A History of the Spanish Language through Texts

by Christopher J. Pountain

This publication looks at the developments of Spanish from its origins in Latin to the 21st century, through the analysis of texts. A student friendly and accessible coursebook, it includes many contemporary texts from Latin American Spanish, and is primarily aimed at History of the Spanish Language and the Structure of Spanish Language courses at undergraduate level.

Genres: Linguistics

360 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this book, Christopher J. Pountain traces the changes that the Spanish language has undergone over the last millennium-plus by closely examining selected texts. He starts with a late Latin/early Romance letter from the Visigothic period (possibly 7th century) and the following texts bring us all the way to transcribed speech of the late 20th century. The texts cover not just Spanish of Spain and several Latin American countries, but also Judeo-Spanish (a.k.a. Ladino), Caló the argot of Spain’s gypsy community, the Spanish of peoples of African descent in the New World and in Equatorial Guinea, and finally a couple of Spanish-based creoles.

Though most texts here are from official registers or works of literature, which may perpetuate archaic usages and are not fully reflective of contemporary speech, Pountain zeros in on the signs of language change. For works from the “Golden Age” of Spanish letters (16th and 17th centuries) he also favours writers working for the standardization of the language, as they mention variant forms and perceived mistakes in the speech of the society around them. Similarly, Pountain shows a predilection for urban writers who attempt to capture the speech of various social classes and professions in their city.

Each text is followed by an English translation, and then a commentary by which Pountain points out the phonological, morphological, and lexical changes evident within. Instead of repeatedly describing the same phenomenon in detail, he generally refers the reader to a series of keypoints located at the end of the book, such as “the f > h change”, “future and conditional”, “palatalization”, and so forth.

In order to trace the history of Spanish, one would have to drawn on, among languages, Latin, Arabic, French, Italian, and even Romani. Pountain shows a mastery of this data, and this book is extremely rich in the sort of etymological trivia that delights historical linguistics buffs. A good command of Spanish is advisable, however; though Pountain provides an English translation for each of the text selections, he does not translate all shorter Spanish-language quotations.

I really enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it to anyone interested in Spanish specifically or the Romance languages in general.