Download A Developmental History of the Hispano-Romance Verb

A Developmental History of the Hispano-Romance Verb Conjugations
Dissertation
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University
By
Thomas William Stovicek, M.A.
Graduate Program in Spanish and Portuguese
The Ohio State University
2010
Dissertation Committee:
Wayne J. Redenbarger, Advisor
Fernando Martínez-Gil
David Odden
Copyright by
Thomas William Stovicek
2010
Abstract
This study outlines the development of Portuguese and Spanish verbal morphology from
Latin in the context of the Hispanic branch of Romance, with a focus on the
conjugational classes, whose number has been reduced to only three in this branch of
Western Romance. It is innovative in approaching the topic as a study of sequential
productive grammars in an Item and Process type framework. We have found evidence
to indicate that in addition to regular phonological change, morphological restructuring
and language contact each played an important role in the reclassification of the Latin
verb classes II-IV into the verb classes of the Hispano-Romance daughter languages. The
historical data studied have been collected from published secondary sources of
manuscript and dialectological data and supplemented with data from searchable
electronic corpora.
ii
Dedication
Dedicated to my wife, Vanessa, who is my soulmate, best friend and greatest inspiration
iii
Acknowledgments
I wish to acknowledge all the outstanding faculty and staff of The Department of Spanish
and Portuguese and The Department of Linguistics at The Ohio State University who
have aided, taught, inspired and elightened me these past 10 years, and especially Dr.
Wayne J. Redenbarger who has been not only an incredible teacher and dedicated mentor
for many years, but also a dear friend. I also wish to acknowledge the College of Arts and
College of Humanities and the Post-Prospectus Fellowship which greatly facilitated the
completion of this dissertation. And of course, I must aknowledge my dear and beloved
family whose unfaltering love and patience form a network of support without which I
could never find the courage to follow my dreams.
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Vita
2000………………………………………... Indian Valley High School
2004………………………………………... B.A. Portuguese, With Distinction, The
Ohio State University
2004………………………………………... B.A. Spanish, With Honors, The Ohio
State University
2004 to present…………………………….. Graduate Teaching Associate, Department
of Spanish and Portuguese, The Ohio State
University
2006………………………………………... M.A. Spanish and Portuguese - Hispanic
Linguistics, The Ohio State University
Publications
Stovicek, Thomas. 2004. A Sociolinguistic Analysis of the Factors Resulting in the
Successful Imposition of the Portuguese Language in Brazil. Precedings of the
National Conference on Undergraduate Research, 2004.
v
Nazareth Soares Fonseca, Maria. 2007. Master Tamoda and His Adventures in Language.
Research in African Literatures. Trans. Thomas Stovicek. 38.1: 75-86.
Assis Duarte, Eduardo de. 2007. Machado de Assis's African Descent. Research in
African Literatures. Trans. Thomas Stovicek. 38.1: 134-151.
Fields of Study
Major Field: Spanish and Portuguese
Hispanic Linguistics
Historical Romance Linguistics
Phonology and Morphology
Language Change
Language Contact
Dialectology
vi
Table of Contents
Abstract .......................................................................................................................... ii
Acknowledgments ......................................................................................................... iv
Table of Contents ......................................................................................................... vii
List of Tables................................................................................................................. ix
List of Figures ............................................................................................................... xi
List of Abbreviations .................................................................................................... xii
Chapter 1: Introduction ....................................................................................................1
Chapter 2: Verbal Morpho-phonology of Classical Latin .................................................7
Chapter 3: Historical Morphology and Phonology in Generative Grammar .................... 24
Chapter 4: Relevant Phonological Changes in the Vulgar Latin of the Iberian Peninsula 34
Chapter 5: Historical Data from Hispano-Romance ....................................................... 46
Chapter 6: Relevant Changes in the Morpho-phonology of the Hispano-Romance
Languages ..................................................................................................................... 57
Chapter 7: Summary and Conclusions ........................................................................... 85
References ..................................................................................................................... 93
Appendix A: Color key to Classical Latin and Hispano-Romance verb data................... 97
Appendix B: CL simple verbs with Modern Spanish and Portuguese Reflexes ............... 98
vii
Appendix C: CL compound prefixed verbs and Modern Spanish and Portuguese Reflexes
.................................................................................................................................... 103
viii
List of Tables
Table 1.1. Modern Castilian and Portuguese cognate verbs which disagree in conjugation
membership. ....................................................................................................................4
Table 2.1. Minimal pairs in CL based on contrastive vowel length, from Penny (2002:
45). ..................................................................................................................................9
Table 2.2. The four CL conjugation classes according to the traditional classification. ... 10
Table 2.3. Differences in the paradigms of CL conjugations III and IIIi in the present
active tense. Adapted from Anderson (1978: 174,176). .................................................. 11
Table 2.4. The CL conjugation classes according to Hall (1983:179). ............................ 12
Table 2.5. The CL Conjugation classes following Redenbarger (1976). ......................... 13
Table 2.6. Two third declension neuter nouns, from Redenbarger (1976: 2). .................. 15
Table 2.7. /ĭ/-epenthesis in third declension nouns. ........................................................ 16
Table 2.8. Application of CL rhotacism and vowel-lowering in the inflection of corpus.17
Table 3.1. The present indicative paradigm of the Modern Castilian verb perder „to lose‟.
...................................................................................................................................... 28
Table 3.2. The present indicative paradigm of the Old French verb amer „to love‟. ........ 28
Table 3.3. The present indicative paradigm of the Modern French verb aimer „to love‟. 29
Table 3.4. Innovative weak preterites in Aragonese and their standard Castilian
equivalents. ................................................................................................................... 30
ix
Table 4.3. The merger of CL vowels in HR tonic position.............................................. 39
Table 4.4. The merger of CL vowels in HR atonic position. ........................................... 39
Table 4.5. The merger of CL vowels in HR word-final atonic position. .......................... 40
Table 4.6. The predicted reclassification of the CL verb conjugations in HR based on
regular sound change. .................................................................................................... 45
Table 5.1. Past Perfect Stem Classification (Perfect Type) ............................................. 52
Table 5.2 Perfect Participle Classification (Part. Type) .................................................. 52
Table 6.1. Latinisms in Castilian taken from the Latin second conjugation .................... 67
Table 6.2. Latinisms in Portuguese taken from the Latin second conjugation ................. 68
Table 6.3 Some Latinisms in Castilian taken from the Latin third (athematic) conjugation
...................................................................................................................................... 74
Table 6.4 Some Latinisms in Portuguese taken from the Latin third (athematic)
conjugation .................................................................................................................... 75
Table 6.5 Some Portuguese Latinisms from the Latin third (athematic) conjugation
alongside their Galician cognates. .................................................................................. 76
x
List of Figures
Figure 4.1. The Vulgar Latin vowel inventory as described by many traditional accounts.
...................................................................................................................................... 35
Figure 4.2. The Vulgar Latin surface vowels before the loss of the length distinction. .... 36
Figure 4.3. The Vulgar Latin inventory of vocalic phonemes after the loss of the length
distinction. ..................................................................................................................... 37
Figure 5.1. A sample view of the spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel 2007. ......................... 56
xi
List of Abbreviations
1SG: first-person singular
1PL: first-person plural
2PL: second-person plural
ant.: antiquated
atr: advanced tongue root
C: consonant
Cast.: Castilian
CdE: Corpus del español
CdP: Corpus do português
CL: Classical Latin
DRAE: Diccionario de la Real Academia Española
HR: Hispano-Romance
Mod.: Modern
PLD: Primary linguistic data
Port.: Portuguese
rtr: retracted tongue root
RV: root-vowel
TV: theme-vowel or thematic vowel
V: vowel
xii
Chapter 1: Introduction
All students of the Spanish and/or Portuguese languages are familiar with the
three conjugation classes, although they may not all know them by that term. Textbooks
for teaching Spanish or Portuguese as a foreign language divide verbs into the groups: “ar verbs”, “-er verbs” and “-ir verbs”, based on the vowel found before the final –r which
is characteristic of verb infinitives in these languages. These groupings hold the key to
learning a large portion of the inflectional morphology of verbs in these languages
because choosing the “correct” inflectional ending often depends on the group to which
the verb belongs. These groupings are also frequently referred to by number, where the –
ar verbs constitute the “first conjugation”, the –er verbs the “second conjugation” and the
–ir verbs the “third conjugation”.
Spanish and Portuguese are both members of the Hispano-Romance language
family, which in turn is a branch of the Romance family of languages; a branch of the
Indo-European language family. The Hispano-Romance family of languages includes the
languages which developed from Latin as it was spoken in the Iberian Peninsula, the
geographic location of modern-day Spain and Portugual. Although Spanish and
Portuguese are, by far, the most widely spoken languages in this family, they are just two
of its members. Galician, Leonese, Asturian and Aragonese are also represented by a
significant body of literature and continue to be spoken natively (often alongside
1
Castilian) by regional populations in Spain. From here on, I will primarily use the name
Castilian in reference to the national language of Spain, and that which is spoken
throughout Spanish-speaking Latin America and elsewhere in former territories of Spain.
This is simply to distinguish this variety from the other Romance varieties which are also
native to Spain. Catalan is a Romance language which is spoken along the eastern coast
of the Iberian Peninsula and along the Spanish border with France. Some scholars of
Romance linguistics group Catalan together with the Hispano-Romance languages as part
of the Ibero-Romance family of languages. However, Catalan shares certain structural
characteristics with languages of the Gallo-Romance family (of which French is a
member), and so other scholars prefer not to group it with Hispano-Romance, but rather
(along with Occitan) in a separate family which is neither Hispano-Romance, nor GalloRomance. Due to some of these structural differences, especially as they relate to the verb
conjugations which are the focal point of the present study, Catalan will not be given
extensive consideration here.
Latin is generally described as having four conjugation classes (see Chapter 2).
Among the Romance languages, only those of the Hispano-Romance subfamily have
completely reduced their conjugation classes, completely eliminating the stress pattern
once characteristic of Latin conjugation-III verbs, to just three conjugations. This
development sets the Hispano-Romance (HR) languages apart from the rest of Romance
in terms of verbal morphology.
Despite the common origin and close relationship between the HR languages, if
we make a comparison of cognate verbs between any two of them, we will quickly notice
that a number of verbs differ in their conjugation class membership. Table 1.1 lists a
2
number of Castilian and Portuguese verbs that differ in this manner along with their Latin
etymons.
Latin Verb
Modern Castilian
Modern Portuguese
fervēre
hervir
ferver
possidēre
poseer
possuir
morī
morir
morrer
percipĕre
percibir
perceber
tussīre
toser
tossir
bat(t)(u)ĕre
batir
bater
cadĕre
caer
cair
constringĕre
costreñir / costriñir
constranger
deterĕre (reterĕre)
derretir
derreter
dīcĕre
decir
dizer
ēligĕre
elegir/eligir
eleger
ērigĕre
erigir / erguir
erguer
exprimĕre
exprimir
espremer / exprimir
fervĕre
hervir
ferver
gemĕre
gemir
gemer
occurrĕre
ocurrir
ocorrer
expellĕre
expeler
expelir
repoenitĕre
repentirse / arrepentirse
arrepender-se
praedīcere
predecir
predizer
reddĕre (rendĕre?)
rendir / render
render
regĕre
regir
reger
requīrĕre
Continued
requerir
requerer
3
Table 1.1 continued
scrībĕre
escribir
escrever
tangĕre
tangir
tanger
convertĕre
convertir
converter
vīvĕre
vivir
viver
sufferre
sufrir
sofrer
Table 1.1. Modern Castilian and Portuguese cognate verbs which disagree in conjugation
membership.
These differences pose an interesting problem for historical linguistics. If we take
into account only the regular sound changes which are known to have taken place in
Hispano-Romance during development of this language family from Latin (see Chapter
4), the above-illustrated differences in conjugation come as a surprise. Therefore, the data
suggest that the evolution of the Hispano-Romance verbs is more complex than what can
be accounted for by historical phonology alone.
The reduction of the conjugation classes in number, from four to three, in
Castilian has been previously discussed by a number of linguists. The process has
generally been described as a collapse of Latin conjugations II and III along with the
movement of some of these verbs (primarily from conjugation III) to conjugation IV.
Several studies have also emphasized the importance of the role played by the stem
vowel (or root vowel) in the reclassification of verbs in Castilian. It has been claimed that
the –er conjugation excluded all verbs with high stem vowels, whereas all verbs of the –ir
4
conjugation include some forms with high stem vowels. Verbs with the stem vowel /a/
are considered “neutral” in this process (Lloyd 1986: 283).
Far less attention has been given to the reduction of the conjugation classes and
the reclassification of affected verbs in the other HR languages. However, a brief look at
data like that given above in Table 1.1 shows that the process must have varied between
varieties of Hispano-Romance. This fact alone warrants a new study of this change from
a wider perspective which incorporates data from throughout the Hispano-Romance
language family.
Furthermore, some linguists have challenged the traditional description of the
Latin verb conjugation system (see Chapter 2). These analyses, especially that of
Redenbarger (1976), posit an athematic verb conjugation which lacks the underlying
theme vowel which is central to the distinction between verbs in the traditional fourconjugation description of the Latin verb system. A thorough study of the development of
the Hispano-Romance verb conjugations that takes into account this finding regarding the
morpho-phonology of Latin has not previously been undertaken.
This dissertation describes the findings of such a study. The study traces the
development of the three-conjugation system of the Hispano-Romance language family
from the five-conjugation system of Classical Latin described by Redenbarger (1976)
with attention to how the system of productive morpho-phonological rules changed from
one stage of the language to another, and to how the overall development of the system
varied between varieties within the language family. The results of this study strongly
suggest that, in addition to regular phonological change, morphological restructuring and
5
language contact were instrumental in shaping the verb conjugations of the HR
languages.
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Chapter 2: Verbal Morpho-phonology of Classical Latin
Latin is the ancestor of Spanish, Portuguese and all other Romance languages.
The Romance languages are Latin as it continues to be spoken today in the diverse and
far-reaching territories of the Romance-speaking world. “[T]here is an unbroken chain of
speakers, each learning his or her language from parents and contemporaries, stretching
from the people of the Western Roman Empire two thousand years ago to the present
population of the Spanish-speaking world (Penny 2002: 4),” and the same can easily be
said of Portuguese and the other Hispano-Romance varieties. Although it has been
recognized since at least the nineteenth century that the Romance languages do not
exactly descend from Classical Latin (the literary language), but rather from spoken, nonliterary varieties (referred to collectively as Vulgar Latin) (Penny 2002: 4), the study of
Classical Latin still plays a key role in our understanding of the history of the Romance
languages. This is simply due to the fact that the knowledge we have of Vulgar Latin is
fragmentary and incomplete in comparison to the wealth of data preserved in the
Classical Latin texts. “There can be no such thing as a „Vulgar Latin text‟. Texts of all
kinds are composed, by definition, by the educated and therefore in the codified or
„standard‟ variety of Latin in which such writers have inevitably been trained (Penny
2002: 6).” Latin was a member of the Italic branch of Indo-European, and was spoken
originally in a small area around the mouth of the Tiber known as Latium (Hall 1974:
7
47). All languages have some degree of variation between speakers, and Latin cannot
have been an exception. As it spread across the vast Roman Empire, the diversity of oral
expression from one geographic region to another increased as well. The separation
between the literary standard and the popular, spoken language became more marked in
the first century B.C. Classical Latin thenceforth became more and more static, while
popular speech continued to develop more-or-less independently (Hall 1974: 71).
Classical Latin can be seen as the best-documented evidence we have of the historical
