and cólera, which have scientific meanings when masculine (el coma ‘coma’ and el cólera ‘colera’) and nonscientific meanings when feminine (la coma ‘comma,’ and la cólera ‘choler, anger’). The el/la cólera pair is particularly striking because both words stem from the Greek feminine noun meaning ‘bile.’ La cólera, whose usage dates from the 1500s, preserves the word’s original gender, though with a somewhat modified meaning (anger was believed to stem from excess bile). El cólera, which dates from the 1800s, is fully modern both in gender and in meaning. Cometa ‘comet,’ also from Greek, followed a different path. Like cólera and coma, it was first borrowed as a feminine noun; however, from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, its usage gradually became masculine as the new, nonscientific meaning ‘kite’ took over the feminine, and the overall association of masculine -a with scientific terminology increased (Pountain 2011: 108–10).

The most mysterious example: mapa ‘map’ Latin mappa ‘napkin, cloth’ was indisputably feminine, but changed gender as it came to mean ‘map’—itself a metonymic extension from the cloth used in early map-making. Masculine mapa might have arisen as an abbreviation of mapamundi, a ‘map of the world’—which, like all Spanish compounds, is masculine.6 (The English compound tramway likewise came into Spanish as masculine tranvía—a word-by-word translation, or “calque”—even though vía ‘way’ itself is feminine.) The scientific nature of maps may also have pushed the word’s gender toward the masculine.

A counterintuitive example: persona ‘person’ A person is una persona (feminine) regardless of his or her sex, even if explicitly referred to as masculine. Thus, in the phrase una persona masculina simpática ‘a friendly masculine person’ every word accompanying persona— including masculino—must take its feminine form. Persona is one of a trio of stubbornly feminine “epicene” (single-sex) nouns that refer to people. Like a persona, a víctima ‘victim’ and a criatura ‘baby’ can never be masculine. Feminine epicene names for animal species abound, including rata ‘rat,’ rana ‘frog,’ and jirafa ‘giraffe.’7

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An unmarked example: yoga When it comes to Spanish grammar, masculine and feminine are not created equal. Linguists consider the masculine gender in Spanish to be “unmarked,” or basic, because masculine forms often lack a distinguishing ending; consider español versus española, ‘Spanish (m./f.)’ and rey ‘king’ versus reina ‘queen.’ As further proof of their unmarked status, masculine forms can refer to individuals of unspecified gender (un español ‘a Spaniard’) and to mixed-sex groups (españoles ‘Spaniards’ and padres ‘parents’). Because the masculine gender is unmarked, new borrowings are normally assigned to this gender even if they end in -a: thus, el yoga, borrowed from Sanskrit.8 An aggressive example of this process is centinela ‘sentinel,’ which changed from feminine to masculine when Spanish adapted it from Italian sentinella (recall Table 9.1). The final stress of many borrowed -a masculines gives them a distinctly un-Spanish feeling; some examples are abacá ‘hemp’ (from Tagalog, in the Philippines), mulá ‘mullah’ (ultimately from Arabic), and sofá (from French). Broadly speaking, the unmarked status of the masculine gender helps explain the overall direction of the various processes described above. Whatever the specific reason for an -a word’s masculine gender—metonymy, Greek origin, epicene status, borrowing, or idiosyncrasy—its outcome conforms to the language’s default, like a river flowing downhill. It would be bizarre if the “perfect storm” of factors were to have the opposite effect.

To learn more ll

For a detailed breakdown of categories of Spanish masculine and feminine nouns, see RAE (2010: 23–33).

ll

The etymology of día and dios above is based on Weiss (2009: 225, 253).

ll

See Penny (2002: 124–26) for a summary of the various sources of irregular Spanish masculine and feminine nouns.

ll

See Question 8 for examples of nonstandard masculine versions of epicene -a nouns.

Question 73. Why is vacaciones plural? Spanish speakers rarely talk about una vacación—‘a vacation’—in the singular. They are much more likely to use the plural, even in such gardenvariety sentences as Estaba de vacaciones ‘I was on vacation’ (literally, ‘on

Chapter 9 Names, nouns, and pronouns

vacations’) or Tuve unas buenas vacaciones ‘I had a good vacation’ (literally, ‘some good vacations’). It’s tempting to look to Hispanic culture for an explanation of this peculiarity; I sometimes tell my students that “Spanish speakers love vacations so much, they never have just one!” If there’s a special circle of hell for teachers who lie to their students, vacaciones is sure to send me there. The explanation behind plural vacaciones is actually linguistic rather than cultural: it is an instance of a relatively common phenomenon known as pluralia tantum. This Latin term simply means ‘nouns that are always plural’; some English examples are scissors and congratulations. Examples from other languages include Russian slivki ‘cream,’ Biblical Hebrew elohim ‘Lord,’ and Chirag šerš–ne ‘saliva’ (Kibrik 2003; Chirag is a Caucasian language of Dagestan).9 Spanish is unusually exuberant in its inventory of pluralia tantum: it has dozens. Not all Spanish pluralia tantum are created equal. Some are strict, completely lacking singular forms; some examples are víveres ‘food, provisions,’ fauces ‘jaw,’ esponsales ‘betrothal,’ añicos ‘broken pieces,’ gárgaras ‘gargling sound,’ and los Andes (the mountain range). To express a singular concept that corresponds to one these nouns requires a different word choice (e.g., mandíbula superior ‘upper jaw’) or syntactic run-around (e.g., una montaña andina ‘an Andean mountain’). However, most Spanish pluralia tantum, like vacaciones, actually have less-used singular forms. Vacación exists, for instance, but vacaciones outnumbers it by more than twenty to one (Davies 2002–). The most interesting pluralia tantum occupy a middle ground: they correspond to a singular noun with a different meaning. Most such pluralia tantum developed from the singular via a metaphorical, or at least affective, twist of meaning. Thus, callos ‘tripe (food)’ comes from callo ‘callus,’ because it is made from the firmer parts of the stomach (Corominas 1973: 121); esposas ‘handcuffs’ is a sarcastic play on esposa ‘wife,’ historias ‘gossip, excuses’ is a negative take on historia ‘story,’ Navidades ‘Christmas time’ is broader than Navidad, and aguas ‘waters’ is, as in English, a more poetic version of agua ‘water’ (as in las aguas de Babilonia). Coinage can also run in the opposite direction: the majestic mountain range los Alpes is the source of the generic singular alp ‘high mountain.’ Spanish pluralia tantum tend to fall into certain semantic categories, including food (espaguetis ‘spaghetti’), finances (emolumentos ‘payment’), collections of objects (bártulos ‘stuff’ and escombros ‘debris’), general locations (andurriales ‘out-of-the-way places’), rituals (vísperas ‘evensong’), clothing (gafas ‘glasses’), and formulaic expressions (Buenos días ‘Good morning,’ Gracias ‘Thanks,’ Felicidades ‘Congratulations,’ and Saludos ‘Greetings’). They often refer to items with plural parts: esposas and gafas, for instance, come in pairs, while espaguetis and escombros are usually found

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in groups. Other pluralia tantum, such as historias, vacaciones, Saludos, or tripas, “read” as singulars. Regardless of their meaning, all pluralia tantum are grammatically plural, requiring plural adjectives, verbs, and so on (e.g., Las tripas mexicanas son  famosas ‘Mexican tripe is famous’). Latin had its fair share of pluralia tantum, such as caulae ‘opening; sheepfold’ and frontalia ‘frontlet (head decoration).’ None of these survived directly as Latin evolved into Spanish, though some entered the Spanish lexicon later as religious or scholarly borrowings; these include Latin nuptiae ‘nuptials’ and idus ‘ides,’ the source of Spanish nupcias and idus. Others were reinterpreted as singulars, including Spanish acta ‘minutes (notes from a meeting)’ and arma ‘weapon,’ both from Latin plurals.

To learn more ll

The various semantic categories of pluralia tantum discussed above (food, finances, etc.) are based on RAE (2010: 44–47). This thorough treatment lists and categorizes almost 125 examples. It follows a discussion of the less common phenomenon of singularia tantum (43–44).

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Batchelor and Pountain (2005: 22–23) is a more selective listing.

Pronouns Question 74. Why doesn’t Spanish (mostly) have a word for ‘it’? If you’re a fan of the horror genre, you might choose to practice your Spanish by reading a Stephen King novel in translation. Among the possibilities are El resplandor ‘The Shining,’ Ojos de fuego ‘Firestarter,’ La cúpula ‘Under the Dome,’ and It. Amazingly, the basic English word it lacks a straightforward Spanish translation. How is ‘it’ possible? To begin with, Spanish syntax minimizes the need to use ‘it.’ Spanish sentences usually omit subject pronouns, and instead rely on a rich set of verb endings, as in Hablo versus Hablamos ‘I/we speak’ (see Question 80). So if you and I are talking about a table, and I want to mention that ‘it’ (the table) is green (verde), an explicit reference to the table isn’t necessary. I can simply say Es verde and count on conversational context to fill in the gap. Spanish speakers likewise produce impersonal sentences, such as Llueve

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‘(It) is raining’ and Es imposible ‘(It) is impossible,’ without the meaningless It subject required in English. The Spanish tendency to invert subjects and objects further reduces the need for ‘it.’ Rather than declaring ‘I like it,’ with an explicit ‘it’ object, a Spanish speaker says Me gusta ‘(It) pleases me,’ omitting, as always, the ‘it’ subject. Likewise, Me encanta ‘(It) enchants me’ replaces ‘I love it,’ Me falta ‘(It) lacks to me’ replaces ‘I don’t have it,’ and so on. (See Question 93 for more examples.) Another factor is gender: in Spanish, every noun is grammatically male or female (see Question 70), so that masculine and feminine pronouns take the place of neuter ‘it.’ In the example above, if I really wanted to refer to the green table explicitly, I would use ella ‘she’ because the noun mesa ‘table’ is feminine: Ella es verde. I might also refer to the table as esta ‘this’ or esa ‘that,’ both of which are feminine. Likewise, to say that someone has bought, damaged, or admired the table, I would use la ‘her,’ as in Elena la admiró ‘Elena admired it’—literally, ‘admired her.’ To be fair, Spanish does have a neuter pronoun, ello, but it’s only used to refer to actions, abstractions, and other things that cannot be assigned a gender, as in Me enfrenté con mi jefe y pagué por ello ‘I confronted my boss and paid for it’ (RAE 2005). Even these uses can usually be avoided. For example, one could use a specific noun to describe the confrontation and its matching (masculine or feminine) pronoun instead of ello, as in Tuve una disputa con mi jefe y pagué por ella ‘I had a fight with my boss and paid for it’—literally, ‘paid for her.’ Since ello is rarely necessary, it is necessarily rare. As shown in Table 6.3 (Question 37), it is the 343rd most frequent word in Spanish, whereas the gendered pronouns él, ella, ellos, and ellas are all in the top one hundred. Life (mostly) without ‘it’ is the Spanish solution—take it or leave it.

Question 75. Why does Spanish have so many words for ‘you’? Don’t blame Latin! Classical Latin had a truly modest inventory of second-person pronouns: just singular tu ‘you’ and plural vos ‘you all.’ Spanish adapted these as tú and vosotros, the latter via a tweak as vos+otros, or ‘you others’ (in parallel, Latin nos ‘we’ evolved to Spanish nosotros). But Spanish also added another pronoun pair: singular usted and plural ustedes. These are used in polite contexts, when talking to professors, police officers, and the like, while tú and vosotros are reserved for friends, family, and inferiors. Dialectal variations on this pattern are considered in the next question.

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It may seem excessive to have four words for ‘you.’ English makes do with one, so why not Spanish? In fact, Spanish turns out to be normal and English exceptional once we compare them to a variety of languages. Like Spanish, most languages have separate pronouns for singular and plural ‘you’ (Ingram 1978), and about 30 percent have a politeness distinction (Helmbrecht 2013). Old English had singular thou versus plural ye, a distinction that in Early Modern English morphed into informal versus formal, possibly in imitation of French (Crystal 2003: 71). Some languages push these distinctions farther. For example, Arabic divides plural ‘you’ into regular antum versus dual antuma, for addressing two people only, and Japanese expresses several degrees of politeness. Languages can also have masculine and feminine ‘you,’ as in Hebrew atah versus at. What’s most interesting about Spanish’s four-way contrast, as it turns out, isn’t its scope but its history, for usted and ustedes are actually the language’s second generation of polite pronouns. As shown in Table 9.2, Old Spanish originally continued a late Latin practice, still seen in French vous, of using vos as a polite singular ‘you’ as well as a plural. (You can grasp the underlying logic of this usage if you think of the so-called royal we, in which plural we serves as a fancy version of I, as in We are not amused.) By the 1500s, singular vos had lost its mojo, so to speak, becoming interchangeable with tú; it was at about this time that vosotros came into vogue as a more distinctive plural form. Vos eventually became obsolete in Spain10 and usted (with its plural ustedes) then emerged as a new polite pronoun. It began as a contracted form of the ultra-polite expression vuestra merced ‘your mercy,’ as in “Would your mercy (i.e., ‘you’) care for a cup of tea?” The question naturally arises: when Spanish lost vos, why didn’t it just abandon the whole notion of informal versus polite ‘you,’ as did English?

Table 9.2  The development of ‘you’ pronouns in Castilian Spanish

Stage

Singular (‘you’)

Plural (‘you all’)

Classical Latin

tu

vos

Old Spanish

tú (informal)

vos

vos (polite) Colonial era

tú~vos

vosotros

Modern Spanish (eighteenth century and later)

tú (informal)

vosotros (informal)

usted (polite)

ustedes (polite)

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The simplest, yet most intriguing, answer is that by maintaining an informal versus polite distinction, Spanish was falling in line with a regional trend. All over Europe, the politeness distinction became the norm as languages achieved their modern form. English is one of the few exceptions in the region, along with Irish and Albanian. This near-uniformity is especially impressive because the languages of Europe spring from several different language families (see Question 21). European languages drew on a variety of sources to create their polite pronouns. Some pronouns, like Old Spanish vos and Turkish siz, come from plurals; others, like usted and Romanian dumneata (from ‘your lordship’), from a formulaic polite expression; and still others from third-person pronouns (e.g., German Sie, from ‘they,’ and Italian Lei, from ‘she’). Politeness in second-person pronouns is thus an excellent example of what linguists call an “areal feature”: one that arises, as if by conspiracy, in geographical clusters of languages regardless of their genetic relationship. While Europe favors two-way politeness distinctions, the Indian subcontinent has many languages with multiple levels of politeness (Urdu, Hindi, Malayalam, and Nepali inter alia), and most Native American languages make no politeness distinction at all. As with any large-scale trend, whether in language, food, or clothing, it’s hard to reconstruct the details of how this particular feature spread across Europe. I’ve seen one account that cites Spanish as a trend-setter (Wells 1985: 275), and another that focuses on the key role played by Latin, while referencing other authors who assign the lead to French (Popov 1985). It’s also possible that no one language served as an inspiration, but rather that nascent polite pronoun usage in each language reinforced its emergence in the others. Regardless of the exact chronology, Spanish undeniably participated in the European pronoun zeitgeist and still does today.

To learn more ll

The account of the evolution of tú, vos, and usted is based on Penny (2002: 137–39).

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Besides arguing for a key role for Latin in the development of polite pronouns in Europe, Popov (1985) recapitulates the history of polite vos in Latin, and argues against a French origin for Russian vy on primarily chronological grounds.

