Talk:History of the Spanish language

message: This article is almost entirely about the spread of the Spanish language, as opposed to the history of the Spanish language (what I expected was an article about how the language evolved over time, both in written and oral form, starting from the fusion of the native culture and Latin, to elements of modern society that are influencing the development of Spanish (i.e. technology, the academy that presides over standard Spanish, etc...); and distinct historical versions of Spanish, like old Spanish, middle Spanish, etc... (if such things do exist); not that the information in here isn't useful, but unless it has information about how the spread of the Spanish language influences the Spanish language (which isn't in this article yet), it may be better to place it in a different article, entitled "The spread of the Spanish language" --Confuzion 11:26, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Not what I expected

message: I've been doing some reading which includes excerpts of old documents between about the time of the Conquest of Mexico until about 150 years ago. I'm seeing both systemtic and random differences to modern Spanish orthography. I cannot find anything on Wikipedia about anything but the current orthography. I would like to know if there were previous reforms, what those changed, or if Spanish orthography was unruly until recently. Any details greatly appreciated!
:Examples of systematic differences:
:*á for modern a
:*muger for modern mujer
:*coraçon for modern corazón
:*dixo for modern dijo
:*ansí or assí for modern así
:*mas for modern más
:*double s in some verb forms
:Examples of non-systematic differences:
:*é or i for modern y
:*io for modern yo
:*Letter v in many places taken by modern b
:*Letters u and v are interchangeable
:*Many missing modern acute accents
I am aware of some of the historic sound changes and that the u/v distinction goes back to Latin, but I am most interested in standardization issues. When was the spelling first standardized? What specific things were standardized at that time? How many times has this standard been reformed since? What were the specific changes made in those reforms? This related to work on Wiktionary where I would like to distinguish spellings which were considered correct at any point in history from non-standardized spellings, and possibly also from poor spelling.
In some parts of the Dominican Republic (The South Region, Azua province, etc) some people do say 'ansi' instead od asi. Just wanted to put it out there Omar (talk) 02:49, 30 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pre-modern Spanish orthography 

message: *I too am dissatisfied with the history of Spanish on wiki and I'd like to do something about.  The existing article is good enough for the purpose of tracking the world-wide spread of Spanish, but gives little info on phonological changes/ changes in orthography, etc.  I have a book from an upper-level undergrad course titled "From Latin to Spanish" by Paul M. Lloyd. ()  It covers everthing all the way back to Classical Latin and has nearly 200 pages in the sections I intend to cover (Late Latin to Old Spanish & Old Spanish to Modern Spanish).  This will be quite an undertaking that will take weeks at a minimum and I'd like some feedback before I start.  Namely, how do I connect it to everything else?  I think this current page should be moved to a title more appropriate to its content (Spread of the Spanish Language?) with the proper adjustments to its content, of course.  I could even start writing the page outside of wiki and paste it in when it's substantial enough.  Any thoughts?--Hraefen 03:45, 26 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I suggest a subpage (such as /Draft or /Linguistic evolution or whatever). I usually edit outside of Wikipedia in a common text editor and then paste a "first stable version" when it's ready. Don't worry about the connection to the rest, for now. "History of Spanish" covers both geographic/cultural expansion and linguistic evolution, so I'd rather not have separate pages; maybe there should be a historic section first, and then a detailed survey of linguistic evolution with pointers to the previously covered historical facts (so as to give the reader an idea of what was happening when). --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 12:28, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

text: The article could benefit from the explicit use of the terms "external history" and "internal history".  These technical terms are standard in language history.  External history is about the social history of the speakers, the geographic distribution, standardization, etc. -- everything that doesn't refer to specific sounds, words, or sentences.  Internal history is the standard term for what this article is calling "linguistics":  phonology (the sound system), morphology (internal structure of words), and syntax (phrases, sentences, agreement -- the relations between words in discourse).  There would be no need to separate external and internal histories into separate articles if they were labeled as such in this article.  I would suggest that the section on internal history be given three subsections:  (1) phonology (including a summary of the history of Spanish orthography), (2) morphology, and (3) syntax.  A fourth area, lexicon (= vocabulary), is probably best treated under external history, since it deals largely with loanwords from other languages in contact.  Kotabatubara 04:33, 23 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: History of Spanish

