Page:EB1911 - Volume 25.djvu/596

LANGUAGE] the Castilian influence substituted os, so that one now hears brassos, presos, mateixos. The words in tx, sc, st have been assimilated to words in s (x); from bosch we originally had the plural bosches; but now boscos; from trist, tristes, but now tristos. For these last in st there exists a plural formation which is more in accordance with the genius of the language, and consists in the suppression of the s before the t; from aquest, for example, we have now side by side the two plurals aquestos, in the Castilian manner, and aquets. The article is lo, los (pronounced lu, lus in a portion of the domain), fem. la, les (las). Some instances of li occur in the ancient tongue, applying indifferently to the nominative and the objective case ; el applying to the singular is also not wholly unknown. On the north-western border of Catalonia, and in the island of Majorca, the article is not a derivative from ille but from ipse (sing. masc. es or so, fem. sa; pl. masc. es, and also ets, which appears to come from istos—ets for ests, like aquets for aquests—fem. sas). Compare the corresponding Sardinian forms su, sa, pl. sos, sas. On the pronouns it has only to be remarked that the modern language has borrowed from Castilian the composite forms nosaltres and vosaltres (pronounced also nosaltros and nosatrus), as also the form vosté, vusté (Castilian usted for vuestra merced).

Conjugation.—Catalan, and especially modern Catalan, has greatly narrowed the domain of the 2nd conjugation in e r e; a large number of verbs of this conjugation have been treated as if they belonged to the 3rd in e r e ; d e b e r e makes deure, v i d e r e, veure, and alongside of haber, which answers to h a b e r e, there is a form heure which points to h a b e r e. A curious fact, and one which has arisen since the 15th century, is the addition of a paragogic r to those infinitives which are accented on the radical; in a portion of the Catalan domain one hears creurer, veurer. Some verbs originally belonging to the conjugation in ere have, passed over into that in ir; for example tenere gives tenir alongside of tindre, r e m a n ē r e romanir and romandre. In the gerundive and in the present participle Catalan differs from Provengal in still distinguishing the conjugation in ir from that in er, re—saying, for example, sentint. As in Provencal, the past participle of a large number of verbs of the 2nd and 3rd conjugations is formed, not from the infinitive, but from the perfect (pogut, volgut, tingut suggest the perfects poch, volch, tinch, and not the infinitives poder, voter, tenir). In the present indicative and subjunctive many verbs in *> take the inchoative form already described, by lengthening the radical in the three persons of the singular and in the third person of the plural by means of the syllable esc (isc). agrakir has the present indicative agraesch, agraheixes, agraheix, agraheixen, the present subjunctive agraesca, -as, -a, -an (or more usually now agraesqui, -is, -i, -in). The old perfect of the conjugation in ar had e (also i) in the 1st pers. sing, and -a in the 3rd ; alongside of the -a, which is proper to Catalan exclusively, we also find, in the first period of the language, -et as in Provencal. Subsequently the perfect of the three conjugations has admitted forms in -r (amáres, amárem, amáreu, amáren), derived from the ancient pluperfect amara, &c, which has held its ground down to the present day, with the meaning of a Conditional in some verbs (one still hears fora, haguera). But the simple perfect is no longer employed in the spoken language, which has substituted for it a periphrastic perfect, composed of the infinitive of the verb and the present of the auxiliary anar: vaig pendre, for example, does not mean "I am going to take," but "I have taken." The earliest example of this periphrastic perfect carries us back to the 15th century. The most usual form of the subj. pres. in spoken Catalan is that in -i for all the three conjugations (ami, -is, -i, -em, -eu -in; temi, -is, &c. ; senti, -is, &c); it appears to be an abbreviation from -to, and in effect certain subjunctives, such as cántia, témia, tínguia, vinguia (for cante, tema, tinga, vingia), evidently formed upon sia (subj. of esser), have been and still are used. The same i of the present subjunctive, whatever may be its origin, is still found in the, imperfect : amés, -essis, -es, -essium, &c.

Catalan Dialect of Alghero (Sardinia).—As compared with that of the mainland, the Catalan of Alghero, introduced into this portion of Sardinia by the Aragonese conquerors and colonists, does not present any very important differences; some of them, such as they are, are explicable by the influence of the indigenous dialects of Sassari and Logudoro. In phonetics one observes—(1) the change of Ij into y as an initial before i (yitx, yigis; lego, legis), a change which does not take place in the Catalan of the mainland except in the interior, or at the end of the word; (2) the frequent change of I between vowels and of / after c, g, f, p or b into r (taura tabula; candera, candela; sangrot, singultum; frama, flama). In conjugation there are some notable peculiarities. The 1st pers. sing, does not take the which continental Catalan has borrowed from Castilian (cant, not canto, &c.) ; the imp. ind. of verbs of the 2nd and 3rd conjugations has eva, iva instead of ia, a form which also occurs in the conditional (cantariva, drumiriva) ; the simple perfect, of which some types are still preserved in the actual language (e.g. anighe, agh.e), has likewise served for the formation not only of the past participle but also of the infinitive (agher, habere, can only be explained by ach, 3rd person of the perfect) ; the infinitives with r paragogic (viurer, seurer, plourer) are not used (viure, seure, ploure instead) ; in the conjugation of the present of the verb essar or esser, the jnd pers. sing, ses formed upon the persons of the plural, while

