When Spanish h- Went Silent. How Do We Know?
2010; Routledge; Volume: 87; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/14753820.2010.483136
ISSN1478-3428
Autores Tópico(s)Linguistic Studies and Language Acquisition
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 4Paul M. Lloyd, From Latin to Spanish. Vol. I: Historical Phonology and Morphology of the Spanish Language (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1987), 220–22. 1Ralph Penny, A History of the Spanish Language, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2002 [1st ed. 1991]), 91. 2Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Orígenes del español, 3rd ed. (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1950 [1st ed. 1926]), 198–233. 3See, for example, Ralph Penny, 'The Re-emergence of /f/ As a Phoneme of Castilian', Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie, 88 (1972), 463–82. 5Menéndez Pidal, Orígenes del español, 227. 6Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Manual de gramática histórica española, 6th ed. (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1941 [1st ed. 1904), 121. 7Menéndez Pidal, Orígenes del español, 229. 8Antonio de Nebrija, Gramática castellana. BNM I2142, ed. John O'Neill (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1995), fol. 10r–11v. 9Menéndez Pidal, Orígenes, 227, 229. 10Lloyd, From Latin to Spanish, I, 325. 11Penny, A History of the Spanish Language, 94. 12Robert J. Blake, 'Ffaro, Faro or Haro?: F Doubling as a Source of Linguistic Information for the Early Middle Ages', Romance Philology, 41 (1988), 267–89 (pp. 268–69). 13Rafael Lapesa, Historia de la lengua española, 9th ed. (Madrid: Gredos, 1981 [1st ed. 1942]), 371–72. 14Ralph Penny, Variation and Change in Spanish (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2000), 45–46. Ralph Penny, 'Contacto de variedades y resolución de la variación: aspiración y pérdida de /h/ en el Madrid del s. XVI', in Actas del V Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Lengua Española (Valencia, 31 de enero–4 de febrero de 2000), ed. Juan Sánchez and María Teresa Echenique Elizondo, 2 vols (Madrid: Gredos, 2002), I, 397–406, proposes the same scenario, which, I believe, he first proposed in Ralph Penny, 'Labiodental /f/, Aspiration and /h/-dropping in Spanish: The Evolving Phonemic Values of the Graphs f and h', in Cultures in Contact in Medieval Spain: Historical and Literary Essays Presented to L. P. Harvey, ed. David Hook and Barry Taylor (London: King's College, 1990), 157–82, where he cites Lapesa's account. Donald Tuten, Koineization in Medieval Spanish (Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003), has most recently subscribed to this view: 'Penny (2000:45–46, 2002) analyzes this spread of the loss of /h/ and its acceptance as a prestige form as a result of dialect mixing during and following the move of the Court to Madrid in 1561' (289). 15Lapesa, Historia de la lengua española, 371–72. 16Menéndez Pidal, Orígenes del español, 227. 17Nebrija, Gramática castellana, fol. 34r. 18Here, and in the phonetic representations that follow, I shall make word, not syllabic, divisions in order to keep the morphology of the articles as clear as possible. 19*FALDA most likely comes from Frankish (cf. Old High German faldan 'to fold'), *HARPA from French harpe (<OHG har[p]fe<Germanic *harpō), and *HASÁNA from Hispano-Arabic ?asána (<Classical Arabic ?asanah 'good deed'), which, influenced by fazer, appeared as fazaña (Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua española, Vigésima segunda edición, ). 20All data are from the Corpus diacrónico del español of the Real Academia Española. 21It should be noted that some of the examples in (11) appear in anonymous works, and therefore the number of examples of words that reveal the /h/ > /Ø/ change shown in (11) is greater than those listed in (12), i.e., 88 vs. 74. The anonymous works in which the words listed in (11) but not in (12) appear are the following: La corónica de Adramón (c.1492), Libro de Acuerdos del Concejo Madrileño, 1493–1497, Libro de Acuerdos del Concejo Madrileño, 1498–1501, Vida de Ysopo (c.1520), Polindo (1526), Carta de Pedro de Valdivia á Hernando Pizarro (1545), El sumario de lo que contiene la historia de la comedia del duque don Alonsso (1535–1622), Traducción del Laberinto de amor de Juan Boccaccio (1546), Traducción de la Cosmografía de Pedro Apiano (1548–1575), Poesías [Cancionerillos de Praga] (c.1550–c.1570). 22Bernando Pérez de Chinchón, La lengua de Erasmo nuevamente romançada por muy elegante estilo (1533), ed. Dorothy S. Severin (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1975), 166–67. 23Jerry R. Craddock, who, after hearing an early, brief version of the present study at the Symposium on Hispanic Historical Linguistics in Honor of Jerry R. Craddock, at Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, 15–17 February 2007, kindly brought to my attention his article 'Comentario de Comentarios: Los Naufragios', Anuario de Letras, 37 (1999), 149–77 (pp. 155–56), for which I am grateful, and in which he writes: 'la presencia de frases como "la hambre" en textos del s. XVI puede considerarse una constatación positiva de la aspiración faríngea /h/'. Although I disagree with his statement that the article la in these contexts can be considered 'proof positive' of the presence of [h] (taking into consideration the lag between /h/ > /Ø/ and la>el, as well as attestations such as la ambre), I do believe, as I have stated above, that it does allow for the possibility of the presence of [h], i.e., la hambre=[la hámbre] or [la ámbre]. I would also like to acknowledge here that, although he did not propose using the la>el change to trace the /h/ > /Ø/ change, and although he believed la signalled without question the presence of [h], he was clearly aware that el signalled its absence, as is evident by his comment: 'Y, en fin, al pasar la hambre /la hámbre/ a el hambre /el ámbre/, el artículo femenino singular no cambia de género sino solamente de forma; el ha sido alomorfo del artículo definido femenino singular la desde los orígenes del idioma'. We have simply focused on opposite sides of the same coin in trying to determine whether the letter h represented [h] or [Ø] in late Medieval Spanish. 24Menéndez Pidal, Orígenes del español, 198–233. 25Nicholas Poppe, Introduction to Mongolian Comparative Studies, Suomalais-Ugrilaisen Seuran Toimituksia 110 (Helsinki: Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura, 1955), 96. Hans H. Hock, Principles of Historical Linguistics (Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991), 131–32, too recognizes the general instability of [h], in both syllable-final and syllable-initial position, as well as the cross-linguistic tendency for its loss: '[W]e noted a common tendency to avoid aspiration in word-final, syllable-final, and coda positions. A similar tendency holds true for segmental [h] […] the tendency manifests itself in a propensity of post-nucleus [h] to be lost […] Even in initial position, [h] is very commonly lost. Compare for instance the fate of Latin [h] in the Romance languages (as in honorem>Ital. onore "honor"), a similar loss of initial [h] in the history of Greek, or the Cockney English deletion of initial [h] in forms like has [æz]'.
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