message: Was the j pronounced as in the French and Portuguese pronouciation? Something like zsh?
This must have evolved to s in the Philippines. In Filipino, we have 'sabun' (jabon- soap), 'relos'(reloj- watch), sugal(jugar-to play, in Filipino to gamble). Some Filipinos have names like Sesus (Jesus) , Sese . Saviour is Javier (and Xavier).--Jondel 02:15, 30 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: IIRC j =  ("zh") and x =  ("sh"). Then they merged into the latter (that's why old writings hesitate between j and x - people no longer distinguished the two sounds and didn't remember how the word was originally written). At some point the sounds moved back and became velar, but I'm not sure if this was before or after the merge. --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 12:34, 26 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Pre-modern Spanish pronounciation

message: Could a speaker of modern Spanish understand a speaker of Spanish spoken centuries before and vice versa? Say, around the 12th and 13th centuries? I know that Spanish seems to have changed much less than English or French from that time to now. Can anyone answer the question? Thanks. Stallions2010 18:57, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comprehension levels 

message: Dbachman recently suggested the merge and I knew it would happen eventually. I created "Linguistic history" because "History of" contained so little info about phonetics, etymology etc. and concentrated mainly on the social/historical spread of Spanish rather than its genetic makeup and its evolution. I didn't want to step on anyone's toes by completely re-arranging this article, so I just started one from scratch. Anyway... my vote is that we keep the basic format of "Linguistic history" as it is and essentially try to merge in any info from this page. Some of the tables at "Linguistic history" could be moved to the bottom because their place in the chronology of the language is hazy at best. The name of the article is also of little importance to me. Any thoughts?--Hraefen Talk 16:26, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Proposed merge of [[Linguistic history of Spanish]] into this article

message: It is well known the Romance languages derived from Latin. How the language is adapted and transformed through generations and geographical areas is the most interesting to me. The question could a spanish speaker from 400 years ago have a discussion and understand spanish speakers of today got me thinking. My initial response was no there have been too many changes in pronunciation, as demostrated above, and the new spanish slang. Today, spanish slang is used so greatly an aged spanish speaker would need to be informed of the slang. Reguardless of the root being Latin and spanish being a popular language spanish people from 400 years ago would not uphold a conversation. While catching the general vocabulary the slang and transformation of the language would be the language barrier. That question was the most interesting paragraph I read.
--216.184.3.245 05:20, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Most Interesting

message: The intro has the following confusing paragraph:
The standard Spanish language is also called Castilian. It originated in the Cordillera Cantabrica, in northern Spain in the 8th and 9th centuries AD, but others claim to came from a Franco-Navarre and Gothic-Castillian dialects in the 11th century AD. After the Reconquista, this northern dialect was brought to the south and nearly replaced the provincial dialects, such as in Andalusia which it shown heavier influences of Moorish Arabic, (Moro or Morocho), Christian Arabic (Mozarabe) and Sefardi Jewish grammar (Ladino, a form of Hebrew is nearly extinct in the 21st century, also known as Judeo-Iberian/Judeo-Hispano), all but vanished by the late 16th century. 
Well, the mozárabes could be described as Christian Arabs, I suppose, but the Mozarabic language was a Romance language, not a form of Arabic! FilipeS 19:49, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Mozárabe