continental Catalan says ets (anciently est), as also, in the plural, sem, seu, instead of som, sou, are to be noted; tenere has passed over to the conjugation in re (trenda = tendre), but it is at the same time true that in ordinary Catalan also we have tindrer alongside of tenir the habitual form; dicere gives not dir but diure, which is more regular.

2. Castilian.—This name is the most convenient designation to apply to the linguistic domain which comprises the whole of central Spain and the vast regions of America and Asia colonized from the 16th century onwards by the Spaniards. We might also indeed call it the Spanish domain, narrowing the essentially geographical meaning of the word Español (derived, like the other old form Españon, from Hispania), and using it in a purely political sense. But the first expression is to be preferred, all the more because it has been long in use, and even the inhabitants of the domain outside the two Castiles fully accept it and are indeed the first to call their idiom Castellano. It is agreed on all hands that Castilian is one of the two branches of the vulgar Latin of Spain, Portuguese-Galician being the other; both idioms, now separated by very marked differences, can be traced back directly to one common source—the Hispanic Romance. One and the same vulgar tongue, diversely modified in the lapse of time, has produced Castilian and Portuguese as two varieties, while Catalan, the third language of the Peninsula, connects itself, as has already been pointed out, with the Gallo-Roman.

Within the Castilian domain, thus embracing all in Spain that is neither Portuguese nor Catalan, there exist linguistic varieties which it would perhaps be an exaggeration to call dialects, considering the meaning ordinarily attached to that word, but which are none the less worthy of attention. Generally speaking, from various circumstances, and especially that of the reconquest, by which the already-formed idiom of the Christian conquerors and colonists was gradually conveyed from north to south, Castilian has maintained a uniformity of which the Romance languages afford no other example. We shall proceed in the first instance to examine the most salient features of the normal Castilian, spoken in the provinces more or less closely corresponding to the old limits of Old and New Castile, so as to be able afterwards to note the peculiarities of what, for want of a better expression, we must call the Castilian dialects.

In some respects Castilian is hardly further removed from classical Latin than is Italian; in others it has approximately reached the same stage as Provencal. As regards the tonic, accent and the treatment of the vowels which come after it, Castilian may be said to be essentially a paroxytonic language, though it does not altogether refuse proparoxytonic accentuation and it would be a mistake to regard vocables like lámpara, lágrima, rápido, &c., as learned words. In this feature, and in its almost universal conservation of the final vowels e, i, u (o), Castilian comes very near Italian, while it separates from it and approaches the Gallo-Roman by its modification of the consonants.

Vowels.—Normal Castilian faithfully preserves the vowels ē, ī, ō, ū; the comparatively infrequent instances in which ē and ō are treated like ě and ŏ must be attributed to the working of analogy. It diphthongizes ě in ie, ŏ in ue, which may be regarded as a weakening of uo (see Romania, iv. 30). Sometimes ie and ue in the modern language are changed into i and e : silla from sella (Old Cast. siella), vispera from vesper a (Old Cast, viespera), castillo from c a s t e l l u m (Old Cast, castiello), frente from f r o n t e m (Old Cast. fruente), fleco from floccus (Old Cast, flueco). The words in which e and have kept their ground are either learned words like medico, mirito, or have been borrowed from dialects which do not suffer diphthongization. In many cases the old language is more rigorous; thus, while modern Castilian has given the preference to mente, como, modo, we find in old texts miente, cuemo, muedo. Lat. a u makes o in all words of popular origin (cosa, oro, &c.).

Consonants.—On the liquids l, m, n, r there is little to be remarked, except that the last-named letter has two pronunciations—one soft (voiced), as in amor, burla, the other hard (voiceless), as hi rendir, tierra (Old Cast, in this case goes so far as to double the initial consonant : rrendir)—and that n is often inserted before 5 and d: ensayo, mensage, rendir (r e d d e r e). L mouillee (written li) represents not only the Latin l, ll, lj, but also, at the beginning of words, the combinations cl, gl, pl, bl, fl llama (f l a m m a), llave