roots shared by all Romance languages, while at the same time it must be recognized that
significant (though scarcely documented) change and diversity had already developed in
the spoken variety (or varieties) of Latin long before the appearance of the first Romancelanguage texts. Despite the fact that there is a considerable gap in the data regarding the
stages and varieties of the language that lie between Classical Latin and any of the
Romance languages, the division between Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin should not be
over-exaggerated. “Whatever the influences which have come to bear on the Romance
languages during the course of their history, their most prominent feature is an abiding
Latinity. From Latium came virtually all their structure and by far the greater part of their
vocabulary (Elcock 1960: 18).”
The remainder of the present chapter will constitute an attempt to summarize
those aspects of Classical Latin morpho-phonological structure that are essential in order
to contextualize the discussion of the historical development of the conjugation classes of
Hispano-Romance that will follow in the subsequent chapters of this dissertation.
8
The Latin vowel system
Classical Latin distinguished between five vowels in terms of articulation. The CL
vowel system was also sensitive to quantity, such that there was a phonemic distinction
between long and short vowels (henceforth represented in the traditional way by the
presence of brevs and macrons respectively). Thus, there were a total of ten vocalic
phonemes in the in the CL system: /ă/, /ā/, /ĕ/, /ē/, /ĭ/, /ī/, /ŏ/, /ō/, /ŭ/ and /ū/.
The phonemic distinction made between long and short vowels can be illustrated
by the existence of minimal pairs such as those given in Table 2.a.
Long vowel
Short vowel
HĪC „here‟
LĪBER „free‟
LĒVIS „smooth‟
VĒNIT „he came‟
MĀLUM „apple‟
ŌS „mouth‟
PŌPULUS „white poplar‟
HĬC „this‟
LĬBER „book‟
LĔVIS „light in weight‟
VĔNIT „he comes‟
MĂLUM „evil, misfortune‟
ŎS „bone‟
PŎPULUS „people‟
Table 2.1. Minimal pairs in CL based on contrastive vowel length, from Penny (2002:
45).
Of the many diphthongs which existed in the oldest Latin texts, only three are
preserved in the literary texts of Classical Latin. These are [aj], [oj] and [aw] (spelled ae,
oe and au respectively) (Elcock 1960: 43).
9
The Conjugation Classes
Traditional descriptions of the Classical Latin conjugations (Anderson 1979,
Lloyd 1987, Penny 2002, Williams 1962, and others) indicate four distinct thematic
classes of verbs, distinguished by a thematic vowel appearing in the present active
infinitive form of the verb. These are shown in Table 2.1 with representative verb forms.
CL Conjugation
Theme vowel
Present, active
infinitive form
I
/ā/
cantāre
II
/ē/
vidēre
III
/ĕ/
perdĕre
IV
/ī/
sentīre
Table 2.2. The four CL conjugation classes according to the traditional classification.
As Table 2.2 illustrates, conjugations I, II and IV were characterized by the
phonemically long vowels /ā/, /ē/ and /ī/ respectively, whereas conjugation III was
characterized by the short vowel /ĕ/. It is also customary to distinguish between two
subgroups of conjugation III, according to certain differences in the surface paradigms of
these verbs as exemplified in Table 2.3 below.
10
Infinitive
perdĕre
(III)
fugĕre
(IIIi)
1SG
perdō
perdam
fugiō
fugiam
2SG
perdis
perdās
fugis
fugiās
3SG
perdit
perdat
fugit
fugiat
1PL
perdimus
perdāmus
fugimus
fugiāmus
2PL
perditis
perdātis
fugitis
fugiātis
3PL
perdunt
perdant
fugiunt
fugiant
Mood
Indicative
Subjunctive
Indicative
Subjunctive
Table 2.3. Differences in the paradigms of CL conjugations III and IIIi in the present
active tense. Adapted from Anderson (1978: 174,176).
We can see from the examples in table 2.3 that conjugation IIIi differs from III by
the presence of an ĭ before the 1SG marker –ō a well as before the subjunctive marker -āthroughout the paradigm. Therefore, conjugation IIIi is generally treated as an irregular
subgroup of the verbs in conjugation III due to the identical vowels appearing in the
theme-vowel position in the surface forms of their present active infinitive forms and the
overall similarity of their surface forms in the present indicative active and other
paradigms.
Although this traditional classification of the CL verb conjugations continues to
be accepted by most scholars of Latin, and remains the standard model for use in the
11
teaching of Latin, some linguists have challenged the validity of the traditional analysis,
and have suggested alternative interpretations of the CL verb data. Hall claims that the
traditional presentation of the conjugation scheme errs in a number of ways. According
to his analysis, the dependence on the comparison of the present active infinitive to the
first person singular present active indicative as a basis for classifying verbs is
inadequate. He posits three theme vowels /a/, /e/, and /i/, each of which can be either
long or short, in addition to a zero theme (1983: 179). His classification is summarized in
Table 2.4.
Conjugation
I
a
b
II
a
b
III
a
b
IV
‘Stem’(Theme)-Vowel
ā
ă
ī
ĭ
ē
ĕ
Ø
Example stem
[kanta:] „sing‟
[da] „give‟
[dormi:] „sleep‟
[kapi] „seize‟
[kale:] „heat‟
[rege] „rule‟
[es] „be‟
Table 2.4. The CL conjugation classes according to Hall (1983:179).
Hall bases his classification on differences in the overall paradigms of the verbs
given in his table, rather than on the present active infinitive and the first person singular
active indicative. Unfortunately however, he does not otherwise offer any argument as to
the superiority of his analysis over the traditional classification. Some weaknesses in his
analysis are revealed when we consider that first, his /ă/-theme conjugation and Ø-theme
conjugation can be exemplified by just one verb each (DĂRE and ESSE, respectively)
and that each of these has long been recognized as irregular. While DĂRE agrees with
the CL conjugation I in most forms, its older compounds share forms with CL
12
conjugation III (Kent 1946: 100). ESSE, on the other hand, is an irregular verb in all of
the Indo-European language family, and varies in its morphology from all of the
conjugation classes (Moreland & Fleischer 1977: 25). Furthermore, Hall fails to account
in any way for the allophony of [ĕ] and [ĭ] in TV position in his /ĕ/-theme and /ĭ/-theme
conjugation classes. Let us now turn to yet another alternative analysis of Classical Latin
verb morphology.
Conjugation
T.V.
Infinitive
2SG pres. ind.
act.
2SG pres. sub.
act.
I
[ā]
laudāre
laudās
II
[ē]
monēre
monēs
III
Ø
dūcere
dūcis
IIIi
[ĭ]
capere
capis
IV
[ī]
audīre
audīs
laudēs
moneās
dūcās
capiās
audiās
Table 2.5. The CL Conjugation classes following Redenbarger (1976).
Redenbarger (1976) posits a five-conjugation system for Latin which is shown
above in Table 2.5. Unlike Hall (1983), Redenbarger makes a strong argument for his
classification based on an analysis of allomorphic alternations throughout the inflectional
morphology of the language, and a set of synchronic morpho-phonological rules and
abstract underlying representations for the surface forms. His classification is supported
by two productive rules which he posits for the synchronic grammar of Classical Latin.
13
2.1) Vowel-lowering: Underlying short high vowels are lowered preceding an [ɾ] or
word-finally.
V[-long] → [-high]/__{[ɾ], #}
2.2) /ĭ/-epenthesis: An /ĭ/ is inserted to break up consonant clusters across a morpheme
boundary.
Ø → /ĭ/ /C__+C
Along with some widely-accepted phonological rules such as the vocalis ante vocalem
corripitur rule (shown in 2.3) and a few others cited in his appendix (such as those shown
in 2.4-2.6), these synchronic rules cleanly account for the surface paradigms of all five of
the conjugations proposed in his classification.
2.3) vocalis ante vocalem corripitur: A long vowel is shortened in pre-vocalic position.
V[+long] → [-long] /__V
2.4) la loi des mots iambes: A long vowel is shortened in the second syllable of a bisyllabic word. (Ordered after vowel-lowering, this rule explains why ubi „where‟ or nisi
„if not‟ are not counter-examples to vowel lowering.)
V[+long] → [-long]/ #CVC__#
14
2.5) Vowel shortening before word-final stop consonants.
V[+long] → [-long]/__C[-strident]#
2.6) Deletion of [ā] before [ō] across a morpheme boundary (e.g. [laud-ā+ō] → laudō )
[ā] → Ø/__[ō]
Rule 2.1 accounts for the allophonic alternation of [ĕ] and [ĭ] in the paradigms of
conjugations III and IIIi by lowering [ĭ] before [ɾ]. Rule 2.2 accounts for the presence of a
vowel in the TV position of verbs from conjugation III, as well as for the lack of an [ĭ]
before the subjunctive marker -ā- when the surface forms of conjugations III and IIIi are
compared. The remaining allophonic alternations between long and short vowels are
accounted for by rule 2.3.
The synchronic productivity of Rule 2.1 is further exemplified if we turn to the
noun morphology of Classical Latin. One example in which the lowering of /ĭ/ in wordfinal position can be seen is in the third declension neuter noun rūs „country‟ which is a
normal third declension noun and mare „sea‟ which is a third declension ĭ-stem noun.
Inflectional form
nom./acc. sg.
nom. /acc. pl.
gen. pl.
Suffix
+Ø
+a
+um
„country‟
rūs
rūra
rūrum
„sea‟ ĭ-stem
mare
maria
marium
Table 2.6. Two third declension neuter nouns, from Redenbarger (1976: 2).
15
“The difference between the consonant final stem of rūs and the vowel final of mare is
clear, as is the alternation of [ĕ] / [ĭ] in that stem: [ĕ] appears word finally and [ĭ] before
vowels (Redenbarger 1976: 2).” The productivity of Rule 2.2 in the noun system is
revealed if we observe the dative / ablative plural forms of normal and ĭ-stem nouns of
the third declension.
Inflectional form
Suffix
„king‟
„sea‟ ĭ-stem
dat./abl. pl.
dat. / abl. pl.
+bus
*+ibus
regibus
regibus
maribus
*mariibus → marībus
Table 2.7. /ĭ/-epenthesis in third declension nouns.
If we take the suffix for the dative / ablative plural forms to be +ibus, given that mare is
an ĭ-stem noun, we would expect an ĭ+ĭ sequence (which Redenbarger shows to
“collapse” into a long ī by rule (1976: 3)). Instead we find the short vowel [ĭ] in both
regibus and maribus. This can be accounted for if we assume the suffix to be +bus. The
sequence [maɾĭ+bus] comes out cleanly as maribus. The /ĭ/-epenthesis rule can then take
care of the vowel that comes between the stem and suffix in the sequence [ɾeg+bus],
giving regibus.
Further evidence for the productivity of rule 2.1 can be found in the morphology
of words like corpus. This is shown in Table 2.8 where [ŭ] in the stem alternates with [ŏ]
in all forms where [ŭ] would have preceeded an [ɾ] (Redenbarger 1976: 6).
16
Rules
nom. / acc. singular dative singular
nom. / acc. plural
[kŏɾpŭs+Ø]
[kŏɾpŭs+ī]
[kŏɾpŭs+ă]
Rhotacism of /s/
[kŏɾpŭɾ+ī]
[kŏɾpŭɾ+ă]
Vowel-lowering
[kŏɾpŏɾī]
[kŏɾpŏɾă]
corporī
corpora
corpus
Table 2.8. Application of CL rhotacism and vowel-lowering in the inflection of corpus.
Rules 2.1-2.6 and the forms given in tables 2.3-2.8 are just a sample of how a
synchronic rule system that constructs the forms of the paradigm from abstract
underlying representations removes much of the mystery behind apparent irregularities
like the partial, but incomplete, similarity between the paradigms of CL conjugation-III
and conjugation-IIIi verbs, and between the paradigms of third-declension and thirddeclension ĭ-stem nouns.
Cases that remain apparently problematic like DARE, ESSE and FERRE (and
their related compounds) can also be accounted for. ESSE and FERRE belong to a
subgroup of the athematic conjugation. These verbs show irregularities in the perfect
system, a fact which suggests that these frequently-used verbs have maintained some
special morphological marking from a previous stage of Indo-European. Another feature
of this archaism is their morphological marking as non-epethesizing verbs, meaning that
they alone are exempt from the application of the /ĭ/-epenthesis rule. DARE is also an
athematic verb, but the apparent anomalies in its surface paradigm are not due to any
special marking as a non-epenthesizing verb. If we consider the internal structure to be
[da-Ø+re], where the root is vowel-final, we can see that the C__+C environment in
17
which /ĭ/-epenthesis occurs in other regular athematic verbs is absent. DARE is therefore
a regular Ø-theme verb whose root happens to end in /ă/ (Redenbarger forthcoming).
Given a convincing generative analysis of the Latin conjugations, in light of
morpho-phonological rules that can be shown to act productively elsewhere in Latin
morpho-phonology, such as that presented above in which the conjugations are not four,
but actually five in number, a reanalysis of the development of the Hispano-Romance
three-conjugation system is strongly warranted. “It is a century-old methodological
maxim that before doing historical comparative reconstruction, one must first do internal
reconstruction. Thus, given this new analysis of the synchronic system of Latin, previous
analyses of how Latin developed into the Romance languages must now be reconsidered
(Redenbarger 1976: 12).” We will begin a reconsideration of just this type with an
examination of a representative set of frequently-used Latin verbs from conjugations IIIV (see Chapter 5), and categorized by their theme-vowels following the schema put forth
by Redenbarger. A number of studies involving the historical development of the Spanish
conjugations, and in particular the changes in conjugation which took place among some
verbs which originated in CL conjugations II-IV, have given great importance to the root(or stem-) vowels as it pertains to their conjugation class membership in Spanish. These
studies include Wilkinson (1971), Togeby (1972), Montgomery (1976, 1978 & 1979),
Malkiel (1984), Lloyd (1987), and Penny (2002). It is therefore justifiable for us to
consider the root-vowels of CL verbs as they relate to their categorization by themevowel.
18
An Examination of Representative CL Verbs from Conjugations II-IV
Of the 305 frequently-used simple Classical Latin verbs selected as a starting
point for this research, the numerical distribution among the /ē/-theme, Ø-theme, /ĭ/theme and /ī/-theme verbs was far from equal. The Ø-theme verbs lead, constituting more
than half of the verbs from conjugations II-IV. The /ĭ/-theme verbs form the smallest
group. Their numbers shy in comparison to those of the Ø-theme verbs, a fact which
(given the overall similarity between the paradigms) certainly contributed to their
traditional classification as a subgroup of conjugation III.
A look at the root-vowels included within each conjugation is also illustrative.
Not surprisingly (due to their overall numbers), the Ø-theme verbs have a great variety of
RVs. These include /ā/, /ă/, /ē/, /ĕ/, /ī/, /ĭ/, /ō/, /ŏ/, /ū/ and /ŭ/ along with the diphthongs
/aj/ and /aw/, an inventory which exhausts the entire set of vowels possible in Classical
Latin with the unique exclusion of the diphthong /oj/. The /ē/-theme verbs have members
with each of the RVs listed above for the Ø-theme verbs, but /ī/, /ō/, and /ū/ are
represented by just one verb each. None of the /ī/-theme verbs in the data contains an RV
of /ā/, and there is only one verb each for the RVs /aj/ and /ō/. The RV inventory of the
/ĭ/-theme verbs is quite restricted. There are zero verbs in this conjugation represented by
the RVs /aw/, /aj/, /ē/, /ī/, /ō/ or /ū/. Thus, it is safe to say that long vowels were
extremely uncommon, if not non-existent as RVs in the verbs of this conjugation class.
Furthermore, while [ĭ] commonly appears in the RV position of prefixed compounds of
the /ĭ/-theme verbs, it is absent from the inventory of underlying RVs. This restricts the
set of possible underlying RVs in this conjugation to just four: /ă/, /ĕ/, /ŏ/ and /ŭ/.
19
These data stand in contrast to a claim made originally by Togeby (1972) and
sustained by Montgomery regarding the complementarity of stem-vowels and themevowels in Spanish. “No verbs of the Spanish –er conjugation contain stem-vowels i or u.
In contrast, all verbs of the –ir class, excluding a-stems and oír, are marked by either i or
u in the stems of some or all of their forms. Thus, broadly speaking, mid-vowels
characterize both stem and ending of one paradigm, and close vowels those of the other
(Montgomery 1976: 281).” If we compare just the /ē/-theme and /ī/-theme verbs from
Classical Latin, we can see that in the former the mid vowels (/ē/, /ĕ/, /ō/, /ŏ/) constitute
about 43% of the total RVs, the high (or „close‟) vowels (/ī/, /ĭ/, /ū/, /ŭ/) constitute about
34% and those with an RV of either /ă/ or /ā/ make up approximately 24%. For the /ī/theme verbs, mid vowels make up around 56% of all RVs, high vowels make up 36% and
the „a-stems‟ constitute about 8% of the total RVs. The proportion of mid vowels to high
vowels in these two conjugations is very similar. If we include the other CL conjugations
we see that the Ø-theme verbs show a similar pattern: mid vowels – 44%, high vowels –
46% and a-stems – 18%. For the /ĭ/-stems: mid vowels – 21%, high vowels – 14% and athemes 64%. The claim regarding complementary stem-vowels put forth by Togeby for
Spanish, which is supported by the corpus of data compiled for the present study, must
clearly have arisen within the Vulgar Latin of Hispania, as the pattern he describes cannot
be observed in a large corpus of representative data from Classical Latin like the one
examined here.
Let us now continue to a discussion about the CL verbs from conjugations II-IV
which did not survive in Hispano-Romance. If we group together the CL verbs in the
corpus which do not have reflexes in the data from HR, several general observations can
20
be made. There are several groupings of CL verbs which lost a majority of their
members during the development of HR. The majority of the /ĭ/-theme verbs was lost,
especially those that were prefixed forms of iacĕre (e.g. adicĕre, interficĕre, prōicĕre).
Some of these did find their way into HR, but through an indirect route, as firstconjugation verbs, presumably formed on the basis of the participle form. Take for
example CL prōicĕre and inicĕre, whose past perfect participle forms are prōiectum and
iniectum respectively. These survive in modern HR as proyectar (Cast.), projetar (Port.)
and inyectar (Cast.) injetar (Port.). A similar process can be observed in Modern
Portuguese where the verbs frigir „to fry‟ and fritar „to fry‟ (from CL frīgere, frictum)
coexist and share a common participle form frito. See Chapter 3 for further discussion of
this type of change.
Most prefixed īre compounds were also lost (e.g. invenīre, custodīre, coīre). Of
these, invenīre has also been adopted as the first-conjugation inventar in Spanish and
Portuguese, presumably on the basis of the perfect participle inventum.
Few of the CL verbs without an attested perfect stem survived in HR. We may
infer that the lack of an attested perfect form alludes to relatively low text frequency for
many of these verbs, a situation which could easily contribute to their loss from the
lexicon. Nearly half of the Ø-theme verbs whose RV was either /ĕ/ or /ŭ/ were lost, a
fact which may just be coincidental since /ĕ/ is the most numerous of the RVs for this
conjugation by far and /ŭ/ is also fairly numerous.
In sum, a number of facts about the morpho-phonology of Classical Latin can be
ascertained from the above discussion. Some of these challenge traditional descriptions of
21
Latin structure, while others present a novel perspective for the study of the development
of the conjugations of Hispano-Romance.