message: (1) I second the suggestion to cut the section "Influences" out of the article "History of the Spanish language" and merge its contents with the separate article "Influences on the Spanish language":  It is a large enough topic to merit its own article.  BUT...
(2) I suggest that the separate article be retitled "Loanwords in Spanish" or "Lexical borrowing in Spanish".  Why?  Because virtually all of the so-called "influences" that are solidly established are adoptions of words from other languages.  Aside from vocabulary, all the given examples of "influence" are controversial, as the present text of the article correctly points out.  F > h thanks to Basque?  "No hard evidence."  Lenition thanks to Celtic?  The article cites problems with the proposal.  Germanic phonological influence?  "Very little."  Arabic influence?  All lexical (though the cross-referenced article "Arabic influence on Spanish" cites some phrases in addition to words).  "Influence" is a nebulous term, much too general for the contents of the section/article merger under discussion.  The unconfirmed speculations about Basque f > h, Celtic lenition, etc. can be included as incidental comments in the respective sections on sound change; they don't merit the focus of a dedicated section on "influences".
(3) I recommend that the separate article "Arabic influence on Spanish" be cut and merged with the newly-titled article "Loanwords in Spanish" (or that the latter article give up its Arabic section to be merged with the former article).
(4) An argument could be made to treat "learnèd" vocabulary in the "Loanwords" article, as borrowings from Latin.
(5) For the article on word-borrowing, languages not yet developed in the article include Catalan, French, Portuguese, Provençal, and Greek.
(6) Where claims about etymology become complex, they should be supported by consulting reputable dictionaries, such as J. Corominas's Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, and Corominas should be cited in the article's final section, "Sources".  This dictionary has an appendix that organizes words according to source language.
Kotabatubara 17:07, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge and re-title 

message: This is a frequent problem in Wikipedia. The section devotes more space to the Phillipines than to the whole of South America. It also gives particular attention to Puerto Rico and even to the Marianas - islands most Spanish speakers have never heard of. I won´t delete half of this section yet, but I may do. I suggest quite a few paragraphs of the section could be transferred to a new page called "The Spanish language in formerly Spanish territories acquired by the USA". 
The rest of this article is informative and good reading.  Sebatianalfar 21:25, 14 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  The section on "External History" is too USA-centred 

message: A new series of Old Spanish legal texts have been discovered in Valpuesta (Basque Country, Spain). The oldest of the texts was written in 804, so it is the first text written in a romance language unless another one is discovered.
See theese links (in Modern Spanish, sorry):
 http://www.valpuesta.com/hemeroteca/noticias_valpuesta/hemeroteca10.php
 http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartularios_de_Valpuesta
 http://www.euskonews.com/0053zbk/gaia5303es.html
In the begining, the Spanish language was spoken in the Basque Country only, and not in Castile.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.3.244.25 (talk) 21:27, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  New oldest spanish text discovered 

message: In most of the articles I've read concerning Spanish pronunciation, I always find the same mistake: B and V are the same sound. Actually, the phoneme B (voiced stop) only appears at the beginning of a word. On the other hand, the fricative version of the B sound is always pronounced this way between two vowels. Depending on historical reasons, the used character is B or V but, in any case, there are two kinds of B sound in Spanish. 
In other words, the B sounds inside some words such as "bebo", "baba", "babor", "vivo" are different even though they are written using the same character.
Believe me. I'm a native Spanish speaker and one of the ways to find out the foreign origin of someone is the use of an only kind of B sound.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Fjfranco75 (talk • contribs) 17:43, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I think you're parsing something unnecessarily.  The b of bario is the same sound as the v of vaca.  Same "sound" in the sense that they are the same phoneme and so could, in theory, replace one another (e.g. vario and baca) and be pronounced the same.  — Æµ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 19:43, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: How is it now?  — Æµ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 03:28, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pronunciation of B and V 

message: Though the article explains how the language came down from Latin, it doesn't explain why? Why, nearly alone, did the Ostrogoths so faithfully preserve Latin that it was able to evolve into Spanish in the Middle Ages? (Okay, Romanian survived as well, and a canton in Switzerland). How did this happen? Why didn't the barbarians insist on their language as did the Lombards who wound up influencing Italian in Italy where one would have supposed Latin to survive the best? Student7 (talk) 01:42, 25 May 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Language change studies rarely go into the why, mostly because it's a web of guesses.  Not to poopoo on your question.  I'm just saying that, rather than try to answer that question, we can certainly find scholars who weigh in on the matter.  — Æµ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 06:59, 25 May 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, first off, I don't think the Ostrogoths "preserved" Latin any better than any other speakers of Vulgar Latin at the time. But to the extent that they did, many isolated populations have very conservative/archaic dialects (Icelandic and Pennsylvania Dutch come to mind). As far as why the spoke VL rather than Gothic, that's hard to answer.  There are many cases where isolation favors linguistic conservatism. Sometimes the ruling elite speak their own language and sometimes they adopt the language of the ruled.  Why did the Franks ultimately adopt VL/French rather than stick with their Germanic tongue? These are great and intriguing questions, but I have not read anyone that tries to answer them (although I'm sure digging up some sources wouldn't be hard... try Mario Pei if you're more of a non-linguist).  Historical linguistics is tough enough when you focus only on the how.--Hraefen Talk 20:59, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

