Is decrementar a Word?

Before we talk about the words that make up the Spanish language, the lexicon, we need to decide which words it includes. If someone asked whether decrementar ‘decrease’ is a word, what would you say? Most people not trained in linguistics will answer that a word exists if it is in the dictionary. But this just shifts the decision to lexicographers, the professionals who write dictionaries. They may not give the answer a linguist would give, but we can use their answer as a starting point. The forty-six members of the Real Academia Española add a new word to the Diccionario de la Real Academia (DRAE) once its usage has become sufficiently frequent in written sources, such as newspapers and books. Their decisions are also informed by consultation with various other organizations, such as the Instituto de Lexicografía and the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (ASALE), which includes Spanish language academies throughout the Spanish-speaking world. In fact, it is even possible for anyone to suggest words for inclusion in the DRAE through an interactive service known as the Unidad Interactiva or UNIDRAE. This website states, though, that the recommended words must be documented in writing and cannot simply be part of one's personal usage.

In this chapter, you will continue analyzing patterns and paradigms in Spanish in order to get an overview of the major changes in the history of Spanish in nominal elements, namely nouns, articles, adjectives, and pronouns. An important paradigm in Latin are cases which were used to indicate the grammatical functions of nominal elements, whether they served as grammatical subjects, possessives, indirect objects, direct objects, or had other functions. These cases were organized into paradigms known as declensions. The story of cases and declensions shows how the typical singular–plural pattern arose in Spanish of singular without -s, as in amiga, and plural with -s, as in amigas. Finally, we will explore the history of the gender of nouns in Spanish: those that show an -o/-a alternation in masculine and feminine, such as el amigo and la amiga, those that have the same ending for both genders, such as el estudiante and la estudiante, and those that show an alternation of -e or consonant for the masculine and -a for the feminine, such as el infante/la infanta and el señor/la señora. Finally, the loss of case distinctions and certain declensions or categories of nouns in Spanish explains why certain nouns, like mano and día, do not conform to the typical endings for masculine and feminine nouns.

Chapter 4 focused on the contact between speakers of what is now Spanish and speakers of other languages from the third century BC to the present. Here we will focus more closely on events from the tenth to the fifteenth century AD in order to understand the historical events that led to the selection and establishment of Castilian as the standard variety of Spanish. At the beginning of this time, Castilian was just one of many different speech varieties spoken in the Iberian Peninsula along with other Romance varieties, such as Galician, Leonese, Asturian, Navarrese, Aragonese, Catalan, and Mozarabic, and other non-Romance varieties, such as Basque and Arabic. It is important to realize that Castilian became the basis for the standard dialect for historical reasons and not for linguistic reasons. As you learned in Chapter 2, one variety of Spanish is not linguistically superior to any other. Instead it is societal events, external to the linguistic features of a particular variety, that led to its selection as the basis for the standard dialect.

Letters in italics in Appendices A and B are supplied by the editor of the texts. Line numbers for these texts have been changed to follow the lines of text as printed here.

Appendix A Auto de los Reyes Magos (end of the twelfth century; the earliest surviving fragment of Spanish liturgical drama) (Menéndez Pidal 1971: I, 71–72, cited by Pountain 2001: 35)

This chapter takes a closer look at three sound changes involving consonants in the history of Spanish in order to illustrate some general principles of sound change. By looking at the changes resulting in words like fieldad and lealtad you will learn that sound changes take place in a certain order. You will also learn that variation may be a part of sound change, so that the same Latin sounds may end up with different results in Spanish. A closer look at the evolution of Latin initial /f/ in Spanish will reinforce the point, made in Chapter 8, that sounds evolve differently in different phonological contexts. It will also illustrate the idea that sound changes occur during a certain time period, so that words introduced after this period will not be subject to that change. Finally, the history of the sibilants in Spanish shows clearly the phases of a sound change and also that sounds can undergo different changes in different geographical regions.

Why fieldad but lealtad?

