History of the Spanish language
[1] Influenced by the peninsular hegemony of Al-Andalus in the early middle ages, Hispano-Romance varieties borrowed substantial lexicon from Arabic.
[6] Spanish varieties henceforth borrowed influence from Amerindian languages, primarily coming from the Caribbean, the Central-Andean and Mesoamerican regions.
Spanish verbal morphology continues the use of some Latin synthetic forms that were replaced by analytic ones in spoken French and (partly) Italian (cf.
In some cases, such as with impersonal verbs referring to meteorological (llover, to rain; nevar, to snow) or other natural phenomena (amanecer, to get light out; anochecer, to get dark out), it is ungrammatical to include a subject.
Compared to other Romance languages, Spanish has a somewhat freer syntax with relatively fewer restrictions on subject-verb-object word order.
Castilian Spanish originated (after the decline of the Roman Empire) as a continuation of spoken Latin in several areas of northern and central Spain.
He assembled scribes at his court and supervised their writing, in Castilian, of extensive works on history, astronomy, law, and other fields of knowledge.
[19] In the late 19th century, the still-Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico encouraged more immigrants from Spain, and similarly other Spanish-speaking countries such as Argentina, Uruguay, and to a lesser extent Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela, attracted waves of European immigration, Spanish and non-Spanish, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
There, the countries' large (or sizable minority) population groups of second- and third-generation descendants adopted the Spanish language as part of their governments' official assimilation policies to include Europeans.
A similar situation occurred in the American Southwest, including California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, where Spaniards, then criollos (Tejanos, Californios, etc.)
Their Judaeo-Spanish language, called Ladino, developed along its own lines and continues to be spoken by a dwindling number of speakers, mainly in Israel, Turkey, and Greece.
The list of Nobel laureates in Literature includes eleven authors who wrote in Spanish (José Echegaray, Jacinto Benavente, Gabriela Mistral, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Pablo Neruda, Vicente Aleixandre, Gabriel García Márquez, Camilo José Cela, Octavio Paz, and Mario Vargas Llosa).
Words of everyday use that are attributed to Celtic sources include camino "road", carro "cart", colmena "hive", and cerveza "beer".
Spanish also borrowed Ancient Greek vocabulary in the areas of medical, technical, and scientific language, beginning as early as the 13th century.
Early in its history, Spanish lost such vowels where they preceded or followed R or L, and between S and T.[35][36][37] *Solitario, which is derived from sōlitārium, is a learned word; cf.
In virtually all the Western Romance languages, the Latin voiceless stops—/p/, /t/, and /k/, which are represented orthographically as P, T, and C (including Q) respectively—where they occurred in an "intervocalic" environment (qualified below), underwent one, two, or three successive stages of lenition, from voicing to spirantization to, in some cases, elision (deletion).
This also is the pattern of a few other Spanish verbs ending in -cer or -cir, as in the table below: Stressed vowels were raised when followed by [j] in the same or next syllable (except when the [j] had fused with earlier preceding /t/ or /k/, e.g. fortia → fuerza with diphthongization).
Learned words—that is, "bookish" words transmitted partly through writing and thus affected by their Latin form—became increasingly frequent with the works of Alfonso X in the mid-to-late 13th century.
The Spanish educational system, and later the Real Academia Española, with their demand that all consonants of a word be pronounced, steadily drove most simplified forms from existence.
Many of the simplified forms were used in literary works in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (sometimes intentionally as an archaism), but have since been relegated mostly to popular and uneducated speech.
Most words with consonant clusters in syllable-final position are loanwords from Classical Latin, examples are: transporte [tɾansˈpor.te], transmitir [tɾanz.miˈtir], instalar [ins.taˈlar], constante [konsˈtante], obstante [oβsˈtante], obstruir [oβsˈtɾwir], perspectiva [pers.pekˈti.βa], istmo [ˈist.mo].
Another type of consonant cluster simplification involves "double" (geminate) plosives that reduced to single: -pp-, -tt-, -cc-, -bb-, -dd-, -gg- /pː, tː, kː, bː, dː, gː/ > -p-, -t-, -c-, -b-, -d-, -g- /p, t, k, b, d, g/.
F was almost always initial in Latin words, and in Spanish most phonemes /f/ followed by a simple vowel passed through a stage in which the consonant eventually developed to [h] and then was lost phonologically.
Spelling conventions have grapheme ⟨h⟩ used in words such as humo 'smoke', hormiga 'ant', hígado 'liver' (compare Italian fumo, formica, fegato, with /f/ intact), but in terms of both structure and pronunciation, the initial consonant has been lost: /ˈumo/, /orˈmiɡa/, /ˈiɡado/.
[61][62][63] That, along with the effect of preservation of /f/ regionally (Asturian fumu 'smoke', formiga 'ant', fégadu 'liver'), accounts for modern doublets such as Fernando (learned) and Hernando (inherited) (both Spanish for "Ferdinand"), fierro (regional) and hierro (both "iron"), fastidio and hastío (both Spanish for "boredom"), and fondo and hondo (fondo means "bottom" and hondo means "deep").
[64] The distribution of this pronunciation throughout so much of western Spain suggests that its spread was due in large part to the role of eastern Asturians in the reconquest of these zones.
The dissimilation in the northern and central dialects occurred with the laminodental fricative moving forward to an interdental place of articulation, losing its sibilance to become [θ].
During the colonization of the Americas, most settlers came from the south of Spain; that is the cause, according to almost all scholars, for nearly all Spanish speakers in the New World still speaking a language variety derived mainly from the Western Andalusian and Canarian dialects.
A related trait that has also been documented sporadically for several hundred years is rehilamiento (literally "whizzing"), the pronunciation of /ʝ/ as a sibilant fricative [ʒ] or even an affricate [dʒ], which is common among non-native Spanish speakers as well.
A further development, the unvoiced pronunciation [ʃ], during the second half of the twentieth century came to characterize the speech of "most younger residents of Buenos Aires" and continues to spread throughout Argentina.
