28.2895, Review: Arabic; Latin; Spanish; Romance; General Ling; Historical Ling; Socioling: Méndez (2016)

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Subject: 28.2895, Review: Arabic; Latin; Spanish; Romance; General Ling; Historical Ling; Socioling: Méndez (2016)

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Date: Mon, 03 Jul 2017 11:00:43
From: Hella Olbertz [h.g.olbertz at uva.nl]
Subject: Diachronic Applications in Hispanic Linguistics

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-2431.html

EDITOR: Eva  Núñez Méndez
TITLE: Diachronic Applications in Hispanic Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Hella Olbertz, Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana, Bahia

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY
 
Diachronic applications in Hispanic linguistics, ed. by Eva Núñez Méndez.
Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016, contains nine, mainly
sociolinguistic, studies of diachronic change in Spanish. The chapters are
ordered in such a way that the book begins with the most concrete and ends
with the most abstract features of language: the first three chapters are
dedicated to the lexicon, followed by three chapters dealing mainly with
phonological aspects of language change; Chapter 7 is dedicated to morphology
and the last two chapters to syntax.
 
In Chapter 1, “Unique lexical survivals in Ibero-Romance: a diachronic
approach”, Steven Dworkin gives an overview on the etymology of Latin-based
lexemes used on the Iberian Peninsula, with a focus on Spanish. Section 1
introduces a tri-partite classification of Romance lexemes: Latin words that
survived in (i) nearly all, (ii) most and (iii) only one or two Romance
languages. The study concentrates on type (iii) lexemes. Section 2 discusses
four etymologically controversial cases from (Old) Spanish, presenting the
different analyses that have been offered by other scholars. Obviously, a
definitive solution cannot be offered. Section 3 presents a list of words with
their Latin origins that have no cognates outside the Iberian Peninsula and an
etymological list of Ibero-Romance words that have cognates at the Eastern
extreme of the Roman Empire, the late and only briefly occupied Romanian
territory. Section 4 discusses a number of words that are generally thought to
prove the conservatism of Ibero-Romance, caused by both its early integration
into the Roman Empire and its geographical isolation. Section 5 is dedicated
to etymons that have survived only in parts of the Peninsula, and Section 6
focuses on the lexical innovations on the Iberian Peninsula, such as the Sp.
‘amarillo’ and Ptg. ‘amarelo’ “yellow”, originating from a diminutive of AMARO
“bitter”. Section 7 shows that a major part of the Spanish etymons belongs to
group (i), i.e. it is shared with other Romance languages. 
 
In Chapter 2, “Arabisms in the Spanish lexicon of trades: a diachronic
perspective”, Patricia Giménez-Eguíbar provides a historical-sociolinguistic
account of a specific lexical field of Arabic borrowings in Spain from the
beginning of the Moorish occupation in 711 to the twentieth century. Section 1
begins with a general overview of the impact of the Arabic dominance not only
on the lexicon of science “for which the Hispano-Romance of the time had no
suitable signifiers” (p. 40), but also on the core-vocabulary. Next, the
author gives a list of Arabisms with competing Romance vocabulary, the focus
of the paper. The remainder of the chapter provides a critical analysis of the
sociolinguistic effects of the Reconquest, which lead to the stigmatization of
Arabic lexical borrowings and their gradual substitution by Romance-based
alternatives. The negative evaluation concerned those Arabisms that were
identifiable as such due to their beginning with the agglutinated article
‘al’. Giménez-Eguíbar shows in detail how this process went hand in hand with
the standardization of Spanish, which culminated in the publication of
Nebrija’s grammar, and was aided by the introduction of printing in the early
sixteenth century. Even Coromines & Pacual’s etymological dictionary
(1980-1991) is shown to contain derogatory comments on Arabisms. (This may
however be related to the fact that the first volume, A-C, of the dictionary,
containing most of the Arabisms, was already published in 1970, i.e. under the
nationalist Franco-dictatorship - a fact that the author fails to recognize.)
The study contains two very well documented case studies of the fate of two
obsolete Arabic terms for professions: ‘alfajeme’ “barber” (now ‘barbero’) and
‘alfayate’ “tailor” (now ‘sastre’). Their loss was caused by both the
association of Arabic with Islam and, as such, lower class and the positive
valuation of the Castilian Christian world. 
 
