Antología conmemorativa: Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica. Cincuenta tomos. Vol. 2 (review)

The present work is the second of the two anniversary collections published by Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica (NRFH) to celebrate the appearance of its fiftieth volume. Volume 2 contains thirty-two selected articles that have been published in the journal over the years. These include eighteen papers on literary topics and fourteen papers concerned with linguistics. I limit my description to the linguistic articles, giving in parentheses the original publication date.

A series of papers in the collection adopt a diachronic or philological perspective. Eugenio Coseriu (1961) challenges the Arabic origin of several Spanish and Rumanian expressions, arguing that these originated within the Romance language family. Rafael Lapesa (1961) traces the development of the Latin demonstratives into the Spanish and French articles. Margherita Morreale (1963–64) offers a philological commentary on the Evangelio de San Mateo según el manuscrito escurialense I-j-6: Texto, gramática y vocabulario published by Thomas Montgomery in 1962. Germán de Granda (1978) examines the history behind the verbal diphthongized voseo forms. Yakov Malkiel (1988) describes the demise of Old Spanish nozir, nuzir ‘harm’ during the Late Middle Ages.

The different varieties of Spanish constitute the focus of a cluster of five papers. María Josefa Canellada de Zamora and Alonso Zamora Vicente (1960), as well as Juan M. Lope Blanch (1963–64), treat the reduction and the loss of unstressed vowels in Mexican Spanish. Tracy D. Terrell (1978) focuses on the aspiration and the elision of the implosive and final /s/ in the Spanish of Puerto Rico. Manuel Alvar (1988) challenges the notion of el dialecto andaluz ‘the Andalusian dialect’. Guillermo L. Guitarte (1992) and María Beatriz Fontanella de Weinberg (1995) take up the phenomenon of rehilamiento in the nineteenth-century Spanish of Buenos Aires.

Two articles employ Spanish data to consider issues related to linguistic terminology and linguistic theory. Bernard Pottier (1961) explores the notion of auxiliary verb. José Pedro Rona (1973) addresses the question of linguistic norm in the context of the different local, regional, national, and pan-Latin American features.

Finally, Antonio Quilis (1982) provides a description of the grammar of Tagalog Arte y reglas de la lengua tagala (1610) written by missionary Francisco de San José Blancas and places this work within the context of the missionary linguistics of the Philippines.

This volume is a valuable source for Hispanists, and for linguists interested in key works on the Spanish language published from the 1960s to the 1990s.