A Brief History of the Spanish Language Book

Author's Note     ix
Preface     xi
Abbreviations     xv
Introduction     1
What Is a Language History?     1
Why Study the History of Spanish?     4
Language Change     7
The Inexorability of Language Change     7
Changes in Progress     8
Language Change as Observed through Written Evidence     9
The Categories of Language Change     11
The Causes of Language Change     13
The Mechanism of Language Change     15
Sociolinguistics     16
Questions     18
The Genealogy of Spanish     19
Language Families     19
Some Important Language Families     23
The Indo-European Language Family     24
The Italic Branch     25
Bilingualism and Diglossia     26
Genealogy of Spanish     28
Questions     28
External History of the Iberian Peninsula up to the Thirteenth Century     31
The Iberian Peninsula before the Arrival of the Romans     31
The Romanization of the Iberian Peninsula     34
The End of the Roman Empire     36
The Visigothic Invasion     37
The Muslim Invasion     40
An Extinct Variety of Ibero-Romance: Mozarabic     42
The Reconquest     44
The Rise of Castilian     47
Questions     50
The Latin Language     51
Stages in the History of Latin     52
Phonology     53
Orthography and Pronunciation     55
Nominal Morphology     57
Verbal Morphology     66
Syntax     67
Text Analysis     68
Questions     70
From Latin to Medieval Castilian: Phonology     75
The Nature of Phonological Change     75
The Most Important Phonological Changes of the Romance Period     77
Phonological Derivations     90
Exceptions to Regular Phonological Change     93
Text Analysis     95
Alphonsine Orthography     96
Questions     97
From Latin to Medieval Castilian: Morphology and Syntax     101
Interdependence of Morphological and Syntactic Changes     101
Nominal Morphology     102
A Linguistic Myth: The Cacophony of the Pronoun Combination le lo     113
Verbal Morphology     118
Principal Syntactic Changes     126
Text Analysis     132
Lexical Archaisms in Alphonsine Prose     135
Questions     137
From Medieval Castilian to Modern Spanish     141
Political and Cultural History of Spain after the Middle Ages     141
An Archaic Dialect: Sephardi     144
Linguistic Changes     151
A Linguistic Myth: The Lisping King     155
Text Analysis     164
A Linguistic Myth: The Phonemic Character of Spanish Orthography     165
Questions     166
History of the Spanish Lexicon     169
Routes of Lexical Integration in Spanish     169
The Reduplicative Playful Template     176
Etymology     181
Stages in the History of the Spanish Lexicon     184
Questions     187
Spanish Dialectology     191
Varieties of Spanish in the Two Castiles     192
Andalusian     194
Canary Island Spanish     203
American Spanish     204
Demography of the Spanish Language     211
Four Distinctive Varieties of American Spanish     212
Spanish in the United States     226
Questions      230
Rudiments of Spanish Phonetics and Phonology     233
Glossary of Linguistic Terms     239
Maps     251
Works Cited     261
Index of Spanish Words Cited     267
Subject Index     285