A morpho-phonological analysis of synchronic processes in Classical Latin
reveals a system of five conjugations characterized by the theme vowels: /ā/, /ē/,
Ø, /ĭ/ and /ī/.

The surface pattern of conjugation III verbs is largely due to the insertion of an
epenthetic /ĭ/.

The athematic (Ø-theme) verbs were the most numerous among CL conjugations
II-IV.

High and mid root vowels were more or less equally distributed in each of the CL
conjugations, not showing the complementarity of root vowel and stem vowel that
can be observed in Castilian.

The underlying RVs of the /ĭ/-theme verbs were limited to just four: /ă/, /ĕ/, /ŏ/,
/ŭ/.

The large majority of /ĭ/-theme verbs was lost.

A number of CL verbs from conjugations II-IV that did not develop directly into
HR –er or –ir verbs, survived through an indirect path as –ar verbs built from
perfect past participles.
This description is intended to serve as a point of comparison for the following
discussion of the morpho-phonological changes that took place in the system during the
22
development of the Hispano-Romance languages. Chapter 3 introduces the theoretical
framework which shall serve as the basis for that discussion.
23
Chapter 3: Historical Morphology and Phonology in Generative Grammar
An approach to the study of language change, which has been advocated by
Kiparsky (1965), King (1969) and others, is to approach historical linguistics as the study
of successive generations of productive, synchronic grammars, each producing the
language output for the various historical phases of the language in question. A detailed
analysis of the allomorphic alternations that can be observed in the data of a previous
stage of a language can lead us to fascinating insights into the phonological and
morphological processes that were productive in a given stage of a language‟s history.
A grammar in generative linguistics is defined as “a set of rules which
characterizes all and only the sentences of the language that we as speakers are able to
produce and understand (Crain & Lillo-Martin 1999: 5)”. These rules guide the
arrangement of items in the dictionary-like lexicon of the speaker in such a way that they
define the set of utterances pertaining to that language, and thusly define the structure of
the language. Of course, “[a]n important feature of the structure of a sentence is how it is
pronounced – its sound structure. The pronunciation of a given word is also a
fundamental part of the structure of the word (Odden 2005: 2)”. The grammar must, then,
define all aspects of the structure of a given language, with rules to dictate what is and is
not possible at every level of structure. For a child who is learning her native tongue, how
do these rules get into her mind?
24
The child is presented with certain “primary linguistic data”, data which are, in
fact highly restricted and degraded in quality. On the basis of these data, he
constructs a grammar that defines his language and determines the phonetic and
semantic interpretation of an infinite number of sentences (Chomsky 1968: 331).
“[T]o learn a language is to master the rules of the mental grammar (Crain &
Lillo-Martin 1999: 5).” The child language learner must acquire a grammar sufficient for
effective communication in her speech community: those who provide her with primary
linguistic data (PLD) by speaking in her presence. If she is successful in doing so, the
language output generated by her acquired grammar will be identical or nearly-identical
in structure to that of the speakers who provided her with the PLD. Since we have plenty
of documentation to show that language does indeed change across generations, it is
evident that something is impeding the child from acquiring (in every case) a grammar
identical to that of the previous generation. As Kiparsky states, “Imperfect learning is
due to the fact that the child does not learn a grammar directly but must recreate it
himself on the basis of a necessarily limited and fragmentary experience with speech
(1965: 1-4).” Due to this so-called poverty of the stimulus, such imperfections seem to be
a highly likely consequence of the language-learning process. Nonetheless, since
children are generally successful in acquiring a grammar that allows them to
communicate fully and successfully in their speech communities, the changes that result
from their “imperfect learning” must generally be minimal enough that the language
25
defined by their grammar is nearly the same as that from which they glean their PLD. It is
the job of the historical linguist to hypothesize as to how such changes arise.
The traditional study of sound change in historical linguistics involved the
formulation of rules that described the changes that took place across time in a language.
An example adapted from Penny (2002: 71) describes a consonant change that took place
in Spanish between the Classical Latin stage and the Old Spanish stage.
3.1) The palatalization of CL intervocalic -LL- in the development of Old Spanish.
-LL- > /λ/
Rule 3.1 is demonstrable through the juxtaposition of Latin words with their cognate
Spanish forms (e.g. CABALLU > caballo „horse‟, GALLU > gallo „rooster‟ and
VALLĒS > valles „valley‟). The complaint that has been made by generative linguists
about this type of rule is that it does not represent speaker competence. Since the speaker
of Latin and the speaker of Old Spanish were not the same individual, such a rule does
not describe a relationship between elements of the same grammar. As King puts it, “We
have nothing to gain from comparing phoneme inventories at two different stages of a
given language and seeing what sound has changed into what other sound. Such a
comparison gives as little insight into linguistic change as a comparison of before-andafter pictures of an earthquake site gives into the nature of earthquakes (1969: 39).”
King‟s essay on the place of historical linguistics in generative grammar describes a
different approach to the practice of historical phonology. “A proper historical phonology
is the history of the grammars of a language, of the competences of successive
26
generations of speakers. The listing of rules converting the sounds of proto-IndoEuropean into those of West Germanic may be of interest as an exercise in ingenuity and
distinctive feature virtuosity, but historical linguistics it is not (1969: 104).”
Following King‟s argument, the question of the origin of the palatal lateral in Old
Spanish must be viewed not as the formulation of a transformation rule, but rather as a
question of language transmission. What was it about the surface forms of Hispanic
Vulgar Latin that led the child learner of Old Spanish to construct a grammar with a
palatal lateral in contrast to the /ll/ sequence of Latin?
For the child acquisition of phonological grammars, Reiss and Hale propose a
directness principle in which “the initial state of the grammar is such that surface forms
and underlying representations are (a) assumed to be identical to each other, and (b)
identical to the (child‟s) parse of the output of speakers of the target language (2003:
151).” Their claim implies that the child‟s grammar initially contains no phonological
rules or processes. In the case of the Old Spanish palatal lateral /λ/, this implies that in
order for the child learner to include a palatal lateral in her lexical entries for horse,
rooster and valley, the surface forms she was exposed to must have had palatal lateral
consonants. Even if the speaker of Hispanic Vulgar Latin had a rule in her grammar
palatalizing the /ll/ sequence, if all instances of underlying /ll/ in her speech were realized
as [λ], there would be no reason for the child language learner to construct /ll/ as the
underlying form, thus producing a change in the underlying structure of the lexical items
in question.
27
Phonological change can also lead to morphological change. Examples of this can
be seen in data from throughout the Romance languages.
1st
2nd
3rd
Singular
pierdo
pierdes
pierde
Plural
perdemos
perdéis
pierden
Table 3.1. The present indicative paradigm of the Modern Castilian verb perder „to lose‟.
The allomorphy illustrated in Table 3.1 is the result of a phonological change by which
CL short non-high vowels were diphthongized in an earlier stage of Castilian (see
Chapter 4). Since the verb stem is not stressed in the 1PL and 2PL forms, the diphthongs
do not appear in the corresponding surface forms. This situation results in the presence of
two different forms of the verb root: perd- and pierd-. A similar pattern can be found in
Old French for the verb amer „to love‟ (Anderson 1979: 30).
1st
2nd
3rd
Singular
aime
aimes
aime
Plural
amons
amez
aiment
Table 3.2. The present indicative paradigm of the Old French verb amer „to love‟.
Table 3.2 illustrates the verb root allomorphy am- ~ aim- corresponding, like in
Castilian, to the unstressed and stressed positioning of the stem respectively. Such
28
allomorphy has been considered a somewhat destructive result of phonological change,
pulling paradigms apart and upsetting the ideal one-to-one correspondence between shape
and meaning. Consider now the paradigm of the Modern French verb aimer „to love‟ in
Table 3.3.
1st
2nd
3rd
Singular
aime
aimes
aime
Plural
aimons
aimez
aiment
Table 3.3. The present indicative paradigm of the Modern French verb aimer „to love‟.
The verb root has the unique shape aim- in all forms of the paradigm. The change
observable through the comparison of Tables 3.2 and 3.3 is an example of what has been
called analogical leveling, and some linguists have considered it to be a response
phenomenon which undoes the destructive effect of phonological change on morphology
(Hock 2005: 450). We now turn to some examples of morphological change in Romance
which appear to have taken place in a similar fashion, but which do not result from
allomorphy that has directly arisen from phonological change.
In Hispano-Romance the past perfect (preterite) verb forms are generally
categorized as either strong or weak, depending on whether the word stress is on the stem
or the inflectional suffix respectively. The weak preterites are in the majority and verbs
of recent coinage, which all pertain to the /a/-theme conjugation, all show the weak
preterite pattern: e.g. Castilian fotocopiar „to photocopy‟, fotocopié „I photocopied‟. This
29
indicates that the rule forming weak preterites is synchronically productive, whereas the
strong preterites, which bear resemblance to cognate Classical Latin perfect forms, are
most likely marked in the lexicon as exceptional, and have separate lexical entries for
their preterite form.
Vicente cites some examples of innovative weak preterite forms characteristic of
the speech of Bielsa and Aragüés in the Aragonese language zone of Spain (1967: 258).
„I found out‟
„I said‟
„I had‟
Aragonese
sabié
dicié
tenié
Standard Castillian
supe
dije
tuve
Table 3.4. Innovative weak preterites in Aragonese and their standard Castilian
equivalents.
We might say that, through a comparison with the more numerous weak preterite forms,
Aragonese innovated weak preterite forms for these verbs. At some stage in the history
of Aragonese the child learners may have failed to incorporate the additional lexical entry
for the preterite forms of these verbs into their grammar. We cannot know for sure if the
necessary input for them to reconstruct the strong preterites was absent or infrequent in
their PLD, or if the loss of these forms is simply due to an overriding of the data as
suggested by Kiparsky (1965: 2-15). In any case, the change can be seen as a
generalization of the rule which forms preterites in the sense that fewer verbs must be
marked as exceptional and have dual lexical entries. Should the rule continue to
30
generalize, it is not difficult to imagine a total loss of the strong preterites in a future
stage of the language.
Finally, let us examine an example of ongoing morphological change in Modern
Portuguese. In Portuguese there are two synonymous verbs meaning „to fry‟, frigir (a
third-conjugation verb) and fritar (a first-conjugation verb). Both verbs share the past
(perfect) participle form frito, and both verbs are derived from the Classical Latin Øtheme (conjugation III) verb frīgĕre „to roast‟, whose past perfect participle is frictum.
Of the competing infinitive forms, frigir (based on the CL conjugation III infinitive)
seems to be loosing ground to fritar, which has every appearance of having been
constructed with a basis on the participle. To give a rough demonstration of this trend; a
search of Portuguese-language websites performed on Google.com on 02-23-2010
returned 31,400 hits for the keyword frigir as opposed to 349,000 hits for fritar. What
might be the cause behind this apparent preference for the –ar verb? As I previously
mentioned, in the modern HR languages, only the first conjugation in synchronically
productive, and new verbs coined in the language are adapted to the morphology of this
particular class of verbs (see Chapter 6 for further discussion). If we assume,
hypothetically, that a child learner of Portuguese is exposed more frequently to the
participle forms of this verb (masc. sing. frito, fem. sing. frita, masc. pl. fritos, fem. pl.
fritas) than to the infinitive or another inflected form of the verb, then it is absolutely
unsurprising that she would posit fritar, with an underlying structure like [fɾit-a+ɾ] where
the root frit- is the common element in all of the participle forms, -a- is the theme-vowel
of the (synchronically-productive) first conjugation, and –r is the infinitive marker. Of
course, with sufficient input and reinforcement, she may or may not later replace this
31
form with the competing frigir [fɾiʒ-i+ɾ], whose root shape is somewhat more similar to
that of the CL frīgere [fɾīg-Ø+ɾe]. This relationship between frequency and
morphological change has often been observed. Krazka-Szlenk affirms that,
“[a]llomorphy positively correlates with high text frequency, while rare text frequency
favors stem leveling. Anything else being equal, it is the more frequent allomorph (in
terms of text frequency) which becomes the Base for leveling, and not a rarer one (2007:
198)”.
We have seen a variety of changes in the phonology and morphology of several
Romance languages in the examples above. These changes have demonstrated how a
phonologically-conditioned change can lead to allomorphy, and how allomorphy can
serve as the basis for leveling by analogy. We have also discussed in this chapter how the
transmission of language from the community of speakers to the child learner can lead to
the generalization or loss of grammatical rules, and the reinterpretation of underlying
structure, between one stage of the language and another. Of course, such changes do not
happen suddenly and categorically between one generation and the next, as such
examples may persuade us to believe. It is quite possible that most innovations begin
initially as added optional rules that subsequently become obligatory (King 1969: 99).
Such a statement is supported by the variation that can be observed in all natural
languages, including those which are no longer spoken, and the presence of variation
should always be taken into consideration in the analysis of any corpus of linguistic data
be it historical or contemporary. In Chapter 4 I will review some of the major morphophonological developments which occurred in the Vulgar Latin of Hispania. These
32
changes set the stage for the divergence of the various Hispanic languages and for the
development of their three-conjugation system of verbal morphology which is the focus
of the present study.
33
Chapter 4: Relevant Phonological Changes in the Vulgar Latin of the Iberian Peninsula
In order to reconstruct the various stages in the evolution of the HispanoRomance conjugation classes it is necessary to understand the relevant synchronicallyproductive rules that were at work in the various stages of the language between Classical
Latin and Modern Castilian and Portuguese. In this chapter I will outline the major
morpho-phonological developments in Hispano-Romance, as relevant to the changes that
took place in the conjugational system.
The Development of the Vowel System
The vowel system of Classical Latin (see Chapter 2) underwent several major
changes en route to developing into the vowel systems of Hispano-Romance. The claim
has been made many Romance scholars, including Penny (2002: 45), that the short
vowels, with the exception of /ă/ which is not considered tense to begin with, became [atr] („atr‟ stands for the distinctive feature „advanced tongue root‟. See Redenbarger
1981.), or lax. Clearly, such a process of laxing must have occurred before the loss of
quantitative distinction in order to apply only to those vowels which had once been short,
and would have resulted in a vowel inventory like that given in Fig. 4.1, where the
difference between the long and short vowels is accompanied by an articulatory
difference; that of [±atr] or tense ~ lax.
34
ī
ū
ɪ
ʊ
ē
ō
ɛ
ɔ
ă, ā
Figure 4.1. The Vulgar Latin vowel inventory as described by many traditional accounts.
One major problem with this traditional analysis is that the high lax vowels [ɪ] and
[ʊ] are unattested in the Romance languages. However, the lax vowels [ɛ] and [ɔ] are
attested in all major branches of Romance. Thus, based on attested Romance vowel
systems, we can assume for Vulgar Latin a synchronic rule (4.1) by means of which the
underlyingly short non-high vowels /ĕ/ and /ŏ/ were laxed in stressed position.
4.1) Early Vulgar Latin laxing rule for /ĕ/ and /ĕ/.
V[+stress –long –high –rtr] → [-atr]
At approximately the same stage we can also assume a productive rule (4.2) lowering the
underlyingly short high vowels /ĭ/ and /ŭ/ to [ĕ] and [ŏ] respectively.
4.2) Early Vulgar Latin vowel lowering rule.
V[-long] → [-high]
35
We can hereby present a more plausible set of surface vowels for this early stage of the
Vulgar Latin of Hispania. Figure 4.2 illustrates the output of the CL vowel inventory after
the application of rules 4.1 and 4.2
ī
ū
ĕ
ŏ
ē
ō
ɛ
ɔ
ă, ā
Figure 4.2. The Vulgar Latin surface vowels before the loss of the length distinction.
By the first century AD, Vulgar (spoken) Latin had lost the meaningful phonemic
distinction between long and short vowels that characterized the vocalic system of
Classical Latin (Penny 2002: 45). It is unknown exactly why the length distinction was
lost, but the tense ~ lax distinction clearly grew to be more prominent in the
differentiation between words. As vowel length ceased to be essential for effective
communication, the child learners ceased to encode it into their grammars, and so, per
Reiss and Hale‟s directness principle, we can construct the inventory of vocalic
phonemes in VL that must have preceded the vowel inventories of all Hispano-Romance
varieties.
36
i
u
e
o
ɛ
ɔ
a
Figure 4.3. The Vulgar Latin inventory of vocalic phonemes after the loss of the length
