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Descending diphthongs and the regular preterite in Hispano-Romance

1983; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 60; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1475382832000360001

1469-3550

Jerry R Craddock,

Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. I have adopted a broad transcription enclosed in slashes in order to avoid the recording of irrelevant phonetic detail; while the differences between the semiconsonants /j ,w/ and the syllabic vowels /i,u/ may not be, in strict structuralist terms, phonemic, the exigencies of my argument require me to maintain the distinction in my transcriptions. In the interest of simplicity, I represent semivowels / / with the same symbols used for semiconsonants. 2. ‘From falling to rising diphthongs: the case of Old Spanish ió < *éu’, RPh, XXVIII–XXIX (1975–76), 435–500. 3. By Proto-Hispano-Romance I understand the common ancestor of the Hispano-Romance dialects, from Galician to Aragonese, including Mozarabic but exclusive of Catalan, insofar as that ancestor can be perceived in cognate sets presupposing a single source for the various reflexes in the individual dialects. The reconstructed forms labelled Proto-Hispano-Romance may at times coincide with general Spoken or Vulgar Latin (Proto-Romance) counterparts, but more often the former depart from the latter in characteristic ways relevant more or less exclusively to the Iberian Peninsula. Such terms as Proto-Hispano-Romance and Proto-Romance are in effect no more than labels for cognate relationships revealed by dialect comparison; they correspond to the commonsense observation that from late Antiquity to the Middle Ages the various Romance vernaculars became more different from one another, and that in any number of cases one can perceive a single starting point for even highly differentiated cognates. The comparison of Romance dialects fails so often to lead to reconstructions coincident with Classical Latin material that one is perforce obliged to create a special terminology. In the present instance, the comparison of vernacular reflexes of the lsg subject pronoun in the Iberian Peninsula suggests a prototype /w/; there is no bit of evidence to require anything resembling Lat. egŌ /go:/. To sum up: Proto-Hispano-Romance consists of that set of forms, reconstructed by dialect comparison, which yields the individual dialect reflexes through the application of well-motivated and independently attested sound changes. 4. Romanische Sprachwissenschaft, I: Einleitung und Vokalismus, 2nd edn (Berlin 1963), 193, and III: Formenlehre, 2nd edn (Berlin 1972), 107. 5. E. B. Williams, From Latin to Portuguese, 2nd edn (Philadelphia 1962), 32. Thorough discussion in E. Learned, ‘Old Portuguese vocalic finals’, Suppl. to Language, XXVI, 2 (Apr.–June 1950). 6. Cantar de mio Cid, ed. R. Menéndez Pidal, 3rd edn (Madrid 1954), 1,166–67; M. Luria, ‘A study of the Monastir dialect of Judeo-Spanish based on oral material collected in Monastir, Yugoslavia’, RHi, LXXIX (1930), 323–583, at 418. 7. Cases of disyllabic scansion of /djós/ (Menéndez Pidal, Cantar, I, 166) and other words similarly structured, rather than implying necessarily the existence of an earlier paroxytonic /díos/, are more likely a secondary consequence of the accentual retraction in adjectival forms such as /udjó/∼/udío/. The alternation /jó/∼/ío/ that this retraction caused in its incipient stage seems to have allowed poets to fit words containing either sequence into monosyllabic or disyllabic slots, according to the metrical demands of the moment. B. Dutton, in his edition of Gonzalo de Berceo, Los milagros de nuestra Señora (London 1971), 98 and 113 (anent vv. 257a and 315a), admits, with perhaps excessive rigour, only monosyllabic /djós/. 8. For what little information on /omjó/ is available, see Malkiel, ‘From falling …’, 482–84. 