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

For decades, students of Spanish historical linguistics have had to approach the origins and evolution of Spanish by resorting to the available standard manuals, which are ill fitted to today’s undergraduate courses for a variety of reasons. Some of them presuppose abundant previous knowledge in linguistics, others pay little attention to the social environment of linguistic changes, and virtually none of them include any type of student activities. Núñez Méndez’s Fundamentos teóricos y prácticos de historia de la lengua española takes a very different approach by presenting linguistic phenomena along with their social background, adding a variety of practical activities, and providing a series of illustrative texts. The result is a highly versatile resource that may be confidently adopted by instructors as an undergraduate textbook.

Fundamentos consists of a main section with 10 chapters and a series of supplementary materials. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the ethno-cultural and linguistic background of the Iberian Peninsula from the pre-Roman era to the medieval period. Chapter 2 deals with the formation of the early Iberian Romance varieties and the influence of Basque on early Castilian. Chapter 3 focuses on the phonetic and phonological changes between Latin and medieval Spanish, as well as patterns of semantic change. Chapter 4 describes the changes affecting the morphological stock of Latin as it changed into Spanish, especially in nouns and verbs. Chapter 5 elaborates on the history of the Spanish spelling and punctuation system. Chapters 6 and 7 provide a rich selection of sample texts from the early glosas to the Diccionario de Autoridades, including some Galician-Portuguese and Catalan texts. Chapter 8 concentrates on the dialectal origins of Latin American Spanish and the lexical consequences of the contact between colonial Spanish and Amerindian languages. Chapter 9 highlights a selection of topics, including voseo or the background of the use of español and castellano as labels for the language. Chapter 10 explains the phonetic equivalence of medieval spellings. The supplementary materials consist of 7 appendices with practical historical, phonetic and lexical information, a collection of historical maps, a glossary, notes and a bibliography.

Fundamentos is a complete, information-rich textbook that succeeds in integrating internal and external language history. Several aspects are worthy of praise. First, the book has clearly been written with the undergraduate student in mind. For instance, every chapter includes a series of activities that check for comprehension of the material and require students to apply what they have learned to analyze specific data or to understand the behavior of forms in context. These questions oftentimes address aspects of Spanish that are usually challenging to second-language learners, thus helping students understand the historical basis for the apparent inconsistencies of the language. The selection of linguistic texts in Chapters 6 and 7 and the accompanying commentaries are particularly useful. Instructors may select specific texts to illustrate the phonological, grammatical and spelling phenomena discussed in class without having to look for these texts elsewhere. The appendices also provide readers with a wealth of additional information that can be used to further illustrate different parts of the main presentation. The language used by the author is another positive aspect of this book: Núñez Méndez avoids the excessive use of obscure linguistic terminology and strives to present linguistic phenomena in a clear and accessible, yet rigorous manner. Perhaps the main accomplishment of this textbook is the fact that it goes beyond the classical chronological presentation of historical highlights and linguistic phenomena to include topics and materials that are of interest to students of Spanish as a second language; for instance, the history of Spanish spelling or the origins of the variation in forms of address throughout the Spanish-speaking world. The numerous diagrams and tables that accompany the text add to the clarity of the...