Whats wrong with Spanish?: Its evolution and how it is today

During the B.C. time, in the Iberian peninsula, there were many groups of Celtic tribes. It was around that time that Romans started to seize the land of many, The Iberian peninsula being one of them. Soon, the Latin spoken by the Romans and the many Celtic languages spoken merged, creating many dialects of Latin that I will call Iberian Latin. Soon after, Germanic people also came to influence these languages because of their many invasions.Years passed, and the language evolved even more, but when Moors invaded the area, it would have a great impact on the language. After the defeat of the Moors, there were many dialects of what we call Spanish and Portuguese (there are more descendants today of those same languages, but I will not go into detail). Theses dialects broke up, and one of them is the direct ancestor of the Spanish we know today. Many people think the it was Basque that influenced the f-h change, but it was an internal change, staying only as f in front of "u" and"o". It also did not change in front of "y", which was like modern French "u", but this sound merged in some cases with "u", and in others to "i". Then Spain took over went into the Americas, and then took over other countries like France, Italy, parts of Germany, and many other places. Spanish took a drastic turn during these times. Before, in Old Spanish, things were conjugated in way very similar to how Modern French does today. It was a more complicated language, and the neuter gender was still present. The genders definite articles were placed at the end of the word("mano'l for modern "la mano"). "J" was pronounced /ʒ/( like french "J"), "x" was pronounced as either /ks/ or /ʃ/( english" sh"), and "y" was still a vowel and pronounced as /y/( french "u"). Aspirated letters ( like english "t", "k"and "p") where present, but in only small cases, "th" being mostly pronounced as /θ/, "ph" as /ɸ /, and "ch" as /tʃ/. V and b merged into /β/, c still kept the Latin sound(/k/), being pronounced as /ts/ when it was the letter "ç". "z" was pronounced as /dz/, and s was /z/ in between vowels unless s was doubled("esso" for "eso"). "H" was still pronounced as /h/. Over time, Spanish lost sounds thanks to the mixing with other languages and people trying to standardize it. /ʒ/ and /ʃ/ merged into /ʃ/, then into /ç/, and finally into /x/. /ts/ and /dz/ merged into /ts/, then into /θ/ in Europe and /s/ in the Americas. "s" changed into /s/ in all cases. "ph" fused with "f", turning into /f/. "ch" finally succumb in /tʃ/ in all cases, and "th" fused with "t", being /t/. "y" went to ways, either into /i/ or /u/. Then neuter gender was deleted, being kept in words like "le" and "les". /h/ was gone too. Then came the spelling change that we know today. In words that kept the /ʒ/ sound, the letter y was placed. /x/ was spelled "j" or "ge" or "gi". What was once /ts/ and /dz/ was respelled as "c" before i or e and z before anything else. /ʒ/ turned into /ʝ/, fusing with/ʎ/ in some dialects. Truly, Spanish lost many of the aspects it had, but people should not hate because of that. Embrace it. Tell it you love it every once in while. Buy it a gift. Be good to it, because it has gone through and very treacherous path.

Hi Komtu,

yes it is incredible just how drastically the phonetic system of Spanish went along reducing to this day.

As you point out with your illustration of the rich variety of consonants present in Early Spanish, a speaker like El Cid in the late 11th century would have had a much greater facility to learn foregin language sounds than do most modern day Spaniards! Thus he could have imitated most of Portuguese sounds (minus of course the nasalised vowels among others), Catalan x-/ch-, j, tx, dz, Italian 'gi-/ge-', initial 'z' and intervocalic '-zz-'.

We know how and -more or less- when this simplifying revolution occured but the question that interests me is: why?

There is no doubt that Basque did exercise some influence on the pronunciation, perhaps even reducing the musicality of the tone to make it sound stacatto and percussive (what to many foregin ears appears like a 'machine gun' effect), a very austere metre to the spoken form. But as you have suggested, surely Basque proximity can't have been the only factor (after all, Basque also influenced the Gascon variant of Occitan across the Pyrenees but this was limited to the 'f-h' change and little else).

Could it have been that as Old Castilian moved southwards across the meseta it encountered the Arabised speaking patterns of the Mozarabe Christians and that their adoption of this language eventually transformed it? Remember that due to Arab-Berber occupation, these Vulgar Latin speakers had effectively been cut off from linguistic developments from the 8th to 11th centuries (during which time the other more northernly Vulgar dialects were emerging as Proto-romance languages and then into de facto Old Ibero-romance languages). Was it not the case that the Mozarabe Romance varieties were more antiquated (ie, frozen in the 8th century) approximations of early medieval vulgar Latin and therefore would have possessed a) - a more limited sound system b) recently incorporated sounds from Arabic including the guttural 'jota' aspiration and the /θ/ sound from Berber?

Of course, for Spanish to have reduced its phonetic system, there must have been some recompense, some incentive..ie, that it would have facilitiated its acceptance among the occupants of the (Mozarabic) territories into which it spread, and hence its success as a lingua franca across the peninsula.

Care to propose any theories?

Mozarabic had more vowels than Old Castilian.

<<Mozarabic had more vowels than Old Castilian>>.

OK, so this suggests that Basque must exercised the biggest influence. Right?

It just remains bizarre as to why Old Castilian speaking settlers, soldiers, traders and their children would have simplified their vowel system for no apparent reason during the expansion from the 13th-15th centuries (and most of the phonetic changes weren't finalised until the mid-16th century, and even less so in certain zones of Sevilla-Cordoba, Canarias etc).

Just consider that during this time, these settlers would have been coming into contact with other Romance speaking peoples: for example, Catalan speakers in the Aragonese armies, and would've been exposed to the equally rich phonetic range of such languages. Why would these Old Castilian speakers feel the need or see any benefit to reduce their phonics in order to communicate with these other Iberians? Surely this outward contact would have had the opposite effect on the language? That it would have reinforced the pre-exisiting phonetic values, if not outright introduced an even greater variety of new sounds... but not to reduce them!

Could there have been another, less obvious, environmental factor? I've heard strange examples as to how phonology can be shaped by things such as the weather! For example, in eastern Scotland around the Aberdeen coastal areas, speakers there of both local English developed a distinct whistling sound (similar to Peninsular Castillian 's') since apparently the cold harsh winds of the North Sea caused them to contract and tighten their lips, curling them up and leaving the teeth visible (like the aggressive body language of canines).

Also mozarabic was spoken in Portugal. So I don't think it had big impact on linguistic idiosincrasy of Spanish. On the other hand Basque influenced Spanish only , not Portuguese. Basque has 5 vowels like Spanish, it provoked Spanish to lose initial f in many words, Spanish also has many basque words, intonation is the same... If you hear Basque its intonation is even more staccato. Spanish spoken in the South, for example in Canary Islands, is more melodious.