When you learned to trace the sound changes from a Latin word to its Spanish reflex in Chapters 6, 7, and 8, we were not concerned about the order the sound changes occurred in. The one exception was to identify the creation of a yod before identifying other changes, since this would certainly affect the evolution of other vowels and consonants in the word. Apart from the yod, though, you could apply the changes in any order and still end up with the same result in Spanish. In this section, we consider a special case where the result of the voiceless consonants /p/, /t/, and /k/ will be different depending on whether voicing or syncope occurs first.

By writing a “student's introduction” to the history of the Spanish language, we have sought to present in an accessible and engaging way material that has gained a reputation for being dry and difficult. We have learned from experience that students are genuinely interested in learning why duermo has one stem and dormimos has another and why mano is feminine and día is masculine. We hope with this book to foster their curiosity by providing them with the tools they need to find answers to their questions and relate them to their daily lives. We also hope that the accessibility of this book willmake it easier for instructors, even those who are not experts in this field, to offer a course in the history of the Spanish language. So as to make the material accessible we have written in a conversational style as if we were sitting down in our offices explaining these concepts to our readers. In fact, we have often found ourselves providing our students with exactly this kind of explication of the other textbooks we have used. The text of each of the seventeen chapters is a step-by-step presentation, supplemented by tables and figures for visual learners, and by textboxes with extra details, additional material, or the sides of a debate. The pedagogical features include lead-in questions at the beginning of each chapter, practice exercises at certain points in the chapter, end-of-chapter summaries, follow-up activities, and suggestions for further reading.

We have designed the book to be adaptable to the preferences of individual instructors. We assume that each of the seventeen chapters provides material for one week of course work, except Chapters 1 and 2, which can be completed together in the first week. Therefore, you may decide to omit two or three chapters, according to your interests and those of your students, and the amount of class time you devote to testing, oral presentations, and other activities. You will almost certainly want to cover Chapters 1–3, which provide an essential foundation, Chapters 6–7, which cover all the regular sound changes, and Chapters 10, 11, and 13, which cover the essentials of noun and verb morphology.

What Are the Consonants in Spanish and How Are They Organized?

In the previous chapter, we saw that a vowel is a sound articulated without any obstruction or audible friction in the oral cavity. Consonants, on the other hand, are produced when the speaker creates a narrow channel or a complete closure in the mouth. The way the air flows or does not flow out of the mouth during the pronunciation of a consonant is called the mode of articulation (el modo de articulación). For example, the consonant /p/ is a stop (una oclusiva) because the flow of air is blocked completely.

In Chapter 11, we explored the major changes in nouns in the history of Spanish. In this chapter, we examine other elements of the nominal system that determine or modify the noun or completely replace it, such as articles, demonstratives, personal pronouns, possessives, indefinites (including negative polarity items), and comparative adjectives. You will see many parallels between the noun changes you have already studied and the development of these nominal elements. Specifically, you will learn about the remarkable productivity of the forms of Latin ILLE as the origin of many of these forms. You will also discover how sound changes, analogical processes, and grammaticalization result in the modern forms.

What Is the Difference between Determiners and Pronouns?

When you wrote a sentence with the word la in it in Lead-in question 12-1, what function did the word have? Had you realized before that the word has more than one use? Did you realize the difference in function between a definite article (el artículo definido) (as in la historia) and a pronoun (un pronombre) (as in la encuentro interesante)? In Chapter 10 we mentioned that an article is a type of determiner that ‘determines’ or defines a noun.

This chapter considers how speakers change the meaning of words by using them in new ways. You will learn that these semantic changes usually result from one of six primary processes, which may be accompanied by two secondary processes. Words can change meaning to that of an object or concept they resemble or with which they are in contact. A word can also change meaning because its form is similar to the form of another word or because it is used in an expression with another word that is then deleted. Words might also change their range, rather than their basic meaning. This occurs when a word's meaning becomes more general or broader or when it becomes more specific or narrower. Finally, any of the six primary processes can be accompanied by a change in affect, that is, a change in meaning to more positive or more negative connotations. Each of these types of semantic change is explained and illustrated below first with examples from English and then with examples from Spanish. By considering these semantic changes, you will arrive at a better understanding of the meanings of the words you use and how these meanings evolved. You will also learn how words of the same origin in Spanish and English can come to have different meanings, like embarrassed and embarazada mentioned above in Lead-in question 16-2.