The effect of printing is taken up again in Chapter 3: “A socio-historical
approach to lexical variation and change in early modern Spanish” by Fernando
Tejedo-Herrero. The chapter examines the first printed editions of the ‘Siete
partidas’ (a legislative study) and of the ‘Gran conquista de ultramar’ (a
Crusade chronicle), both written in the 13th century. The editions of the
manuscripts were printed in 1491 and 1503, respectively, under the reign of
the Catholic Monarchs, who partially sponsored these editions. Tejedo-Herrero
studies a number of selected lexical changes from the manuscripts to the
printed version, and argues that the print edition also served the purpose of
lexical standardization. He mentions two lexemes from the manuscripts that
were adapted in the printed editions because they were not even understood by
the editors: ‘enlaidecer’ “make ugly” and ‘amidos’ “by force”. However, in
other cases of adaptation, the alternative form had not been lost and
continued to be used elsewhere. The lexical adaptations found in the new
editions were of three different kinds. First, ambiguities were eliminated,
which holds e.g. in the case of the noun ‘sabor’ “desire, wish”, which was
substituted by three different words. The effect was semantic specialization,
e.g. ‘sabor’ became “taste”. Second, for less transparent reasons,
alternatives were introduced, e.g. the adverb ‘asaz’ “enough” (from Latin AD
SATIS) was always replaced by ‘harto’. Third, inherited vocabulary was
systematically replaced by borrowings from Latin, e.g. ‘padron’ became
‘patron’ “patron”, and ‘sagramientos’ was rendered as ‘sacramentos’
“sacraments”; both represent coinages called ‘cultismos’ in Spanish. This
undoubtedly had the effect of creating an “educated standard”, thus
stigmatizing the inherited variants.
 
Eva Núñez Méndez is the author of Chapter 4, “A diachronic approach to the
confusion of ‘b’ with ‘v’ in Spanish”. She studies an exclusively Spanish
phenomenon: the neutralization of the contrast between /b/ and /v/, yielding
/b/, realized either as a fricative [β] or a plosive [b] depending on the
surrounding sounds. To begin with, Núñez Méndez uses data from the “Appendix
Probi” to demonstrate that the phenomenon had already occurred in the Iberian
varieties of Vulgar Latin. After explaining the complexity of this change,
which also involved the voicing of Latin /p/, the reduction of the geminate
/bb/ and the neutralization of /w/, she discusses the possible origin of the
change. She argues that, like all other phonological idiosyncrasies of
Spanish, the neutralization of /b/ and /v/ can be explained through the
long-term contact of Old Castilian with Basque. Her overall claim is
controversial (which the author readily concedes), but the argument for the
fusion of /b/ and /v/ is generally accepted: Basque apparently never had a
/v/. As regards dating the completion of the fusion of the two phonemes, Núñez
Méndez provides evidence from prescriptive grammars and the like: up to the
16th century authors insisted on differentiating /b/ and /v/, but by the 17th
century the neutralization was generally recognized. The only decisive
evidence, however, comes from verse: as soon as etymological ‘b’ rhymes with
etymological ‘v’ in a systematic way, we know that the two graphemes represent
just one phoneme. In addition to discussing the literature that dates the
generalization of the phenomenon somewhere between the 16th and 17th
centuries, the author provides some nice examples from verse of both
non-neutralization (from the years 1330-1496) and neutralization (from
1543-1624).
 
