Fundamentos teóricos y prácticos de historia de la lengua española by Eva Núñez Méndez (review)

Eva Núñez Méndez’s textbook on the history of Spanish treats the evolution of the language from Latin to “modern” Spanish with consideration of early Peninsular influences and the eventual global expansion of Spanish. The book is rather clearly designed as a text for advanced undergraduates with previous preparation in general linguistics and an advanced reading knowledge of Spanish. Each of its ten chapters concludes with student exercises, and seven appendices and fifteen maps place additional resources at hand.

Núñez Méndez opens with two chapters of historical background, the first treating political history and the second, Vulgar Latin’s movement toward Spanish, in fewer than seven pages. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 address “changes” to the language: phonological and phonetic (3), morphosyntactic (4), and orthographic (5). The strengths of the book, I suggest, are chapters 3, on the rise of Castilian and sound change, and 4, on morphosyntactic change. The next two chapters (6 and 7) provide brief excerpts from texts chosen to demonstrate language change chronologically. Chapter 6 opens with 18 items from the Appendix Probi (dated, the introduction asserts, at about the second century BCE), four items from the glosas of San Millán and Silos, a good number of selections from Mozarabic poetry, sixteen lines from Gonzalo’s Milagros, and so on, through excerpts dating to the eighteenth century in chapter 7. In both chapters, certain selections open with an introduction followed by the excerpt (transcripción paleográfica), and, as necessary to support reading of earlier texts, a “Versión en español”. In chapter 6 only, most entries conclude with brief linguistic observations (Comentario). While introductions focus on literary and historical matters in a context where one would expect a linguistic and/or textual concentration, the Comentarios, too, are brief and overly scant on linguistic content for teaching exposition. Chapter 7 abandons the “Comentario” element, and text excerpts come from editions unspecified in the introductory comments, so their details must be sought in the bibliography. According to the bibliography (313–14), the texts presented as “paleographic transcriptions” in chapter 6 and as taken from early printed books in chapter 7 come from twentieth-century editors’ texts rather than from manuscripts or early printed books; for this reason, they may be insufficiently authentic for some instructors. Bibliography entries do not cite editors’ names for most of these editions or give edition numbers.

The final chapters return to exposition: chapter 8 addresses language items coming into Spanish at the Colonial period and linguistic distinctions between Peninsular Spanish and that of the Americas, as well as distinctions among regional and national dialects of New World Spanish. Chapter 9, “Cuestiones de interés”, provides answers that will perhaps be useful to students planning to become language teachers. Its material treats voseo, ceceo (the latter under the heading “La leyenda del rey ceceante”), seseo, judeoespañol, and, finally, “¿Por qué tenemos dos tiempos verbales en imperfecto de subjuntivo?” [all-caps suppressed in both titles; otherwise, sic]. Chapter 10 addresses medieval pronunciation in four pages, a matter that might have been more appropriately covered in chapters 3 and 5 or in conjunction with the texts of chapter 6. An exercise question for chapter 6, indeed, asks the student to make a phonetic transcription of a medieval text.

There is no sound, productive way of comparing this text here, as readers may wish to do for their own purposes, with the books on the history of Spanish by Antonio Alatorre, Rafael Lapesa, Thomas Lathrop, Paul Lloyd, Ralph Penny, David Pharies, Melvyn Resnick, and others who offer various paths of entry into the material that are at once more deeply and broadly informed, in some instances, more specialized in some aspect of linguistics, and more comprehensive generally; moreover, the works mentioned are also aimed at a more...