Early Modern Spanish (also called Classical Spanish or Golden Age Spanish, especially in literary contexts) is the variant of Spanish used between the end of the 15th century and the end of the 17th century, marked by a series of phonological and grammatical changes that transformed

Old Spanish Old Spanish (, , ; ), also known as Old Castilian or Medieval Spanish, refers to the varieties of Ibero-Romance spoken predominantly in Castile and environs during the Middle Ages. The earliest, longest, and most famous literary composition in O ...

into Modern Spanish. Notable changes from Old Spanish to Early Modern Spanish include: (1) a readjustment of the sibilants (including their devoicing and changes in their

place of articulation In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation (also point of articulation) of a consonant is an approximate location along the vocal tract where its production occurs. It is a point where a constriction is made between an active and a pa ...

, wherein voicing remains before voiced consonants, such as , , and , but only allophonically), (2) the phonemic merger known as '' yeísmo'', (3) the rise of new second-person pronouns, (4) the emergence of the "se lo" construction for the sequence of third-person indirect and direct object pronouns, and (5) new restrictions on the order of

clitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic ( , backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ...

pronouns. Early Modern Spanish corresponds to the period of Spanish colonization of the Americas, and thus it forms the historical basis of all varieties of New World Spanish. Meanwhile, Judaeo-Spanish preserves some archaisms of

that disappeared from the rest of the variants, such as the presence of voiced sibilants and the maintenance of the phonemes and . Early Modern Spanish, however, was not uniform throughout the Spanish-speaking regions of Spain. Each change has its own chronology and, in some cases, geography. Slightly different pronunciations existed simultaneously. The Spanish spoken in Toledo was taken as the "best" variety and was different from that of Madrid.

Phonology

From the late 16th century to the mid-17th century, the voiced sibilants , , lost their voicing and merged with their respective voiceless counterparts: laminal , apical , and palatal , resulting in the phonemic inventory shown below: * The phoneme (from Old Spanish initial ) progressively became silent in most areas, though it still exists for some words in varieties of

Andalusia Andalusia ( , ; , ) is the southernmost autonomous communities of Spain, autonomous community in Peninsular Spain, located in the south of the Iberian Peninsula, in southwestern Europe. It is the most populous and the second-largest autonomou ...

and

Extremadura Extremadura ( ; ; ; ; Fala language, Fala: ''Extremaúra'') is a landlocked autonomous communities in Spain, autonomous community of Spain. Its capital city is Mérida, Spain, Mérida, and its largest city is Badajoz. Located in the central- ...

. In several modern dialects, the sound is the realization of the phoneme ; additionally, in many dialects it exists as a result of the debuccalization of in syllabic coda (a process commonly termed ''aspiration'' in Hispanic linguistics). * In the

Americas The Americas, sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising the totality of North America and South America.''Webster's New World College Dictionary'', 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Cleveland, Ohio. When viewed as a sing ...

, the

Canary Islands The Canary Islands (; ) or Canaries are an archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean and the southernmost Autonomous communities of Spain, Autonomous Community of Spain. They are located in the northwest of Africa, with the closest point to the cont ...

, and almost all of Andalusia, the apical merged with laminal (the resulting phoneme is represented as ). In central and northern Spain, shifted to , and the apicoalveolar sibilant was preserved without change and so it can be represented phonemically as ). Some authors use the transcription and for and/or for . * Many dialects have lost the distinction between the phonemes and in a merger, called '' yeísmo''. Both phonemes have remained separate in parts of the

Iberian Peninsula The Iberian Peninsula ( ), also known as Iberia, is a peninsula in south-western Europe. Mostly separated from the rest of the European landmass by the Pyrenees, it includes the territories of peninsular Spain and Continental Portugal, comprisin ...

and in parts of

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a considerably smaller portion in the Northern Hemisphere. It can also be described as the southern Subregion#Americas, subregion o ...

, mainly in

Bolivia Bolivia, officially the Plurinational State of Bolivia, is a landlocked country located in central South America. The country features diverse geography, including vast Amazonian plains, tropical lowlands, mountains, the Gran Chaco Province, w ...

Paraguay Paraguay, officially the Republic of Paraguay, is a landlocked country in South America. It is bordered by Argentina to the Argentina–Paraguay border, south and southwest, Brazil to the Brazil–Paraguay border, east and northeast, and Boli ...

, and

Peru Peru, officially the Republic of Peru, is a country in western South America. It is bordered in the north by Ecuador and Colombia, in the east by Brazil, in the southeast by Bolivia, in the south by Chile, and in the south and west by the Pac ...

Grammar

* A readjustment of the second-person pronouns differentiates Modern Spanish from

. To eliminate the ambiguity of the form , which served for both the second-person singular formal and the second-person plural, two alternative forms were created: ** The form (< < , 'your grace') as a form of respect in the second-person singular. ** The form (< , "you others") as a usual form of second-person plural. In parts of Andalusia, in the Canary Islands, and in the Americas, however, the form did not take hold, and the form came to be used for both the formal and the informal second-person plural. * The loss of the phoneme —through a merger with —caused the medieval forms (consisting of an indirect object followed by a direct object) to be reinterpreted as , , , , as in 'I gave it to him/her' > Early Modern Spanish > Modern Spanish . * In Early Modern Spanish, clitic pronouns were still often suffixed to a finite verb form, as in Portuguese, but they began to alternate with preverbal forms, which became the norm in Modern Spanish: and > ("he/she/it got ill") and ("he/she/it died").

Spelling

Spelling in Early Modern Spanish was anarchic, unlike the Spanish of today, which is governed and standardized by the

Real Academia Española The Royal Spanish Academy (, ; ) is Spain's official royal institution with a mission to ensure the stability of the Spanish language. It is based in Madrid, Spain, and is affiliated with national language academies in 22 other Hispanopho ...

, a semi-governmental body. There was no reference book or other authority writers or compositors could turn to, to find the "correct" spelling of a word. In fact, spelling was not considered very important. Sometimes words were spelled according to their Latin origin, rather than their actual pronunciation (''trasumpto'' instead of ''trasunto''). That presents a challenge to modern editors of texts from the period, who are forced to choose what spelling(s) to use. The radical proposals of were not adopted.

Phonology

Grammar

Spelling

References

Notes

Citations

Sources

Further reading