Chapter 5, “Andalusian Spanish: a diachronic survey of its origins and
footprint in the Americas” (Cynthia Kauffeld), is a description of the
formation of the Andalusian dialect as well as the influence of Western
Andalusian on early American Spanish. Andalusian is described as a koiné that
came into existence as a result of the repopulation of newly acquired
territories in the South of Spain in the course of the Reconquest. In the
description of the phonological and morphological characteristics of the
Western Andalusian dialect in its present-day form, the author mentions, among
others, ‘seseo’ (i.e. the lack of a phonemic distinction between /s/ and /θ/),
the weakening of syllable-final /s/, the confusion of syllable-final liquids,
and the use of ‘ustedes’ for the informal plural address. The author also
mentions ‘yeísmo’ (i.e. the fusion of /λ/ with /ʝ/), which she - erroneously -
believes to be specific to Andalusian Spanish. With reference to numerous
studies by Boyd-Bowman, she argues that the majority of the first settlers
were of Andalusian origin. Therefore, Kauffeld adopts the ‘andalucista’ stance
in the debate about the origin of American Spanish against the defendants of a
polygenetic origin (e.g. Henriquez Ureña 1925; Alonso 1951), but she restricts
this claim to early (16th century) American Spanish. Against the
polygeneticists’ argument that ‘seseo’ did not yet exist by the time of the
early colonization, Kauffeld counters that recent research proves that the
‘seseo’ and the logically preceding simplification of the Old-Spanish sibilant
system (consisting of both voiced and voiceless dental affricates, alveolar
fricatives and prepalatal fricatives) through deaffrication and devoicing
occurred much earlier than previously assumed. Evidence comes from, among
others, Frago García (1992) and Kauffeld (2011). Not surprisingly, the ‘seseo’
turns out to be the most salient of the Andalusian features discovered in 16th
century American Spanish documents. Despite her andalucista stance, Kauffeld
concludes that modern American Spanish is heterogeneous rather than being “a
simple continuation of Andalusian Spanish”.
 
Chapter 6, “Diachronic perspectives on varieties of Spanish pronunciation:
‘seseo’ and ‘yeismo’” by Sonia Kania, takes up the issue of ‘seseo’ and refers
to the evidence presented in Chapter 5, according to which the development of
the ‘seseo’ in Western Andalusia had taken place before the Spanish
colonization of America. According to Kania, the easy spread of ‘seseo’ was
not only caused by the numerical predominance of Andalusians among the early
settlers, but also by the prestige of the city of Seville and the simplicity
of the Andalusian koiné. Indeed, Kania provides impressive evidence of ‘seseo’
from orthographic errors from various Mexican sources from the 16th century
onward. With respect to the second case of phoneme-neutralization, the
so-called ‘yeísmo’, the results are much less convincing. In the first place,
it turns out that ‘yeísmo’ is not a predominantly Andalusian phenomenon (Table
6.1, p. 215-216). Furthermore, in the Mexican corpora there is much less
evidence of ‘yeísmo’ than of ‘seseo’, a fact that is probably simply due to
the relatively low frequency of words expected to contain /λ/ as opposed to
the words containing the sound pronounced as [θ] in Spain outside Western
Andalusia. In present-day Spanish, ‘seseo’ has not been taken over in Central
and Northern Spain, but ‘yeísmo’ is predominant in all varieties, which may be
due to its relatively low impact as a distinctive feature.
 
In Chapter 7, “A diachronic perspective on Latin American Spanish verbal
morphology: reassessing the role of koineization”, Israel Sanz-Sánchez takes a
radically different stance with respect to the origin of American Spanish.
First of all he argues that, despite persistent claims to the contrary,
American Spanish is far from uniform. He rejects theories of monogenetic
origin, such as the ‘andalucismo’ theory, because they provide no explanations
beyond phonology. Furthermore, monogenetic approaches consider only the
language of the settlers, failing to account for the highly heterogeneous
linguistic conditions in America and the varying effects of language contact.
A “tabula rasa” situation, such as presupposed by the monogenetic account, did
obtain in the Antillean area, where the indigenous population was erased in
the course of a few decades, but this is the exception rather than the rule.
Taking a polygenetic or, as he calls it, a “multi-causational” (e.g. p. 269)
approach to the origin of the different varieties of American Spanish,
Sanz-Sánchez inspects the variation in verbal morphology encountered in the
different varieties. After providing an overview of morphological variation,
he discusses two cases of variation, both in Mexico and Spain, of the 3rd
person preterites, ‘vido’ (standard ‘vió’) “he/she/it saw”, retained from Old
Spanish, and ‘truxe’ or ‘troxe’ (standard ‘traxe’) “he/she/it brought”, an
analogical formation based on other strong verb stems. It is shown that both
in Spanish and in Mexican documents the initial variation decreases under the
pressure of standardization from the Real Academia’s first grammar (1771). But
Sanz-Sánchez also demonstrates that in more remote areas of Mexico the
variation continues. From this example it is concluded that in the study of
Spanish in America “a primary role should be given to the study of the local
socio-demographic history of each area, including dialect and language
contact” (p. 271).
 