9. Malkiel,'From falling …’,437. Though it goes without saying, I will nevertheless point outthat Harris bears no responsibility for the use hereinafter made of his suggestions, and that he does not necessarily support all or any of the conclusions I reach. 10. For the present, I would like to analyse the correspondence /w/ > /jó/ separately from /j/ > /wé/, reserving my discussion of the latter for another occasion. 11. L. Rodríguez Castellano, ‘El pronombre personal en el asturiano’, Bol. del Instituto de Estudios Asturianos (=BIEA), VI (1952), 119–30, at 120 and 130; Aspectos del bable occidental (Oviedo 1954), 200; M. Menéndez García, El Cuarto de los Valles (un habla del occidente asturiano), I (Oviedo 1963), 25, 191 (with bibliography). 12. Rodríguez Castellano, ‘El pronombre’, 120; Aspectos, 208–09; ‘El posesivo en el dialecto asturiano’, BIEA, XI (1957), 171–87, at 172–75. 13. El Cuarto de los Valles, 23–25,194–95. For ‘God’ and ‘he gave’ see Rodríguez Castellano, Aspectos, 234, and Menéndez García, El Cuarto de los Valles, 233–34. 14. See Menéndez García, El Cuarto de los Valles, 230. 15. Rodríguez Castellano, Aspectos, 231. 16. M. J. Canellada, El bable de Cabranes (Madrid 1944), 24; Rodríguez Castellano, ‘El posesivo’, 178–81; C. Díaz Castañón, El bable de ‘El Cabo Peñas’ (contribución al estudio del bable central) (Oviedo 1966), 184–87. 17. See the convenient map prepared by Rodríguez Castellano, ‘El posesivo’, between pp. 186–87, to illustrate the various forms of the lsg possessive adjective in Western Asturian. 18. Ample documentation in Rodríguez Castellano, ‘El posesivo’. 19. Williams, From Latin …, 155; V. García de Diego, Elementos de gramática histórica gallega (Burgos [1909]), 102. 20. Rodríguez Castellano, ‘El posesivo’, 173. In Castilian, the originally feminine forms /tú/ and /sú/ replaced their masculine counterparts as possessive adjectives, while the pronominal function was taken over by /túyo/ and /suyo/, modelled on the relative /kúyo/ ‘whose’. 21. Williams, From Latin …, 222. 22. In the Western Leonese dialect of La Ribera del Órbigo, alongside /djéw/ there exist the variants /djów/ and /djó/, invariably followed by clitic pronouns: diouy unas turnadas ‘he gave him some blows’, i.e. ‘he beat him’, diouye güeña pasmarote ‘he gave him a good fright’, dioy una patada ‘he gave him a kick’, diom ideya ‘he gave me an idea’ (R. M. Farish, ‘Notas lingüísticas sobre el habla de la Ribera del Órbigo’, in Trabajos sobre el dominio románico leonés, I [Madrid 1957], 41–85, at 45–49). The possibility that /djó(w)/ may also surface as a combinatory variant deserves further investigation. 23. Rodríguez Castellano, Aspectos, 223–25. 24. C. H. Grandgent, An Introduction to Vulgar Latin (Boston 1934; repr. New York 1962), 166. On the modern Castilian forms see now R. de Gorog, ‘L'origine des formes espagnoles doy, estoy, soy, voy’, Cahiers de Linguistique Hispanique Médiévale, 5 (1980), 157–62. 25. The particular kind of analogy here advocated is not necessarily connected with rhyme or vowel harmony. It involves no more than the reshaping of one form to match in some particular way another with which it is frequently joined in fixed phrases. It is an analogy based almost purely on the fact of adjacent collocation, rather than on a semantic relationship such as synonymy or antinomy. A somewhat similar case may be made for Sp. /mísmo/ ‘self, same’, assuming it was distorted from its original shape /mésmo/ (preserved in dialects) < VLat. /metipsimu/ through its frequent syntactic association with the prepositional pronouns /mí/, /tí/, and /si/, as in a mi mismo ‘to myself, por tí misma ‘by yourself, de sí mismo ‘of himself, and the like. Malkiel, ‘New problems in Romance interfixation (I)’, RPh, XXVI–XXVII (1974–75), 304–55, at 316, argues convincingly that the stressed vowel of OSp. plega ‘may it please’ echoes that of OSp. pese ‘may it displease’ because of the former's frequent use in the formula que pese o que plega ‘whether one likes it or not’. 