Lenguas, reinos y dialectos en la Edad Media ibérica: la construcción de la identidad. Homenaje a Juan Ramón Lodares (review)

Juan Ramón Lodares Marrodán died in a horrific road accident in April 2005. His colleagues at the Universidad Autónoma in Madrid held a two-day conference in his honour on 16-17 November 2006, and this attractively produced book contains most of the lectures given there. Lodares, originally a pupil of Gregorio Salvador, had become well known both inside and outside the academic world for his calm and considered defence of the use in Spain of Castilian outside Castile, a politically incorrect approach which had made him highly unpopular in several quarters; for example, when this Bulletin accepted his article on 'La comunidad lingüística en la España de hoy' (eventually published in BHS 82.1 (2005): 1-16) there were colleagues who felt strongly that we should not have accepted it. Despite this, his work was well written and worth reading, and he himself was charming and inoffensive despite the necessity for acquiring a thick skin.

There are twenty-five contributions in this volume. The first eleven, generally entitled 'Lengua y sociedad: identidad y convivencia en los romances medievales de la Península Ibérica', and the last five, from a Mesa Redonda entitled 'Las lenguas de España: balance de una convivencia milenaria', fit the title of the volume better than the intervening nine collectively summarized as 'La evolución del castellano: cuestiones léxicas y gramaticales'. The topics of the formation and interrelationship of the medieval dialects of the Peninsula have been the subject of a number of collective volumes in recent years, and it is not easy for even the most dedicated specialist to keep up with them all; but this is one of the most interesting. It is still true, unfortunately, that the outsider with a knowledge of modern sociolinguistics is likely to see some of the concerns of some of the Spanish workers in this field as misplaced or even meaningless. For example, almost all the contributors seem to take for granted that delimitable Ibero-Romance dialects within the peninsula-wide continuum existed long before anybody explicitly mentioned them. This is a view which most sociolinguists elsewhere would now find old-fashioned, in that it has come to be generally accepted that although individual divergent linguistic features arise naturally, their isoglosses do not coincide naturally on the ground, so that separately identifiable dialects within a continuum (ausbau dialects as they are often called), as opposed to their individual features, need to be created by politicians rather than developing naturally. One of the articles here demonstrates this beautifully, without the author really noticing: Marta Lacomba's illuminating comparative study of the Semejanza del mundo (of c. 1220) and the later Lapidario of Alfonso X (of c. 1250, before he ascended the throne) points out correctly that the second is explicitly said in the text to be in castellano whereas the first is said internally to be in romanzo or nuestro latín, 'aunque', says a puzzled Marta Lacomba, 'la lengua utilizada es el castellano' (357, n.22); but no, the language used in Semejança is not Castilian, and is indeed Romance, because the concept of Romance (contrasted with Latin grammatica) had been invented by the 1220s (which is why it is what Berceo says he is writing in), whereas the concept of Castilian (as opposed to other kinds of Romance) had to wait until the patronage of Alfonso el Sabio to be invented in the same way. As Ralph Penny has so brilliantly shown, the early linguistic features which are later ascribed to particular dialects can be studied individually without begging the issue through the application of anachronistic geographically based dialect...