Old Spanish


Old Spanish, also known as Old Castilian or Medieval Spanish, was originally a dialect of Vulgar Latin spoken in the former provinces of the Roman Empire that provided the root for the early form of the Spanish language that was spoken on the Iberian Peninsula from the 10th century until roughly the beginning of the 15th century, before a consonantal readjustment gave rise to the evolution of modern Spanish. The poem Cantar de Mio Cid, published around 1200, remains the best known and most extensive work of literature in Old Spanish.

Phonology

The phonological system of Old Spanish was quite similar to that of other medieval Romance languages.

Sibilants

Among the consonants, there were seven sibilants, including three sets of voiceless/voiced pairs:
The set of sounds is identical to that found in medieval Portuguese and almost the same as the system present in the modern Mirandese language.
The Modern Spanish system evolved from the Old Spanish one with the following changes:
  1. The affricates and were simplified to laminodental fricatives and, which remained distinct from the apicoalveolar sounds and .
  2. The voiced sibilants then all lost their voicing and so merged with the voiceless ones.
  3. The merged was retracted to.
  4. The merged was drawn forward to. In Andalusia and the Canary Islands, however, the merged was instead drawn forward, merging into.
Changes 2–4 all occurred in a short period of time, around 1550–1600. The change from to is comparable to the same shift occurring in Modern Swedish.
The Old Spanish spelling of the sibilants was identical to modern Portuguese spelling, which, unlike Spanish, still preserves most of the sounds of the medieval language, and so is still a mostly faithful representation of the spoken language. Spanish spelling was altered in 1815 to reflect the changed pronunciation:
The Old Spanish origins of jeque and jerife reflect their Arabic origins, xeque from Arabic sheikh and xerife from Arabic sharif.

b and v

The letters and still had distinct pronunciations; still represented a stop consonant in all positions, and was likely pronounced as a voiced bilabial fricative or approximant or . The use of and in Old Spanish largely corresponded to their use in Modern Portuguese, which distinguishes the two sounds except in northern European dialects. The phonological distinction of the two sounds also occurs in several dialects of Catalan, though not in Standard Catalan from eastern Catalonia. When Spanish spelling was reformed in 1815, words with and were respelled etymologically to match the Latin spelling whenever possible:
Many words now written with an were written with in Old Spanish, but it was likely pronounced in most positions. Such words have cognates in other Romance languages without :
Modern words with before a vowel mostly represent learned or semi-learned borrowings from Latin: fumar "to smoke", satisfacer "to satisfy", fábula "fable, rumor". Certain modern words with that have doublets in may represent dialectal developments or early borrowings from nearby languages: fierro "branding iron", fondo "bottom", Fernando "Ferdinand".

ch

Old Spanish had, just as Modern Spanish does, which mostly represents a development of earlier *, from the Latin ct. The use of for originated in Old French and spread to Spanish, Portuguese, and English despite the different origins of the sound in each language:
The palatal nasal was written , but it was often abbreviated to following the common scribal shorthand of replacing an or with a tilde above the previous letter. Later, was used exclusively, and it came to be considered a letter in its own right by Modern Spanish. Also, as in modern times, the palatal lateral was indicated with, again reflecting its origin from a Latin geminate.

Spelling

Greek digraphs

The Graeco-Latin digraphs ,, and were reduced to,, and, respectively:
In common with other European languages before the 17th century, the letter pairs and and and were not distinguished. Modern editions of Old Spanish texts usually normalise the spelling to distinguish the pairs, as Modern Spanish does.

Morphology

In Old Spanish, perfect constructions of movement verbs, such as ir and venir, were formed using the auxiliary verb ser, as in Italian and French: Las mugieres son llegadas a Castiella was used instead of Las mujeres han llegado a Castilla.
Possession was expressed with the verb aver, rather than tener: Pedro ha dos fijas was used instead of Pedro tiene dos hijas.
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. However, that was inconsistent even in the earliest texts.
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 :
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 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:

Vocabulary

Sample text

The following is a sample from Cantar de Mio Cid, with abbreviations resolved, punctuation, 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.