text: I think you'd be hard pressed to claim that the Lombards influenced Italian more than the Franks influenced French or the Goths influenced Spanish.  In fact, the Germanic-speaking barbarians only successfuly "insist[ed] on their language" with any success in Britain, where a case can be made that the substrate was not Vulgar Latin, but rather Celtic or a bilingual Celtic/Latin society. Ben (talk) 03:36, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Missing "why"?

message: At the top of this article is a box that says "This article needs additional citations for verification," dated March 2009.  Since that time, many citations have been added.  Is there someone in Wikiland who needs to be notified of the new citations, or is there a periodic review of articles that will eventually see them?  Kotabatubara (talk) 04:24, 24 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: If the places that need citations are unclear, I think I can go through the article and mark any places that ought to be cited with . — Æµ§œš¹ [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi] 05:25, 24 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Source citations

message: This article is too biased towards Madrid Spanish. While the Real Academia Espanola may be holding on to the Madrid dialect as the worldwide standard, it is a comparatively small dialect with phonological and morphological oddities that never appear in Latin America at all. Please address this and incorporate more information about Latin American Spanish. (Latin American Spanish is not homogenous by any means, but the inclusion of the "th" phoneme here as the 'standard' pronunciation honestly feels like a slap in the face.)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 200.55.125.95 (talk) 04:52, 11 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Continental Spanish Bias

message: The statement that the [θ] sound is specific to northern and central Spain is wildly inaccurate. Most southern Spain also speaks using the [θ] sound, see for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IberianSeseo2a.PNG
88.163.168.188 (talk) 10:13, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Even so it is still by far the minority pronunciation. Dave  (djkernen)|Talk to me|Please help! 17:48, 26 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Ceceo and Seseo

message: Very very interesting article - but aren't the following incorrect?
...faciendam, factum, faminem, farīnam, fēminam, fīcatum, fīlium, foliam,
fōrmōsum, fūmum, fungum, furcam
Thought it was femina, filius, fumus, fungus -- but I'm not sure, beginner.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Littledogboy (talk • contribs) 01:46, 13 October 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Are you asking about the final -m according to your message or the Latin f- to Spanish h- according to your section title? The final -m is the marker of the accusative case. Forms in -a or -us are nominative. Most forms in Romance languages developed from the accusative form, not the nominative. The final -m was dropped early on so that only a final vowel remained. — Eru·tuon 02:44, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

text: I suppose the assumption is that [f] was an allophone of /h/ at the time. --Jotamar (talk) 15:31, 24 July 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: The converse would make more sense in terms of historical phonology, i.e. [h] arises as an allophone of /f/, then eventually ousts /f/ in the relevant lexical items (and, not unusually, leaving occasional doublets or stress-conditioned near doublets à la fuego/hogar)). But that doesn't address this: the phoneme /f/ reappeared in the language (around the 16th century, as a result of borrowings from Classical Latin). If /f/ was preserved (with or without an [h] allophone) in fiesta, fuego, flor etc., the phoneme remained in the language; it never disappeared, thus it couldn't reappear. 96.42.57.164 (talk) 17:06, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Latin f- to Spanish h-    

message: I don't like to embarrass an individual, but an editor known only as "79.159.238.252" has recently been making this article (and others) incomprehensible by inserting language that can only be called "broken English". I think "79" means well, but his/her English isn't up to the job of editing in English.  For example, words have come into Spanish "since" Mexico and "since" the Philippines ("since" = Sp. "desde" = "from").  See the "View History" of Influences on the Spanish language and History of Spanish for many more examples.  Can we—those of us who care about these articles—together ask "79" to get some help with his/her English, or to go to the Wikipedia in his/her native language and edit there? Kotabatubara (talk) 15:20, 6 December 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Broken English 