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Braun and Schubert (2012) include a general discussion of how polite pronouns like vos lose their polite meaning (“Polite forms wearing out”).

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Question 76. How do Spanish dialects differ in their words for ‘you’? The previous question traced the origin and implications of the four Spanish words for ‘you’: singular tú and usted, and plural vosotros and ustedes. For simplicity’s sake, this presentation sidestepped the important topic of dialectal variation. Even though all Spanish speakers—or at least all educated ones— understand these pronouns, only a minority actually use all four. Dialectal variations abound. There are two reasons for this variety. First, as described above, the Spanish pronoun system continued to evolve into the eighteenth century— that is, throughout the formative years of Latin American Spanish—leading to nonuniform results. A second reason is more fundamental. Although the Spanish system isn’t exceedingly complex by any objective standard (at least for native speakers), it isn’t simple either. And as always in language, complexity begets dialectal variation.11 The broadest dialectal difference has to do with vosotros, the informal plural ‘you’ that is akin to y’all in the southern United States. The vast majority of Spanish speakers—those from southern Spain (Andalusia), the African territories (Question 1), and Latin America—don’t use vosotros. Instead, ustedes does double duty in these regions, serving as a second-person plural in both formal and informal contexts. The absence of vosotros in Latin America is so profound that most Spanish textbooks published in the United States underemphasize the pronoun and its associated verb forms. As a result, it can be startling for Americans visiting Spain to encounter them in everyday use, such as grocery signs urging Spaniards to Comed fruta ‘Eat fruit.’ A second dialectal difference has to do with preferences for informal versus formal pronouns. In Spain, the informal pronoun tú has become increasingly common, at the expense of usted. Vosotros has likewise advanced on ustedes in the parts of the country that use both plurals (that is, outside of Andalusia). One contemporary Spanish writer summarized the situation: “You can’t address older people today as usted because they become angry or uncomfortable. . . . The retreat of usted in Spain is almost total and, in contrast, the ‘social climber tú’ [tú gorrón de famas] has easily pulled into the lead, vaulting over social barriers and equalizing the scholar and the slob” (González Castro 2007). The Spanish sociologist and language commentator Amando de Miguel traces this trend to “an egalitarian illusion that came into fashion on both sides of the Spanish Civil War” (2005). While this interpretation may or may not be accurate, it has a well-documented parallel in Nicaragua, whose socialist Sandanista movement officially encouraged the use of informal pronouns in the 1980s (Lipski 1994: 160; 2008: 173). The

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opposite pronoun pattern reigns in Colombia, where usted is used instead of tú when conversing with one’s closest companions (Ringer Uber 1985). For example, in the Colombian movie María llena eres de gracia ‘Mary Full of Grace’ the pregnant protagonist tells her lover No me casaré con usted ‘I won’t marry you’ and likewise addresses her mother, sister, and other intimates as usted. For a Spanish speaker used to more conventional pronoun uses, the Spanish and Colombian variations take some getting used to. A third notable dialect pattern is voseo, the use of vos as an informal singular ‘you’ instead of, or along with, tú. Voseo occurs in parts of Central and South American, such as Argentina and El Salvador, that are geographically distant from the two Spanish colonial capitals of Mexico City and Lima (Figure 1.3). As described in Question 5, when vos became obsolete in Spain during the colonial period, the change failed to penetrate these relatively isolated regions. Voseo users are proud of their distinctive speech style. One Costa Rican linguist put the case for voseo as follows: [I want to] stick up for voseo as an indisputable part of oral and written Spanish for anyone who takes pride in being a Tico [Costa Rican]. I don’t have anything against tú, which in the mouth of a Spaniard, Peruvian, Mexican, Chilean, and other Spanish speakers is, besides pleasing to the ear, authentic for those cultures. . . . The majority of Ticos continue to respect this cultural feature that we have inherited from our grandparents. . . . [But] today’s press, radio, television, and advertisers are guilty of substituting tú for vos. This narrow-minded belief that our way of speaking is inferior leads others to naively copy a form of expression that goes against what we learned in the cradle and in kindergarten, the Spanish that we speak at home, in school, at work, and with our friends. This shows a lack of respect for who we are, and even shame for our own national identity. (Mora Poltronieri 2011)

Why get so worked up about pronouns? Of course, anything can become a symbol of identity: a piece of cloth with stars and stripes, baggy pants, rice and beans. But a pronoun like tú, usted, or vos excels as a linguistic identity marker because it is both ubiquitous and salient. Ubiquitous, because you can’t have a conversation in Spanish without deciding, consciously or not, how to address the other person. Salient, because Spanish speakers are remarkably aware of pronoun choices, whereas most other grammatical processes happen without conscious thought. Parents and teachers correct inappropriate pronoun usage, speakers openly negotiate pronouns (one can ask ¿Lo puedo tutear? ‘Can I call you tú?’), and pronouns even feature in Spanish humor.12 It makes sense that such a prominent linguistic feature could become an overt symbol of cultural identity as well.

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To learn more ll

In the same issue as González Castro (2007) one finds reflections on pronoun usage in Spain by other cultural heavyweights.

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Benavides (2003) summarizes the geographic and social distribution of voseo in Latin America.

Question 77. What are leísmo, loísmo, and laísmo? As a linguist, I relish the Spanish convention of giving self-descriptive names to linguistic phenomena. We’ve already seen that the terms seseo, ceceo, and yeísmo refer to expanded usage of the s, th, and y sounds (Question 63). The terms leísmo, loísmo, and laísmo likewise refer to expanded use of the object pronouns le, lo, and la.13 In standard Spanish le is an indirect object pronoun, while lo and la are direct object pronouns; see Table 9.3 for some examples. This small set of pronouns is dense with information. While the main dividing line is between direct and indirect objects, the system also differentiates male and female—but only for direct objects. It also roughly divides grammatical objects into people versus things, since indirect objects are usually people (like Matthew or Sara in Table 9.3), while direct objects are usually things (like cars and cookies). However, it’s also possible for people to be direct objects, as in Lo necesito ‘I need him’ or La quiere ‘He loves her.’ This triple, and untidy, encoding—of direct versus indirect, male versus female, and people versus things—should set off linguistic alarm bells. Like other complex aspects of Spanish—its many words for Table 9.3  Le, lo, and la in standard Spanish (add -s for plurals)

Indirect object (le)

Direct object (lo, la) Masculine

¿Por qué está contenta Mateo (Sara)? ‘Why is Matthew (Sara) happy?’ Le pagué €1000 por el bici. ‘I paid €1,000 to him (to her) for the bike.’

¿Dónde está el coche? ‘Where is the car?’ Lo puse en el garaje. ‘I put it in the garage.’

Feminine

¿Dónde está la galleta? ‘Where is the cookie?’ La he comido. ‘I ate it.’

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‘you’ (Question  75), its large set of consonants (chapter 8), and its three past tenses (Question 84)—this pronoun group has been ripe for dialectal variation and change. Most variations on the standard use of le, lo, and la promote the parameters of gender (male vs. female) and/or human status (people vs. things) at the expense of the distinction between direct and indirect objects. This is not surprising, for this distinction is in many ways problematic in Spanish. Most object pronouns ignore it: for example, me can be either direct (e.g., Me necesita ‘He needs me’) or indirect (Me pagó el dinero ‘He paid the money to me’). Many verbs also blur the distinction, taking direct or indirect objects depending on context. For example, enseñar ‘to teach’ takes a direct object in Lo enseñé el año pasado ‘I taught him last year’ but an indirect object in Le enseñé español ‘I taught Spanish to him,’ even though the student’s role is identical in both cases. Finally, the “personal a” (Question 97) can create a superficial similarity between direct and indirect objects: Tomás is a direct object in Visité a Tomás ‘I visited Tom,’ which includes the personal a, but an indirect object in Le vendí el bici a Tomás ‘I sold the bike to Tom,’ where a has its usual meaning of ‘to.’ Leísmo—the expanded use of the pronoun le—is the most widespread variation on the standard system. At a minimum, leísmo extends the use of the indirect le pronoun to direct objects that are both masculine and human. Lo necesito ‘I need him’ is therefore expressed as Le necesito in leísta Spanish. This type of leísmo is the norm in most of Spain (though not Andalusia), and has often been adopted by writers elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world because of the prestige associated with peninsular Spanish. It has also been accepted as a variant of the standard by the Real Academia Española (Question 2), though only for singular le, not les. Parts of northern Spain extend leísmo further, using le also for masculine direct objects even if they are not human, such as the coche ‘car’ in Table 9.3: thus, Le puse en el garaje.14 Rarer than leísmo, loísmo and laísmo are its inverse: the use of lo and la as masculine and feminine indirect object pronouns. For example, the Le pagué example in Table 9.3 would become Lo pagué (for Matthew) and La pagué (for Sara). A completely different flavor of leísmo, prevalent in all Spanish-speaking countries, is known as leísmo de cortesía ‘polite leísmo.’ This usage substitutes le for lo or la when the pronoun has the meaning ‘you,’ in a formal sense. For example, one might say Le admiro ‘I admire you’ when talking to an elder, or in other polite contexts. This usage is advantageous because the technically more correct Lo admiro or La admiro (depending on gender) is ambiguous: it can also mean ‘I admire him (or her).’ Because loísmo and laísmo, along with the more extreme variety of leísmo (e.g., Le puse en el garaje), are not accepted as “proper” Spanish,

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and because even accepted leísmo (e.g., Le necesito) is normally seen as a variation of standard usage, the average Spanish speaker probably assumes that they are fairly recent developments in the language. On the contrary, they already existed in Old Spanish. Consider, for example, the uses of le and lo in the thirteenth-century epic poem El poema de mío Cid (Table 9.4; for more on the poem, see Box 9.1). The poem is replete with examples of le used either as an indirect object pronoun (as in standard Spanish) or as a direct object pronoun (as in leísta Spanish). Lo was used in the poem alongside le as a direct object pronoun, but principally in reference to abstractions, such as actions or information, rather than men, or even grammatically masculine objects.

Box 9.1. El poema de mío Cid

Like a Hollywood biopic, the epic poem El poema de mío Cid—the oldest work of Spanish literature—combines fact and fiction to create a piece that both instructs and entertains. The poem’s titular subject is Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, known as “El Cid,” the hero of the Spanish Reconquista (see Box 1.3). The poem dates from the early thirteenth century, a century or two after the French Chanson de Roland. Like that epic, it was composed to be read out loud, perhaps to pilgrims visiting the Cid’s tomb. The poem focuses on the years 1089–1092, when the Cid has been exiled from Castile for what the poem describes as trumped-up corruption charges. Through a series of military conquests, culminating in the successful siege of Valencia, the Cid wins back King Alfonso’s favor and that of the Spanish people. The author takes liberties in recounting these conquests, but even more so in adding a second major plot arc: that of

Chapter 9 Names, nouns, and pronouns

the Cid’s evil sons-in-law, who turn against him, beat his daughters, and leave them for dead in a forest. By the end of the poem the daughters are rescued, the sons-in-law humiliated, and the daughters remarried to the princes of Navarre and Aragon. Thus, the Cid gains both public and personal redemption. The poem paints a complex picture of the Christian-Moorish dynamic in medieval Spain. On the one hand, the Cid’s victories are driven by religious fervor. His Christian knights vanquish the Islamic Moors as both sides invoke divine assistance: Los moros llaman Mafómat e los cristianos Sancti Yagüe ‘The Moors call on Mohammed and the Christians on St. James.’ On the other hand, the Cid has close ties to many Moorish leaders. He calls Abengalbón, the governor of the town of Molina, mio amigo de paz ‘my friend in peace,’ and even served the Moorish Emir of Saragossa during a previous exile from 1081 to 1087. The title Cid itself comes from the Arabic Sayyidi ‘My Lord.’ Moreover, one of the Cid’s chief antagonists is a fellow Christian (the Count of Barcelona), who fields a combined army of Christians and Moors. Nor are the Cid’s motives purely religious. Booty is a running theme: after every battle, the Cid and his men gloat over the horses, arms, and other valuable items won. The Cid trumpets this track record as an incentive when recruiting new soldiers, and sends a steady stream of winnings back to Castile to propitiate King Alfonso. The poem is loaded with dramatic details guaranteed to enthrall live audiences. At different times the Cid slices foes in half (fata la cintura el espada llegado ha), returns from battle with blood dripping down to his elbow (por el cobdo ayuso la sangre destellando), and compares the pain of parting from his daughters to that of having a fingernail ripped out (como la uña de la carne). Humorous touches abound as well, usually at some villain’s expense: the craven sons-in-law, who dirty their clothes as they tried to hide from an escaped pet lion, or a pair of moneylenders, who lend the Cid start-up funds for his campaign in return for two chests full of supposed “treasure”—actually, sand. The poem is written in Old Spanish (Question 11). For someone who knows modern Spanish, it is difficult to read—undoubtedly harder than Shakespeare is for modern English speakers, though perhaps easier than Chaucer. However, it definitely repays the effort. To learn more ll

Hamilton, Perry, and Michael (1984), a Spanish-English edition of El poema de mío Cid with a helpful introductory essay and footnotes, is perfect for a first-time reader.

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Table 9.4  Some uses of le and lo in El poema de mío Cid

Le

Lo Masculine indirect object pronoun (as in standard modern Spanish)

Masculine direct object pronoun (with abstract referent)

Danle tres palafres muy bien ensellados ‘They give to him three well-saddled horses’

que no lo sepan moros ni cristianos ‘which neither Moors nor Christians know’

Del conde don Remon venido le es mensaje ‘The message came to him from don Remon’

cuanto dexo no lo preçio un figo ‘whatever I leave behind, I don’t give a fig for it’

Masculine direct object pronoun (leísmo)

Masculine direct object pronoun (with human referent)

Con estos caballeros que le sirven a su sabor ‘With these knights who serve him willingly’

Reçibiolo el Çid abiertos amos los braços ‘The Cid received him with both arms open’

Al conde don Remon a prision le han tomado ‘They have taken don Remon to prison’

Prisolo al conde, para su tierra lo llevaba, A sos creenderos guardarlo mandaba ‘He took him, the Count, and carried him to his land, and ordered his followers to guard him’

Leísmo was not only prevalent in Spanish from an early date, but also enjoyed early acceptance by grammarians. The first four editions of the Real Academia’s Gramática de la lengua castellana, published between 1771 and 1796, were leísta, prescribing le as the masculine pronoun in both direct and indirect contexts. These early editions also endorsed laísmo, giving Díganla lo que quieran ‘explain to her what you want’ (instead of díganle) as an example of correct usage (e.g., RAE 1771: 37). Lo as a direct object pronoun is not even mentioned until the fourth edition, where it is described as a mistake to be avoided. The Academia grammarians speculated that authors (including Cervantes) who had thus used lo must have had a bad copy editor, or been careless, or had “sacrificed the rules of grammar to satisfy the ear” (RAE 1796: 73). By the fifth edition, published in 1854 after a long hiatus, the Academia had had a change of heart. It now listed both le and lo as acceptable masculine direct object pronouns, and summarized the opposing points of view on leísmo in an even-handed fashion: The most intractable controversy is between those who favor the use of le as a masculine direct object pronoun, to avoid confusing such objects with the abstract ones assigned to lo [see upper right quadrant in Table 9.4], and those who find this potential confusion less of a problem than the use of le for direct and indirect masculine objects as well as feminine indirect objects. (RAE 1854: 35)

Chapter 9 Names, nouns, and pronouns

The writers went on to praise, though not explicitly endorse, the same compromise position—allowing leísmo only for human direct objects—that the Real Academia maintains today. Likewise, this was the first edition in which laísmo was discouraged. This new standard has influenced written Spanish as well as upper-class speech norms in Spain (Fernández-Ordóñez 1999).15 Leísmo is thus somewhat reminiscent of English ain’t. The bane of English teachers, ain’t is not a recent corruption of isn’t, but rather an alternative negative from the 1700s that was initially accepted in all social classes, only to fall later into disrepute (Crystal 2013: 158–60). Likewise, the negative perception of full-blown leísmo, and the treatment of moderate leísmo as nonstandard, followed an earlier period of widespread acceptance. The relative fall from grace of both ain’t and leísmo is a telling reminder that in language, just as in fashion, nothing is immune to change.

