Old Spanish

Old Spanish (roman, romançe, romaz; Spanish: español medieval), also known as Old Castilian or Medieval Spanish, refers to the varieties of Ibero-Romance spoken predominantly in Castile and environs during the Middle Ages. The earliest, longest, and most famous literary composition in Old Spanish is the Cantar de mio Cid (c. 1140–1207).
(/s/ and /z/ were apico-alveolar.)
These were still distinct phonemes in Old Spanish, judging by the consistency with which the graphemes ⟨b⟩ and ⟨v⟩ were distinguished. Nevertheless, the two could be confused in consonant clusters (as in alba~alva “dawn”) or in word-initial position, perhaps after /n/ or a pause. /b/ and /β/ appear to have merged in word-initial position by about 1400 and in all other environments by the mid–late 16th century at the latest.
At an archaic stage, the realizations of /h/ (from Latin /f/) would have been approximately as follows:
By early Old Spanish, [ɸ] had been replaced with [h] before all vowels and possibly before [j] as well.
In later Old Spanish, surviving [ɸ] and [ʍ]/[hɸ] were modified to [f] in urban speech, likely due to the influx of numerous French and Occitan speakers (and their particular pronunciation of Latin) beginning in the twelfth century. Various words with [f] were then borrowed into Spanish, leading to minimal pairs like [ˈfoɾma] “form” (a borrowing) and [ˈhoɾma] “shoemaker's last” (inherited from Latin forma). The result was a new phoneme /f/, distinct from /h/.
Possibly realized as [d͡ʒ] after pauses or certain consonants (judging by outcomes in Judeo-Spanish).
Old Spanish was generally written in some variation of the Latin script. It was also sometimes written in Arabic script in a practice called Aljamiado.
These sounds were spelt ⟨nn⟩ and ⟨ll⟩ respectively. ⟨nn⟩ was often abbreviated to ⟨ñ⟩, which went on to become the normal spelling of /ɲ/ in Modern Spanish.
Old Spanish featured the digraphs ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ph⟩, ⟨(r)rh⟩, and ⟨th⟩ which were simplified to ⟨c⟩, ⟨f⟩, ⟨(r)r⟩, ⟨t⟩ in Modern Spanish. Examples include:
⟨y⟩ often stood for /i/ in word-initial position. In this context it has since been respelt to ⟨i⟩ in Modern Spanish.
(The following table does not account for sandhi contexts.)
In Old Spanish, perfect constructions of movement verbs, such as ir ('(to) go') and venir ('(to) come'), were formed using the auxiliary verb ser ('(to) be'), as in Italian and French: Las mugieres son llegadas a Castiella was used instead of Las mujeres han llegado a Castilla ('The women have arrived in Castilla').
Possession was expressed with the verb aver (Modern Spanish haber, '(to) have'), rather than tener: Pedro ha dos fijas was used instead of Pedro tiene dos hijas ('Pedro has two daughters').
In the perfect tenses, the past participle often agreed with the gender and number of the direct object: María ha cantadas dos canciones was used instead of Modern Spanish María ha cantado dos canciones ('María has sung two songs'). However, that was inconsistent even in the earliest texts.
The prospective aspect was formed with the verb ir ('(to) go') along with the verb in infinitive, with the difference that Modern Spanish includes the preposition a:
Personal pronouns and substantives were placed after the verb in any tense or mood unless a stressed word was before the verb.
The future and the conditional tenses were not yet fully grammaticalised as inflections; rather, they were still periphrastic formations of the verb aver in the present or imperfect indicative followed by the infinitive of a main verb. Pronouns, therefore, by the general placement rules, could be inserted between the main verb and the auxiliary in these periphrastic tenses, as still occurs with Portuguese (mesoclisis):
When there was a stressed word before the verb, the pronouns would go before the verb: non gelo empeñar he por lo que fuere guisado.
Generally, an unstressed pronoun and a verb in simple sentences combined into one word. In a compound sentence, the pronoun was found in the beginning of the clause: la manol va besar = la mano le va a besar.
The future subjunctive was in common use (fuere in the second example above) but it is generally now found only in legal or solemn discourse and in the spoken language in some dialects, particularly in areas of Venezuela, to replace the imperfect subjunctive. It was used similarly to its Modern Portuguese counterpart, in place of the modern present subjunctive in a subordinate clause after si, cuando etc., when an event in the future is referenced:
The following is a sample from Cantar de Mio Cid (lines 330–365), with abbreviations resolved, punctuation (the original has none), and some modernized letters. Below is the original Old Spanish text in the first column, along with the same text in Modern Spanish in the second column and an English translation in the third column.