In Chapter 8, “Romance syntax in texts from the Early Middle Ages: a study in
scribal evolution and continuity”, Robert J. Blake and Carlos Sánchez Lancis
investigate two sets of notarial documents written in Latin between the 11th
and 13th centuries, i.e. before the Romance vernacular was used in writing.
The aim of the short but fascinating study is to disprove the belief that the
Iberian Peninsula was a diglossic community, using Latin as the “high” and
Romance as the “low” register. What a closer scrutiny of the documents reveals
is that the notarial scribes combined a set of strictly Latin formulae with
Romance syntactic structures. The study reveals four cases of typical Romance
syntax. First, there is a tendency to use the redundant preposition AD with
the dative form of pronouns (or AD with the nominative) in order to express
the dative, in accordance with the Old and Modern Spanish rule. Secondly, the
preposition AD (or A) tends to be used with the accusative with human
referents, which is a precursor of human object marking in Old and Modern
Spanish. Thirdly, the possessive adjective follows the noun in more formulaic
Latin contexts, whereas in non-formulaic contexts, it tends to precede the
noun, which is the rule in Old and Modern Spanish. Fourthly, ILLE, IPSE and
the like may be followed by a possessive adjective, which corresponds to the
Old Spanish usage of the article (from ILLE) with possessive adjectives (still
common in present-day Portuguese). The authors conclude that by studying this
and further features of documents of this kind from the Iberian Peninsula, the
use of Latin as a written language helps to date syntactic features of Old
Spanish ‘avant la lettre’.
 
In Chapter 9, “Semantic changes of ‘ser’, ‘estar’, and ‘haber’ in Spanish: a
diachronic and comparative approach”, Miriam Díaz partially replicates the
seminal study of these diachronic changes by Pountain (1985). The main
difference is that she also gives a comparative description of the modern use
of these verbs as copulas and auxiliaries in different Romance languages. Díaz
first discusses the origins of the three verbs and their meanings and
functions in Latin. She then turns to ‘ser’ (also: ‘seer’), originally meaning
both “be” and “sit” (from Latin ESSE and SEDERE), and its functions as an
existential verb, a copula, and a perfect and passive auxiliary in Old
Spanish. Next, Diaz demonstrates how Latin STARE “stand” was grammaticalized
in Old Spanish and took over the auxiliary functions of ‘se(e)r’: ‘estar’ came
to be used as a resultant state passive auxiliary (‘ser’ continuing in the
“action passive”), as well as copular functions with “stage-level” predicates.
After that, ‘haber’ (from Latin HABERE “have”, “acquire”) is considered both
in its developing existential function and in its perfect auxiliary function,
where it competes with ‘ser’ until well into the 17th century. In parallel
with its acquisition of auxiliary functions, ‘haber’ very gradually loses its
possessive meaning to ‘tener’ (from Latin TENERE “have”, “hold”). In the
section on present-day Romance languages, the realizations with cognates of
the three grammaticalized verbs in (i) the (resultative) passive, (ii)
locative and existential constructions, (iii) copula constructions, and (iv)
perfects and progressives are compared, ending in a nice overview in Table
9.3. 
 
EVALUATION
 
The volume is aimed at “students of Hispanic Linguistics, as well as general
readers and scholars with an interest in the field”; more specifically, the
editor wants the book to suit “pedagogical purposes” (p. vii). Most of the
papers do indeed provide sufficient background to be a good read for a
non-specialist. The exception is the paper by Steven Dworkin, which is just
too difficult for students without any training in etymology, but it can
certainly be used in an etymology course or class, where additional
explanation is being provided.
 
In order to make the book accessible to the non-expert reader, “technical
terminology has been kept to a minimum” (p. vii). For an explanation of the
unavoidable technical terms, there is a glossary at the end of each chapter.
Some of the terms occur more than once, such as “standardization” (ch. 2 and
3), “social network(s)” (ch. 3 and 7) and “grammaticalization” (ch. 8 and 9),
each time with slightly different explanations. Sometimes terms are missing in
one chapter, but appear somewhere else. It would have been more helpful to the
reader and it would also have enhanced the coherence of the book if the
glossaries had been fused into a common one at the end of the book.
 
A serious drawback of the book is that the references to the literature never
contain page numbers; this is even the case, most irritatingly, with literal
quotations. Such a practice is very unhelpful for the reader and is simply
unacceptable in scientific literature, whatever didactic intention a
publication may have.
 