To learn more ll

An excellent overview of leísmo, loísmo, and laísmo can be found in their corresponding entries in RAE (2005).

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For a detailed scholarly treatment of the history and diversity of the three phenomena, see Fernández-Ordóñez (1994, 1999).

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Parodi, Luna, and Helmer (2012) document a decline in leísmo in Latin American literature beginning in the nineteenth century, as writers felt less of a need to adopt peninsular norms.

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RAE (2005) and Fernández-Ordóñez (1994, 1999) discuss contact with indigenous American languages as a possible source of leísmo in bilingual regions of Latin America. Fernández-Ordóñez also explores a possible Basque connection.

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The above discussion omits the additional complication of plurality: the history and modern usage of les, los, and las, which do not always parallel those of their singular counterparts. This topic is amply covered in the cited sources.

Question 78. How can su mean ‘his,’ ‘her,’ ‘their,’ and ‘your’? The Spanish possessive adjective su is impressively ambiguous. Su oficina can mean ‘his office,’ ‘her office,’ ‘their office,’ or ‘your office,’ where the ‘you’ involved is formal and/or plural.16 Because of the multiple meanings

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of su, it’s often necessary, or at least helpful, to add expansions such as de él ‘of his,’ de Magda ‘Magda’s,’ and the like. Su oficina de ella ‘her office of hers’ doesn’t sound redundant in Spanish; it’s just extra-clear. The multiple ambiguity of su is especially interesting for English speakers, because it is one of the rare cases where Spanish grammar collapses distinctions made in English; hay, which can mean either ‘there is’ or ‘there are,’ is another example (Question 94). The root cause of the ambiguous su possessive is what initially appears to be a quirky gap in Latin’s set of personal pronouns. Its only true pronouns were ego, nos, tu, and vos, meaning ‘I,’ ‘we,’ and singular and plural ‘you.’ Latin lacked pronouns for ‘he,’ ‘she,’ and ‘they.’ Instead, Latin speakers used a variety of demonstrative pronouns meaning ‘this one’ or ‘that one,’ such as is, hic, or ille. The most frequently used of these, ille ‘that one,’ is the source of Spanish él ‘he.’ Its feminine form illa and its plurals illos and illas are likewise the source of ella ‘she’ and ellos/ellas ‘they,’ as described in Question 14. Each of the true Latin personal pronouns had a related possessive adjective: meus, noster, tuus, and vester, meaning ‘my,’ ‘our,’ and singular and plural ‘your.’17 As with the personal pronouns, possessives for ‘his,’ ‘her,’ and ‘their’ were missing. To fill in these gaps Latin used the possessive form of the reflexive pronoun se ‘oneself’: suus ‘one’s own.’ Suus was versatile; it could be used whether the possessor was masculine or feminine (i.e., ‘his’ vs. ‘her’), and singular or plural (i.e., ‘his/her’ vs. ‘their’). Latin suus led directly to Spanish su. Interestingly, most Romance languages—all but Spanish and Portuguese—developed a split system instead, using a descendant of suus for singular ‘his/her’ and a descendant of ille for ‘their.’ French, for example, contrasts son père ‘his father’ with leur père ‘their father’; likewise, Italian suo padre and il loro padre. From a broader perspective, Latin’s apparently quirky “pronoun gap” turns out not to have been quirky at all; nor is the Latin and Spanish solution. Linguist Joseph Greenberg observed that “In many languages there is no separate third-person pronoun as distinct from one or more of the demonstratives. In other cases third-person pronouns derive historically from demonstratives, though there are other sources, most notably reflexive pronouns” (1990a: 328). In the specific case of Latin, the lack of dedicated third-person pronouns was inherited from Indo-European. Other IndoEuropean branches filled in the gap just as Romance did: with a mixture of demonstratives and reflexives. For example, within the Germanic family, English his descends from the Indo-European demonstrative *ki- ‘this,’ while German sein descends from the same reflexive root as su. There’s more to the story of su. During the Golden Age of Spain, when the formal ‘you’ pronouns usted and ustedes arose (see Question 75), su took

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on the additional meanings of formal and/or plural ‘your.’ Some examples are Señor Presidente, su oficina es majestuosa ‘Mr. President, your office is majestic’ or Estimados colegas, les pido su atención ‘Esteemed colleagues, I request your attention.’ Looking ahead, a contemporary phenomenon described by Penny (2002: 139–43) suggests a possible bleak future for su. Given that su is redundant in phrases like su oficina de ella ‘her office of hers,’ speakers in some Latin American varieties of Spanish have started to drop it, instead using structures like la oficina de ella ‘the office of hers.’ Some even extend this pattern to other personal possessives (e.g., la oficina de nosotros instead of nuestra oficina for ‘our office’). In other words, they treat personal possessives just like normal possessives (e.g., la oficina de Magda for ‘Magda’s office’). If this tendency were to spread, it would mean that all possessives, as well as normal adjectives (like blanca ‘white’ in casa blanca ‘white house’) would follow their nouns. This would harmonize with a general historical trend in Spanish toward what linguists call “head-initial” structures (Question 95).

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Penny (2002: 139–43) gives more details about the development of Latin suus into Spanish su.

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For a comparison to pronoun systems in other Romance languages, see Posner (2002: 277–78).

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Bhat (2013) explores the relationship between third-person pronouns and demonstratives across a wide range of languages; see also Deutscher (2005: 227–31).

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Chapter 10 Where the action is: Spanish verbs

Chapter 10 Where the action is: Spanish verbs Questions General considerations 79 Why does Spanish have -ar, -er, and -ir verbs? (p. 231) 80 Why conjugate? (p. 233) 81 Why does Spanish have so many irregular verbs? (p. 235)

The present tense 82 Why do only some verbs have the “boot” pattern? (p. 238) 83 Why do so many verbs have irregular yo forms in the present tense? (p. 241)

The past tense 84 Why does Spanish have so many ways to talk about the past? (p. 243) 85 Why are there so many more irregulars in the preterite past tense than in the imperfect? (p. 247) 86 How can Spanish use the same word for was and went? (p. 249)

The subjunctive 87 How can the subjunctive be used for actual events? (p. 250) 88 Why does Spanish have two past tense subjunctives? (p. 254) 89 Why does Spanish have a present and past subjunctive, but no future subjunctive? (a trick question) (p. 257) 90 Why is the subjunctive so irregular? (p. 258)

Other tenses and uses 91 Why are the future and the conditional different from other tenses? (p. 260) 92 Why are Spanish commands so complicated? (p. 262) 93 Why does Spanish have so many “backwards” verbs like gustar? (p. 264) 94 How can hay mean both ‘there is’ and ‘there are’? (p. 266)

Chapter 10 Where the action is: Spanish verbs

Spanish is famous for the complexity of its verb system. Because the language has so many verb tenses, governed by subtle rules and riddled with irregulars, this topic is a major challenge for Spanish students. Spanish verbs take up about half the pages in a typical textbook and have inspired myriads of special-purpose grammar workbooks. Any textbook or review book explains how to conjugate verbs, and when to use which tense. This chapter goes behind the scenes to explore the why of this system. We’ll begin with some general considerations that affect Spanish verbs across the board: verb classes, conjugation itself, and irregular verbs. Most of the chapter, though, tours the verb system, tense by tense and mood by mood, explaining its nooks and crannies. What explains -go verbs, -zco verbs, and “boot” and “sole” verbs? Why are there more irregulars in the preterite past tense than the imperfect? Why does Spanish have the present subjunctive, two past subjunctives, but no future subjunctive? (That’s a trick question.) How can hay mean both ‘there is’ and ‘there are’? More so than other parts of this book, this chapter dives deeply into the minutiae of Spanish grammar. Many of its questions concern specific irregular verb patterns; while each of these questions has something of interest to say, they will appeal mostly to the Spanish enthusiast. For the general reader, I recommend focusing on the broader questions at the beginning of the chapter (79 to 81), Questions 84 and 87, which concern the meanings of different verb tenses and moods, and the chapter’s last two questions.

General considerations Question 79. Why does Spanish have -ar, -er, and -ir verbs? Julius Caesar famously began his account of the conquest of Gaul—modernday France—with the simple declaration Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, ‘All Gaul is divided into three parts.’ Likewise, all Spanish verbs are divided into three groups: those ending with -ar, -er, and -ir. A verb’s group determines how it is conjugated; compare hablamos ‘we speak,’ from hablar ‘to speak,’ comemos ‘we eat,’ from comer, and vivimos ‘we live,’ from vivir. The groups are therefore usually referred to as conjugation classes. A verb’s conjugation class only affects its endings, not its meaning. In other words, the three-way division between -ar, -er, and -ir verbs is arbitrary: hablar could just as well be habler, comer be comir, or vivir be vivar. This

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divorce of form and meaning isn’t a given. Consider, in contrast, the Semitic languages, in which each conjugation class imparts a unique and predictable shade of meaning to a verb. For example, the Hebrew root k-t-v, having to do with writing, appears in all seven of the language’s conjugation classes, yielding verbs like active katav ‘to write,’ passive nikhtav ‘to be written,’ reciprocal hitkatev ‘to write to each other,’ and so on. It’s as if hablar, habler, and hablir all existed in Spanish, and referred to three different aspects of speaking.1 In fact, Spanish verb pairs like crear ‘to create’ and creer ‘to believe,’ fundar ‘to found’ and fundir ‘to melt,’ and sentar ‘to seat’ and sentir ‘to feel,’ are obviously unrelated. The arbitrary division of Spanish verbs into conjugation classes also contrasts with the language’s treatment of nouns. As discussed in Question 70, all Spanish nouns are divided into two groups (Caesar would have said partes duae): masculine and feminine. True, there’s nothing inherently masculine or feminine about most nouns. Why should a glass be masculine (el vaso), but a cup feminine (la taza)? Nevertheless, hundreds of genuinely gendered words, from abuelo/abuela ‘grandmother/grandfather’ to zorro/zorra ‘fox/ vixen,’ provide a meaningful core to this distinction. In fact, the only rationale behind the three conjugation classes is historical. The Spanish -ar class comes from Latin -āre verbs, the -er class from the merger of Latin -ēre and -ĕre, and the -ir class from -īre. The passage of time has somewhat muddied these waters. Some verbs hopped class boundaries; for example, meiĕre ‘to urinate’ and dicĕre ‘to say,’ both in Latin’s -ĕre class, became Spanish mear and decir. Changes from -er to -ir were the most common. In addition, newly coined or borrowed verbs have overwhelmingly joined the -ar class, swamping the original system to a degree. Tracing the conjugation classes back to Latin, though, merely deflects our current question. If the answer to “Why does Spanish have -ar, -er, and -ir verbs?” is essentially “Because Latin had -āre,-ēre,-ĕre, and -īre verbs,” this then begs the question, “Why did Latin have -āre, -ēre, -ĕre, and -īre verbs?” And here at last we find some real answers. In a nutshell, Latin carved out its four conjugation classes from a more complex system, rather than inheriting them ready-made. As described in Question 21, Latin evolved from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the language that linguists have reconstructed as the common ancestor of languages from the British Isles to Western China and India’s Deccan Plateau. Each part of the immensely complicated PIE verb system boasted a wide variety of conjugation patterns, and—to make matters worse—a verb’s behavior in one part of the system didn’t predict its behavior in the others. Latin tidied up the system by grouping the verbs into uniform conjugation classes that more or less determined all verb forms. The “less determined” verb forms of Latin

Chapter 10 Where the action is: Spanish verbs

are the ancestors of modern Spanish irregulars like dije ‘I said’ or quiso ‘he wanted’ (see Question 85). To some extent this carving-out process intertwined form and meaning. For example, the Latin -ēre class pulled together four distinct groups of PIE verbs—each with final sounds, or sound sequences, that evolved into Latin ēre—and standardized their conjugation. In three of these groups the relevant sounds were part of a suffix that contributed a specific shade of meaning to the verb. PIE verbs with a suffix that expressed causation are the source of Latin verbs like monēre ‘warn,’ from the PIE root *men- ‘think’ (i.e., to cause someone to think), and docēre ‘to teach,’ from the PIE root *dek- ‘accept’ (i.e., to cause someone to accept).2 PIE verbs with two different suffixes that expressed the notion of ‘being’ led to Latin verbs like calēre ‘to be hot’ (from *kel- ‘warm’), and albēre ‘to be white’ (from *albho- ‘white’). Thus at its inception, the Latin -ēre class largely consisted of verbs of causation and ‘being.’ It’s possible to draw similar generalizations, to a greater or lesser extent, for the other Latin conjugation classes. Although these ancient correspondences between form and meaning are no longer relevant to the functioning of the modern Spanish verb system, it’s satisfying to know that they played a role in its creation.

To learn more ll

For more on the creation of the Latin conjugation classes, see Weiss (2009: 400-8) and Fortson (2010: 278-9).

ll

Slocum (2014) is a good resource for learning more about PIE roots and their descendants in Latin, Spanish, and other Indo-European languages.

ll

The fate of the Latin conjugation classes in Spanish is described in more detail in Penny (2002: 171–73).

Question 80. Why conjugate? “Whodunnit?” This classic question is as essential to communication as it is to crime solving. In order to advise, amuse, amaze, or merely apprise, it’s necessary to convey who did something—or is doing, or will do it. In grammatical terms, every verb needs a clear subject. This communicative need is the driving force behind one of the most characteristic features of Spanish: conjugation. The ending of every Spanish

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verb reveals “Whodunnit;” thus ‘I eat’ is como, ‘you eat’ comes, and so on, for a total of six variants. (See Table 2.8 in Question 15 for an example.) As the saying goes, nunca llueve a gusto de todos—‘One man’s meat is another man’s poison.’ Unfortunately, the conjugations that are so vital to the Spanish speaker pose a daunting barrier to the Spanish learner. The six variants mentioned above are just for the present tense, but other basic tenses or moods must be mastered as well: two past tenses, three subjunctives, the future, and the conditional. The three conjugation classes of Spanish (-ar,  -er, and -ir, see the previous question) further inflate the system, producing a total of fifteen different conjugation patterns to learn.3 And then there are the irregular verbs. It doesn’t have to be this way. English and many other languages make minimal use of conjugation, instead indicating “Whodunnit” with pronouns: the same verb form is used in I ate, you ate, we ate, they ate, and so on. French follows the same strategy as English despite its close relationship to Spanish. Because its verb endings have eroded over time they have lost their distinctiveness, so that pronouns are needed to distinguish, for example, je parle ‘I speak’ from il parle ‘he speaks.’ The use of conjugation versus pronouns to say “Whodunnit” tends to be an either/or proposition. Most languages either have distinctive verb forms, like Spanish, or ambiguous forms, like English and French, with pronouns required. This is common sense as well as linguistic fact. The English and French solution appears advantageous a priori because the same pronouns can be recycled in every tense, thus reducing the amount of memorization required. Nevertheless, well over half the world’s languages opt for conjugation, perhaps because it is more efficient, substituting a single word for two (Dryer 2013a). The drive to conjugate can also be seen across time. While it’s common for verb endings (or prefixes, for that matter) to erode over time as they have in French, making pronouns necessary, it’s also common for new conjugations to arise. This happens when pronouns or auxiliary verbs themselves weaken and therefore come to be seen as verbal appendages rather than individual words. A nice example of this process in Spanish is the creation of the future and conditional tenses, described in Question 91.