26. Reported only in one region (Sonandi) by Rodriguez Castellano, ‘El pronombre’, 120, and Aspectos, 200. 27. T. Navarro, Documentos lingüísticos del Alto Aragón (Syracuse, N. Y. 1957), 15 (§12.62), 29 (§22.24), 29 (§22.12), 118 (§81.4,12,21); ‘Textes castillans inédits’, éd. A. Morel-Fatio, Romania, XVI (1887), 364–82, at 379 (spelled Dieos) and 380 (spelled dieu). 28. J. Corominas, ‘Dos grandes fuentes de estudio del aragonés antiguo’, in his Tópica hespérica, I (Madrid 1972), 186–226, at 192 (first published in NRFH, XII [1958], 65–75, 202–213); Navarro, Documentos, 82 (§55.114). 29. Already attested in the thirteenth century, see Navarro, Documentos, 80 (§55.28). 30. A. Kuhn, ‘Der hocharagonesische Dialekt, RLiR, XI (1935), 1–312, at 137. 31. A. Badia Margarit, Gramática histórica catalana (Barcelona 1951), 130–37. 32. Badia, Gramática, 275–77. 33. A. Alcover and F. de B. Moll, Diccionari català-valencià-balear, 10 vols (Palma de Mallorca 1930–62), s. vv. anar, donar, ésser and estar; Badía, Gramática, 331. 34. Badía, Gramática, 129–30. 35. Corominas, DCE, s.v. yo, allows for a very early accent shift in VLat. /o/ ‘I’ > /eó/ > /jó/. 36. Lausberg, Romanische Sprachwissenschaft, III, 216. 37. Useful discussion in Malkiel, ‘From falling …’, 446–52. 38. Compare Lausberg, Romanische Sprachwissenschaft, III, 255–57. 39. The standard doctrine has it that the desinence -o of verbs like OCast. /tóvo/ ‘he held’, /díšo/ ‘he said’, etc., is analogical to the endings of regular 3sg preterites like /kantó/, /komjó/, and the like (Menéndez Pidal, Manual de gramática histórica española, 10th edn [Madrid 1958], 316 [=6th edn, 1941]). However, so far as I am aware, no one has attempted to explain how the accentual disparity between the regular and irregular preterites was maintained in the face of the alleged analogical pressure; one would have expected types like */tovjó/, /dišjó/ (or perhaps *tenjó/, */didzjó/), and so on. In fact, forms like OCast. /véno/ he came’, /fédzo/ ‘he did, made’, bear all the earmarks of an archaic pattern. The analogy with the 3sg preterites did occur, but at a much earlier time than has hitherto been supposed. J. J. Nunes, Compêndio de gramática histórica portuguesa, 6th edn (Lisbon 1960), 313, postulated a base *uenut to explain OGal.-Ptg. vo (>veio). 40. Menéndez Pidal, Manual, 317. 41. One would similarly deduce, in view of the levelling reported for some varieties of Western Asturo-Leonese, i.e. /díw/ ‘he gave’, /perdíw/ ‘he lost’, and /partíw/ ‘he left’, that the first and second forms just cited are analogical to the last, the only one with a firm etymological basis (<PHR /partíwt/ < Lat. Partiu[i]t). 42. Lausberg, Romanische Sprachwissenschaft, III, 255–57, 260, 278. 43. J. Martínez Alvarez, ‘Bable y castellano en el concejo de Oviedo’, Archivum, XXVII (1967), 5–292, at 94–95. 44. I believe that PHR /dmos/, /dstes/ and /dront/, like PHR /perdémos/, etc., arose through a haplological deletion of the penultimate syllable of Lat. dedimus, perdidimus, etc., in other words, that the segment /di/˜/de/ underwent the same treatment as its counterpart /ui/˜/ue/ in Lat. partĪuimus>PHR /partímos/, cantāiuimus>PHR /kantfámos/, etc. At first the deletion affected the stressed penultimate syllables of the 2nd person singular and plural, as well as the 3rd person plural, forms, so that the word stress fell on the same syllable throughout the preterite paradigms of regular verbs. Accordingly, cantāuistĪ, cantāuistis and cantāuērunt yielded the variants cantastĪ, cantāstis and cantārunt, all abundantly attested in Classical times; see Menéndez Pidal, Manual, 310. The comparative Hispano-Romance data make it clear that this deletion was later extended to the 1st person plural, in other words, to all forms with a fully syllabic desinence (i.e. -stĪ, -mus, -stis, runt, as opposed to lsg cantāui, where the person-number desinence cannot be separated from the segment /ui/, and 3sg cantāuit). The evolution of partĪuimus, perdidimus and dedirnus in Hispano-Romance follows this same general pattern with remarkable consistency, a fact that has not, to my knowledge, been observed in the relevant literature, and which I hope to describe in greater detail on another occasion. 