The partially didactic nature of the book does not mean that its scientific
merits would not have to be evaluated. Most of the studies are interesting and
original, but the ‘andalucista’ studies in Chapters 5 and 6 are somewhat
outdated, because the only way in which they account for regional variation of
Spanish in America is the ‘highlands vs. lowlands’ theory, which attributes
the lack of ‘Andalusian’ features to the influence of Madrid in the Highlands
(pp. 192, 223). With such an approach it is impossible to explain features
that are unrelated to any variant of Old World Spanish, such as the strong
consonantism in the Andean Highlands (cf. e.g. Toscano Mateus 1953; Lipski
1994, n.d.). Furthermore, Chapter 9 retells the - admittedly very complex -
story of interrelated semantic and syntactic changes, but is less clear than
Pountain’s (1985) study on the same subject. What unnecessarily complicates
the story is that Díaz attributes a lexical meaning to the copula ESSE in
Latin, i.e. “to exist” (pp. 303, 306). In addition, there is an error in
Chapter 9, i.e. the repeated claim that (Classical) Latin used ESSE with “the
gerund to create the progressive tenses” (p. 304; see also pp. 309, 311 and
333). In fact, Latin never had “progressive tenses” (cf. e.g. Posner 1996:
175). The example of the alleged progressive “tunc in monte erat Darius
vociferando et congregando multitudinem hostium” (Leo, ‘Historia Alexandri
Magni’) dates not from Classical but Medieval Latin (10th century), and the
construction with the gerunds in the ablative case most probably should be
read as a secondary predication (Stengaard 1991: 76). On the positive side,
Díaz’s lucid description of modern Romance provides a starting point for
potentially very interesting comparative research.
 
Apart from the above criticism, this book certainly is an interesting
collection of a broad spectrum of diachronic phenomena, containing valuable
(sociolinguistic) explanations of the different “Spanish curiosities”, from
which I, personally, have learned a lot.
 
REFERENCES
 
Alonso, Amado. 1951. Historia del ceceo y del seseo españoles. Thesaurus.
Boletín del Instituto Caro y Cuervo 7, 111-200.
 
Coromines, Joan & José Antonio Pascual. 1970. Diccionario crítico etimológico
castellano e hispánico. vol. 1: A-C. Madrid: Gredos.
 
Coromines, Joan & José Antonio Pascual. 1981-1990. Diccionario crítico
etimológico castellano e hispánico. 6 vols. Madrid: Gredos.
 
Frago García, Juan Antonio. 1992. El seseo: orígenes y difusión americana. In:
César Hernández Alonso (ed.), Historia y presente del español de América.
113-142. Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León.
 
Henríquez Ureña, Pedro. 1925. El supuesto andalucismo de América. Cuadernos
del Instituto de Filología 2 (1), 117-122. 
 
Kauffeld, Cynthia. 2011. Andalusian Spanish: a linguistic study of 14th and
15th century texts from Sevilla y Córdoba. New York: Hispanic Seminary of
Medieval Studies.
 
Lipski, John M. 1994. Latin American Spanish. London: Longman.
 
Lipski, John M. n.d. The role of the city in the formation of Spanish American
dialect zones. http://www.personal.psu.edu/jml34/city.pdf (6 December, 2016)
 
Posner, Rebecca. 1996. The Romance Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
 
Pountain, Christopher J. 1985. Copulas, verbs of possession and auxiliaries in
Old Spanish: The evidence of structurally interdependent changes. Bulletin of
Hispanic Studies 62 (4), 337-355.
 
Real Academia Española (1771) Gramática de la lengua castellana, compuesta por
la Real Academia Española. Madrid: Juan de Ibarra.
 
Stengaard, Birte. 1991. Vida y muerte de un campo semántico. Un estudio de la
evolución semántica de los verbos latinos ‘stare’, ‘sedere’ e ‘iacere’ del
latín al romance del s. XIII. Tübingen: Niemeyer (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für
romanische Philologie, 234).
 
Toscano Mateus, Humberto. 1953. El español del Ecuador. Madrid: Gredos
(Revista de filología española, Anejo 16).


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Hella Olbertz (Ph.D. 1996, University of Amsterdam) is researcher at the
Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication. She works on the syntax and
semantics of varieties of Spanish and Portuguese, which she approaches from a
functional perspective. Her recent publications concern language contact in
the Ecuadorian Andes and the grammaticalization of periphrastic aspect and
modality in Peninsular Spanish.





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