To learn more ll

Deutscher (2005: 144–70) provides an elegant explanation of how verb conjugations, and other grammatical paradigms, arise and decay.

Chapter 10 Where the action is: Spanish verbs

Question 81. Why does Spanish have so many irregular verbs? The essence of an irregular verb is its unpredictability. Consider, for example, the four Spanish verbs in Table 10.1. Nothing about the verbs themselves explains the appearance of the i in cierran and the g in salgo, or the drastic changes in dijo and vamos. This table also previews the four sources of irregular verbs that will be explored below. The Spanish verb system is riddled with such irregularities. One standard survey estimates a total of almost nine hundred irregular verbs (Green 1987). A less ambitious estimate, based on the three thousand or so most frequent Spanish verbs (HarperCollins 2004: 163–86), is that about one out of six is irregular.4 Because the most common Spanish verbs are irregular (recall Table 6.2 in Question 37), this figure rises to one out of three for verb forms in normal Spanish text.5 Many descriptions of Spanish would put this number even higher because of the hundreds of Spanish verbs with spelling changes in certain forms. For example, Spanish spelling prohibits the sequence ze; this rule explains borrowings like cero (from Italian zero) and plurals like lápices ‘pencils’ (from singular lápiz). All verbs ending in -zar therefore replace the z with a c before an e, as in empecé ‘I began,’ from empezar. Other spelling changes lead to alternations like coger/cojo ‘to take/I take,’ jugar/jugué ‘to play/I played,’ and sacar/saqué ‘to take out’/I took out.’ But because these changes apply predictably to all -zar, -ger, -gar, and -car verbs, and don’t affect pronunciation, they shouldn’t be counted as true irregulars. Is Spanish unique, unusual, or merely undistinguished in its arsenal of irregular verbs? Unfortunately, it’s impossible to answer this question definitively because every verb analysis applies different standards. What Table 10.1  Sources of irregular verbs

Example verb form Verb

Actual

Expected

Source of irregularity

cerrar ‘to close’

cierran ‘They close’

cerran

Sound change

salir ‘to leave’

salgo ‘I leave’

salo

Analogy

decir ‘to say’

dijo ‘He said’

deció

Inheritance

ir ‘to go’

vamos ‘We go’

imos

Suppletion

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constitutes an irregular verb? (Verbs with spelling changes are a perfect example of a borderline category.) How many verbs should be considered? (An exhaustive search will find more irregulars, though at a diminishing rate.) Should verbs with identical irregularities be counted separately, or combined? These are just some of the possible variables at play. Nevertheless, two crosslinguistic conclusions stand out. First, it’s safe to say that Spanish has at least as many irregular verbs as many other commonly taught languages, such as the other Romance languages and German. Second, at a gross level, the number of irregular verbs in a language depends on how it constructs verb forms. Languages like Spanish, whose verb endings (or prefixes) fuse together multiple bits of meaning, tend to have many irregular verbs. This group includes not just the Indo-European language family (see Question 21) but other families as well, including Semitic. At the other extreme, Chinese has only one form of each verb, which rules out the possibility of irregular verbs. Between these two extremes lie languages like Turkish, Finnish, and Japanese, which add individual bits of meaning sequentially to verb roots instead of fusing them together.6 These languages tend to have few or no irregulars, presumably because the clarity of a complete verb form depends on the integrity of each of its components. Spanish irregular verbs are not just copious: they are also, by and large, relatively new. Few were inherited from Latin. Dijo ‘he said,’ in Table 10.1, is one of these; its unexpected j comes from the irregular x in Latin dixit. Cierran ‘they close,’ also in Table 10.1, is more typical. Its unexpected i is the result of a sound change that split the short Latin vowel ĕ into two vowels (ie) in most stressed syllables (Question 13). This change applied to verbs and nonverbs alike, turning Latin fĕsta ‘party,’ for example, into Spanish fiesta. It is one of several sound changes that created scores, if not hundreds, of Spanish irregular verbs. In this regard Spanish contrasts sharply with German, another language notorious for its irregular verbs. Whereas Spanish inherited relatively few irregulars from Latin, all German irregular verbs (its “strong” and “mixed” verbs) are of ancient lineage. Their vowel alternations, related to English patterns like sing-sang-sung, can in fact be traced back to PIE. And while sound change has had a profound structural impact on the Spanish verb system, this has not been the case in German. For example, although an important German sound change in the late first millennium softened the hard consonants still heard in English make and eat to the softer sounds of machen and essen, it didn’t change these verbs’ essence. Machen remained regular, and essen irregular. The remaining verbs in Table 10.1 illustrate two additional sources of irregulars in Spanish. Vamos is an example of a rare and dramatic process

Chapter 10 Where the action is: Spanish verbs

called “suppletion” in which one verb effects a hostile takeover of another. Normally the two verbs involved have similar meanings. In this particular case, the Latin verb vadere ‘to go, walk, hurry,’ which is related to English wade, evade, and invade, took over the present tense of ire ‘to go.’7 Salgo represents the much more common process of “analogy,” in which a regular verb picks up an existing irregular pattern. (Analogy can also work in the opposite direction, to normalize an irregular verb.) The -go ending first appeared in a few common verb forms including hago ‘I make, I do’ and digo ‘I say,’ thanks to normal sound change. It then spread to salir and several other verbs. Analogy occasionally runs amok. This happened most notably in Spanish with the -zco pattern seen in alternations like conocer/conozco ‘to know’/‘I know.’ Like -go, the -zco irregularity first arose through sound change; it originally affected only a limited set of verbs ending with -cer. But the -zco pattern has spread widely, via analogy, from this initial beachhead. It has taken over almost all -cer verbs, as well as all verbs ending with -ducir and -lucir, as in traducir/traduzco ‘to translate/I translate’ or deslucir/desluzco ‘to spoil/I spoil.’ This brings us back to the uncontroversial observation that began this question: that “the essence of an irregular verb is its unpredictability.” By this standard, there’s no doubt that verbs like cerrar (recall Table 10.1) are irregular. Because Latin’s long ē and short ĕ have merged in Spanish, there is no way, short of memorization, to predict that the e in cerrar alternates with ie in forms like cierran, while the identical e sound in verbs like pesar ‘to weigh,’ which comes from a long ē in Latin, does not. One must learn, one by one, which verbs with e are irregular and which are regular. The status of -zco verbs, in contrast, is problematic. Since all -ducir and -lucir verbs predictably follow the -zco pattern, shouldn’t they be considered regular? Going out further on this linguistic limb, shouldn’t the few -cer verbs that don’t follow the -zco pattern be considered irregular? Given what linguists know about the human drive to abstract patterns from language, chances are that Spanish speakers are already processing -zco verbs in this fashion, even if textbooks have yet to catch up with them. Along these lines, there is substantial evidence that speakers of English implicitly ‘know’ major English verbal subpatterns, all technically irregular, such as the sing-sang-sung vowel alternation mentioned above. Children attempt to fit existing regular verbs into these patterns (brang is a common childhood version of brought), analogy occasionally brings new verbs into the fold (like dove, formerly the regular dived), and adults freely apply these patterns to made-up words like spling in laboratory experiments. Spanish speakers no doubt accord the -zco pattern equal status.

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To learn more ll

Many of the remaining questions in this chapter discuss these types and sources of irregular verbs in more detail. Vowel alternations in verbs like cerrar are discussed in Question 82, which further explores the dynamic between sound change and analogy. Salgo, conozco, and the like are discussed in Question 83. Inherited irregularities in verb forms like dijo are discussed in Question 85. Finally, Question 86 describes another dramatic instance of suppletion involving the verb ir.

ll

The one-out-of-three estimate for Spanish irregulars in text is based on the same text sample used in Question 38. The sample included ninety-one verb forms, of which thirty-three were irregular.

ll

The discussion of the origin of regular and irregular German verbs is based on Fortson (2010: 345). The sound change referred to is the Second Sound Shift of Old High German.

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Prasada and Pinker (1993) summarize the research on the psychological reality of irregular English verb subpatterns.

The present tense Question 82. Why do only some verbs have the “boot” pattern? It’s a rite of passage for first-year Spanish students: memorizing and practicing the large, seemingly arbitrary set of irregular “boot” verbs—more formally, stem-changing verbs. Little do they know that these verbs represent the convergence of some of the most important historical processes in the evolution of Spanish. Moreover, these processes are emblematic of the two most fundamental types of change seen in language in general. Therefore, boot verbs turn out to be a mini-lesson in normal language evolution and its manifestation in Spanish. Linguists categorize most changes in language as either sound change or analogy. Sound change, in its purest form, applies to all instances of a given sound. For example, when Latin nn changed into Spanish ñ, this affected all Latin words with nn: annus became año ‘year,’ grunnire became gruñir ‘growl, grumble,’ and so on.8 Analogy undermines the uniformity of sound change. It takes place when an individual word changes under the influence

Chapter 10 Where the action is: Spanish verbs

of a similar word, as when the past tense of English wear shifted to wore (instead of the earlier weared) in analogy to existing irregular verbs like bear/ bore and tear/tore. Most boot verbs arose as a side effect of one the most distinctive sound changes in the history of Spanish: the change of Latin short vowels ĕ and ŏ to the diphthongs ie and ue in stressed syllables (Question 13). Stress placement fluctuates in the Spanish present tense, sometimes falling on the last vowel of the stem, and sometimes on the verb ending. This led to a predictable alternation between plain and diphthongized vowels, depending on stress placement, in verbs whose stem vowels come from ĕ and ŏ. As shown in Table 10.2, the diphthong appears in the three singular verb forms plus the third-person plural, a configuration that gives rise to the “boot” moniker. Verbs whose stem vowels come from Latin long ē and ō, like deber ‘should’ and poner ‘to put’ (from Latin dēbere and Latin pōnere), don’t share this pattern; they have stem vowels e and o throughout. However, because the vowel length distinction was lost in the evolution of Spanish (recall Question 57), there’s no difference today between the e of negar and deber, or the o of poder and poner. This means that when learning a new verb with e or o, the only way to know whether or not it follows the boot pattern is to consult a dictionary. But as discussed in the previous question, this is, after all, the very definition of an irregular verb: one whose conjugation is unpredictable. Sound change created the boot verb class, but analogy tinkered with it. Several verbs whose stem vowels descended from Latin long ē and ō, and so had no reason to alternate, took on the boot pattern by analogy, thus becoming irregular.9 The most common of these is pensar ‘to think,’ from Latin pēnsare. Its present tense forms are pienso, piensas, etc. instead of penso, pensas, etc., as would be predicted from sound change alone. At the same time, some boot verbs became regular. For example, the present tense of prestar ‘to lend’ is presto, prestas, etc. instead of the expected priesto, priestas.10 Sound change played only a catalytic role, and analogy a major one, in the creation of a smaller set of boot verbs like medir ‘to measure,’ whose e Table 10.2  Alternations in the present tense of e  ie and o  ue “boot” verbs (Boot shape is outlined, and stressed vowels are CAPITALIZED)

negar ‘to deny’ (< Lat. nĕgare)

poder ‘to be able to’ (< Lat. pŏtere)

I (deny)

nIEgo

negAmos

we

I (can)

pUEdo

podEmos

we

you

nIEgas

negÁis

you all

you

pUEdes

podÉis

you all

he/she

nIEga

nIEgan

they

he/she

pUEde

pUEden

they

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vowel alternates with i (Table 10.3). The specific source of the alternation was the -io ending of the Latin first-person singular form (as in metio ‘I measure’), whose pronunciation changed to yo in Vulgar Latin. As described in Question 13, the sound y triggered a host of phonetic changes in nearby sounds. In this case, because y is pronounced with the tongue high in the mouth, the preceding vowel e changed to i, a higher vowel (recall Figure 8.1), to anticipate and accommodate the height of the y. The i then spread, by analogy, throughout the full “boot.”11 The y trigger was only found in Latin -ire verb endings; for this reason, all Spanish verbs of this “boot” type are in the modern -ir class.12 Those -ir verbs whose stem vowel came from Latin short ĕ were eligible, as it were, to participate in either the e  ie pattern or the e  i pattern. For example, sentir ‘to feel,’ from Latin sĕntire, is conjugated as siento, sientes, etc., as in Table 10.2, while servir ‘to serve,’ from Latin sĕrvire, is conjugated as sirvo, sirves, etc., as in Table 10.3. In fact, these two “boot” patterns eventually took over all -ir verbs with an e stem vowel, regardless of the vowel’s Latin origin (ĕ, ē, or ĭ). As a result, modern Spanish has no remaining regular -ir verbs with an e stem vowel: a small but significant distributional oddity. The set of -ir verbs with an o stem vowel had a more radical outcome. Precisely two verbs went into the o  ue group: dormir ‘to sleep’ (duermo, duermes, etc.) and morir ‘to die’ (muero, mueres, etc.). In all other such verbs, the following y raised the o to a u—but then, analogy truly ran rampant, so that u completely took over the verb. Latin mollire ‘to soften,’ for example, became Spanish mullir; no modern forms of this verb reflect the original o.13 As with e stems, no regular -ir verbs with an o stem vowel remain in modern Spanish.14 To summarize, the three “boot” categories illustrated in Tables 10.2 and 10.3 are the result of two important sound changes in the history of Spanish: diphthongization of Latin ĕ and ŏ in stressed syllables, and the raising of e and o before y. Analogy also played a key role in determining the final outcome for these verbs. Analogy within the verbal paradigm spread the high Table 10.3  Alternation in the present tense of e  i “boot” verbs (Boot shape is outlined)

medir ‘to measure’ (< Lat. metire) I (measure)

mido

medimos

we

you

mides

medís

you all

he/she

mide

miden

they

Chapter 10 Where the action is: Spanish verbs

vowel within the present tense of verbs like medir, except in the cases where a diphthong won out instead (as in sentir and dormir). Analogy between verbs added to the boot class in some cases (as with pensar) and subtracted from it in others (as with prestar). Together, sound change and analogy created a complex grammatical cul-de-sac that is truly unique to Spanish.

To learn more ll

Any good introductory linguistics textbook will cover sound change and analogy. A classic treatment is Bloomfield (1933, chaps. 20, 21, 23).

ll

For more on the development of boot verbs, see Penny (2002: 181–90).

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The “boot” irregulars make a return appearance in the present subjunctive and command forms (Questions 90 and 92).