distinction.
Word stress also came to play an important role in the vowel system of HispanoRomance. This may be due in part to the change in accent type that occurred during the
development of Vulgar Latin. It is believed that Latin accent was of the pitch type,
whereas Hispano-Romance accent is of the stress type (Penny 2002: 42).
The increasingly uneven deployment of energy over the word (more to the tonic,
less to the atonics) accounts in large part for the differential historical treatment of
the Latin vowels in different positions. Concentration of energy on the tonic (and
the greater audibility this brings) allows vowels to be quite well differentiated and
preserved, while lesser degrees of energy devoted, in decreasing order, to initial,
and final and intertonic vowels imply greater degrees of merger and loss (Penny
2002: 43).
We can see from the data available to us that stressed, or tonic, vowels in
Hispano-Romance have developed differently from the unstressed, or atonic, vowels.
The inventory of vowels which appear in atonic position is restricted in comparison to
37
that of vowels which occur in tonic position. This change in itself is a significant
departure from the CL system in which any vowel, long or short, could occur in either
stressed or unstressed position in a word.
CL tonic vowels
ā
ă
ē
ĕ
>
>
>
>
ī
ĭ
ō
ŏ
>
>
>
>
ū
ŭ
>
>
HR tonic vowels
a
a
e
ɛ
i
e
o
ɔ
u
o
Table 4.1. The tonic HR outcomes of CL vowels.
CL atonic vowels
ā
ă
ē
ĕ
ī
ĭ
ō
ŏ
ū
ŭ
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
HR atonic vowels
a
a
e
e
i
e
o
o
u
o
Table 4.2. The atonic HR outcomes of CL vowels.
38
An examination of Tables 4.1 and 4.2 above reveals that in both the tonic and
atonic vowels of Hispano-Romance, several of the vowels that were distinct from one
another have merged. In fact, if we study the atonic vowels of Hispano-Romance which
appear in word-final position, it becomes evident that these merged even further,
resulting in a mere three-way distinction. The results of these mergers are summarized in
tables 4.3 – 4.5.
CL Vowels
ā
HR tonic
vowels
ă
ē
a
ĭ
ĕ
ō
ɛ
e
ŭ
o
ŏ
ī
ū
ɔ
i
u
ŏ
ī
ū
i
u
Table 4.3. The merger of CL vowels in HR tonic position.
CL Vowels
HR atonic
vowels
ā
ă
a
ē
ĭ
ĕ
ō
e
ŭ
o
Table 4.4. The merger of CL vowels in HR atonic position.
39
CL Vowels
Word-final
HR atonic
vowels
ā
ă
a
ē
ĕ
ī
ĭ
ō
e
ŏ
ū
ŭ
o
Table 4.5. The merger of CL vowels in HR word-final atonic position.
The Classical Latin diphthongs [aj], [oj] and [aw] also underwent changes. In
Vulgar Latin, [aj] became [ɛ] and [oj] became [o]. There is also evidence that [aw]
sometimes became [o] during the same stage (such as the coexistence of forms like
CLAUDIUS and CLODIUS), but it was not until much later that this change was
generalized via a stage as [ow], which still persists in Portuguese (Elcock 1960: 43).
The vowel inventories illustrated in Tables 4.3 – 4.5 are relatively well preserved
in modern HR varieties, like Portuguese and Galician, which maintain a phonemic
distinction between seven oral vowels. However, further east on the Iberian Peninsula,
varieties like Leonese, Asturian, Castilian and Aragonese have subsequently lost the
tense ~ lax distinction (between [e], [o] and [ɛ], [ɔ] respectively). This occurred through a
process of diphthongization, in which the lax vowels came to be realized as diphthongs
(see Garcia de Diego 1909, Menéndez Pidal 1962, and Alvar 1953). Although the exact
contexts in which this occurred vary from language to language, the change can be well
40
illustrated by the one that took place in Castilian whereby /ɛ/ > /je/ and /ɔ/ > /we/ (Penny
2002: 52).
Changes in Accentuation
“[T]he position of the [Classical] Latin accent was determined by the
phonological structure of the word concerned and never by its meaning (Penny 2002:
41).” The rule of accentuation in CL was based on syllable weight, whereby a long
syllable is considered heavy and a short syllable is considered light. Syllable length and
accent position are determined by the following rules. In multi-syllabic CL words, either
the penultimate or antepenultimate syllable will bear the accent. In words of two
syllables, the penultimate syllable is accented. In words of more than two syllables, the
penultimate syllable receives the accent if it is long. If the penultimate syllable is short,
the antepenultimate syllable will bear the accent of the word. An open syllable ((C)V
structure) is long if it contains either a long vowel or a diphthong. Closed syllables
((C)VC structure) are also considered long. An open syllable containing a short, simple
vowel is a short syllable (Moreland & Fleischer 1977: 3). Therefore, a CL verb form like
FĂCĔRE (with a short penultimate syllable) would be stressed on the antepenultimate
syllable, whereas a verb form like DĒBĒRE (with a long penultimate syllable) would
bear penultimate stress.
For the most part, the Hispano-Romance languages maintain the stress on the
same syllable which was stressed in CL, even though the overall number of syllables, or
position of the stressed syllable relative to the number of syllables in the word, have
changed in many cases. Consider two examples from Castilian: MĀTERĬA > madera,
and DĒBĒRE > deber. MĀTERĬA was a four-syllable word with antepenultimate stress
41
[mā.‟tĕ.ɾĭ.ă]. Even though madera [ma.‟ðe.ɾa] is a three-syllable word in Castilian, we
can clearly see that the stressed is maintained on the same vowel which bore it in Latin.
DĒBĒRE was a three-syllable word with penultimate stress [dē.‟bē.ɾĕ]. The final vowel
was lost in Castilian, and yet the stress persists on the same vowel, despite its position in
the final syllable of the word [ðe.‟βeɾ].
Hispano-Romance, in contrast with the other Romance families, extended this
accentuation pattern on verb infinitives to all verbs, including those which bore word
stress on the antepenultimate syllable in CL (like FĂCĔRE) (Penny 2002: 154). As I will
show in Chapter 6, this generalization of the stress pattern of infinitives contributed to the
reduction of the conjugation classes to three in HR. Since the regularization of the stress
pattern of verb infinitives in all conjugations is unique, within Romance, to the Hispanic
languages, it is reasonable to assume that this development occurred in the late stages of
Vulgar Latin within that geographical area.
The overall retention of word-stress position, in spite of the changing shape of
Hispano-Romance words, ultimately led word stress to have distinctive, phonemic value,
since stress placement was no longer entirely predictable by phonology alone.
Loss of Intertonic Vowels
The internal (neither word-initial nor word-final) unstressed vowels of CL are
often referred to as intertonic vowels. These were often lost entirely in Vulgar Latin as
evidenced by inscriptions in the Appendix Probi. For example:
42
ANGULUS NON ANGLUS
CALIDA NON CALDA
SPECULUM NON SPECLUM
STABILUM NON STABLUM
VETULUS NON VECLUS
VIRIDIS NON VIRDIS
With the exception of /a/, Latin intertonic vowels have been almost entirely
eliminated in orally-transmitted words throughout the Romance languages (Penny 2002:
59). The fact that intertonic vowels were lost is often key in determining which words
have been borrowed back into Romance from Latin, as opposed to having passed through
all the stages of development that occurred as part of oral transmission. See Chapter 6 for
further discussion of this topic.
Rule Changes
As we have seen in the preceding chapter, phonologically-conditioned changes in
language can lead to the alteration, addition or loss of synchronically-productive rules in
the grammar of subsequent generations of speakers. Several such rule changes in
Hispano-Romance are relevant to the development of the verb conjugations.
Due to the allomorphic alternations observable in the inflectional paradigms of
words which contain lax vowels in some of their surface forms, the child learner of
Vulgar Latin would need to construct an unstressed tensing rule (4.3) to account for the
surface distribution of the lax vowels, and their appearance in stressed syllables only.
43
4.3) Vulgar Latin unstressed tensing rule
V[-stress] → [+atr]
The rule which deleted the TV -ā- before the 1SG marker –ō in first-conjugation
CL verbs like CANTŌ [kant-ā+ō] (Rule 2.6) became generalized in Vulgar Latin to the
extent that all TVs were deleted across a morpheme boundary when to the left of another
vowel. Therefore, CL verb forms like the first person singular indicative active DĒBEŌ
[deb-ē+ō] and first person singular subjunctive active DĒBEĀ [deb-ē+ā+Ø], in which the
TV /ē/ is apparent in the surface form, came to be realized without the TV in the surface
form just like their contemporary reflexes in Portuguese (devo and deva), and Castilian
(debo and deba).
The loss of word-final nasal consonants in Latin occurred by the first century A.
D. with the exception of a few frequent monosyllabic words in which the final nasal
consonants were preserved (e.g. QUEM, TAM, CUM). By the time we reach the earliest
stages of Old Castilian and Old Portuguese, around the 12th century AD, the word-final
stop consonants had probably fallen out of the underlying lexical representations of HR
speakers due to their absence in the surface forms of the PLD. The possible exception to
this is the third-person singular marker, which has been attested inconsistently in
manuscripts as both –t and –d up through the early thirteenth century (Lloyd 1987: 281),
although its appearance in written texts is feasibly due to the dual literacy in both
Classical Latin and Romance of the early Romance authors. It is reasonable to suggest,
44
then, that a socially-variable rule like Rule 4.4 that deleted final stop consonants was
present in Vulgar Latin until its latest stages.
4.4) Variable deletion of word-final stop consonants in Vulgar Latin
C[-cont] → Ø/__#
The above-mentioned changes in the morpho-phonology of the Vulgar-Latin of
Hispania led to an increasing similarity among the verbs which were developing from
those of CL conjugations I-IV. The combined effects of these changes in the vowel
inventory and grammar of the language would lead us to expect a change in the
conjugation classes of HR like that illustrated below in Table 4.6.
Latin Conjugation I
Latin Theme Vowel [ā]
II
[ē]
IIIa
Ø
HR Conjugation
HR Theme Vowel
[e]
[e]
I
[a]
IIIb
[ĭ]
IV
[ī]
[e]
III
[i]
II
Table 4.6. The predicted reclassification of the CL verb conjugations in HR based on
regular sound change.
As we can clearly see when we examine the reflexes of these verbs in Modern
Castilian and Portuguese, the changes in conjugation class were not entirely as regular as
our study of these major structural changes in the Vulgar Latin of Hispania would lead us
to predict.
45
Chapter 5: Historical Data from Hispano-Romance
In order to collect and organize a large amount of verb data from Classical Latin
and the Hispanic daughter languages, a spreadsheet was created in Microsoft Excel 2007.
The software was chosen because it allows data to be organized in columns and rows
which can be sorted alphabetically, numerically or by cell color for an added dimension.
Selected columns or rows can also be hidden at the user‟s discretion. These features
prove extremely useful to the visually-oriented researcher who is looking for patterns
within the data. First, a column was created for Latin verbs, to be listed by their present
active infinitive form. Given that the focus of the present study is the historical linguistic
development of the /e/-theme (second) and /i/-theme (third) conjugation classes of the
Hispano-Romance languages from the Classical Latin conjugations II-IV, it was
necessary to collect a representative sample of Hispano-Romance verbs that derived from
Latin verbs in those classes. To do so, it was convenient to begin with a listing of
commonly used Latin Verbs under the assumption that words employed with higher
frequency have a greater chance of surviving in the lexicon of subsequent generations of
speakers. For this I turned to the book 501 Latin Verbs fully conjugated in all the tenses
in a new easy-to-learn format alphabetically arranged (501 Latin Verbs) (Prior &
Wohlberg 1995), and to Joseph Wohlberg‟s original 201 Latin Verbs Fully Conjugated in
all the Tenses Alphabetically arranged (201 Latin Verbs) (1964). In 201 Latin Verbs,
46
Wohlberg chose his verbs from the New York State Regents examinations and various
College Board tests. Prior expanded upon this work in 501 Latin Verbs by including the
“highest-frequency verbs in Classical Latin and all the irregular and defective verbs”
(Prior 1995: vii). I began collecting data by selecting the verbs from the main entries of
501 Latin Verbs whose surface forms were not consistent with the morphology of the
Latin /ā/-theme conjugation (Conjugation I), originally with the exception of deponent
verbs, since the modern Romance languages have no deponent-type verbs, and the
majority of these did not survive in Romance. I then cross-referenced this list against the
main entries of 201 Latin Verbs. All verbs also included in the main entries of 201 Latin
Verbs were given a light blue cell color in the Excel sheet. A few verbs that were listed
only as secondary entries in 501 Latin Verbs, but were given main entries in 201 Latin
Verbs were also included with the same light blue cell color.
A second column was added under the Latin Verb heading for the theme vowel
(TV). The underlying TV was determined for each of the Latin verbs through a morphophonological analysis of the surface form alternations and following Redenbarger‟s
(1976) analysis of Classical Latin morpho-phonology. Each verb was assigned a TV
value of „ē‟, „ĭ‟, „Ø‟, or „ī‟. A third column was added for the designation of special cases
for quick recognition by the researcher. The symbol „D‟ was used to designate deponent
verbs. The symbol „NE‟ was used to designate non-epenthesizing athematic verbs. These
verbs lack a theme vowel, but are morphologically marked to not undergo /ĭ/-epenthesis
(Redenbarger forthcoming). Examples include FERRE, ESSE and POSSE. In this
column the symbol „?‟ was used to mark entries where multiple forms are attested , or the
47
verb‟s paradigm is defective in such a way that the determination of the TV is left
somewhat ambiguous.
This list of 362 frequently-used Latin verbs was compared to the etymologies
given by the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (DRAE) (Real Academia
Española 1992), and all Modern (Castilian) Spanish verbs with etymons from the list
were included in infinitive form in a column for Modern Spanish in the Excel sheet. This
process was repeated for Modern Portuguese using the Larousse Cultural Dicionário da
Língua Portuguesa (Lovisolo et. al. 1992). Columns for the TV were added to the Excel
sheet under the Modern Spanish and Modern Portuguese headings. The TVs for Modern
Spanish and Portuguese were determined by the infinitive form, and each verb was
assigned a symbol either „e‟ or „i‟ for second and third conjugation verbs respectively.
The Modern Spanish and Portuguese verbs that share a common Latin etymon, but differ
in their TV, were identified and their entries were highlighted with a yellow cell color.
Column headings were then created for historical data from the Hispano-Romance
daughter languages. These columns were later organized geographically from West to
East (Left to Right), giving the ordering: Old Portuguese, Galician, Western Asturian,
Asturian, Leonese, Old Castilian, Navarro, Aragonese, and Catalan. The languages listed
as column headings were chosen with a basis in the entries of Garcia de Diego‟s
etymological Spanish and Hispanic dictionary (1985).
Each of the 364 Latin verbs included in the Excel sheet was looked up in the
etymological dictionary (Garcia de Diego 1985). All corresponding Hispanic verbs were
entered into the Excel sheet in the columns of their respective languages with the
exclusion of those already represented by the Modern Spanish and Portuguese entries.
48
These entries were analyzed based on their TVs as seen in their infinitive forms. Those
cognate verbs that differ in conjugation class membership between two or more of the
Hispanic languages were highlighted with an orange cell color. Where there was some
inconsistency between Garcia de Diego (1985) and either the DRAE or the Larousse
Cultural Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa (Lovisolo et. al. 1992) with regard to the
correct Latin etymon the entries were highlighted with a light green cell color.
Some additional Hispanic verbs of interest were then added to the Excel sheet,
and color coded according to their source. These additional verbs were all cited in
linguistic or philological studies as differing from their Castilian cognates in conjugation
class membership. Additional Galician verbs were taken from Elementos de gramática
histórica gallega: (fonética-mofología) (García de Diego 1909). These entries were given
a light violet cell color. Additional Leonese verbs were added from El Dialecto Leonés
(Menéndez Pidal 1962), and from Étude sur l‟ancien dialecte léonais d‟après des chartes
du XIIIe siècle (Staaff 1907). These entries were given purple and dark blue cell colors
respectively. Additional Aragonese verbs were taken from El Aragonés: identidad y
problemática de una lengua (Conte Cazcarro et. al. 1977) and from El Dialecto Aragonés
(Alvar 1953). The Aragonese additions from Conte Cazcarro et. al. were very few, and
were coded with a brown text color. Those from Alvar were given a brown cell color.
Several of these additional Hispanic verbs were cited as having Latin etymons not
among those already included in the Excel sheet, including some deponent verbs. These
Latin verb infinitives were added to the Excel sheet and given a red cell color to clearly
distinguish them from those Latin verbs taken from 501 Latin Verbs and 201 Latin
49
Verbs. At this point, the deponent Latin verbs from conjugations II-IV were also added
to the Excel sheet along with their Hispanic reflexes.
Two electronic searchable corpora were used to add additional historical
Portuguese and Castilian data to the Excel sheet. The Corpus do Português (CdP)
(Davies & Ferreira 2006-) and the Corpus del Español (CdE) (Davies 2002-). The CdP
allows the user to search more than 45 million words in nearly 57,000 Portuguese texts
from the 1300s to the 1900s. The CdE allows the user to search more than 100 million
words in more than 20,000 Spanish texts from the 1200s to the 1900s. Both corpora have
interfaces that permit the user to search for exact words, phrases, wildcards, lemmas,
parts of speech, or any combination therein. Searches can also be restricted by the
century or centuries from which the texts are taken. Using this powerful tool, I searched
the CdP for each of the Modern Portuguese verbs included in the Excel sheet in the
