Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/374

 350 SPAIN [LANGUAGE. weakening of uo (see Romania, iv. SO). Sometimes ie and ue in the modern language are changed into i and e: silla from sell a (Old Cast, siclla), vtspera from vespera (Old Cast, viespcra), Castillo from castellum(01dCast. castiello), /rente from frontem(01dCast. fruente), fleco from floccus (Old Cast, flucco). The words in which and 5 have kept their ground are either learned words like medico, merito, 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, mucdo. Lat. au makes o in all words of popular origin (cosa, oro, &c. ). Consonants. On the liquids I, m, n, r there is little to bo re- marked, except that the last-named letter has two pronunciations one soft (voiced), as in amor, burla, the other hard (voiceless), as in rendir, tierra (Old Cast, in this case goes so far as to double the initial consonant : rrendir) and that n is often inserted before s and d: ensayo, mensage, rendir (reddere). L mouillee (written II) re- presents not only the Latin I, II, Ij, but also, at the beginning of words, the combinations cl, gl, pi, bl,fl: llama (flarnma), Have (clavis), llorar (plorare) ; the tendency of the modern language is, as in Catalan, to reduce II to y ; thus one readily hears yeno (plenum). Jf mouillee (i!) corresponds to the Latin nn, mn, nj, and sometimes to initial n: aiio (annum), dafio (damn um), nudo (nodum). Passing to the dentals, except as an initial, t in words that are popularly current and belong to the old stock of the language, can only be derived from Lat. it, pt, and sometimes ct, as in meter (mittere), catar (captare), punto (punctum); but it is to be observed that the habitual mode of representing ct in normal Castilian is by ch (proii. tch), as in derecho (dire c turn), pecho (pectus), so that we may take those words in which t alone represents ct as secondary forms of learned words ; thus we have bendito, otubre, santo as secondary forms of the learned words bendicto, octubrc, sancto, alongside of the old popular forms bendicho, ochubre, sancho. D corresponds in Castilian to Latin t between vowels, or t before r: amado (amatus), padre (patrem). At the present day the d of the suffixes ado, ido is no longer pronounced throughout the whole extent of the domain, and the same holds good also of the final d: salu, pone, for salud,poned (from, salutem, ponite). Sometimes d takes the interdental sound of z (English th), or is changed into I ; witness the two pronunciations of the name of the capital Madriz and Madril (adj. Madrileno). The study of the spirants c, z, s ; g, j is made a very delicate one by the circumstance that the interdental pronunciation of c, z on the one hand, and the guttural pronunciation of g, j on the other, are of comparatively recent date, and convey no notion of the value of these letters before the 17th century. It is admitted, not without reason, that the spirants c, z, which at present represent but one interdental sound (a lisped s, or a sound between s and Eng. th in thing), had down till about the middle of the 16th century the voiceless sound ts and the voiced sound dz respectively, and that in like manner the palatal spirants g, j, x, before assuming the uniform pronunciation of the guttural spirant ( = Germ. ch in Bitch), had previously represented the voiced sound of 2 (Fr. j) and the voiceless sound of S (Fr. ch), which are still found in Portuguese and in the Castilian dialects of the north-west. The substitution of these interdental and guttural sounds for the surd and sonant spirants respectively did certainly not take place simul- taneously, but the vacillations of the old orthography, and afterwards the decision of the Spanish Academy, which suppressed x ( = S ; x was retained for cs) and allows only c and g before e and i, z and j before a, o, u, make it impossible for us to follow, with the help of the written texts, the course of the transformation. S now has the voiceless sound even between vowels : casa (pronounced cassa) ; final s readily falls away, especially before liquids : todo los for todos los, vamono for vamos nos. The principal sources of j (g) are Lat. j and g before e and i (juego, jocum ; gcnte, gentem); Lat. initial s (jabon, saponem) ; Lat. x (cojo, coxum); Ij, cl (conscjo, con- silium; ojo, oc'lum). The sources of z (c) are Lat. ce, cj, tj, s (cielo, caelum; calza, calcea; razon, rationem; zampona, sym- phonia). As regards the spirants /and v, it is to be observed that at the beginning of a word f has in many instances been replaced by the aspirated h (afterwards silent), while in others no less current among the people the transformation has not taken place ; thus we have hijo (f ilium) alongside of fiesta (festa). In some cases the/ has been preserved in order to avoid confusion that might arise from identity of sound : the/in fiel (fidelis) has been kept for the sake of distinction from hiel (fel). As for v, it has a marked tendency to become confounded, especially as an initial letter, with the sonant explosive b; Joseph Scaliger's pun bibere est vivcre is applicable to the Castilians as well as to the Gascons. H is now nothing more than a graphic sign, except in Andalusia, where the aspirate sound represented by it comes very near j. Words be- ginning in hue, where the h, not etymologically derived, marks the inseparable aspiration of the initial diphthong ue, are readily pronounced gue throughout almost the whole extent of the domain : gilele for huele (olet) ; gueso for hucso (os). This gue extends also to words beginning with buc : giienofor biieno (bonum). Inflexion. There is no trace of declension either in Castiliau