Old Spanish

The earliest, longest, and most famous literary composition in Old Spanish is the Cantar de mio Cid (c. 1140–1207).

[4] At an archaic stage, the realizations of /h/ (from Latin /f/) would have been approximately as follows:[5] By early Old Spanish, [ɸ] had been replaced with [h] before all vowels[6] and possibly before [j] as well.

[7] 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.

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').

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').

[citation needed] 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.