Portuguese texts from the 1300s. The search returned all forms of the verb, including
alternate spellings, which were present in the corpus. When the TV of the verb could be
determined though a study of the forms returned by the search, the infinitive form of the
verb was entered in the Old Portuguese column. This process was repeated for Old
Castilian using the CdE, but the search was conducted on texts from the 1200s-1300s.
“The Present Indicative, Present Infinitive, Perfect Indicative, and the Perfect
Participle constitute the Principal Parts of a Latin verb, -- so called because they contain
the different stems, from which the full conjugation of the verb may be derived (Bennett
1918:55).” Since the infinitive alone cannot give us all the information we need about
the inflection of a given verb, columns were added under the Latin Verb heading for the
Latin Perfect Indicative and Perfect Participle. The third and fourth principal parts,
50
respectively, were taken from 501 Latin Verbs when possible, and from the Oxford Latin
dictionary (Glare 1983) when necessary. This additional morphological data is useful for
the study of Hispanic verb morphology because some Hispanic verbs have preterite
perfect and/or participle forms derived from the Latin perfect stem or the Latin perfect
participle stem respectively. For example, Penny says this of the Spanish strong
preterites. “In Spanish, this type of paradigm came to belong only to a minority of verbs,
although all very frequent ones, by contrast with Latin, where it was applied to all –ĔRE
verbs and the vast majority of those of the –ĒRE class (2002:223).” He also addresses
the question of Spanish participles.
“As in the case of the Latin perfect, a distinction should be drawn between weak
and strong participles. As in the perfect, the large majority of –ĀRE and –ĪRE
verbs had weak (ending-stressed) participles (CANTĀTUS, AUDĪTUS, whence
cantado, oído), while a high proportion of participles belonging to –ĒRE and –
ĔRE verbs bore the accent on the root (TEMĬTUS, MISSUS, DICTUS, etc.). A
further similarity with the perfect is that the majority of verbs which in Latin had
strong participles, and which have survived in Spanish, now have weak participles
(e.g. CURSUS, HABĬTUS, MISSUS > corrido, habido, metido) (Penny
2002:237).”
After the data were entered in the columns for the Latin perfect and participle
stems, these were categorized into types based on the morphological analysis of Bennett
(1918). Columns were added under the Latin Verb heading for Perfect Type and
51
Participle Type. Tables 5.1 and 5.2 identify the symbols used to code the data in these
columns.
Symbol
Type
V
-TV-v+
V*
-v+ (TV not present)
U
-u+
S
-s+ (Sigmatic)
Re
Reduplicating
L
Stem vowel lengthening
NC
No Change
(* Indicates a form worthy of special attention due to some deviation from the identified
patterns)
Table 5.1. Past Perfect Stem Classification (Perfect Type)
Type
Symbol
T
-tus (dt or tt → s)
VT
TV –tus (dt or tt → s)
S
-sus
I
-ĭtus
(* Indicates a form worthy of special attention due to some deviation from the identified
patterns)
Table 5.2 Perfect Participle Classification (Part. Type)
52
Several studies of the development of the Spanish conjugation classes have
suggested that the “root-vowel” (RV) of Spanish verbs played a key role in determining
their conjugation class membership (Penny 2002, Montgomery 1976, Togeby 1972).
Therefore it was deemed useful to include columns indicating the RV of each verb in the
Spreadsheet. Due to the completeness of the morphological information available for
Classical Latin in works like 501 Latin Verbs and for Modern Spanish and Portuguese by
virtue of the fact that they are still widely spoken, it was decided that it was most feasible
to determine the underlying values of the RV for these three languages only, given that
such a determination of the underling phonemic representation must be inferred through
a study of the morpho-phonemic alternations observable in the various inflected surface
forms of each verb (Odden 2005:94).
In Romance linguistics the root-vowel of a verb is considered to be the rightmost
vowel to the left of the TV when given the infinitive form. In most cases it is also the
stressed vowel in the third person singular form of the present indicative form of the verb.
For Classical Latin, the surface form alternations were retrieved from 501 Latin
Verbs. Under the Latin Verb heading an RV column was created and each verb was
assigned a symbol from among the following: „a‟, „ā‟, „aj‟, „aw‟, „e‟, „ē‟, „i‟, „ī‟, „o‟, „ō‟,
„u‟, „ū‟. These correspond to the full set of both long and short vowels that appeared in
RV position as well as the two diphthongs spelled AE and AU. Vowel length is indicated
by the orthography used in 501 Latin Verbs.
In Classical Latin the RVs of simple verbs often change in prefixed compound
verbs. Before a single consonant /ĕ/ and /ă/ become [ĭ]. Before two consecutive
consonants, /ă/ becomes [ĕ]. /aj/ and /ā/ become [ī] and /aw/ becomes [ū] or sometimes
53
[ō] (Bennett 1918: 6). In compounds of this type /ă/ is realized as [ŭ] when preceded by
/kw/, which is realized as [k] in these compounds. For these compound verbs, the
underlying RV is listed alongside the surface realization of the RV, which is given in
parentheses. For ease of reference, these verbs are listed by their root verb followed by
their prefix, and then by the surface form of the present active infinitive in parentheses.
For example, the verb requīrere is listed as: quaerere, re= (requīrere). Its RV entry is: aj
(ī). The the root-prefix structure of compound verbs is indicated in 501 verbs. For
additional verbs, Lewis (2000) was consulted.
For Modern Spanish, the surface form alternations were retrieved from the online
verb conjugator of the Real Academia Española (Real Academia Española [online]). In
the Modern Spanish RV column, each verb was assigned one of the following symbols:
„a‟, „e‟, „i‟, „o‟, „u‟, „je‟, „we‟, „aw‟. These correspond to each of the five basic vowels of
Spanish in addition to the three diphthongs spelled je, ue, and au. Vowel quality in
Spanish is readily determinable by orthography.
The Modern Portuguese surface form alternations were retrieved from the online
verb conjugator of the Dicionário Priberam da Língua Portuguesa (PRIBERAM [online]).
In the Modern Portuguese RV column, each verb was assigned one of the following
symbols: „a‟, „e‟, „ɛ‟, „i‟, „o‟, „ɔ‟, „u‟, „aw‟. These correspond to the seven oral vowels of
Portuguese and the diphthong spelled au. Determining the vowel quality in a given
Portuguese surface form from the orthography is somewhat more complicated as both
vowels [e] and [ɛ] are spelled with the letter „e‟, and both [o] and [ɔ] are spelled „o‟.
Therefore some knowledge of Portuguese morpho-phonology is required. In Portuguese
54
there is a verb-stem laxing rule that assigns the binary feature [-atr] to vowels that are [high, -rtr] in the rightmost vocalic position of word roots in the stem formation stratum
(Redenbarger 1981: 167). Thus we can assume an underlying /ɛ/ or /ɔ/ in the RV position
of Portuguese verbs where the vowel is spelled „e‟ or „o‟ respectively.
The prefixed compound verbs were then extracted from the Excel sheet and
pasted into a separate sheet along with the entries for their root verbs. This allows the
simple CL verbs to easily be considered separately from the compounds.
Once the Excel sheet had been constructed and the data collected and entered as
described above, it had grown from 362 rows of data to contain 445 rows. It then became
evident that a large number of the Latin verbs included in the data had no reflexes in the
Hispanic data. For these entries, the cells in the columns corresponding to the Hispanic
daughter languages were given a black cell color to distinguish them visually from the
Latin verbs that have at least one Hispanic reflex in the data. Figure 5.1 illustrates the
appearance of the spreadsheet when opened in Microsoft Excel 2007.
55
Figure 5.1. A sample view of the spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel 2007.
56
Chapter 6: Relevant Changes in the Morpho-phonology of the Hispano-Romance
Languages
Having already discussed Redenbarger‟s synchronic study of Latin morphophonology (see Chapter 2) in addition to the major phonological changes that took place
in the vowel system of the Vulgar Latin of the Iberian Peninsula (see Chapter 4), we are
now ready to examine in detail the changes in morpho-phonology that took place in
Hispano-Romance, which ultimately led the HR verbs of Latin origin to fit into the threeconjugation system that characterizes the languages of this branch of Romance. In
discussing HR verbs of Latin origin it is necessary to make a distinction between orallytransmitted words and Latinisms. Orally-transmitted words have also been referred to as
popular words, inherited words and patrimonial words. They are words which, in a given
language, have a continuous oral history. In the case of Romance this means that the
word in question was transmitted from spoken Latin by word of mouth, across
generations of speakers, until finally arriving at the stage under study of the language in
question. In such a case, the word undergoes all the phonological and morphological
changes which are characteristic of the development of that language (Penny 2002: 39).
These words, which are the traditional focus of historical grammars, should be viewed in
contrast to the so-called learned words; those lexical items which share the same source
57
language, but have not passed through all the same stages of development undergone by
the orally-transmitted words. Lexical items of this latter variety are traditionally referred
to as cultismos or semicultismos in studies of Spanish historical grammar, depending on
the degree to which they have undergone the characteristic historical changes suffered by
the Spanish language during its evolution from spoken Latin. The problems surrounding
the use of these terms are discussed by Gloria Clavería Nadal in her book El latinismo en
español.
El cultismo en la gramática histórica tradicional es un concepto de valor relativo
ya que forma parte de un conjunto de tres nociones que se reparten los distintos
elementos léxicos del vocabulario del español que proceden del latín. Así, la
definición del término cultismo no puede entenderse sin la ayuda de otros dos:
palabra patrimonial, popular o heredada y semicultismo; pero los lingüistas no se
han puesto de acuerdo ni en los criterios esenciales sobre los que debe descansar
esta triple distinción ni en el mismo valor de estos conceptos. Además, el vocablo
latinismo es utilizado generalmente como sinónimo de cultismo, aunque en
algunas ocasiones se ha intentado llevar a cabo una distinción entre uno y otro
(1991: 9).
The potential ambiguity of these terms as they have been used can lead to
confusion since the identity of a particular lexical item as a cultismo tends to depend on a
variety of criteria which do not always coincide (Clavería Nadal 1991:14). In the
determination of cultismo status it is common to appeal to phonetic criteria, the nature of
58
the word‟s meaning, the cultural and social environment of its incursion into the
language, the semantic field to which it belongs and the learned word‟s survival across
history (Clavería Nadal 1991: 13). It is highly possible for a particular word to meet one
or more of these criteria without meeting all of them. For example, there are many
Spanish words used in scientific and mathematical contexts that have their origins in the
Greek or Arabic languages. These would easily meet the cultural and semantic criteria of
cultismos, but cannot effectively be compared to orally-transmitted words to determine if
they meet the phonetic criteria, since they do not share a common source language to
serve as a basis for such a comparison.
Clavería Nadal also points out the difficulties encountered in trying to adhere to
chronological criteria for the determination of cultismos and semicultismos, affirming that
many of these have attestation dates as old as any of the language‟s orally-transmitted
words. The Spanish words clavo and llave, for example, have comparable dates of first
attestation, and yet, CLAVEM > llave demonstrates the typical Spanish development of
the initial cl cluster, whereas clavo maintains the cluster in its Classical Latin form (1991:
18).
In light of such complications, Clavería Nadal proposes a substitution of the term
latinismo for cultismo in reference to Spanish words borrowed from Latin at a later stage
in the language‟s development, such that the word does not undergo all of the structural
developments typically undergone by orally-transmitted words (1991: 66). This
treatment of Latinisms as borrowings implies that such lexical items are susceptible to
undergoing structural alterations or adaptations in order to fit into the structural patterns
of the borrowing language. This same type of adaptation can be observed in Spanish
59
words that have been borrowed from English. The English verb shoot entered Spanish as
chutar (Salamon 2004: 445). The voiceless palatal sibilant [] of shoot [ut] underwent a
phonological adaptation to the voiceless palatal affricate [t] of chutar [tut.‟a], since the
former is absent from the phonemic inventory of Spanish. Additionally, the verb stem
was formed through the addition of a theme-vowel /a/ to the root: [tut-a]. With the
addition of the infinitive marker //, the borrowed verb takes on the form of a Spanish
infinitive [tut-a+] of the first conjugation. In fact, virtually all Spanish verbs borrowed
from English belong to the first conjugation. The verbalizing suffixes used in the
morphological adaptations are –ar, -ear and –izar (Salamon 2004; 445). Such
adaptations give the borrowing the shape of a native Spanish word, and allow speakers to
conjugate it just as they would any other regular verb of the first conjugation. The first
conjugation in Modern Spanish (as well as other Romance languages) is considered to be
synchronically productive because new verbs tend to have a TV of /a/ and obey the
morphology of this class as opposed to the second (/e/-theme) or third (/i/-theme)
conjugation classes. However, the first conjugation has not always been the only
productive conjugation class. During the development of Spanish, “the –ir class retained
all surviving –ĪRE verbs (except TUSSĪRE), and was increased by Germanic loans in
–JAN (SKARNJAN > escarnir, later escarnecer), and by a large number of learned
borrowings (definir, infundir, etc.) (Penny 2002: 173)”. It is not surprising to learn that
the third conjugation was once widely productive in Spanish given that the productive
verb classes in Latin were the –ĀRE and –ĪRE conjugations (Penny 2002: 171).
60
Such adaptations allow borrowings to act like native words in the synchronic
grammar of the language, and can consequently mask their foreign origin to later
generations of speakers. A native speaker may not recognize these words as borrowings,
since they have been incorporated into the structure of the borrowing language. To the
historical linguist, however, they will be recognizable as borrowings because they could
not have developed as such in the ordinary course of language change. Therefore, an
adapted verb may be historically and etymologically foreign, but to the native speaker it
is as psychologically indigenous as any orally-transmitted word once it is commonly used
(Clavería Nadal 1991: 46).
In the following discussion of the development of the HR conjugation classes I
will adopt Clavería Nadal‟s suggestion and use the term Latinism, as opposed to cultismo
and/or semicultismo, in reference to verbs of Latin origin, which have entered HispanoRomance as borrowings rather than through oral transmission. It should be recognized
that the question of Latinisms as borrowings in Romance is complicated by the fact that
any given Romance language was not only in prolonged contact with Latin, but also
generally in contact with neighboring Romance varieties.
The contact situation between Latin and Romance was a multifaceted one. As the
Romance languages developed they became increasingly differentiated from Latin, which
remained relatively unchanged in comparison, due to its status as a primarily written
language rather than a spoken one. This fact, never the less, did not imply a clear
separation between Latin and Romance. By virtue of the fact that Latin was a literary
language, as opposed to a vernacular one, those who made the earliest transcriptions of
Romance vernaculars “virtually all knew Latin and had presumably acquired their first
61
literacy in that language. It would come naturally to them, therefore, to introduce Latin
features, particularly orthographical and lexical, into their writing of the vernacular
whenever a problem of expression arose (Hall 1974: 133).” Thus, these scholarly
individuals, who produced the first Romance texts, must have relied heavily on their
knowledge of Latin to fill in the gaps of expression when they could not find a vernacular
word to their satisfaction. “Lexical borrowings from Latin began almost as soon as the
writing down of Romance material (Hall 1974: 134).”
Many Romance speakers who likely did not have daily contact with written Latin
were nevertheless exposed to Latin as read aloud in the church, the law courts, etc. Many
Latinisms have been designated as semi-learned words or semicultismos under the
assumption that they were transmitted orally in this fashion. They have undergone some,
but not all, of the changes typical of orally-transmitted words. Take, for example, the
Castilian CRŬCE > cruz, which shows the popular lenition of C e,i, but maintains its tonic
/u/ which appears as /o/ in typical orally-transmitted words (Penny 2002: 40).
Robert A. Hall, Jr. elegantly describes the contact situation among different
Romance varieties in his book External History of the Romance Languages:
It must not be thought that western European speakers of Romance made
borrowings only from Latin. There were, for the times, very active cultural
currents flowing from one Romance-speaking area to another, and particularly
from Gallo-Romance to Ibero- and Italo-Romance. These last-mentioned
influences were correlated with the growing prestige, first of the Provençal courts
of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and, only slightly later, of the North French
62
court. French came to be regarded as the most elegant of the Romance
languages…As with Latin borrowings, translators would often introduce French
words when they could find no exact vernacular equivalent…Naturally, the
currents of borrowing were not all in one direction. French took various terms
from Italian in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries… (Hall 1974:
136).
There is also evidence that borrowing took place among Romance varieties within