45. One could also argue that in the central Hispano-Romance dialects the descendants of ‘recomposed’ preterite types VLat. /vend(de)mos/ ‘we sold’, /perd(de)mos/ ‘we lost’ escaped the identification of their stem vowel // with the conjugational stem vowel /é/ and yielded directly OCast. /vendjémos/, /perdjémos/. OGal.-Ptg. /vendémos/, /perdémos/, etc., would in that case represent an innovation. In view of the relatively greater conservatism of the more westerly dialect group, I have with some reservations decided to discount the possibility that the Old Castilian forms are strictly etymological. 46. Navarro, Documentos, 47 (§32.4), 7 (§6.45), 11 (§9.32–33), and 161 (§111.11); Morel-Fatio, ‘Textes’, 381; and Menéndez Pidal, Orígenes del español, 5th edn (Madrid 1964), 364 (=3rd edn, 1950), respectively. Menéndez Pidal's explanation of the last mentioned form coincides with the views advanced here: ‘esta forma parece variante de la leonesa de verbos -er, meteo [‘he put’], atreveo [‘he dared’], venceo [‘he conquered’], influída por Él dieu “dio” …’ I suspect, with P. Fouché, ‘Etudes de philologie hispanique’, RHi, LXXVII (1929), 1–170, at 38, that the graphies -ieo and -eo merely represent -/jéw/ and -/éw/, particularly in areas where word-final -/o/ was becoming, or had become, -/u/, with concomitant confusion in spelling. 47. Esp. in the town of Hecho; see Kuhn, ‘Der hocharagonesische …’, 133–46. 48. F. Krüger, El dialecto de San Ciprián de Sanabria (Madrid 1923), 47–48; M. C. Casado Lobato, El habla de la Cabrera Alta (Madrid 1948), 47; and Farish, ‘Notas’, 73. 49. Farish, ‘Notas’, 50 and 46, resp. 50. Farish, ‘Notas’, 45, 51, 58; Krüger, San Ciprián, 47–48; and Casado Lobato, Cabrera Alta, 47, resp. 51. Farish, ‘Notas’, 57; Casado Lobato, Cabrera Alta, 57. 52. San Ciprián, 44–50. 53. ‘Sound changes rooted in morphological conditions’, RPh, XXIII–XXIV (1969–70), 188–200. 54. San Ciprián, 48; Menéndez Pidal, Orígenes, 364, accepted Krüger's view that the shift /íw/ > /jéw/ in San Ciprián de Sanabria had nothing to do with the Medieval development /jéw/ < /w/. 55. W. Meyer-Lübke, Historische Grammatik der französischen Sprache, I: Laut- und Flexionslehre, 4th/5th edn (Heidelberg 1934), 74; J. Anglade, Grammaire de l'ancien provençal (Paris 1921), 71; G. Rohlfs, Le Gascon, 3rd edn (Tübingen 1977), 119. 56. Krüger, Studien zur Lautgeschichte westspanischer Mundarten auf Grund von Untersuchungen an Ort und Stelle (Hamburg 1914), 83–84; J. G. C. Herculano de Carvalho, ‘Fonologia mirandesa’, Biblos, XXXIII (1957), 1–133, at 48. 57. Thus Krüger; Fouché, Études’, 36, rightly objects that Cast, /jó/ cannot be explained in such a manner. 58. San Ciprián, 48; see also Casado Lobato, Cabrera Alta, 70, and Rodriguez Castellano, ‘Elposesivo’, 175. 59. Corominas, DCE, s.v. sandio; Malkiel, ‘From falling …’,479–81. Phonology permitting, there was no hesitation to rime /judío/ and /sandío/ (var. /sendío/); see Dutton (ed.), Los milagros, 188,219 (w. 646ab and 811 [766]ab, resp.). 60. Corominas, DCE, s.v. viuda. 61. A. R. Fernández González, El habla y la cultura popular de Oseja de Sajambre (Oviedo 1959), 44,59,9. 62. Menéndez Pidal, Manual, 57; Cantar, I, 140; Fouché, ‘Études’, 36–39. 63. An abbreviated version of the present article was read at the Sixth California Convocation on Romance Philology, meeting at Stanford University, 20 October 1979. Earlier drafts were read and criticized by my colleagues at the University of California, Milton Azevedo, Suzanne Fleischman, Ruggero Stefanini and Máximo Torreblanca, as well as by Steven N. Dworkin of the University of Michigan. I am very grateful for their assistance.