Question 83. Why do so many verbs have irregular yo forms in the present tense? Compared to the “boot” verbs discussed above, the next largest group of Spanish irregular verbs is less cohesive. It’s more of an agglomeration of verb types that share a single characteristic: the first-person singular (yo ‘I’) form is irregular in the present tense. What makes these verbs interesting, rather than just odd, is that from a historical perspective many of these yo forms are comparatively regular—that is, faithful to the original Latin. This pattern is most clearly seen for verbs like florecer ‘to prosper,’ in which the k sound of the original Latin verb, florescere, remains only in the modern yo form, florezco ‘I prosper.’ In the infinitive florecer, and the other forms of the present tense (floreces, florece, and so on), the k sound was lost as part of a general simplification of Latin sk clusters before e and i (compare Latin pesce ‘fish’ and Spanish pez). The case of digo ‘I say’ is subtler. Here, the k sound of Latin dicere changed to a g because of a process called “lenition” that affected certain Latin consonants (Question 13). However, the infinitive decir and the other forms of the present tense (dices, dice, and so on) show a more radical change: the original Latin k softened to an s (th in Castilian Spanish), as did other instances of Latin k before e or i (compare Latin circa, pronounced with a k, and Spanish cerca). For both verb types, the -o of the yo ending effectively insulated conozco and digo from sk simplification and

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k softening, so that they remained closer to their Latin forerunners than the other present tense forms. Like the “boot” pattern described in the previous question, the -zco and -go patterns spread by analogy to many verbs whose Latin ancestors lacked the relevant sk or k. The -zco pattern spread not only to other verbs ending in -cer, such as ofrecer ‘to offer’ (from Latin offerre), but also to verbs ending in -ucir, like lucir ‘to shine’ and producir ‘to produce’ (from Latin lucere and producere). The -go pattern first emerged in a relatively small set of verbs, including decir and hacer ‘to make, to do,’ from Latin facere, but spread to other common verbs, such as venir ‘to come,’ tener ‘to have,’ and salir ‘to leave,’ that lacked the original k sound.15 As a result, modern Spanish ended up with almost a hundred -zco verbs and around ten -go verbs. Veo ‘I see,’ from the verb ver ‘to see,’ also fits this question’s overall theme of conservative but irregular yo forms. Veo was regular in Old Spanish. By then, regular sound changed had turned the Latin infinitive videre into Old Spanish veer. Its conjugation was in line with the other ee verbs of Spanish: creer ‘to believe,’ leer ‘to read,’ and poseer ‘to possess’ (see Table 10.4). When the double ee of veer (alone among the ee verbs) later simplified to a single e, veo was stranded as an irregular form. Its expected form, based on the modern infinitive ver, would be vo.16 Completeness demands that we also trace here the history of two small groups of irregular yo verbs that don’t fit this questions’s general pattern. Four verbs have an -oy ending in the yo form instead of an -o. This ending first appeared in soy ‘I am,’ though the source of the y is uncertain; the Old Spanish form was so, which was the predictable development from Latin sum via normal sound change. From soy, the -oy ending spread by analogy to dar ‘to give’ (doy), estar ‘to be located’ (estoy), and ir ‘to go’ (voy). Finally, two verbs have short yo forms ending in -e. This pattern began in the auxiliary verb haber (e.g., He comido ‘I have eaten’) via drastic reduction from Latin habeo, then spread to the verb saber (e.g., Sé la respuesta ‘I know the answer’ ) by analogy. Table 10.4  Development of ver and creer from Old Spanish to Modern Spanish

veer > ver ‘to see’

creer ‘to believe’ (likewise leer and poseer)

veo

veemos > vemos

creo

creemos

vees > ves

veedes > veis

crees

creedes > creéis

vee > ve

veen > ven

cree

creen

Chapter 10 Where the action is: Spanish verbs

To learn more ll

For more on these present tense irregularities, see Penny (2002: 176–81, 190–96).

ll

Like the “boot” pattern in the previous question, the irregularities explored in this section make a return appearance in the present subjunctive and command forms (Questions 90 and 92).

The past tense Question 84. Why does Spanish have so many ways to talk about the past? ¿Qué pasó? ‘What happened?’ Saying what happened is a core function of language, as basic as warnings (Tiger!) and commands (Let go of my food!). Every language therefore has at least one way to talk about the past. A small set of languages, including Chinese, lack a grammatical past tense, relying instead on time expressions meaning ‘yesterday’ or ‘last year.’17 Most languages, though, have at least one grammatical marker of the past tense, either an auxiliary verb (He comido tu galleta ‘I have eaten your cookie’) or a conjugated verb form (La abandonaste ‘You neglected it’). Talking about the past is so important that every language also has ways to express nuances such as: ll

When did an event happen? (just now? today? recently? in the remote past?)

ll

How often did it happen? (once? repeatedly? habitually?)

ll

Is it relevant to the present? (If someone just spilled milk, it needs to be cleaned up; if the spill happened last year, it’s too late.)

ll

Was it bounded in time—that is, did it have a specified beginning, end, or duration? Or did it take place at some unspecified time in the past?

ll

Is it described from the outside, as an integral and complete action, or from the inside, as an action in progress?

Linguists refer to such nuances as “aspects” of the past tense. While the present and future also admit nuance, the past tense has more aspectual

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variety, underscoring its importance in communication. Like the past tense itself, aspect can be expressed with time expressions and other adverbs, or by grammatical means. Hebrew employs the former approach: it only has one set of past tense forms, but embellishes them with adverbs such as k’var ‘already’ and tamid ‘always.’ Spanish, like most languages, falls into the latter category. As shown in Table 10.5, Spanish speakers have a formidable arsenal of grammatical means at their disposal, including two Table 10.5  Primary means of expressing the past tense in Spanish

Structure

Example

Aspect(s)

Preterite (simple past)

Caminé a la tienda.

‘I walked to the store.’ A completed action, bounded in time; many uses specify a time or duration.

Imperfect

Caminaba a la tienda.

‘I used to walk to the store’ (habitual activity at an unspecified time in the past), or

Verb conjugations

‘I was walking to the store’ (action in progress).

La tienda era pequeña.

‘The store was small’ (description set in an unspecified time in the past).

Auxiliary verb structures

Present perfect

He caminado a la tienda.

‘I have walked to the store.’ A completed action that is relevant to the present (I now need a ride home). Depending on dialect, may express recency rather than present relevance.

Past perfect

Había caminado a la tienda.

‘I had walked to the store.’ Similar to present perfect, except that relevance (or recency) is with respect to some time in the past, rather than the present.

Past progressive

Estaba caminando a la tienda.

‘I was walking to the store’ (action in progress). Similar to many uses of the imperfect. The progressive can also be an aspect of the present (Estoy caminando ‘I am walking’).

Immediate past

Acabo de caminar a la tienda.

‘I just walked to the store’ (Literally, ‘I’m finished walking to the store’). A completed action in the very recent past.

Source: These are the past tense structures that met Dahl’s criteria for a ‘major Tense/Mood/Aspect category’ in Spanish (1985: 171).

Chapter 10 Where the action is: Spanish verbs

past tense conjugations (the preterite and imperfect) and four auxiliary verb constructions. This variety is unusual. Of the sixty-four languages surveyed by Dahl (1985), only Kikuyu, a Bantu language, had more ways to talk about the past: seven structures, compared to the six of Spanish. However, with the exception of the immediate past (acabar de), the individual aspects of the past expressed by the Spanish structures are common in other languages as well. The range of aspectual nuances available in Spanish, especially the contrast between the preterite and the imperfect, multiplies the language’s expressive potential. Consider the line Ella me quiso, y veces yo también la quería ‘She loved me, and sometimes I loved her,’ from Pablo Neruda’s “Poema 20.” By choosing the preterite quiso, which implies a completed action, to describe his former lover’s affections, and the imperfect quería to describe his own, Neruda subtly implied that her love had ended more definitively than his own.18 For poets and nonpoets alike, the use of the preterite changes the meaning of several common verbs by casting them in the mold of completed actions. For example, the verb conocer ‘to know someone’ takes on the meaning ‘to meet someone’ when used in the preterite, because ‘meeting’ is the action that initiates ‘knowing.’ Thus Lo conocí (preterite) ‘I met him’ contrasts with Lo conocía (imperfect) ‘I knew him.’ Besides their sheer quantity and expressive power, the Spanish past tense structures in Table 10.5 are of historical interest. Like successive fossils in a riverbed, they capture the normal stages in the development of new verb patterns from auxiliary structures to conjugations. For the first stage in this process—the creation of new auxiliaries—Spanish has turned to verbs of possession (haber), completion (acabar), and location (estar). These are common sources of past tense and progressive structures in other languages as well. The next stage usually involves a double change in meaning: the auxiliary loses its original literal meaning over time, and the aspectual range of the structure increases. Acabar, the newest auxiliary in Table 10.5, has just begun this process; the literal meaning of ‘finishing’ is still reflected in the structure’s restriction to just-completed actions. Haber is furthest along. The verb’s original meaning has been completely lost (tener is the modern Spanish possessive) and the structure’s aspectual range has expanded accordingly, from actions that can be interpreted possessively—He comprado un libro ‘I have bought a book’ originally meant something like ‘I have a book that has been bought’—to all completed actions. In French, the aspectual range of the haber-type past tense has continued to expand at the expense of the simple past, which is now restricted to formal writing. In other words, J’ai acheté un livre can now mean ‘I bought a book’ as well as ‘I have bought a book.’ A similar process is underway in significant portions of the Spanish-speaking world. In most of Spain, expressions like

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He caminado a la tienda now indicate a recent action—something that happened today, yesterday, or perhaps earlier, but within the speaker’s view of ‘now’—rather than one whose results are relevant to the present (Penny 2000: 158–61). In this region the use of the preterite in sentences such as Hoy caminé a la tienda ‘Today I walked to the store’ now sounds odd. A different expansion of the haber past tense, which limits the preterite to the narration of action sequences (first I did X, then Y, then Z), has been observed in Andean Spanish (Howe and Schwenter 2003). In a final stage, auxiliaries can become phonologically reduced and attach to main verbs, thus creating new conjugations. Although this has not taken place in the Spanish past tense, in the future tense it has given rise to the modern Spanish future conjugation, whose endings (-é, -ás, -á, etc.) originated as reduced forms of haber (Question 91). Looking back in time, we find that the Spanish imperfect conjugation ultimately developed from an auxiliary construction as well. Latin (and other Italic languages) discarded the original PIE imperfect in favor of a new set of endings derived from the verb *bhuH‘to be’ (Fortson 2010: 279). This root can still be seen in Spanish imperfect forms like jugaba ‘I used to play,’ although the -b- was eventually lost from the imperfect endings of Spanish -er and -ir verbs (e.g., comía ‘I was eating’). In Question 15, we saw how the cycle of language change has affected the Spanish verb system as a whole: over and over, new verb structures have arisen to replace old ones. This overall pattern is echoed within the more focused realm of the Spanish past tense. The preterite conjugation (caminé in Table 10.5), which descended from Latin’s perfect indicative, is now threatened by the newer, haber-based perfect (he caminado). The imperfect (caminaba), which Latin derived from a ‘to be’ auxiliary at the expense of an older conjugation, now shares some of its semantic territory with a newer ‘to be’ auxiliary, the past progressive (estaba caminando). As the haber perfect expands its territory, the newest past tense structure (acabo de caminar) has the potential to shed its literal interpretation and flex its aspectual muscles as well. No matter what happens next, the future of the past is likely to be as interesting as its past.

To learn more ll

Bybee and Dahl (1989) discuss the normal pathway from auxiliary verb structures to conjugations. Particularly relevant to the discussion above is their synopsis of verb types, such as possessives, completives, and locationals, that often become auxiliary verbs with predictable aspectual associations (58).

ll

Harris (1982) is the classic treatment of the development of haber perfects in Romance.

Chapter 10 Where the action is: Spanish verbs

Question 85. Why are there so many more irregulars in the preterite past tense than in the imperfect? It’s a dramatic contrast. The preterite—the past tense that most Spanish students learn first—is a nightmare. There are dozens of irregular verbs, and, like unhappy families according to Tolstoy, they are irregular in different ways. Students have to master at least half a dozen different irregular patterns and keep track of which verbs follow each one. The imperfect past tense, usually learned next, comes as a tremendous relief, for it only has three irregular verbs. (See the previous question for the meaning and usage of these tenses.) This contrast dates back to Latin. The Latin perfect tense, which gave rise to the preterite, was riddled with irregulars; not so the Latin imperfect. The evolution of Spanish from Latin then exacerbated this difference. Some perfects that were regular in Latin became irregular by analogy (and the reverse, to be fair), while sound change created additional irregular types. In contrast, the imperfect was relatively stable, adding only one irregular to two inherited from Latin. The irregular Latin perfects, traditionally called “strong” perfects, had two main characteristics.19 First, many of the strong perfect forms stressed the verb root instead of the ending, a pattern that persists in Spanish. For example, irregular dije and dijo ‘I/he said’ stress the di- root, while regular hablé and habló ‘I/he spoke’ stress the -é and -ó endings. Second, the strong perfects didn’t share the normal v endings seen in regular perfects, such as laudavi ‘I praised’ (from laudare) or audīvit ‘he heard’ (from audīre), or even a single set of endings. Most of today’s irregular preterites can be traced to three types of strong perfects, as shown in Table 10.6. As always, analogy (see Question 81) muddied the evolutionary trail. Several common verbs that were regular in Latin picked up the u pattern of hube, supe, and the like, including tener ‘to have,’ estar ‘to be,’ and andar ‘to walk’ (Spanish tuve, estuve, anduve). The irregular preterite of ver influenced that of dar (di, diste, dio, etc.), while the preterites of ser ‘to be’ and ir ‘to go’ merged; see Question 86. On the other hand, many verbs with strong perfects in Latin became regular in Spanish. Some examples are temer ‘to fear,’ which belonged to Latin’s -ui class (Latin timui, timuisti, etc.), leer ‘to read,’ in the -i class (legi, legisti), and escribir ‘to write,’ in the -si/-xi class (scripsi, scripsisti, etc.). Their modern yo preterites are regular temí, leí, and escribí instead of something like tume, lije, and escrise. To this potpourri of Latin-based irregular preterite types, Spanish added two of its own. As shown in Table 10.7, certain verbs show a vowel change

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Part 2 Inside Spanish Table 10.6  Some irregular Spanish preterites from Latin strong perfects

First person singular (yo form) Verb

Latin perfect

Spanish preterite

haber ‘to have’

habui

hube

saber ‘to know’

sapui

supe

poner ‘to put’

posui

puse

poder ‘to be able to’

potui

pude

hacer ‘to do’

feci

hice

venir ‘to come’

veni

vine

ver ‘to see’

vidi

vi

ser ‘to be’

fui

fui

conducir ‘to drive’

conduxi

conduje

decir ‘to say’

dixi

dije

traer ‘to bring’

traxi

traje

querer ‘to want’

quaesi(v)i

quise

For most of these -ui and -i perfects, a series of sound changes effectively transferred the -u- or -i of the Latin ending to the verb root.

Table 10.7  Vowel alternations in the -ir preterite (affected vowels underlined)

ei e.g., despedir ‘to say goodbye’

ou e.g., dormir ‘to sleep’

despedí

despedimos

dormí

dormimos

despediste

despedisteis

dormiste

dormisteis

despidió

despidieron

durmió

durmieron

in certain forms of the preterite. Specifically, for verbs in the -ir class, if the final vowel of the verb stem is e or o, it changes to i or u, respectively, in the third person of the preterite. This irregularity had the same source as the vowel alternation in the present tense of -ir verbs like medir (Question 82). In fluent speech, verb forms like despidió ‘he said goodbye’ and durmieron ‘they slept’ are pronounced with a y sound in the ending: yo for -ió and yeron for -ieron. As discussed in that question, the raising of e to i and o to u anticipates the height of the following y. The limitation of this change to -ir verbs, even though the -er endings are identical, may reflect the influence of the present tense.