the Iberian Peninsula. Let us consider the Castilian word dividir, which gives every
indication of being a Latinism. It was documented for the first time in the writing of D.
Enrique Villena in the 15th century where it supplanted departir and distinguir. However,
if we bear in mind that this term appears in non-literary Aragonese documents as early as
the 13th century and that Villena introduced a variety of Aragonesisms, it becomes quite
reasonable to admit the possibility that dividir entered the Castilian lexicon indirectly
from Latin via Aragonese (Clavería Nadal 1991: 47). Portuguese has also borrowed from
Castilian. This can be easily demonstrated by the Portuguese word pair cavaleiro and
cavalheiro, both of which developed from Late Latin CABALLARIUS, meaning one
who rides a horse. The indigenous Portuguese cavaleiro maintains this meaning whereas
cavalheiro, which came into Portuguese via the Castilian caballero, carries a meaning
akin to English gentleman (Lovisolo et. al. 1992: 200), a secondary meaning of the
Castilian term.
It is evident that when scrutinizing the development of Romance words from their
Latin origin to their modern forms, we must keep in mind the fact that a quite significant
63
number of lexical items followed and indirect path. In the field of historical grammar
these alternative pathways have often been ignored, or relegated to minor consideration,
in favor of the study of regular Neogrammarian-type sound change, through the analysis
of the orally-transmitted lexicon. Any rigorous investigation of historical Romance
grammar must take into consideration the interaction between the dual presence of both a
written tradition and a separately-evolving vernacular in addition to the complex
interaction between the two. As Clavería Nadal asserts, “[l]a importancia de la lengua
escrita en la transmisión y pervivencia de muchos latinismos hace que la sustitución de la
norma de escritura latina por una nueva norma se configure como un factor de evolución
histórica fundamental (1991: 203).”
In light of the above considerations, let us now begin our analysis of the
development of the three conjugation classes of HR from the five conjugation classes of
Classical Latin. The discussion will be organized in accordance with the TVs of the five
conjugation classes of Classical Latin, beginning with the verbs of the /ā/-theme
(Conjugation I), and followed by the /ē/-theme (Conjugation II), the Ø-theme and /ĭ/theme (Conjugations III and IIIi), and finally the /ī/-theme (Conjugation IV) in that order.
The discussion will attempt to track the destiny of the verbs from each conjugation,
insofar as they survived in HR, in terms of how they came to fit into the threeconjugation system of HR. The account given here for the verbs of Classical Latin
conjugations II-IV is based primarily on an analysis of the data set collected as described
in Chapter 5. I will first describe the major changes as they relate to the development of
the Castilian and Portuguese conjugations, and then attempt to place these within the
64
broader context of Hispano-Romance, including a discussion of data from the other HR
languages.
The /ā/-theme verbs (Classical Latin Conjugation I)
The trajectory of the verbs from this class across the history of Hispano-Romance
is fairly intuitive. Since Latin did not have any verbs with a TV of /ă/, and since the
development of the Vulgar Latin vowel system of the Iberian Peninsula from the
Classical Latin vowel system did not result in the merger of /ā/ with any vowel other than
/ă/, the natural destiny of these verbs is the HR first conjugation. This conjugation is
characterized by the TV /a/ across this subfamily of Romance. This is not to say,
however, that the first conjugation did not gain a certain number of verbs that previously
belonged to other conjugation classes.
Penny cites a few such examples for Castilian including TORRĒRE > turrar,
FIDĔRE > fiar, MINUĔRE > menguar, MEIĔRE > mear (2002: 172). Garcia de Diego
also mentions some cognate verbs of this type in Galician, pointing to the fact that their
presence in other (Romance) languages indicates a change whose roots were already
firmly established in Latin (1909: 111). In fact, MEIĔRE has also been attested as
MEIĀRE in Latin, strongly indicating that the conjugation class change predates its
appearance as a Romance first conjugation (Penny 2002: 172).
The /ē/-theme verbs (Classical Latin Conjugation II)
The reader will remember from the discussion in Chapter 4 that /ē/ became
/e/ during the development of the Vulgar Latin vowel system in Hispania. Therefore, it is
65
unsurprising to find that most of the orally-transmitted /ē/-theme verbs fell into the
Castilian second conjugation, whose TV is /e/. One clear exception is RĪDĒRE > reír,
which happens to be the only /ē/-theme verb in the data with a root-vowel (RV) of /ī/, and
finds a home in the Castilian third conjugation. FERVĒRE > hervir shares a similar fate
despite its non-high RV, although we should keep in mind that FERVĒRE also appeared
as FERVĔRE in some texts (Anderson1979: 168). Therefore, it is reasonable to entertain
the possibility that its treatment in Castilian was not necessarily typical of the /ē/-theme
verbs.
A number of the /ē/-theme verbs that survive in Castilian are Latinisms.
Montgomery (1978: 915) identifies ejercer as such, but several others are worthy of this
distinction due to their retention of Latin consonant clusters and/or vowel quality. These
are given in Table 6.1. Note that RESIDĒRE coexisted with RESIDĔRE, and it is not
entirely obvious which of these is the true etymon of residir.
66
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Classical Latin
ABSTINĒRE
CONTINĒRE
EXERCĒRE
PLACĒRE
RESPONDĒRE
SORBĒRE
LUCĒRE
NOCĒRE
TONDĒRE
URGĒRE
Castilian
abstener
contener
ejercer
placer
responder
sorber
lucir
nocir
tundir
urgir
Table 6.1. Latinisms in Castilian taken from the Latin second conjugation
The Castilian verbs in rows 1-6 of Table 6.1 belong to the second conjugation. Those in
rows 7-10 belong to the third. Clearly, the treatment of Latinisms from this conjugation
class was not uniform. It is unclear exactly why this is the case, but there is some
evidence to suggest that the Latinisms adopted by Castilian more recently were adapted
as –ir verbs. The third conjugation was still productive during earlier stages of the
language, and during the period when many additions took place (around the 15th
century) many orally-transmitted verbs were also reshaped under learned influence, often
moving from the second to the third conjugation in the process. Several such examples
are emer > gemir, llañer > plañir and esleer > elegir (Montgomery 1978: 915).
Montgomery also observes that a more recent continuation of this trend may, in fact, be
the force behind the movement of hervir (formerly herver) to the third conjugation, along
with cerner > cernir and others (1978: 915).
67
Like Castilian, Portuguese also adopted the majority of the orally-transmitted
Latin /ē/-theme verbs into the second conjugation. RĪDĒRE > rir also shows a similar
treatment of this lonely /ē/-theme verb whose TV is /ī/. POSSIDĒRE > possuir seems an
unlikely candidate for inclusion in the third conjugation, but if we consider the possibility
that the verb was formed from the noun POSSE > posse with the addition of the TV /i/
from the still-productive Old Portuguese third conjugation, [posse-i+] > possuir may
represent a more feasible etymology for this particular verb.
A number of Portuguese Latinisms were also extracted from the /ē/-theme
conjugation. These are shown in Table 6.2.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Classical Latin
ABSTINĒRE
CONTINĒRE
EXERCĒRE
PLACĒRE
RESPONDĒRE
SORBĒRE
LUCĒRE
RESIDĒRE
URGĒRE
Portuguese
abster
conter
exercer
prazer
responder
sorver
luzir
residir
urgir
Table 6.2. Latinisms in Portuguese taken from the Latin second conjugation
The reader will observe that in Portuguese the Latinisms from the /ē/-theme
conjugation that gained the TV /i/ in Portuguese all have high RVs. Of those that entered
the second conjugation, the only verbs showing high RVs in their Latin form are the
68
prefixed compounds ABSTINĒRE > abster and CONTINĒRE > conter, whose
underlying theme vowel is /ĕ/. These are best thought of as verbs based on the orallytransmitted TENĒRE > ter upon which the prefixes AB- and CON- continue to act as
prefixes in the modern language. (See the following discussion of compounds.) The
height of the RV in the Latin etymons may well not be the cause of the verbs‟ adoption
into either the second or third conjugation, but it is certainly an observation that can be
made of the data, one which does not hold true for the Castilian data. We will return to
this question below.
With respect to the verbs of the CL conjugation II, Galician sets itself apart within
the HR varieties by having adopted into the third conjugation a small number of these
verbs, which were adopted by the second conjugation elsewhere in HR. These include
OLĒRE > olir and SORBĒRE > sorbir. Like Portuguese, Galician also adopted
POSSIDĒRE into the third conjugation, as did Navarro and Aragonese in the East.
Despite this, Galician also “maintained” several of these verbs in the second conjugation
which have been adopted into the third conjugation by Castilian. These include
IMPLĒRE > encher, NOCĒRE > nocer, LUCĒRE > locer, and FERVĒRE > ferver
(Garcia de Diego 1909: 112). NOCĒRE also survived as nocer in Aragonese. The
adoption of RĪDĒRE into the third conjugation was apparently not universal across the
varieties of HR. Its reflexes are cited as rier in Asturian and Leonese (Garcia de Diego
1985) and as (a)rrier in Aragonese (Alvar 1953: 223).
Overall, we can see that, although it is not without exception, there was a strong
tendency across HR for verbs of CL conjugation II to survive as members of the second
conjugation in the HR varieties. The adoption of several of these verbs into the third
69
conjugation also strongly suggests that at the earliest stages of Hispano-Romance there
was enough similarity between the inflectional morphology of the /e/-theme and /i/-theme
conjugations that the distinction between the two was, at least at times, too opaque to be
accurately reconstructed by learners of the language.
The Ø-theme verbs (Classical Latin Conjugation III)
The athematic conjugation class presents the most complex problem among the
five CL conjugation classes in the development of the HR verb system. Its verbs had to
make the transition from a grammar in which a very large percentage of commonly used
verbs had no underlying theme vowel, to a grammar in which there are only three distinct
conjugation classes, each distinguished by one of the underlying TVs: /a/, /e/ or /i/. We
have seen that the vowel appearing in the TV position of these Latin verbs was, in fact,
an epenthetic /ĭ/ (see Chapter 2), which was realized as [ĕ] before rhotics and elsewhere
as [ĭ], breaking up consonant clusters across morpheme boundaries.
This means that as the language was transmitted across generations of speakers,
the verbs of the athematic class had to have been assigned an underlying TV at some
stage in the development of Hispano-Romance. This stage was necessarily prior to the
production of the first Spanish language texts in the 11 th century, since the reduction of
the five CL conjugations to the three conjugations of Spanish had evidently occurred
before the emergence of those earliest written documents (Penny 2002: 171). Moreover,
the generalization of the penultimate stress pattern of the infinitives in CL conjugations I,
II and IV had placed the word stress on the TV position of all verb infinitives in HR
(Penny 2002: 154), giving more phonetic prominence than ever to the TV of the verbs
70
from CL conjugations III and IIIi, which now held the status of being the nucleus of the
stressed syllable for the first time. With the development of the Vulgar Latin vowel
system, in which the quantitative distinction between long and short vowels was lost, and
the Latin vowels /ē/ and /ĭ/ merged as /e/ in the Iberian Peninsula, it may seem obvious
that /e/ would be the most natural choice for an underlying theme vowel as the /ĭ/epenthesis rule grew too opaque to be acquired by child learners of HR, and that all verbs
from the Latin athematic conjugation would find a home in the HR second conjugation.
The data clearly indicate that this was not entirely the case.
If we look at the Castilian data, we can see that orally-transmitted verbs whose
Latin etymons had long, high, front RVs (such as DĪCĔRE > decir, SCRĪBĔRE >
escribir, VĪVĔRE > vivir, and SŪMĔRE > sumir) were adopted by the third conjugation.
Other orally-transmitted verbs (CĂDĔRE > caer, LĔGĔRE > leer, QUAERĔRE >
querer, BĬBĔRE > beber, VŎLVĔRE > volver, RŬMPĔRE > romper, etc.) were all
adopted by the second conjugation. It seems that with the choice of available themevowels having been reduced to just /e/ and /i/ ( the /a/-theme remaining unambiguously
distinct from the rest, as seen above), Castilian had a tendency to insert the TV that
matched the height of the Vulgar Latin RV (/ĭ/ and /ŭ/ having lowered to /e/ and /o/
respectively). Thus, the verbs with RV /ī/ > /i/ and /ū/ > /u/ gained the high TV /i/, while
the rest gained the TV /e/.
In observing the Portuguese cognate data from the verbs with long, high, front
RVs (DĪCĔRE > dizer, SCRĪBĔRE > escrever, VĪVĔRE > viver, SŪMĔRE > sumir) as
well as those of other verbs (CĂDĔRE > cair, LĔGĔRE > ler, QUAERĔRE > querer ,
BĬBĔRE > beber, VŎLVĔRE > volver, RŬMPĔRE > romper) a few facts stand out
71
prominently. First, with the exception of just a pair of cases like SŪMĔRE > sumir, the
Latin verbs of this class with long, high, front RVs were adopted by the Portuguese
second conjugation, as were the majority of the other orally-transmitted verbs.
SĔQUĪ > seguir and PĔTĔRE > pedir are interesting exceptions in both Castilian
and Portuguese. SĔQUĪ > seguir along with NĀSCĪ > nacer (Cast.) / nascer (Port.) are
the two deponent athematic verbs that survived in HR. The DRAE gives NASCĔRE as
the etymon for nacer. If this is indeed an attested form in Latin, then we can assume that
the verb had already begun to lose its deponent character, and behave as a conjugation III
verb by the later stages of Latin. The loss of deponent verbs has been cited as one of the
“earliest and most noteworthy developments” of Vulgar Latin, with evidence dating back
to the writings of Platus, in which deponent verbs are adjusted from the morphology of
the passive voice to that of the active voice (Elcock 1960: 103). The DRAE gives
*SEQUĪRE for the etymology of Castilian seguir, whereas the Larousse Cultural gives
(the presumably reconstructed) SEQUĔRE for the etymology of Portuguese seguir. If we
are to believe the etymology of the DRAE, and the etymon of seguir is unattested in
Latin as a non-deponent verb, it may be the case that its later adoption into the third
conjugation was due to the productivity of that conjugation class at the time, or perhaps
akin to other learned adjustments. PĔTĔRE > pedir presents an interesting morphological
history due to the fact that although its present active infinitive and present tense forms
exhibit morphology typical of the Latin conjugation III, its past perfect stem [pet-ī+v+]
and past perfect participle stem [pet-ī+t+] show a pattern more typical of the verbs of
conjugation IV, with [ī] in the TV position. It is not inconceivable, then, that this bridging
of conjugations III and IV could have led to the verb‟s adoption as a conjugation IV verb
72
in the vernacular. The Old Castilian form pitent (mod. piden) with the metaphonic RV [i]
(typical of the third conjugation in Castilian) appears among the oldest texts (Harris
1975: 372). It demonstrates that this verb‟s membership in the /i/-theme conjugation of
Castilian dates back at least as far as the 13th century. Portuguese CĂDĔRE > cair, which
is attested as caer in Old Portuguese and Galician, may have moved into the third
conjugation as a natural result of the noticeably low frequency of the vowel sequence
[a.e] in hiatus in favor of the much more prevalent sequence [a.i].
In sum, the orally-transmitted verbs of Castilian and Portuguese which originated
in the Latin athematic class can be shown to have been adopted by the HR second
conjugation, gaining /e/ as their theme-vowel. The major exception to this is the group of
verbs whose RVs were long, high, front vowels. These were adopted by the third
conjugation in Castilian. A very limited pair of examples from Portuguese (SŪMĔRE >
sumir and LŪDĔRE > loir ant.) suggest that the high RV /ū/ may also have coaxed Latin
athematics into the third conjugation in Portuguese.
A look at the Latinisms adopted by Castilian shows that they are present in both
the second and third conjugations. Table 6.3 presents a sampling of these. Although a
small number of these does clearly belong to the second conjugation, the vast majority
can be found in the third conjugation.
73
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Classical Latin
ACCĔDĔRE
SUSPĔNDĔRE
GĔMĔRE
TĂNGĔRE
APPLAUDĔRE
SUBMĔRGĔRE
PRAEFERRE
RĔGĔRE
COMPRĬMĔRE
EXPRĬMĔRE
CONSTRŬĔRE
ADDŪCĔRE
Castilian
acceder
suspender
gemir
tangir
aplaudir
sumergir
preferir
regir
comprimir
exprimir
construir
aducir
Table 6.3 Some Latinisms in Castilian taken from the Latin third (athematic) conjugation
As we have seen in our examination of the Latinisms taken from the /ē/-theme
conjugation, it is justifiable to conclude that the /e/-theme Latinisms are older adoptions
and may predate the 15th century when existir, constituir, and incluir along with a great
many more Latinisms were absorbed into the /i/-theme conjugation in Castilian
(Montgomery 1978: 915). Of course, since we cannot assume that all Latinisms were
used for the first time in a given Romance language only as early as their first written
attestation, it is impossible to determine with exactitude the relative order of their
adoption. We can also rule out the influence of the RV on the conjugation class
membership of these Latinisms, since those found in the third conjugation encompass the
full range of possibilities for Latin root-vowels.
74
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Classical Latin
ACCEDĔRE
GEMĔRE
SUSPENDĔRE
TANGĔRE
SUBMERGERE
REGĔRE
APPLAUDĔRE
PRAEFERRE
COMPRIMĔRE
EXPRIMĔRE
CONSTRUĔRE
ADDUCĔRE
Portuguese
aceder
gemer
suspender
tanger
submergir
reger
aplaudir
preferir
comprimir
exprimir / expremer
construir
aduzir
Table 6.4 Some Latinisms in Portuguese taken from the Latin third (athematic)
conjugation
As Table 6.4 shows, a fair number of Latinisms which belong to the third
conjugation in Castilian can be found in the second conjugation in Portuguese. In
numerical terms it can easily be said that the Portuguese tendency to adopt Latinisms into
the third conjugation was much weaker than said tendency in Castilian. A closer