message: Under "Influences", the second paragraph contains a statement that "sharks were known to Spaniards mainly as 'sea dogs'". If this is the case, the Spanish word(s) should be given. Aside from this problem, getting so deeply into a specific example seems inappropriate for an encyclopedia. The section was added as part of the 1,069-byte addition of 4 December 2012, by "79.159.238.252". See "79.159.238.252 (talk)" about sockpuppet allegations. I suggest that someone delete the second half of the paragraph, or will do so myself if someone seconds the motion. Kotabatubara (talk) 21:39, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: See also the "Broken English" thread above. Your suggestion sounds good to me. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 02:06, 13 January 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Shark 

message: To explain my reversions of 19 April 2013: The reason why historians say "the eighteenth century" is that an expression like "the 1700s" can be unclear as to whether it means the whole eighteenth century or just its first decade. Second topic: When one language adopts a word from another language, the conventional term in linguistics is "borrowing". Granted, it's not like borrowing money or a library book, where you're obligated to return it, but it's the standard term, and it's not the role of Wikipedia to change that custom. Wikipedia's article on the phenomenon is correctly titled Loanword. A search on the [<http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=lexical+borrowing%2Clexical+adoption&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=> Google Books Ngram Viewer] will corroborate what I'm saying about standard usage. Kotabatubara (talk) 22:42, 19 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Centuries and borrowing

message: Is it ok to add a section as below? MagistraMundi (talk) 08:55, 3 July 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Discussion of liquids

message: Also present in Southern Italy, e.g. Neapolitan salùteme à sòrete 'salutami tua sorella'.96.42.57.164 (talk) 22:18, 29 June 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  The "personal a" 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on History of the Spanish language. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20091229122345/http://kluna.bol.ucla.edu/Development%20of%20Medieval%20Spanish%20Sibilants.html to http://kluna.bol.ucla.edu/Development%20of%20Medieval%20Spanish%20Sibilants.html
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 10:58, 5 November 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: In the section "Modern development of the Old Spanish sibilants", paragraph 2 contradicts paragraph 1. Paragraph 1 says their "contrast depended entirely on a subtle distinction between their places of articulation:" apicoalveolar (also called "cóncava" by Menéndez Pidal) and laminodental (alias "convexa").  Paragraph 2 says they were "homorganic". The IPA uses the unadorned [s] for an "alveolar" sibilant, without reference to the shape of the tongue, and [s̪] with a "subscript bridge" for a "dental" variant, also unspecified as to whether apical or laminal. What's a good source to resolve this question? Kotabatubara (talk) 23:42, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Lapesa (Historia de la lengua española, last edition, p. 317), unlike Penny, seems to say (it's not completely clear) that the alveolar s vs dental s was a feature of Andalusian Spanish, while in other areas the old affricates ts/dz changed to θ from an early date. I've always suspected that this theory (that there was this alveolar/dental s distinction at one point in all dialects, and that the θ was a late change in Northern Spain), is very popular among Latinamericans, as it implies that their pronunciation is the original one, while the Spanish pronunciation would be a purely peninsular quirky innovation. --Jotamar (talk) 16:32, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
thread_title: Was there a stage of s/s̪ contrast?

message: "escudriñar, "scrutinize", earlier escrudiñar, from Latin *scrutiniāre, from noun scrutinium."
Am I blind, or is there no liquid interchange in this example? There's metathesis, of course, -crudi- > -cudri, but that's not what the section talks about.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.147.35.152 (talk) 18:30, 23 October 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Example deleted. --Jotamar (talk) 16:40, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Interchange of liquids 

message: There is a move discussion in progress on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Languages which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you.  —RMCD bot 12:00, 6 April 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Move discussion in progress 

message: There is a move discussion in progress on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Languages which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you.  —RMCD bot 07:15, 9 April 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Move discussion in progress 

message: There is a move discussion in progress on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Languages which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you.  —RMCD bot 23:15, 10 April 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Move discussion in progress 

message: ... is not explained in the article, or at least I don't find an explanation.--82.137.115.143 (talk) 21:01, 25 November 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  The origin of Old Spanish /ʃ/ and /ʒ/