Chapter 10 Where the action is: Spanish verbs

To summarize, Spanish inherited a bevy of preterite irregularities from Latin’s perfect tense, and, for good measure, introduced the vowel-change irregulars exemplified in Table 10.7. In contrast, the imperfect tense is ridiculously regular. Spanish only kept two of Latin’s few irregular imperfects: ir ‘to go’ (iba, ibas, etc., from Latin ibam, ibas, etc.) and ser ‘to be’ (era, eras, etc., from Latin eram, eras, etc.). The third Spanish verb with an irregular imperfect is ver.20 Its conjugation—veía, veías, etc. instead of the expected vía, vías, and so on—was actually regular in Old Spanish, when the verb’s infinitive was veer. Like the present tense form veo ‘I see’ (Question 83), the imperfect became irregular when veer reduced to ver. But even with three irregulars, the imperfect is still drastically outnumbered.

To learn more ll

For more details on how the irregular preterites took their modern form, see Penny (2002: 223–31).

ll

Verbs like despedir or dormir (Table 10.7) are often called “sole” verbs, an extension of the “boot” terminology used in the present tense (Question 82).

ll

The irregulars of the preterite make a return appearance in the imperfect subjunctive (Question 90).

ll

When veer became ver, why didn’t veía become vía? Rini (2001) attributes the persistence of veía to that of veo ‘I see’ (see Question 83). Speakers used to the high-frequency (and regular) pairs creo/ creía and leo/leía were primed to pair veo with veía instead of regularizing the imperfect form.

Question 86. How can Spanish use the same word for was and went? When my beginning Spanish students and I wrap up the present tense and venture into the past, typically a couple of months into a semester, it always surprises them that two of the most common Spanish verbs, ser ‘to be’ and ir ‘to go,’ are identical in the past tense. Fui can mean either ‘I was’ or ‘I went,’ fuiste can mean either ‘you were’ or ‘you went,’ and so on. Students always wonder how Spanish speakers deal with this confusion: “How can they tell which one is which?” As a linguist I’m also interested in the historical side of the question: since the purpose of language is to convey meaning, how did such an ambiguous situation evolve?

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My students soon come to see that in practice, context invariably prevents confusion. Juan Carlos fue el primer rey de España después de Franco can only mean that Juan Carlos was the first king of Spain after Franco, not that he went; the second interpretation just doesn’t make sense. Likewise, Juan Carlos fue a Barcelona can only mean that Juan Carlos went to Barcelona, not that he was Barcelona. In general, people are skilled at using context to fill in gaps in meaning—this is how we are able to communicate effectively despite speech errors, static phone lines, and other complications. Fue shows how important this skill is even in untroubled speech. As for the historical side, the facts of the merger are clear. Classical Latin had distinct past tense conjugations for esse ‘to be’ and ire ‘to go.’ But just as a modern English speaker can say I’ve been to New York instead of I’ve gone to New York, a Latin speaker could swap esse for ire to produce sentences like In Mediam fui sæpius ‘I was [=went] to Media more often’ (Lathrop 2003: 191). In both Latin and English, this substitution makes sense because going and being are closely related: if I went to Media, it follows that I was in Media and vice versa. Spanish then expanded this usage so that the past tense of esse took over that of ire more generally, not just when talking about a specific destination. The fact that the past tense forms of esse (fui, fuisti, etc.), with their initial f consonant, were more robust than those of ire (ii, isti, etc.), which eroded phonetically over time, undoubtedly contributed to this change. Although we’re talking about the grammatical past, I can’t resist speculating about the temporal future. Modern Spanish uses the verb estar, not ser, to express location (Question 41). It has therefore become normal to say, for example, Estuvo en Barcelona ‘He was in Barcelona’ as an alternative to Fue a Barcelona ‘He went to Barcelona.’ If history repeats itself, hundreds of years from now the past tense forms of estar might take over the past tense forms of ser to become a third-generation past tense of ir.

The subjunctive Question 87. How can the subjunctive be used for actual events? Linguists are compulsive pattern seekers. We crave the most general possible explanations for the behavior of sounds, words, and sentences. The Spanish subjunctive is a particularly daunting challenge in this regard: this group of verb forms occurs in such a wide variety of contexts that many observers throw

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in the towel rather than attempting to construct an overarching interpretation. One popular textbook devoted specifically to the Spanish subjunctive thus begins with a deliberately vague definition of the subjunctive as “a set of verb forms required in clauses of certain types,” before detailing its many specific uses throughout the book (Vogt 2008). This approach follows a trail most notably blazed by the nineteenth-century linguist Andrés Bello (1847, chap. 21). Of the various uses of the subjunctive, the hardest to reconcile with an overall pattern (for this linguist at least) is the one named in this question: its use, in certain contexts, to describe actual events. The good news is that if one analyzes the subjunctive properly, these cases fit right in, enabling a broad range of subjunctive uses to be seen in a unified way. The most common use of the subjunctive in Spanish is illustrated in Table  10.8. The simple sentences in the first column report actual events: things that have happened, are happening, or will happen. These sentences all use verb forms known as the indicative. When the event is embedded within a context that introduces uncertainty or impossibility, as in the third column, the subjunctive is required instead. It’s important to recognize that examples like these are heard every day throughout the Spanish-speaking world, even Table 10.8  The subjunctive in embedded sentences

Tense

Indicative for actuality

Subjunctive for uncertainty/impossibility (Embedded sentences in [brackets])

Past

David fue a la tienda.

No era posible [que David fuera a la tienda].

‘David went to the store.’

Ana ha visto Madrid. ‘Anne has seen Madrid.’ Present

Los estudiantes hacen el trabajo. ‘The students do the work.’

Está lloviendo. ‘It is raining.’ Future

Visitarán mañana. ‘They will visit tomorrow.’

Van a asistir al concierto. ‘They are going to attend the concert.’

‘It was impossible [for David to go to the store].’

Espero [que Ana haya visto Madrid]. ‘I hope [that Anne has seen Madrid].’

Ojalá [que los estudiantes hagan el trabajo]. ‘I hope to God [that the students are doing the work].’

Dudo [que esté lloviendo]. ‘I doubt [it’s raining].’

Recomiendo [que visiten mañana]. ‘I recommend [that they come tomorrow].’

No creo [que vayan a asistir al concierto]. ‘I don’t think [they are going to attend the concert].’

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in the most casual speech: the subjunctive is a vital and inescapable part of modern Spanish. This is a dramatic contrast to English, which has more or less abandoned the subjunctive except for minor uses such as I wish I had a million dollars or If I were a rich man. Unfortunately, the pattern of indicative for actual events, and the subjunctive otherwise, does not always hold. Table 10.9 shows that exceptions can arise after impersonal expressions of the ‘It is . . .’ variety. The first two sentences in the table are not problematic: here, the speaker is referring to impossible or uncertain events. However, the third sentence may refer to an actual visit, and in the final example it is certainly raining; otherwise, the speaker would not be sad. Subjunctives for actual events are found after many other impersonal expressions that likewise convey a judgmental or emotional reaction. Some examples are Es raro ‘It’s strange,’ Es una lástima ‘It’s a pity,’ Es fantástico ‘It’s great,’ and Es emocionante ‘It’s exciting.’ Reactions that sidestep the Es . . . structure also trigger the subjunctive; examples are Estoy triste ‘I’m sad,’ Siento ‘I’m sorry,’ Estoy alegre ‘I’m happy,’ and Me sorprende ‘I’m surprised.’ The routine use of the subjunctive in these emotional contexts is an innovation in Modern Spanish; in Old Spanish, the indicative was used instead (Jensen and Lathrop 1973: 54). To incorporate these very common cases, we need to shift our focus from the objective reality of an event to the speaker’s intention in talking about it. In particular, we need to distinguish sentences that assert a fact from those that merely assume it. In Table 10.8, the sentences in the indicative column Table 10.9  The subjunctive after impersonal expressions: from straightforward to problematic

Degree of uncertainty

Example

Impossibility

Es imposible [que David venga a la fiesta]. ‘It’s impossible [for David to come to the party].’

Uncertainty

Es aconsejable [que tú estudies]. ‘It’s advisable [for you to study].’ (advice that may or may not be heeded)

Uncertainty OR actuality

Es bueno [que Miguel visite a sus abuelos]. ‘It would be good [for Michael to visit his grandparents].’ OR ‘It’s good [that Michael does visit his grandparents].’

Actuality

Es triste [que llueva]. ‘It’s sad [that it’s raining].’

Chapter 10 Where the action is: Spanish verbs

are assertions: the speaker’s intention is to tell someone that David went to the store, that Anne has seen Madrid, and so on. In contrast, the purpose of a sentence like Es triste que llueva or Me sorprende que llueva is not to tell someone that it is raining, but to express the speaker’s reaction. The fact that it is raining is something that speaker assumes in forming the sentence. Subjunctives that express uncertain or impossible events, of course, neither assert nor assume them. Therefore the most useful generalization is that the indicative is for assertions, and the subjunctive for nonassertions, including assumptions. This subtle difference explains why impersonal expressions that express certainty or belief are followed by the indicative rather than the subjunctive. The sentence Es obvio que llueve ‘It’s obvious that it’s raining,’ with the indicative verb form llueve, is superficially similar to Es triste que llueva, with its subjunctive llueva. However, the speaker’s intention in the Es obvio sentence is very different: the sentence is essentially a stronger version of the plain assertion Llueve ‘It’s raining.’ (A more illuminating English translation might be ‘It is obviously raining.’) Personal statements like Creo ‘I think’ or Me parece ‘It seems to me’ are likewise in essence assertions, each with its own affective twist. Recognizing that lead-ins like Es triste or Me sorprende assume facts rather than assert them helps to explain their behavior when negated. Linguists who study semantics (meaning) have found that such lead-ins, called “factives,” can be negated without negating the assumed fact itself. This is certainly the case in Spanish. Flipping our example into its negative counterpart No es triste que llueva ‘It isn’t sad that it’s raining’ doesn’t change the fact that it’s raining; it only affects the speaker’s reaction. In contrast, adding no to a non-factive negates whatever follows. No creo que llueva ‘I don’t think it’s raining’ is equivalent to Creo que no llueve ‘I think it isn’t raining.’ Note that the No creo version, which expresses disbelief, requires the subjunctive (llueva), while the Creo version, which expresses certainty, requires the indicative (Llueve). Unfortunately, the assertion/nonassertion distinction doesn’t explain another use of the subjunctive: in clauses that act as adjectives (describing people and things) or adverbs (describing events). In the “Actual” column of Table 10.10, habla and sonó are in the indicative even though the friend’s German skills and the bell’s ringing are assumed rather than asserted. The actual/uncertain distinction posed at the beginning of the question does a better job for these clauses.21 The 3:00 friend in Table 10.10 is an actual German speaker, while the needed friend in the “Uncertain” column is only hoped for; the salimos departure took place when a bell actually rang, while the saldremos bell might not ever ring. It thus appears that the subjunctive requires two explanations: one for adjective and adverb clauses, and one for

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Table 10.10  Indicative and subjunctive in adjective and adverb clauses

Type of clause Adjective

Actual (indicative)

Uncertain (subjunctive)

A las tres voy a ver a un amigo [que habla alemán].

Necesito un amigo [que hable alemán]. ‘I need a friend [who speaks German].’

‘At 3:00 I’m going to see a friend [who speaks German].’ Adverb

Salimos [cuando sonó el timbre].

Saldremos [cuando suene el timbre].

‘We left [when the bell rang].’

‘We’ll leave [whenever the bell rings].’

the cases considered earlier, collectively known as noun clauses. That’s a generalization I can live with.

To learn more ll

Terrell and Hooper (1974) is a seminal publication about the assertion/assumption distinction.

ll

Lunn (1992) explores other uses of the subjunctive that can be traced to the assertion/assumption distinction.

ll

For a detailed presentation of the many specific uses of the subjunctive, see Batchelor and Pountain (2005: 389–415).

ll

The classic paper on factives is Kiparsky and Kiparsky (1974).

ll

Castronovo (1990) summarizes linguists’ analyses of the Spanish subjunctive from 1830 to 1973, while Kempchinsky (1995) describes more contemporary approaches.

ll

The order in which children learn the different uses of the subjunctive reflects the counterintuitive nature of sentences like Es triste que llueva; see Question 31.

Question 88. Why does Spanish have two past tense subjunctives? Languages embrace redundancy in vocabulary—consider, for example, the Spanish adjectives maravilloso, fantástico, estupendo, fabuloso, excelente, fenomenal, tremendo, and buenísimo—but avoid it in grammar. The Spanish imperfect subjunctive is a striking exception because it has two parallel conjugations.

Chapter 10 Where the action is: Spanish verbs

The imperfect subjunctive is used to talk about hypothetical events in the past, as in Mi madre quería que viniéramos ‘My mom wanted us to come,’ where there’s no indication whether or not we actually came. It’s also used for expressions like Si María hubiera sido rica . . . ‘If Maria had been rich . . .,’ which implies that Maria wasn’t rich. Both these examples use a version of the imperfect subjunctive that is built around the syllable -ra. It’s also possible to construct the imperfect subjunctive using -se, as in viniésemos and hubiese for the two examples above. The -se subjunctive isn’t as common as the -ra subjunctive. Its use varies from dialect to dialect; for example, it’s relatively common in Argentina and relatively rare in Peru. The use of the two forms also varies somewhat according to sentential context; for example, only the -ra form appears in formulaic, polite expressions like Quisiera . . . ‘I would like to . . .’ and ¿Pudiera . . .? ‘Could you . . .?’ Nevertheless, both forms are understood throughout the Spanish-speaking world and are equally appropriate in most contexts that require the subjunctive. The existence of two imperfect subjunctive conjugations adds an extra means of expression to a Spanish speaker’s toolkit. The two can be combined in a single sentence, as in the saying Fuera como fuese ‘come what may.’ They can be exploited to create internal structure and rhythm within a sentence, as in these examples from Argentinian and Spanish contemporary fiction: Hubo un silencio del otro lado, como si Kloster ya tuviera el presentimiento correcto y se preparase a jugar una partida diferente. (Martínez 2008: 103) There was silence at the other end of the phone line, as if Kloster already knew what was coming and was readying himself to play a different game. Todo el rato, hasta que la cerró [la puerta] tras de sí, estuvo esperando que fuese hasta él y lo agarrara por el brazo, que lo obligase a mirarla a los ojos, que contara cualquier cosa para retenerlo. (Pérez-Reverte 2000: 140) The whole time, until he closed the door behind him, he was hoping that she would come after him and grab him by the arm, that she would make him look her in the eyes, and say anything to stop him.