or in Portuguese. Some nominative forms Lios (anciently Dios, and in the Castilian of the Jews Dio), Carlos, Marcos, sastre (sartor) have been adopted instead of forms derived from the accusative, but the vulgar Latin of the Peninsula in no instance presents two forms (subjective and objective case) of the same substantive. The article is derived from ille, as it is almost everywhere throughout the Romance regions : cl, la, and a neuter lo ; los, las. The plural of the first and second personal pronoun has in the modern language taken a composite form nosotros,vosotros which has been imitated in Catalan. Quien, the interrogative pronoun which has taken the place of the old qui, seems to come from quern. Conjugation. The conjugation of Castilian (and Portuguese) de- rives a peculiar interest from the archaic features which it retains. The vulgar Latin of Spain has kept the pluperfect indicative, still in current use as a secondary form of the conditional (cantdra, vcn- diera, partiera), and, what is more remarkable still, as not occurring anywhere else, the future perfect (cantare, i:endiere,partUrc, formerly cantdro, vendiero, partiero). The Latin future has been replaced, as everywhere, by the periphrasis (cantare habeo), but it is worth noticing that in certain old texts of the 13th century, and in the popular songs of a comparatively ancient date which have been preserved in Asturias, the auxiliary can still precede the infinitive (habeo cantare), as with the Latin writers of the decadence: "Mucho de mayor pre9io a seer el tu manto Que non sera, el nuestro" (Berceo, S. Laur., str. 70), where a seer (habet sedere) corresponds exactly to sera (sedere habet). The vulgar Latin of the Peninsula, moreover, has preserved the 2d pers. pi. of the imperative (cantad, vended, partid), which has disappeared from all the other Eoinance languages. Another special feature of Castilian-Portuguese is the complete absence of the form of conjugation known as inchoative (intercalation, in the present tense, of the syllable isc or esc between the radical and the inflexion), although in all the other tenses, except the present, Spanish shows a tendency to lay the accent upon the same syllable in all the six persons, which was the object aimed at by the inchoative form. Castilian displaces the accent on the 1st and 2d pers. pi. of the imperfect (cantdbamos, cantdbais), of the pluperfect indicative (cantdramos, cantdrais), and of the imperfect subjunctive (cantdsemos, cantdscis) ; possibly the impulse to this was given by the forms of future perfect cantdrcmos, cantdrcis (cantarlmus, cantarltis). The 2d persons plural were formerly (except in the perfect) -adcs, -edes, -ides ; it was only in the course of the 16th century that they got reduced, by the falling away of d, to ais, cis, and is. The verb essere has been mixed, not as in the other Romance languages with stare, but with sedere, as is proved by older forms seer, siedes, sieden, seyendo, obviously derived from sedere, and which have in the texts sometimes the meaning of "to be seated," sometimes that of "to be," and sometimes both. In old Latin charters also sedere is frequently met with in the sense of esse : e.g., "sedcat istum rneum donativum quietum et securum" (anno 1134), where sedcat=sit. The 2d pers. sing, of the present of ser is cres, which is best explained as borrowed from the imperfect (eras), this tense being often used in Old Spanish with the meaning of the present ; alongside of eres one finds (but only in old documents or in dialects) sos, formed like sois (2d pers. pi.) upon somos. The accentuation in the inflexion of perfects in the conjugation called strong, like hulieron, hizieron, which cor- respond to habueruut, feceruut (while in the other Romance lan- guages the Latin type is erunt: Fr. eurent, fircnt), may be regarded as truly etymological, or rather as a result of the assimilation of these perfects to the perfects known as weak (amdron), for there are dialectic forms having the accent on the radical, such as dixon, hizon. The past participle of verbs in er was formerly udo (tit us) in most cases ; at present ido serves for all verbs in er and ir, except some ten or twelve in which the participle has retained the Latin form accented on the radical : dicho, hccho, visto, &c. It ought to be added that the past participle in normal Castilian derives its theme not from the perfect but from the infinitive : habido, sabido, from haber, saber, not from hubo, siqjo. CASTILIAN DIALECTS. To discover the features by which these are distinguished from normal Castilian we must turn to old charters and to certain modern compositions in which the provincial forms of speech have been reproduced more or less faithfully. Asturian. The Asturian idiom, called by the natives bable, is differentiated from the Castilian by the following characters. Ic occurs, as in Old Castilian, in words formed with the suffix cllum (castiellu, portiellu, while modem Castiliau has reduced ie to i. E, i, u, post-tonic for a, c, o : penes (penas), grades (gracias), esti (cste), frenti (/rente), llechi (leche), nucchi (noche), unu (uno), primcru (primero). There is no guttural spirant, j, but, according to circumstances, y or x (s) ; thus Lat. cl, Ij gives y: veyu (*veclus), espeyu (spec'lum), conseyu (consilium); and after an i this y is hardly perceptible, to judge by the forms fiu (filium), escoidos (Cast, escogidos), Castia (Castilla) ; Lat. g before c and i, Lat. initial j, and Lat. ss, x, give x (s) xiente (gentem), xudiu (Judaeus), Mail (bassus), coxu (coxus), floxu (fluxus). Lat. initial/ has kept its ground, at least in part of the province : fiu, /ueya (Cast.