Pountain Christopher J. A History of the Spanish Language through Texts

Routledge, 2001. — xviii, 341 pages. — ISBN: 0–415–18061–9; ISBN: 0-203-18605-2.One way of approaching the history of a language is to lay out in a formal fashion the main changes observable in phonetics and morphology, citing single word examples for the former and paradigms, or sets of morphological forms, for the latter. This method has followed from the belief that changes in these areas essentially conform to regular patterns which can be abstracted from such data. Vocabulary has rarely been approached in a similarly systematic way (indeed, many linguists would deny that it can be), and has thus been the almost exclusive preserve of compendious etymological dictionaries which have generally dealt with the semantic histories of words on an individual basis. Syntax was for a long time a relatively neglected area of historical linguistics, finding a natural home in neither of these formats. Textual references to individual examples are of course frequently given, but continuous texts are cited less often, and usually in the form of an appendix. A History of the Spanish Language through Texts reverses these priorities. Making the study of individual texts a starting point for the history of the language does not lend itself to a comprehensive and systematic account of phonological and morphological change; it is like turning jigsaw pieces out of a box rather than seeing the whole picture at once. It cannot be guaranteed, even with careful choice of texts, that all phonetic changes will be illustrated, and quite unrealistic to assume that even a representative selection of morphological forms will emerge.Preliminaries
Latin and Romance
Early Romance
Al-Andalus
Early literature in Castilian: dialect diversity and mixture
The Castilian norm
Prose documents in Castilian from the fifteenth century
The Golden Age: linguistic self-awareness
The Golden Age
The Enlightenment
Modern Peninsular Spanish
Latin America
US Spanish
Judeo-Spanish
Caló
The African connection
Creoles and contact vernaculars