Ironically, neither version of the Spanish imperfect subjunctive comes from Latin’s imperfect subjunctive. As shown in Table 10.11, the -se forms come from Latin’s so-called pluperfect subjunctive, and the -ra forms from its pluperfect indicative, or non-subjunctive. “Pluperfect” simply means a tense that is used to talk about actions completed before some past point in time, as in modern Spanish Había comido ‘I had eaten.’ The -se subjunctive emerged first. Its evolution involved only a shift in time from pluperfect to past tense, and the shortening of its endings through normal sound

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Part 2 Inside Spanish Table 10.11  The roots of the Spanish imperfect subjunctives

Spanish imperfect subjunctive verb endings

Latin pluperfect verb endings

-se forms

Pluperfect subjunctive -issem

-issemus

-se

-semos

-isses

-issetis

-ses

-seis

-isset

-issent

-se

-sen

-ra forms

Pluperfect indicative -eram

-eramus

-ra

-ramos

-eras

-eratis

-ras

-rais

-erat

-erant

-ra

-ran

change. The -ra subjunctive evolved later because it also involved a switch from indicative to subjunctive: that is, from actuality to possibility. Penny (2002: 205) dates its emergence to the Golden Age (1500 to 1700), and its overtaking the -se subjunctive to the nineteenth century. The persistence of these parallel conjugations makes the imperfect subjunctive unique within Spanish grammar. Normally, a difference in form implies a difference in meaning. For example, the three Spanish past tenses that one can use to express ‘I ate’—comía, he comido, and comí—correspond roughly to ‘I used to eat,’ ‘I have eaten,’ and ‘I ate’ (referring to a specific meal). The two future expressions Voy a comer and comeré ‘I will eat’ refer to the near and distant future, respectively. The multiple Spanish pronouns meaning ‘you’ are variously singular and plural, informal and formal. The Spanish imperfect subjunctive is a fascinating counterexample: essentially, a freeze frame of a slowly progressing change in the language. The older and newer versions of the imperfect subjunctive continue to coexist because standardization and literacy, themselves relatively modern phenomena, have slowed down change by continuing to support the -se forms. The Spanish imperfect subjunctive is of general linguistic interest for the same reason. It is the only case I’m aware of in any language where two parallel constructions coexist in the core of the grammar. Other redundant constructions affect only individual words, such as French je m’assieds or je m’assois for ‘I sit down,’ or small groups of words, such as Italian siedo/seggo ‘I sit’ and possiedo/posseggo ‘I own,’ or Finnish öiden/öitten ‘of the nights’ and omenoiden/omenoitten ‘of the apples.’ The two versions of the Spanish

Chapter 10 Where the action is: Spanish verbs

imperfect subjunctive, which apply across the board for all verbs, thus help to make Spanish unique.

To learn more ll

Lunn 1992 discusses dialectal and contextual differences in the use of the two subjunctives.

ll

For more details about the evolution of the -ra and -se subjunctives, see Penny (2002: 201–05).

ll

Thornton (2012) discusses the evolution and continuation of the Italian verb pairs like siedo/seggo.

Question 89. Why does Spanish have a present and past subjunctive, but no future subjunctive? (a trick question) The present and past (imperfect) subjunctives are both part of everyday Spanish. Most Spanish speakers, students, and even teachers aren’t aware, however, that the language once had a future subjunctive as well. This tense22 became nearly obsolete some two hundred years ago, leaving vestiges only in legal documents and a few expressions, such as Venga lo que viniere ‘Come what may.’ It isn’t unusual for a verb tense to die out: all five passive Latin tenses were lost, for example, as the language transitioned to Spanish (Question 15). But the demise of the future subjunctive was ironic because it was a uniquely Spanish creation to begin with. More accurately, it was an Iberian creation, since the tense is also found in Portuguese, where it is used more actively. The future subjunctive evolved in an almost mathematically satisfying way from the merger of two Latin tenses, one future (the future perfect, which relates what ‘will have happened’) and one subjunctive (the perfect subjunctive). These two tenses had nearly identical conjugations in Latin, differing only in the first-person singular (the yo ‘I’ form). Their joint Spanish offspring closely resembles the -ra imperfect subjunctive described in the previous question, except with e instead of a in its endings. With one exception, the present subjunctive has taken over the former role of the future subjunctive, so that it now expresses hypothetical events both present (Espero que esté aquí ‘I hope he’s here’) and future (Espero que venga ‘I hope he will come’). That exception, ironically, involves the

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most basic Spanish hypothetical: si ‘if.’ Phrases like si sale ‘if he leaves’ use the indicative even though facier hypotheticals like con tal de que salga ‘provided that he leaves’ and en caso de que salga ‘in case he leaves’ use the subjunctive. This discrepancy is even more striking because in the past tense, the subjunctive (sensibly) is found after si in expressions like Si tuviera dinero ‘If I had money.’ Not surprisingly, many dialects of Spanish have effectively revolted, using the subjunctive in si ‘if’ contexts such as No sé si pueda ‘I don’t know if I can’(Lunn 1992). The si exception has historical roots. Latin allowed both the present indicative and the present subjunctive in si clauses. Likewise, Old Spanish allowed both the present indicative and the future subjunctive. The loss of the future subjunctive left the present indicative as the only option in this context.

To learn more ll

The evolution of the future subjunctive forms is detailed in Penny (2002: 215–16).

ll

See Macías Villalobos (1997) for more on the evolving use of the present indicative, present subjunctive, and future subjunctive in si clauses.

ll

Fajardo (1997) advocates for the continued use of the future subjunctive to provide an extra shading of either future time or uncertain mood to a verb.

Question 90. Why is the subjunctive so irregular? I remember the exact moment when I became completely fascinated by Spanish. My third-year Spanish class had wrapped up the basic tenses and the present subjunctive, and was ready to launch into the imperfect (past) subjunctive. Our teacher explained to us that this tense23 was based on the preterite and incorporated all of its irregulars. This struck me as extraordinary, or even as a bad joke. We had already learned that the present subjunctive inherited all the idiosyncrasies of the normal present tense. But the preterite is even thornier. Why was the subjunctive cursed with the most complicated elements of both these tenses? The explanation is historical. The irregulars of the normal present tense and the preterite are the result of five different patterns that happened to

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be duplicated in the subjunctive: four patterns of phonetic change, and one of Latin irregularities. Together, these patterns explain all but a handful of irregular Spanish subjunctives. The patterns labeled (i) through (iii) in Table 10.12 explain the irregularities of the present subjunctive: i. In the indicative (normal) present tense of verbs like dormir and querer, the changes from o to ue and from e to ie are the legacy of a language-wide phonetic change that affected certain Latin vowels in stressed syllables (Question 82). The present subjunctive has the same vowels and the same stress pattern, and therefore the same vowel changes. ii. In the present tense of verbs like medir, the change from e to i first appeared in verb forms whose endings contained the y sound, then spread to other forms (see again Question 82). Latin’s present subjunctive endings for -ire verbs all developed the y sound, and so triggered the same change. iii. In the present tense of verbs like conocer, decir, and hacer, the -o ending of the yo form insulated it from changes that affected the other present tense forms and the infinitive (Question 83). The subjunctive endings for these verbs all begin with -a, which had the same insulating property. Table 10.12  Some irregulars of the present and imperfect subjunctive, with comparisons to related indicative (non-subjunctive) forms. (Numbers refer to groups defined in the text)

Present (yo ‘I’ form illustrated)

Past (ellos ‘they’ form illustrated)

Infinitive

Present indicative

Present subjunctive

Preterite indicative

Imperfect subjunctive1

dormir ‘sleep’

duermo (i)

duerma

durmieron (iv)

durmieran

querer ‘want’

quiero (i)

quiera

quisieron (v)

quisieran

medir ‘measure’

mido (ii)

mida

midieron (iv)

midieran

conocer ‘know’

conozco (iii)

conozca

decir ‘say’

digo (iii)

diga

dijeron (v)

dijeran

hacer ‘make’

hago (iii)

haga

hicieron (v)

hicieran

(regular)

The table illustrates the more common -ra subjunctives, but the -se forms (Question 88) have the same irregularities.

1

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The remaining two patterns in the table concern the past tense: iv. In the preterite, as in the present tense, e was raised to i before an ending that contained y; likewise, o was raised to u (Question 85). This explains the irregular preterite forms of verbs like dormir and medir. The same changes happened in the imperfect subjunctive because its endings are similar. v. The drastic preterite changes seen in verbs like querer, decir, and hacer are legacies of the so-called strong perfects in Latin (see again Question 85). The imperfect subjunctive is based on the Latin pluperfect tense (Question 88), which had the same irregularities. If I could go back in time, I would explain to my younger self that the subjunctive’s many irregulars aren’t a joke, but an unfortunate coincidence: a perfect storm of phonetic change and inherited irregularities.

To learn more ll

The references provided for the present tense irregulars—the “boot” verbs (Question 82) and irregular yo verbs (Question 83)—include their application to the subjunctive.

ll

To learn about the six verbs with idiosyncratic irregularities in the present tense subjunctive (ser and estar ‘to be,’ saber ‘to know,’ dar ‘to give,’ ir ‘to go,’ and haber ‘to have’), see companion website, and, for more detail, Penny (2002: 192–95).

ll

For the extension of preterite irregular patterns to the imperfect subjunctive, see Penny (2002: 202).

Other tenses and uses Question 91. Why are the future and the conditional different from other tenses? In a beginning Spanish class, I sometimes introduce the mechanics of verb conjugation with a pair of scissors. I write an infinitive like hablar ‘to speak’ on a large index card, have a student cut off the -ar ending, tape the card with the remaining habl- root to the blackboard, and show how we can add

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different endings to create the various conjugated forms: hablo, hablas, and so on. All Spanish conjugations but two—the future and conditional— follow this principle. In these two tenses the verb endings are attached to the infinitive, not the root, as in hablaré ‘I will speak’ and hablaría ‘I would speak.’ These conjugations are different because they are relatively recent innovations. The original Latin future tense didn’t survive in Spanish, and Latin had no conditional; the subjunctive was used instead. In fact, these two Spanish tenses are a prime example of how new grammatical forms enter a language. The ground for the new tenses was laid when late Latin speakers began to use the verb habere ‘to have’ to also mean ‘to have to.’ It was then only a short semantic step from future obligation (‘I have to speak’) to a plain future (‘I will speak’), and from past obligation (‘I had to speak’) to past possibility (‘I would speak’) and then other conditional usages, most importantly in ‘if’ sentences (‘If I had more money I would live in Madrid’). Eventually, as shown in Table 10.13, these auxiliary (“helping”) forms of haber became reduced in form and lost their independent status, fusing onto the main verbs they accompanied. As the haber auxiliaries evolved into verb endings, they became less flexible. As auxiliaries, they could appear either before or after a main verb, either directly or separated by a pronoun (e.g., darlo he ‘I will give it’). In modern Spanish, they behave like proper verb endings, always attached to the verb, with no pronoun interruptions (lo daré). Stress in these newly minted tenses fell (and still falls) on the verb ending, not the verb itself, as shown in the second and fourth columns of Table 10.13, leaving the infinitive ending itself (-ar, -er, or -ir) unstressed. The normal Old Spanish tendency to drop unstressed vowels then led to the emergence of irregular futures and conditionals like habré ‘I will have’ (instead of haberé), and querré ‘I will want’ (instead of quereré). In some cases this created an un-Spanish consonant sequence, which was then “fixed” by adding an extra Table 10.13  Derivation of the future and conditional endings

Present tense of haber

Future tense (shown for vivir ‘to live’)

Imperfect tense of haber

Conditional tense (shown for vivir ‘to live’)

he

hemos

vivir + é

había

vivir + ía

has

habéis

vivir + ás vivir + éis

habías habíais

vivir + ías vivir + íais

ha

han

vivir + á

había

vivir + ía

vivir + emos

vivir + án

habíamos

habían

vivir + íamos

vivir + ían

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consonant (e.g., pondrá ‘he will put,’ from ponrá  ñ change. 9. This is similar to the use of dove as an alternative past tense for English dived, by analogy to drove and other irregular past tenses. 10. A handful of boot verbs became regular in a different way: by extending the diphthong to all verb forms. According to Penny (2002: 184), this only happened in cases where the diphthong was also present in a relatively common word, thus making it a powerful catalyst for analogical change. For example, the verb diezmar ‘decimate,’ from Latin dezmar, became an alldiphthongized verb via analogy with the word diezmo ‘tithe’ and also, perhaps, with diez ‘ten’ itself. 11. The presence of y in some verb endings in other tenses triggered vowel raising in those verb forms as well, giving further impetus to the analogical spread of i in the present tense (Penny 2002: 187). 12. The y also occurred in Vulgar Latin -ĕre and -ēre verb endings but was lost before it had the opportunity to affect the verb stem. 13. Subir ‘to go up’ is the most common verb in this category. Its Latin source was subire; without the y the normal Spanish development of the short ŭ would have been o (see again Question 57). 14. Bizarrely, the fact that there are no such verbs means that dormir and morir cannot technically be considered irregular! 15. All other verbs in the original -go group (besides hacer and decir) became regular. Most now have an s (or th in Castilian Spanish) in all forms, such as cocer ‘to cook,’ from Latin coquere (pronounced with a k). 16. The Old Spanish infinitive veer is also the source of ver‘s irregular imperfect conjugation: veía, veías, etc. rather than the expected vía, vías, etc. (Question 85). 17. While this may seem like an unworkable gap, it is no more so than using time expressions to distinguish present versus future uses of the progressive

Notes

18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

(-ing form) in English, for example, I’m visiting my grandparents right now (present) versus I’m visiting my grandparents next week (future). A similar line earlier in the poem uses the preterite for both participants: Yo la quise, y a veces ella también me quiso. The contrast between the two lines adds an air of ambiguity to their relationship and its end. The term “strong” is used in Germanic grammar to describe verbs with a vowel change in the past tense, like wear/wore or eat/ate. But there is no direct connection between the verbs with a strong past in Germanic languages and those in Latin. It’s a purely terminological relationship. The verb prever “to predict,” which is based on ver, shares its irregularities. The word antes “before” is a notorious exception: unlike cuando and other time words used in adverbial clauses, it is followed by the subjunctive even when it refers to an actual event (e.g., Salí antes de que llegara Elena ‘I left before Elena arrived’). Ogihara (1995) describes related phenomena in English and Japanese and proposes an explanation grounded in formal logic theory. Strictly speaking, the future subjunctive isn’t a “tense” (the future itself is a tense), but rather a combination of a tense (future) and a mood (subjunctive). As in the previous question, I am using the word “tense” loosely, to refer to some combination of tense (present, past, or future) and mood (subjunctive or indicative). The same shortening initially happened in the otherwise-identical third-person singular indicative, but the forms were later regularized. The similarity between the Spanish and English verbs is coincidental. Have and haber come from two different PIE roots, each meaning ‘to grasp.’

