Antología conmemorativa: Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica. Cincuenta tomos. Vol. 1 (review)

Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica (NRFH), published in Spanish by the Centro de Estudios Lingüísticos y Literarios (CELL) of the Colegio de México, is one of the leading journals in the fields of Hispanic literature and linguistics. To celebrate the publication of NRFH’s fiftieth volume, the members of CELL selected sixty-four articles from those that have appeared in the journal since its founding in 1947 and published them as a two-volume anniversary set. As longtime editor Antonio Alatorre explains in the introduction, the articles included were chosen because they are considered relevantes ‘relevant’, representativos ‘representative’, and ejemplares ‘exemplary’ (ix).

The present publication is the first volume of the set. It contains thirty-two articles, thirteen of which deal with linguistics. I limit my description to the linguistic contributions, indicating in parentheses the original year of publication.

Several of the papers take up topics in phonetics and phonology. Amado Alonso (1947) provides an analysis of Old Spanish sibilants. Dámaso Alonso, Alonso Zamora Vicente, and María Josefa Canellada de Zamora (1950) investigate the change undergone by Andalucian Spanish vowels due to the loss of the plural marker -s. Joseph Matluck (1952) examines the Spanish pronunciation of the Valle de México. Peter Boyd-Bowman (1952) explores the reduction and the loss of unstressed vowels in Mexican Spanish. Juan Corominas (1953) offers a diachronic discussion of yeísmo (the merger of the palatal lateral /λ/ and the midpalatal fricative /j/ in favor of the latter) and lleísmo (the lack of such merger).

Lexical studies are represented by four papers. Fritz Krüger (1950) focuses on the agricultural vocabulary of the Northwestern part of the Iberian Peninsula. Samuel Gili Gaya (1953) investigates the incorporation of learned words into the seventeenth-century Spanish underworld jargon. Berta Elena Vidal de Battini (1953) provides an analysis of the vocabulary related to the cultivation and processing of yerba mate. Marcos A. Morínigo (1953) looks at a series of factors that have influenced the Latin American Spanish vocabulary.

Ángel Rosenblat (1950) offers a commentary on the widely known American-Spanish syntax by Charles E. Kany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945). Max Leopold Wagner (1950) discusses the derogative function of the suffix -eco in Latin American Spanish. Álvaro Galmés de Fuentes (1950) focuses on the linguistic characteristics of the Libros de los repartimientos de Mallorca y Valencia and the clues that these texts provide about Mozarabic. Ana María Barrenechea (1953) examines the linguistic concerns of Jorge Luis Borges expressed in his essays and assesses the manifestation of these preoccupations in Borges’s works of fiction.

This volume is a valuable source for any Hispanist and for any linguist interested in the key works on Spanish published during the 1950s.