A Brief History of the Spanish Language (review)

One of the most difficult tasks for any professor is to determine exactly the right amount of information to present, whether in an article, book, class, or a semester-length course. In fact, this task is considerably more difficult than attempting to exhaust the material with little or no consideration given to the constraints of pagination or time. The exercise of writing a "brief history" of the Spanish language had to have been especially difficult for David Pharies since he is such an outstanding scholar in the field. Nevertheless, his book is a triumph and is sure to become the standard textbook for courses on the history of the Spanish language. Beyond managing to cover all the requisite material, Pharies also includes new sections that will enhance student understanding of the essential information (for example, chapters presenting basic linguistic concepts and a concise explanation of the pertinent structures and peculiarities of Latin) and likely will inspire them to continue studying the history of Spanish. In his lively and entertaining prose, Pharies also manages to explode some long-standing myths. This is not the first book to attempt a more manageable history of Spanish (see, for example, Lathrop's The Evolution of Spanish), but it is by far the best.

The genesis of this book was the exhaustive nature of existing histories and their unsuitability for the typical, introductory history of the Spanish language course, an incongruity which Pharies points out had the undesired effect of "overwhelming beginners with details and technical explanations that are inappropriate for an introductory work" (xiii). Standard books on the subject, including Lapesa's Historia de la lengua española, Penny's A History of the Spanish Language, and Lloyd's From Latin to Spanish—all of them outstanding in their own right—simply were not suitable for the more modest task at hand: providing the right balance of external and internal history, explaining the essential developments in phonology and syntax-morphology, according syntactic evolution more attention, and providing answers to such recurring queries as why do we use the feminine form of an adjective when forming a –mente adverb, or why do we say "Se lo dio a Martha" ("He gave it to Martha") instead of "Le lo dio a Martha."

Because of his authority on the subject and experience teaching it, Pharies explains the most complicated topics with clarity and concision. In his introductory chapter, he presents the general concepts of language change in an enlightening manner. His examples—many of which are from English—illuminate the factors that cause languages to evolve and provide a linguistic framework for the rest of the book. What about phonological changes from Latin to Medieval Castilian? Pharies whittles them down to the twenty-two most essential (78), explaining each one of them in accessible language and offering splendid examples. This distillation will help not only students but also instructors by providing the latter with a manageable structure for their presentations and testing. Pharies' Brief History also provides opportunities for textual analysis and sample questions at the end of each chapter. Among the myths that Pharies debunks are the presumed sonority of "se lo" rather than of "le lo" (he also explains how the grammatically correct combination evolved, 113–14), the "lisping king" that supposedly introduced the ceceo /Θe Θé o/ into Peninsular Spanish (155), and, referring to an earlier study by Lipski, the long-accepted fundamentality of Andalusian Spanish as the origin of American Spanish (208–12). True to his introductory statements, these sections (and others) show Pharies' book to be not the least bit "lacking in academic vigor" (xiii); indeed, novice and expert alike stand to learn something from his Brief History. The glossary of linguistic terms, works cited, maps, and the section entitled "Rudiments of Spanish Phonetics and Phonology" are also beneficial.

Perhaps the only part of this marvelous book that could be developed in more detail is the section...