Chapter 11 1. Spanish can afford this flexibility partly because the ‘personal a’ (see Question 97) helps distinguish subject and object in most sentences that are otherwise ambiguous. Thus, in both Atacó el león a la cazadora and Atacó a la cazadora el león ‘The lion attacked the hunter,’ the a before la cazadora makes it absolutely clear who attacked whom. As discussed in that question, the personal a evolved in response to this flexibility; thus, historical and actual causality flow in opposite directions. 2. The writings of Julius Caesar, born in 100 BCE, are a notable exception. Caesar is famous among Latin writers for overwhelmingly, and already archaically, preferring to end sentences with a verb. 3. The careful reader may wonder why auxiliaries are considered to be phrasal heads even though they contribute less than main verbs to the overall meaning of a sentence. Modern syntactic theories ascribe head status to auxiliary verbs because of their syntactic importance. Crucially, the auxiliary bears features such as tense and subject agreement that carry through to the verb phrase as a whole. Similar reasoning underlies the linguistic analysis of determiners

301

302

Notes

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

like un ‘a’ and conjunctions like que/et ‘and’ as phrasal heads. In fact, most linguists would label un molino de viento as a determiner phrase instead of a noun phrase. Three other Spanish adjectives that act as quantifiers before nouns, but not after them, are significantly different from those in Table 11.1. Mismo means either ‘the same’ or ‘himself’ (depending on adjective position) medio means either ‘half’ or ‘average,’ and cualquier means either ‘any’ or ‘ordinary.’ These adjectives fail the two tests mentioned below: they can’t appear after the verb ‘to be’ (La película es cualquiera doesn’t mean ‘The film is ordinary’), and can’t be modulated with muy, bastante, and the like. Therefore, it’s best to think of mismo, medio, and cualquier as true quantifiers with variant meanings after a noun, rather than as normal adjectives with a quantifier interpretation before a noun. The personal a thus distinguishes between literal and figurative meanings as in Admiro la iglesia ‘I admire the church’ (a building), and Admiro a la iglesia ‘I admire the Church’ (as an anthropomorphized institution). As a measure of this linguistic interest, Internet searches on “Spanish clitic doubling” and “Spanish clitic climbing” yield tens of thousands of hits each. This constraint is referred to as the Tobler–Mussafia law after the two linguists who independently observed it, coincidentally named Adolf Tobler and Adolfo Mussafia. It is somewhat more general than stated above, applying not only at sentence beginnings, but also after other syntactic boundaries. Y and o have different histories. For y, the e version descends directly from Latin et, and the y version is a Spanish innovation. O has the opposite history: the o version comes from Latin aut, and the u version is an innovation. See Lathrop (2003: 200–01), Penny (2002: 245). As an example, a nineteenth-century Latin textbook by a Yale professor preached that “Two negatives in the same clause, acting reciprocally upon each other, destroy the negation. In other words, the negation of a negation is equivalent to an affirmation. This must be considered as the general rule in all languages.” (Gibbs 1858: 67; my emphasis). One difference among the Romance languages is that Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian only allow only one negative element before a verb, while French sentences with a negative subject require two negatives. Compare Nadie vino ‘Nobody came’ with French Personne n’est venu, or Nada es interesante ‘Nothing is interesting’ with Rien n’est intéressant. The preverb restriction in Spanish (and other languages) is called “negative absorption” because nadie and nada have seemingly absorbed the extra no seen when the negative subject follows the verb (No vino nadie, No es interesante nada).

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Index Numbers following entries refer to questions (1–101), except for those preceded by C (for chapter introductions) and n (for endnotes). For example, C2 is the introduction to Chapter 2, and n10.1 is the first endnote for Chapter 10. ¡ and ¿  53, 55–6 Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española. See Real Academia Española accent marks  19, C7, 50–2, 55–6, 65 Africa  1, 4, 57, n1.1 Alfonso X (king)  11, 16 alphabet  2, 21, 45–8 American Sign Language  29, n5.1 analogy  13, 81–2, 85, n10.9–10 Andalusia  4–5, 8–9, 76–7, 100, n6.1 Anderson, James M.  23 Andes  5, 7, 27, 63, 84, 100 Andorra  1, 19 apellidos  67 apostrophe  19, 54, 57 aquel. See demonstratives Aquitanian. See Basque Arabic dialects or language  4, 9 differences from Spanish  35, 41 gender  70 impact on Spanish  19, 26, 38–9 areal feature  57, 75 Argentina. See also voseo internet usage  10 languages other than Spanish  1, 7, 17, 29 linguistic accommodation  9 Spanish  1, 5, 76, 88 augmentatives 39 b and v development from Latin  C2, 13 infant perception  30 pronunciation  47 spelling  C7, 47, 50 Bantu languages  70, 84

Basque characteristics 21–2 history 21–3 impact from Spanish  24 impact on Spanish  23–4, 38 status  1, 4, 6, 22 Belize  1, 7 Bello, Andrés  50, 77, 87 Berber(s)  26, 43 bilingualism  1, 6–7, 27–8, 94, 100 Bolívar, Simón  1, 28 Bolivia  1, 5, 7, 29 calque  17, 27, 72 Canada 1 Canary Islands  1, 4, 63 capitalization 49 Caribbean  1, 5, 7–8, 27 castellano  3, 11 Castile  3, 61 Catalan differences from Spanish  19 impact on Spanish  17, 38 and plural hay 94 sign language  29 status and controversy  1, 4, 6 ceceo. See seseo Celtic  21, 23–4, 38, n4.8 Cervantes, Miguel de  2, 11–12, 38–9, 72, 77. See also Don Quijote Ceuta 1 ch  C2, 11, 13, 45, 50, 62 Chávez, Hugo  1, 45 Chile  1, 7–8, 29 Chinese differences from Spanish  35, C8, 81, 84 similarities with Spanish  70, 95 status  1, 4, 9 Chomsky, Noam  C11, 98, 100

Index clitic climbing  98 clitics  98, 99 cocoliche  17 code-switching 28 Colombia  1, 7, 10, 29, 66, 76 Columbus, Christopher  1, 27 comparative method  21 compounds  12, 28, 40, 44 consonants. See also lenition; seseo; yeísmo; and individual consonants added to words  C2, 13, 27, 91 Basque 22 changes from Latin  C2, 13 children’s learning of  30 compared to vowels  58 deleted at ends of words  C2, 13, 92 Costa Rica  1, 29, 39, 66, 76 Cuba  1, 5, 10 demonstratives  14, 37, 42, 78 derivation(al affixes)  C2, 39, 72 de Saussure, Ferdinand  2 Deutscher, Guy  13, 70 de Vega, Lope  11, 72 dialect, definition of  4 differential object marking  97. See also personal ‘a' diminutives 39 diphthongization (e > ie, o > ue). See also verbs: “boot” in Catalan  19 compared to Ladino  20 in Spanish  C2, 13, n7.1 in Spanish verbs  81–2, 90, n10.10 Dominican Republic  1, 5, 17, 29 Don Quijote  11–12, 17, 38–9. See also Cervantes, Miguel de double negatives  101 doublets  12, 16 Dutch 43 Ecuador  1, 5, 7, 29, 45 El Salvador  1, 7, 29, 76 English impact on Spanish  28, 39, 55 international status  1 other language aspects  43, 49, 77–8, 95 pronouns  75, 80 pronunciation  48, 59, 64 verb system  43, 81, 87, 93 vocabulary  36–8 epicene nouns  72 Equatorial Guinea  1 errors made by native speakers  32 ese. See demonstratives

Eskimo. See linguistic relativity estar. See ser este. See demonstratives f  C2, 13, 19, 24, 48, 62 factives  87 feminine. See gender Finnish  21, 81, 88 French accent marks  51 geographical distribution  1 grammar  71, 75, 78, 80, 84, 93–4, n11.10 impact on Spanish  2, C3, 17, 38–9 learnability 35 negatives 40 pronunciation  C8, 59, 64–5 sign language  29 fronterizo  17 Galician  1, 4, 6, 17 García Márquez, Gabriel  46 gender development from Latin  C2, 14, 70–2 differences within Romance  14, 71 extension of endings  8, 20, 31 and ‘it’  74 learning by children, adults  31, 70 and leísmo  77 masculines ending in -a  72 psychology of  33, 70 in speech errors  32 uses of  70 German grammar  41–2, 70, 75, 78, 81 learnability  31, 35 pronunciation  C8, 59, 62 spelling and punctuation  49–50, 54 Germanic (early)  19, 25, 38, 49, 68, n4.5 -go verbs  81, 83, 90, n10.15 Granda, Germán de  27 Greek children’s learning  30 gender  70, 72 impact on Latin  16 impact on Spanish  23, 38–9, 72 Indo-European language  21 Greenberg, Joseph  78, 95 Grimm’s law  21 Guaraní  1, 7, 27, 54 Guatemala  1, 7, 29 h  C2, 13, C7, 48, 50, 55 Hausa  42, C8 head-initial syntax  78, 95–6, n11.3

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Index Hebrew and Ladino  20 nouns and pronouns  70, 73, 75, 97 sounds  48, 59, 62 verb system  43, 79, 84, 94, 100 Hindi  21, 49, C8, 75 Honduras  1, 7 Hoyos, Amalia  32 Iberian (language)  23–4 Indo-European grammar  70, 78–9, 81, 95 history  21–3, n9.8 language learnabilty  35 pitch accent  65 irregular verbs children’s learning  31 development from Latin  C2, 15, 81 importance  37, C10 ser 41 in specific tenses  83–3, 85, 90–2 ‘it’  37, 74 Italian apostrophe 54 in Argentina  1, 5, 17 and Catalan  19 grammar  75, 78, 88, 93 impact on Spanish  17, 38–9 pronunciation  19, 57 Japanese grammar  43, 75, 81, 95 learning  30, 35 and linguistic relativity  33 pronunciation  64–5 jerigonzas  66 Jespersen, Otto  40 Kuuk Thaayorre  33 l 8 Labov, William  8 Ladino 20 laísmo. See leísmo “la la” rule  99 Latin continued cultural importance of  16 derivational affixes from  39, 72 establishment in Spain  C2 later vocabulary from  16, 38 pluralia tantum  73 as SOV language  95 strong perfects  85 summary of evolution into Spanish C2

Latin America. See also Andes; Caribbean; Yucatan; and individual countries colonialization  1, 4, 7, 11 dialectal features  5, 8, 43, 60, 63, 78, 100 (see also voseo) emigration to U.S.  7 indigenous languages  7, 27, 38 Romance blends  17 Latin case system  11, 14, C2 Latin verb system  C2, 15, 82–6, 88–94 learning Spanish as a first language  30–1 as a second language  34–5 leísmo  2, 4, 77, 100 lenition  13, 24, 83 linguistic relativity  33 Lipski, John  28 ll  13, 45, 50 loísmo. See leísmo Macken, Marcy  30 masculine. See gender Mayan  7, 27 Melilla 1 metathesis 32 metonymy  72 Mexico  1, 7, 29, C7 Moors  3, 26, 77, 226 Moros y cristianos 3 Mozarabic  17, 26, 38, n2.2 n 8 ñ  C3, 11, 13, 46, 56 Nahuatl  7, 21, 27 names  67–8 negatives  40, 101 Neruda, Pablo  70, 84 neuter. See gender Nicaragua  1, 7, 29, 76 Nicaraguan sign language  29 nicknames  69 object pronouns as clitics  98 development from Latin  14 double-marking  8, 100 “la la” rule  99 and leísmo  77 position rules  11, 14, 92, 98 Occitan. See Provençal Old Spanish  11, 77, 87 onomatopoeia  C2, 12, 38 palatalization  13, 65 Panama  1, 5, 8

Index Paraguay  1, 7, 27 para. See por and para Penny, Ralph derivational affixes  39 dialectal variation  4, 78, n6.1 history of Spanish  8, 12, 15, 88, n10.10 mutual intelligibility with Portuguese  18 personal a  34, 77, 97, 100, n2.3 Peru  5, 7, 66, 88 Phoenician. See Carthaginian Pig Latin. See jerigonzas plural  14, 52, 73 pluralia tantum  73 Poema de mío Cid  3, 11–12, 77, 98 por and para  11, 31, 44 Portuguese  17–18, 43, C8, 89 possessive  8, 54, 78, 94 Pountain, Christopher  5, 28, 96 prepositions 43–4 Provençal  17, 38 Puerto Rico and English  1, 28 r  8, 30, 60 sign language  29 Spanish  1, 5 Quechua  7, 27, 38 r

children’s pronunciation  30 development from Latin  C2, 13, 59 dialectal merger with -l 8 pronunciation  59–60 in Puerto Rico  8, 30, 60 Real Academia Española and ¿, ¡ 53 and accent marks  50, 51 and ch, ll  45, 50 history and mission  2, 11 and leísmo  2, 77 and ñ key  46 publications  2, 8, 36, 69 Reconquista  3, 26, 77 Reddit  46 reflexive pronouns  78, n10.1 retablos ex-voto  C7 Rome  C2, 25 Russian  21, 94, n9.1, n9.3 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. See linguistic relativity se accidental  33, 93 second language acquisition and language change 95 seseo  4, 8, 63

Seville. See Andalusia si clauses using indicative  89 Siglo de Oro  11, 72 sign language  29 Silva-Corvalán, Carmen  28 SOV order  95 Spain coat of arms  3 dialects and languages  1, 4, 6 history  C2, 3, 5, 7, 20, 23, 26 informal pronouns in  76 place names  23 Spanish called castellano 3 dialects  4–5, 8–9 evolution of  C2, 8, 11 on the Internet  10, 34 and other languages  16, 18, 24–8, 38 status 1 Spanish sign language(s)  29 spelling  C7, 50, 55 stress  16, 30–1, 51, 65, 82, 98 subject pronouns development of  14, 42, 78 omission of  37, 74, 80 subjunctive children’s learning of  31 development of  15, 87–9 irregulars 90 loss of future subjunctive  11, 89 two versions of imperfect  88 usage  87, 92 substrate languages  24 suppletion  81, 86, n9.17, n10.7 SVO order  95 Swahili  70, 94, 100 s weakening and deletion  4, 5, 8 syllable structure  16, 28,  32, 64–6 Tartessian 23 text messaging  55, n6.12 th  C2, 11, 13, 61 Thai  70, 95 themes Blame Latin!  42, 64, 70, 78–9, 95 Don’t blame Latin!  41, 44, 72, 75, 82–3, 86–9, 91, 97–101 Linguistic legends  33, 61, 69, 99 Perfect storm  72, 81, 85, 90, 92 Spanish is normal  40, 42, 48–9, 57–9, 65, 70, 73, 75, 95, 97 Spanish is special  43, 53, 61, 81, 84, 88, 97 Trask, Larry  22, 24 Turkish  31, 48, 75, 81

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Index United States  1, 7, 28 Uruguay  1, 5, 7 Vaquero de Ramírez, María  28 Venezuela  1, 7, 29 Verbs. See also irregular verbs; subjunctive aspect 84 “backwards”  74, 93 “boot”  15, 81–2, 90, 92, n10.10 commands  8, 27, 31, 92, 98 conjugation  15, 31, 47, 80, 100 conjugation classes  C2, 15, 31, 79 conocer  41, 84 (see also verbs: -zco) evolution from Latin  C2, 15 fui, fuiste, etc.  86 future tense  8, C2, 15, 31, 80, 91, 95 gustar. (see verbs: “backwards”) haber  C2, 15, 37, 84, 91, 94 hay 94 imperfect past tense  15, 31, 84–5 perfect past tense  C2, 15 preterite past tense  15, 84–6, 90 saber and conocer 41 ser and estar  8, 11, 19, 31, 37, 41 “sole” 85 spelling changes  81 stem-changing (see verbs: “boot”, “sole”) -zco  81, 83, 90 Visigothic (language). See Germanic Visigoths  25–6 vocabulary borrowings from other languages  C2, 16–17, 24, 26–8

change in form  C2, 12 change in meaning  C2, 12, 17, 28 coinages  C2, 8, 12 obsolescence  C2, 12 size of  36 sources of  C2, 12, 38 word frequency  37 voseo  5, 8, 76 vowels. See also diphthongization development from Latin  57, 82 final vowel deletion  C2, 13, 92 5-vowel system  57–8 raising  13, 82, 85, 90 unstressed vowel deletion  C2, 13, 65 Vulgar Latin  C2, 37, 38 Weinreich, Max  4 word order  8, 14, 95, 96, n11.1 /x/  11, C2, 13, 50, 62 y  13, 63, 65 yeísmo  4, 8, 27, 55, 63 Yiddish 20 ‘you’ and commands  92 development from Latin  11, 14, 75, C2 dialectal variation  4, 76 in Ladino  20 Yucatan  5, 7, 27, 100 z  11, C2, 61

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