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.

Now that you have learned to think like a linguist in Chapter 2, you are ready in this chapter to delve into the core concern of a book on the history of Spanish: how and why languages change. We will start with the premise that languages do not change on their own, but rather speakers change their language in line with their goals. We will also see that changes take place in different aspects of a language – in spelling, sounds, forms, the order of forms and words, the words themselves, and the meanings of these words – and that the speakers have different reasons for changing each of these aspects of their language. Finally, you will learn that historical linguists study language change by formulating hypotheses about changes and then testing them by collecting data from written texts.

What Is Language Change?

Language change (el cambio lingüístico) is of course a change in a language, like the creation of a new word such as selfie in English or autofoto in Spanish. But when we talk about any change in a language, like the creation of a new word, we must keep in mind two important points.

Students of Spanish often want to know why there are so many verb tenses in Spanish. To arrive at an answer to this question, as for so many other questions about Modern Spanish, we will begin by looking at Latin. Whereas Latin had only ten verb tenses, six in the indicative and four in the subjunctive, Spanish has fourteen verb tenses, ten in the indicative and four in the subjunctive. Of the ten Latin tenses, four were kept, two were lost, and four were repurposed. In Spanish ten new tenses were created. This chapter outlines these changes and then focuses in particular on the new future and conditional forms, like cantaré and cantaría, and the compound tenses, like he cantado and había cantado. We will see how these tenses were created and then look at the competition in Modern Spanish between two future forms, cantaré and voy a cantar, and two past tense forms, the preterit canté and the present perfect he cantado.

What Is a Verb Tense?

Speakers of English and Spanish find it useful to indicate the time of an event, whether past, present, or future, by the tense of the verb they choose. In its most basic definition a verb tense is a verb form that indicates time. The word tense comes to English from Old French tens (Modern French temps), meaning ‘time’ from TEMPUS ‘stretch of time,’ which becomes tiempo in Spanish.

In order to start you on the path to learning about the history of Spanish, this chapter presents some interesting questions about the Spanish language that you will be able to answer after learning about its history. One such question, explored in this chapter, is why the noun arte can be eithermasculine or feminine in Spanish, as in el arte abstracto, where it is masculine, and las bellas artes, where it is feminine. The answer to this question illustrates how understanding its history can increase your understanding of Spanish today.

Why Study the History of Spanish?

If you are interested in learning about the history of the Spanish language, then it is likely that you have developed some proficiency in Spanish. You may have studied it in a classroom or on your own, or you may have grown up speaking Spanish with your family or in your community. Your ability to communicate in Spanish means that you have an understanding of how Spanish is spoken today by a particular group of people in a particular place. You know, for example, that the letters ue are pronounced [we] and that this diphthong occurs in duermo but not dormimos. You also know that the letters ch are pronounced [tʃ] and that this sound occurs in the noun noche but not in the adjective nocturno. You know the different forms for nouns, like the plural tamales and the singular tamal; pronoun forms, like sin mí and conmigo; and irregular verb forms like soy, quepo, pongo, and tuve. You also know that the words fábrica and carpeta have different meanings from English fabric and carpet. Your knowledge of Spanish as it is spoken now allows you to use the language and to describe how you use it.

In this chapter, you will learn about four major moments of language contact in the history of Spanish. The first moment is the arrival of Romans in the Iberian Peninsula, which puts speakers of Latin in contact with speakers of Basque, Iberian, Celtic, and other languages. A second moment of contact is the arrival of Germanic tribes in the Iberian Peninsula, who encounter the speakers of Latin who had settled there. A third moment of contact is the arrival of Arabic speakers in the Iberian Peninsula. The fourth and final moment of contact is the arrival of Spanish speakers in the Americas, who encounter speakers of indigenous Amerindian languages. For each moment of contact, we will consider its effects on the sounds and words of Spanish. We will see that we can identify borrowed words and place names with a higher degree of certainty than borrowed sounds.

What Is Language Contact?

Language contact can be defined quite simply as “the use of more than one language in the same place at the same time … [where] at least some people use more than one language” (Thomason 2001: 1). Thus, language contact occurs when speakers of different languages occupy the same territory, as was the case for example when the Romans arrived in the Iberian Peninsula in 218 BC. In these situations, speakers need to communicate with speakers of another language and so they accommodate their speech by learning the other language to a greater or lesser degree.

This Chapter Begins With An Overview Of The Grammatical Categories And Functions In Use In Spanish Today And The Forms Used To Express Them. This Is Followed By A Look At The Processes That Have Led To Changes In These Functions And Forms. You Will Learn How Speakers Create New Forms From Existing Elements And Also How They Reshape Existing Forms Through Analogy.

What Are Morphemes and Paradigms?

We have seen in Chapters 6–9 on phonological changes how speakers change their language by changing their pronunciation of certain sounds. In this chapter and the next four, Chapters 10–14, we will consider morphological changes in the history of Spanish, the ways in which speakers change the forms they use. The key to understanding morphology is first to realize that the forms in Spanish, like those of other languages, are organized into patterns or paradigms (los paradigmas). The next step is to learn to analyze these patterns. Therefore, the best way to understand morphology is to become a “pattern-seeking device” that learns to detect and analyze patterns in the forms in Spanish that express grammatical functions.

One paradigm that you are no doubt familiar with is a verb conjugation, such as the conjugation of the present indicative of the verbs dormir and cantar:

When we compare these two paradigms, we can see that certain forms are associated with certain functions. It is easy to see that the stem of the verb, duerm- or dorm- for dormir and cant- for cantar, indicates the meaning of the verb, its lexical content, whether ‘sleep’ or ‘sing,’ and that the verb endings indicate grammatical person, such as the first person singular -o of duermo and canto.

In this chapter, you will learn how Spanish vowels evolved from Latin. Latin had the same five vowels as Spanish, /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, and /u/, but there was a long and short version of each of these vowels. Vowel length in Latin determined whether a vowel was stressed or unstressed and this in turn determined its result in Spanish. Knowing the vowel changes in the history of Spanish will allow you to determine the Spanish result or reflex (reflejo) for a Latin word, since these changes are for the most part regular, by which we mean that the same vowels change in the same ways. For example, both of the Latin short mid open vowels, Ĕ and Ŏ, diphthongize to [je] and [we] in Spanish when they are stressed. This regularity is especially remarkable since speakers make no conscious effort to change sounds in a particular way.

Where Do the Sounds in Spanish Come from?

The modern varieties of Spanish come from the continuous development of speech varieties going back to Latin and then to the Italic branch of the Indo- European family of languages and ultimately to Proto-Indo-European, as mentioned in Chapter 4. Thus, the sounds that make up Spanish today have a long backstory, but it is typical to begin our discussion of their history with Latin, the oldest language variety in this line of continuous development for which we have ample documentation.