comparison of the Latinisms in the Portuguese /e/-theme conjugation which disagree in
conjugation class with their cognate Latinisms in Castilian reveals that several of these
are attested in Old Castilian with forms in –er (e.g. bater > batir , erger > erguir, esleer >
eligir, gemer > gemir, render > render, tañer > tangir). Thus, we may hypothesize that in
conjunction with the trend for Latinisms adopted around the 15 th century to be adopted
into the third conjugation, there was also a trend in Castilian for older forms to remodeled
with a basis in their Latin etymons and also adopted into the third conjugation. A few
Portuguese third-conjugation verbs are also attested with older forms in the second
75
conjugation (e.g. aduzer > aduzir, correger > corrigir, freger > frigir) indicating that
some such remodeling has also occurred.
As in Portuguese, in Leonese and Galician a number of verbs from the
athematic conjugation class became part of the /e/-theme conjugation, which in Castilian,
were adopted by the /i/-theme conjugation (Bishop 1977: 90). Both Galician and
Leonese follow the same general pattern as Portuguese, adopting orally-transmitted verbs
with long, high, front RVs into the second conjugation. In the Galician data we see
DĪCĔRE > dizer, SCRĪBĔRE > escrever (alongside escribir), and VĪVĔRE > viver. In
the Leonese data we see DĪCĔRE > dicer, SCRĪBĔRE > escrever, VĪVĔRE > viver. The
Asturian data also show us DĪCĔRE > dicer. In these Western HR varieties other orallytransmitted athematic verbs also generally show membership in the second conjugation,
with the exception of CĂDĔRE, which is attested as both caer and cair in the Galician
data. Several of the Portuguese Latinisms in –ir, have cognates in –er elsewhere in the
Western varieties. This is especially evident in the Galician data exemplified in Table 6.5.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Classical Latin
GEMĔRE
TANGĔRE
SUBMERGERE
REGĔRE
COMPRIMĔRE
EXPRIMĔRE
ADDUCĔRE
Portuguese
gemer
tanger
submergir
reger
comprimir
exprimir / expremer
aduzir
Galician
gemer
tanger
somerger
reger
compremer
experemer
aduzer / aducir
Table 6.5 Some Portuguese Latinisms from the Latin third (athematic) conjugation
alongside their Galician cognates.
76
On the other hand, if we compare the Castilian data to the data from Aragonese in
the East, we can find several verbs in the third conjugation whose Castilian cognates
belong to the second: cullir, cusir, texir (Cast. coger, coser, tejer) (Conte Cazcarro et. al.
1977: 66). We will also see atrivir, escondir, and leyr (Cast. atrever, esconder, and leer)
(Alvar 1953: 223). This fact may indicate that Old Castilian found itself on the border
between two competing general tendencies; the adoption of CL athematics into the
second conjugation to the West, and the adoption of these into the third conjugation to the
East. As Bishop points out, “[i]n the 13th century there was still a number of –er verbs in
old Spanish which vacillated between the –er and –ir conjugations, ultimately becoming
–ir. These verbs tended to show only –er forms in the west (1977: 90).” Galician shows
a greater predisposition towards the triumph of the –ir model in the infinitive than does
Portuguese. However many of these are recent changes in the history of the language,
such as dizer > dicir/decir and viver > vivir (Mariño Paz 2008: 94).
Of course, we should not ignore the influence of contact among the different
varieties of Hispano-Romance. In Galician, the increasing influence of Castilian has
given more extension to the forms in –ir, although many coexist along with the form in
–er (Garcia de Diego 1909: 112). In fact, further consideration of data like that in Tables
6.2 and 6.5, in light of this claim, suggests the feasibility of Castilian influence on the /i/theme membership of many Latinisms in Portuguese. Returning to the question of the
Portuguese Latinisms taken from the /ē/-theme conjugation, we can now see that the
membership of several of these in the third conjugation may actually have more to do
with an indirect transmission via Castilian than with the quality of their RVs. Wilkinson
also asserts that a number of learned verbs in Portuguese (all members of the /i/-theme
77
conjugation) seem like Hispanisms including agredir, progredir, transgredir, prevenir
and denegrir (1971: 18).
Let us also give some special consideration to the non-epenthesizing subgroup of
the Ø-theme verbs. As shown above, FERRE did not survive in HR as a simple verb and
while some of its prefixed compounds did survive, they have been significantly
remodeled (see the section on compounds below). ESSE survives in HR as ser but, as the
„be‟ verbs do throughout the Indo-European languages, it maintains a number of
irregularities attributable to its high frequency of use and considerable archaism.
POSSE, which is a compound of ESSE (Moreland & Felischer 1977: 88), survives in HR
as poder, but its morphology suggests development from *POTĒRE (DRAE) [pot-ē+re],
with a reanalyzed /ē/-theme stem. While poder is a regular 2nd conjugation verb in
modern Spanish, Portuguese had two two different roots for poder. In the 1SG and
subjunctive forms of the present tense the root is [pɔs-]. Elsewhere the root is [pɔd-].
The development of HR dar from CL DARE is also worthy of special attention.
In HR dar is irregular in the sense that its paradigm follows the pattern of 1st conjugation
verbs in the present indicative, present subjunctive, imperfect indicative and forms based
on the infinitive, but follows the pattern of 2nd conjugation verbs elsewhere. If we keep in
mind that DARE was athematic in CL and was also a reduplicating verb in the perfect
system, we can see how the morphology of dar in HR developed naturally. Once the CL
reduplication rule (Redenbarger forthcoming) was lost from the system, the perfect
system developed like a HR 2nd conjugation (as was typical of orally-transmitted
athematic verbs), and the present system came to resemble the HR 1 st conjugation
without suffering virtually any diachronic changes at all.
78
The /ĭ/-theme verbs (Classical Latin Conjugation IIIi)
Despite the similarity between the surface paradigms of the /ī/-theme verbs of CL
conjugation IV and the /ĭ/-theme verbs of CL conjugation IIIi, these two classes of verbs
did not share a common pattern of development in HR. The fate of the /ĭ/-theme verbs
was entangled by the development of /ĭ/ into /e/ in Vulgar Latin. The early generalization
of the CL morpho-phonological rule that deleted /ā/ before vowels across a morpheme
boundary (see Chapter 2), and the generalization of penultimate stress in HR (see Chapter
4) further complicated the ability of the conjugation IIIi verbs to maintain an identity in
Romance that was distinct from those of the verbs in CL conjugations II - IV.
If we look at that data for the Castilian reflexes of the simple /ĭ/-theme verbs, we
can see that very few of these actually survived. Of those that did, /ă/ was the most
common RV, and these verbs virtually all developed as –er verbs in Castilian. PARĔRE
> parir is an immediately evident exception to this generalization. MŎRĪ, which came
into Castilian as morir, is not only exceptional for being a deponent, but also for being
the only survivor from the /ĭ/-theme conjugation with an RV of /ŏ/. The retention of /u/
as the RV in huir, whose etymon had an RV of /ŭ/, is most likely a recent and learned
adaptation, even though huir is not attested in earlier forms with the root vowel spelled as
o. Although there is nothing on the surface of parir to explicitly identify it as a Latinism,
the prevalence of alternative HR expressions such as dar a luz in vernacular speech hint
at the possibility of an indirect or learned transmission of the verb from Latin to HR. As
the only surviving deponent verb from the /ĭ/-theme conjugation, it remains unclear why
MORĪ was ultimately adapted as a third conjugation verb in Castilian. One suggestion is
79
that in Castilian the diphthongizing –ir verbs all included either an r or an n at the end of
their root. These include dormir, morir, herir, mentir, sentir and venir (Montgomery
1976: 292). Since the rest of these verbs originated in the CL conjugation IV, MORĪ may
have found a home among them through analogy, as the only member of the CL
conjugation IIIi to survive with a diphthongizing RV. The verb has also been attested as
MORIRI in the work of Platus and Ovid, and later (after the Vulgar Latin period) as
MORIRE in the writing of Gregory of Tours. The Romance reflexes of this verb also
show membership in the /i/-theme conjugations of French mourir, Italian morire and
Romanian a muri (Elcock 1960: 103) in contrast to the prevalence of morrer elsewhere in
Hispano-Romance, and are perhaps suggestive of cross-Romance influence in Castilian.
The Portuguese data look very similar to the Castilian data within this group of
verbs. PARĔRE was also adopted by the Portuguese third conjugation. The one surviving
simple CL verb whose RV was /ŭ/ (FUGĔRE > fugir) also became an /i/-theme verbs in
Portuguese, and is attested with orthographic o in RV position in closely-related Galician.
This may give us some insight into history of this verb, since, excluding the infinitive, the
RV is only realized as [u] in contexts where an underlying RV of /ɔ/ would be raised and
tensed to [u] by the Portuguese vowel harmony rule. Thus, the restoration of [u] to the
RV position of the infinitive may well be due to learned adaptation. In Portuguese MŎRĪ
developed as morrer, joining the second conjugation in contradistinction to its Castilian
cognate.
Perhaps due to their relatively low rate of survival in Hispano-Romance, the
treatment of verbs from the CL conjugation IIIi in HR was nearly uniform as it concerns
their conjugation class membership. Castilian MŎRĪ > morir remain an exceptional case
80
of adoption by the third conjugation, even when compared to all of HR. Only in Asturian
is morrir attested (alongside morrer) as a reflex of this verb. Two CL verbs, which did
not survive in modern Castilian or Portuguese (RAPERE and deponent PATĪ) seem to
have developed as –ir verbs. Garcia de Diego cites rabir for both Leonese and Navarro,
and padir as an Old Castilian form.
If we examine the HR reflexes of the CL prefixed compound verbs from this
conjugation class, we can see that all of these are –ir verbs in the HR languages with the
exception of PERCIPĔRE, which is perceber in both Portuguese and Galician. Further
discussion regarding the fate of CL prefixed compounds will follow.
The /ī/-theme verbs (Classical Latin Conjugation IV)
As is the case for the verbs of CL conjugation I, there is little cause for
complication as concerns the fate of the verbs from the /ī/-theme conjugation. The Latin
vowel /ī/ became /i/ during the development of the Vulgar Latin vowel system, allowing
verbs of this conjugation to fit neatly into the HR third conjugation, whose TV is /i/. With
the unique exception of Castilian TUSSĪRE > toser, all Latin conjugation IV verbs which
survived were adopted into the third conjugation of both Modern Castilian and
Portuguese.
This sweeping adoption of /ī/-theme verbs by the HR /i/-theme conjugation is not
quite so categorical if we include the broad range of historical and cross-linguistic HR
data. A number of Galician verbs whose origins lie in the /ī/-theme conjugation of Latin
have been adopted by the second conjugation. These include VĔSTĪRE > vister,
SĔNTĪRE > senter, MENTĪRĪ > menter, PRŪRĪRE > proer, GLĂTTĪRE > later,
81
MŎLLĪRE > moler (Garcia de Diego 1909: 112). Several of these also occur in other
forms: vister is also cited as vester, and senter is also cited as sinter and sinter, indicating
a fair amount of fluctuation between the vowels /e/ and /i/ in the Galician data. The
Latinism EXPEDĪRE > expeder was also adopted by the second conjugation in Galician.
Asturian and Leonese both accept AUDĪRE into the second conjugation (oer, oyer, ouyer
and oyer, oer respectively), but otherwise adopt all verbs from this class into the third
conjugation.
A note on prefixed compound verbs
When we examine the HR reflexes of CL prefixed compound verbs, three distinct
patterns become apparent. First, there are some CL compounds which have survived as
compounds in HR. Examples of this pattern are verbs like Cast. abstener and Port. abster.
Like CL ABSTĬNĒRE, whose unprefixed base is TĔNĒRE. The simple verbs tener and
ter (in Castilian and Portuguese respectively) share the entirety of their inflectional
morphology with their related compounds, and also share a semantic relationship with
them much like that between TĔNĒRE and its compounds.
A second pattern is characterized by verbs like the Castilian and Portuguese
reflexes of CL CĂPĔRE and the related compound PERCĬPĔRE. CĂPĔRE survives as
the –er verb caber in both Castilian and Portuguese. However, PERCĬPĔRE survives as
percibir, a Castilian –ir verb, and perceber, an –er verb in Portuguese. The RVs of these
modern HR reflexes are /i/ and /ɛ/ underlyingly, and are inflected as regular –ir and –er
verbs (respectively), whereas caber has “strong” preterite forms in both languages.
Accordingly, it is unlikely that most native speakers of these languages, who have not
82
studied Classical Latin or historical linguistics, would be likely to see any connection
between the etymologically related caber and percibir/perceber. This situation also
strongly suggests that percebir/perceber (along with others like recibir/receber) were
borrowed from Latin, but caber was transmitted orally.
In the third pattern, the CL simple verb is lost, but (some of) its related
compounds survive in HR. Some of the FERRE compounds illustrate this. SUFFERRE
[sub=ferre] survives as the –er verb sofrer in Portuguese. The non-high RV of sofrer
suggests an oral transmission of this verb across the generations. However, PRAEFERRE
[prae=ferre] survives as the –ir verb preferir. In Castilian, SUFFERRE gives us sufrir
and PRAEFERRE (as it does in Portuguese) gives us preferir. Although the
diphthongizing RV of preferir (and other reflexes of FERRE compounds like, referir,
transferir and inferir) seems more suggestive of oral-transmission than of borrowing
from Latin, we can see a clear difference between the development of these and the
development of sufrir, in which the RV of SUFFERRE has been lost completely, and the
vowel derived from the CL prefix SUB- has taken on the role of the RV in the Castilian
reflex. (Note that the Old Castilian form is sofrir, meaning that the change in RV from /o/
to /u/ was probably a learned adaptation.) The reflexes of SUFFERRE in both
Portuguese and Castilian appear to have lost all traces of a morpheme boundary where
there was once a prefix. On the other hand, Castilian verbs like preferir, referir,
transferir, inferir etc. seem to behaive more like prefixed verbs, with meanings that can
be considered compositional with respect to their prefixes. Although, with the loss of
FERRE from the Castilian lexicon, these verbs may have been reanalyzed as compounds
of Old Castilian ferir (Modern Castilian herir), a reflex of CL FĔRĪRE, which would
83
explain the development of their diphthongizing RVs in addition to their membership in
the –ir conjugation. An analogous analysis of preferir, referir, transferir, inferir etc. in
Portuguese (where ferir < FĔRĪRE still maintains the CL initial consonant in the modern
language) is also feasible, given the overall similarity of the inflectional paradigms of
ferir and the reflexes of the FERRE compounds (in contrast to that of sofrer).
84
Chapter 7: Summary and Conclusions
As we have seen in the preceding chapters, the evolution of the Hispano-Romance
three-conjugation system involved much more than a collapse of the Classical Latin
conjugations II and III as some scholars have suggested. The present study extends our
understanding of Hispano-Romance diachronic verbal morpho-phonology in a number of
important ways.
In contrast to previous studies of the topic, we have begun with the morphophonology of Latin, rather than choosing reconstructed proto-Hispano-Romance or Old
Spanish as our starting point. It is only through examining the synchronic processes and
underlying structures of Latin first that we can truly get a sense of how that system has
changed and evolved during the development of the Hispano-Romance varieties. Simply
put, we cannot see what has been lost from the system, if we are not aware of the inner
workings of the system to begin with. For example, only by understanding the
productive CL /ĭ/-epenthesis rule can we begin to track the effects of its loss from the
system. The recognition of an athematic conjugation class in CL also allows us to better
understand the seemingly peculiar HR development of verbs like DARE or those from
the specially marked non-epenthesizing subgroup like FERRE, ESSE and POSSE (See
Chapter 6).
85
We have collected verb data from throughout the diverse varieties of HispanoRomance and organized it in a novel way that is not only convenient for our purposes,
but also for the needs of researchers conducting future investigations as well. This
database also highlights several important features of the underlying structure of
Classical Latin, Modern (Castilian) Spanish and Modern Portuguese. Latin prefixed
compounds have been identified and separated from simple verbs, illustrating the vowel
mutations that result from the compounding process. This treatment reveals clearly that
not all compounds behaved equally during their diachronic development. Three distinct
patterns can be identified (See Chapter 6):
1) CL compounds whose reflexes fully behave as compounds in HR, with
identifiable prefixes and root verbs.
2) CL compounds whose root verbs developed separately from their compounds in
HR, such that the modern reflexes have lost the root-compound relationship.
3) CL compounds whose root verb has been lost, but is survived by reflexes of one
or more of its compound forms.
The underlying root vowels of Modern Spanish and Portuguese have been
identified and labeled in the database. Using our knowledge of the development of the
HR vowel system, the identity of the underlying RV in these modern varieties (in
comparison with those of their CL etymons) is often key in identifying which verbs
developed through the course of direct oral transmission across generations of speakers.
86
Those HR verbs that stray from the normal patterns of oral transmission can often be
identified as Latinisms; lexical items borrowed as a result of prolonged contact with
Latin, and adapted to the synchronic morphophonology of a later stage of the language‟s
development.
We have also demonstrated the importance of considering Latinisms separately
from orally-transmitted verbs. It is only when the orally-transmitted verbs are considered
in isolation from Latinisms that the researcher can begin to get a clear picture of the
patterns that can be identified in their development:

CL /ā/-theme verbs developed as HR 1st conjugation verbs.

CL /ē/-theme verbs generally developed as HR 2 nd conjugation verbs, with
the exception of RĪDĒRE whose RV of /ī/ may have triggered its
development as a 3rd conjugation verb in both Spanish and Portuguese.

CL Ø-theme verbs generally developed as HR 2nd conjugation verbs. An
important exception is those with the RVs /ī/ and /ū/ in CL, which all
developed as 3rd conjugation verbs in Castilian. In Portuguese, only those
few with the RV /ū/ have developed as 3rd conjugation verbs.

Few of the CL /ĭ/-theme verbs survived. Of those that did, most developed
as HR 2nd conjugation verbs. The few that did not were also exceptional in
other ways.

CL /ī/-theme verbs generally developed as HR 3rd conjugation verbs.
87
The CL verbs from conjugations II-IV that were borrowed by the HR varieties
as Latinisms show a different patterning with regard to conjugation class
membership. Latinisms in HR come from all CL conjugations, but a particularly large
number of these Latinisms were borrowed from CL Ø-theme verbs.

Many older Latinisms from CL conjugations II & III were adapted as
HR 2nd conjugation verbs.

Many of the more recent Latinisms from CL conjugations II and III,
especially a large number cited for the first time in the 15 th century,
were adapted as HR 3rd conjugation verbs, especially in Castilian.

Many HR verbs were remodeled under Latin influence, gaining a more
Latin-like spelling in more recent manuscripts. A change from the HR
2nd conjugation to 3rd conjugation morphology accompanied these
adaptations in a number of cases.
This type of adaptation is not the only indirect means though which Classical
Latin verbs made their way into the lexicon of Hispano-Romance. A number of CL
verbs, which were otherwise lost, have lived on through their perfect past participles,
or their adjectival forms, which have been adapted as the roots of regular 1st
conjugation verbs in HR. The 1st is the only active conjugation in modern HR into
which new verb are coined and adapted to the inflectional morphology. The HR 2 nd
conjugation also gained some verbs early on due to the productive adaptation of
nouns and adjectives to HR verb morphology through the addition of the suffix –
88
escer (e.g. Cast. noche ~ anochecer, rico ~ enriquecer etc.) (Penny 2002: 172). A
number of older 3rd conjugation verbs were also replaced by adaptations of this type.
Take for example Old Spanish padir and its modern counterpart padecer.
By tracing changes in conjugation class membership in verbs of HR varieties
from across the Iberian Peninsula, we have been able to identify geographic
tendencies in the diachronic morphophonology of HR verbs.

The tendency for CL athematic verbs to develop as 3 rd conjugation
verbs was strongest in the east of the Iberian Peninsula, whereas the
tendency for these to develop as 2nd conjugation verbs dominated in
the west.

The recent influence of Castilian is a likely cause of an increase in HR
3rd conjugation verbs in western HR varieties, whose etymons lie in
the CL athematic conjugation.
In this sense, Modern Portuguese exhibits a comparatively cleaner
development from CL than Modern Spanish, and its socio-political autonomy
may have spared it from much of the Castilian influence undergone recently by
Galician. Previous studies, which have tended to use Castilian rather than Latin as
a point of reference, have failed to capture these geographic tendencies that are
easily highlighted through the methodology we have employed here.
89
Having begun our study with the Classical Latin data as the starting point,
we have also been able to make some generalizations about the significant
number of frequently-used CL verbs which did not survive in Hispano-Romance.

The majority of the /ĭ/-theme verbs was lost.

Most prefixed ĪRE compounds were lost.

Many verbs without attested perfect stems were lost.

A number of deponent verbs were lost.
Although these trends stand out in the data, it is not always possible to
venture an explanation as to why a particular word may be lost from the lexicon
of a language. The most frequently-used words tend to survive, but even these
may become less frequent as they complete with new words that overlap in
meaning. However, sometimes an ongoing structural change in a Language can
be a factor in the loss of a particular category of words. This was probably the
case with the CL deponent verbs. The deponent verbs of CL are characterized by
their passive-voice-type morphology, even when their meaning is active. Since
the modern Romance languages have entirely lost the synthetic passive voice
(replaced by an analytical passive construction), it makes sense that many of the
deponents would be lost as well. In fact, as we have seen, only three CL
deponents (NASCĪ, SEQUĪ, and MORĪ) have survived in Modern Spanish (as
nacer, seguir and morir respectively) and Modern Portuguese (as nascer, seguir
90
and morrer respectively). One additional deponent, PATĪ, also survived in Old
Spanish as padir. NASCĪ seems to have made the transition by simply adopting
active-voice morphology (a documented tendency in Vulgar Latin), and then
developing as a regular HR 2nd conjugation verb, as we would expect from most
orally-transmitted athematic verbs. If the same had been true of SEQUĪ, we
should expect *seguer, rather than the 3rd conjugation seguir. The curious
development of MORĪ also remains a puzzle. As the only surviving /ĭ/-theme
deponent, we cannot place it anywhere in a more general pattern.
“It is the special privilege of Romance philologists that they are not
compelled to rely entirely upon reconstruction. Apart from the massive testimony
of Latin literature, various direct sources of information concerning the nature of
the spoken language are available for scrutiny (Elcock 1960: 21).” It is in the
wealth of available data that historical Romance linguistics stands apart from
other subfields of historical linguistics. While this enormous and diverse body of
data (both historical and contemporary) often allows the Romance linguist to give
a more detailed description of past stages of the language in question without such
heavy reliance on the recourses of reconstruction and speculation, it also serves as
a powerful and concrete reminder that language is a complex, multidimensional
and dynamic aspect of human society. Our growing understanding of the nature of
language change informs our knowledge of language structure just as new
discoveries regarding the nature of language structure can, in turn, alter our
approach to studying language change. It is my sincere hope that the conclusions
91
drawn from the present study can serve, in some modest way, to further our
overall understanding of human language and cognition.
92
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96
Appendix A: Color key to Classical Latin and Hispano-Romance verb data
Entries showing some variation in conj. class between Hispano-Romance
languages.
Entries showing variation in conj. Class between Modern Castilian and
Modern Portuguese
Verbs included in 201 Latin Verbs
Ambiguous or questionable Latin etymologies
Latin verb not found in main entries of either 501 or 201 Latin Verbs
97
Appendix B: CL simple verbs with Modern Spanish and Portuguese Reflexes
Latin Verb
Infinitive
Modern Spanish
TV
Modern Portuguese
Infinitive
TV
Infinitive
TV
arder
e
arder
e
ārdēre
ē
carēre
ē
dēbēre
ē
deber
e
dever
e
dolēre
ē
doler
e
doer
e
exercēre
ē
ejercer
e
exercer
e
fervēre
ē
hervir
i
ferver
e
habēre
ē
haber
e
haver
e
iacēre
ē
yacer
e
jazer
e
licēre
ē
lucēre
ē
miscēre
ē
mordēre
ē
morder
movēre
ē
mulgēre
(*carescere)
carecer
lazer
lucir
i
luzir
i
mexer
e
e
morder
e
mover
e
mover
e
ē
muir
i
nocēre
ē
nocir
i
olēre (olere)
ē
oler
e
placēre
ē
placer
e
prazer
e
possidēre
ē
poseer
e
possuir
i
putēre
ē
podrir / pudrir
i
rīdēre
ē
reír
i
rir
i
solēre
ē
soler
e
soer
e
98
sorbēre
ē
sorber
e
sorver
e
tenēre
ē
tener
e
ter
e
timēre
ē
temer
e
temer
e
tondēre
ē
tundir
i
torquēre
ē
torcer
e
torcer
e
urgēre
ē
urgir
i
urgir
i
valēre
ē
valer
e
valer
e
vidēre
ē
ver
e
ver
e
capere
ĭ
caber
e
caber
e
facere
ĭ
hacer
e
fazer
e
fugere
ĭ
huir
i
fugir
i
morī
ĭ
morir
i
morrer
e
parere
ĭ
parir
i
parir
i
sapere
ĭ
saber
e
saber
e
aperīre
ī
abrir
i
abrir
i
audīre
ī
oír
i
ouvir
i
dormīre
ī
dormir
i
dormir
i
ferīre
ī
herir
i
ferir
i
fīnīre
ī
finir
i
glattīre
ī
latir
i
latir
i
īre
ī
ir
i
ir
i
mentīrī
ī
mentir
i
mentir
i
mētīrī
ī
medir
i
medir
i
mollīre
ī
mullir
i
mūnīre
ī
munir
i
nūtrīre
ī
nutrir
i
nutrir
i
pūnīre
ī
punir
i
punir
i
salīre
ī
salir
i
sair
i
sentīre
ī
sentir
i
sentir
i
sepelīre
ī
sepelir
i
99
servīre
ī
servir
i
servir
i
tussīre
ī
toser
e
tossir
i
venīre
ī
venir ?
i
vir ?
i
vēnīre
ī
venir ?
i
vir ?
i
vestīre
ī
vestir
i
vestir
i
agere
Ø
agir
i
ascendere
Ø
ascender
e
ascender
e
attribuere
Ø
atreverse
e
atrever-se
e
bat(t)(u)ere
Ø
batir
i
bater
e
bibere
Ø
beber
e
beber
e
cadere
Ø
caer
e
cair
i
cēdere
Ø
ceder
e
ceder
e
cernere
Ø
cerner
e
cingere
Ø
ceñir
i
cingir
i
comedere
Ø
comer
e
comer
e
constituere
Ø
constituir
i
constituir
i
costriñir
i
constranger
e
coser
e
coser
e
contender
e
(a)contecer
e
costreñir /
constringere
Ø
consuere
Ø
contendere
Ø
conti(n)gere?
Ø
(a)contecer
e
coquere
Ø
cocer
e
crēdere
Ø
creer
e
crer
e
crēscere
Ø
crecer
e
crescer
e
currere
Ø
correr
e
correr
e
dēfendere
Ø
defender
e
defender
e
dīcere
Ø
decir
i
dizer
e
dīrigere
Ø
dirigir
i
dirigir
i
dīvidere (dīvīdere)
Ø
dividir
i
dividir
i
esse
Ø
ser
fallere
Ø
fallir
ser
i
100
falir
i
fervere
Ø
hervir?
i
ferver?
e
fingere
Ø
fingir
i
fingir
i
frangere
Ø
frangir
i
frīgere
Ø
freír
i
frigir
i
fundere
Ø
hundir
i
fundir
i
gemere
Ø
gemir
i
gemer
e
legere
Ø
leer
e
ler
e
lūdere
Ø
ludir
i
mittere
Ø
meter
e
meter
e
nāscī (nascere)
Ø
nacer
e
nascer
e
petere
Ø
pedir
i
pedir
i
plangere
Ø
plañir
i
pōnere
Ø
poner
e
pôr
e
prehendere
Ø
prender
e
prender
e
quaerere
Ø
querer
e
querer
e
redimere
Ø
redimir
i
redimir / remir
i
regere
Ø
regir
i
reger
e
resīdere
Ø
residir ?
i
residir ?
i
rumpere
Ø
romper
e
romper
e
scrībere
Ø
escribir
i
escrever
e
sequī
Ø
seguir
i
seguir
i
solvere
Ø
solver
e
solver
e
spargere
Ø
esparcir
i
espargir / esparzir
i
stringere
Ø
estreñir
i
sūmere
Ø
sumir
i
sumir
i
surgere
Ø
surgir
i
surgir
i
tangere
Ø
tangir
i
tanger
e
tendere
Ø
tender
e
tender
e
texere
Ø
tejer
e
tecer
e
tollere
Ø
tullir
i
101
trahere
Ø
traer
e
trazer
e
tremere
Ø
tremer
e
tremer
e
tribuere
Ø
tribuir
i
vendere
Ø
vender
e
vender
e
verrere
Ø
barrer
e
varrer
e
vertere
Ø
verter
e
verter
e
vincere
Ø
vencer
e
vencer
e
vīvere
Ø
vivir
i
viver
e
volvere
Ø
volver
e
volver
e
102
Appendix C: CL compound prefixed verbs and Modern Spanish and Portuguese Reflexes
Latin Verb
Infinitive
Modern Spanish
TV
Modern Portuguese
Infinitive
TV
Infinitive
TV
sedēre, re=(residēre ?)
ē
residir
i
residir
i
spondēre, re= (respondēre)
ē
responder
e
responder
e
tenēre, abs= (abstinēre)
ē
abstener
e
abster
e
tenēre, con= (continēre)
ē
contener
e
conter
e
capere, per= (percipere)
ĭ
percibir
i
perceber
e
quatere, re= (recutere)
ĭ
recodir / recudir
i
quatere, sub= (succutere)
ĭ
sacudir
i
sacudir
i
īre, sub= (subīre)
ī
subir
i
subir
i
ped-ī+re, ex= (expedīre)
ī
expedir
i
expedir
i
ped-ī+re, in= (impedīre)
ī
impedir
i
impedir
i
agere, ex= (exigere)
Ø
exigir
i
exigir
i
cand+re, in= (incendere)
Ø
encender
e
cēdere, ad= (accēdere)
Ø
acceder
e
aceder
e
claudere, in=(inclūdere)
Ø
incluir
i
incluir
i
cluaudere, ex=(exclūdere)
Ø
excluir
i
excluir
i
currere, ob= (occurrere)
Ø
ocurrir
i
ocorrer
e
dare, abs, con= (abscondere)
Ø
esconder
e
esconder
e
dare, ad, in= (inaddere)
Ø
añadir
i
dare, re= (reddere)
Ø
render/rendir
e/i
render
e
dīcere, prae= (praedīcere)
Ø
predecir
i
predizer
e
dūcere, ad=(addūcere)
Ø
aducir
i
aduzir
i
ferre, con= (conferre)
Ø
conferir
i
conferir
i
103
ferre, dē=(dēferre)
Ø
deferir
i
deferir
i
ferre, di= (differre)
Ø
diferir
i
diferir
i
*inferere?
Ø
inferir
i
inferir
i
ferre, prae= (praeferre)
Ø
preferir
i
preferir
i
ferre, prō= (prōferre)
Ø
proferir
i
proferir
i
ferre, re= (referre)
Ø
referir
i
referir
i
ferre, sub= (sufferre)
Ø
sufrir
i
sofrer
e
ferre, trans= (transferre)
Ø
transferir
i
transferir
i
flīgere, ab= (afflīgere)
Ø
afligir
i
afligir
i
fundere, con= (confundere)
Ø
confundir
i
confundir
i
gerere, in= (ingerere)
Ø
ingerir
i
ingerir
i
legere, con= (colligere)
Ø
coger
e
colher
e
legere, ex= (ēligere)
Ø
elegir/eligir
i
eleger
e
mergere, sub= (submergere)
Ø
sumergir
i
submergir
i
nōscere, con= (cognōscere)
Ø
conocer
e
conhecer
e
pellere, ex= (expellere)
Ø
expeler
e
expelir
i
pendere, in=(impendere)
Ø
impender
e
pendere, sūb= (suspendere)
Ø
suspender
e
suspender
e
petere, ex=(expetere)
Ø
despedir
i
despedir
i
plaudere, ad= (applaudere)
Ø
aplaudir
i
aplaudir
i
(comprimere)
Ø
comprimir
i
comprimir
i
premere, ex= (exprimere)
Ø
exprimir
i
espremer / -imir
premere, ob= (opprimere)
Ø
oprimir
i
oprimir
i
premere, re= (reprimere)
Ø
reprimir
i
reprimir
i
quaerere, re= (requīrere)
Ø
requerir
i
requerer
e
regere, con= (corrigere)
Ø
corregir
i
corrigir
i
regere, ē= (ērigere)
Ø
erigir / erguir
i
erguer
e
i
escorrer
e
ferre, in= (inferre)
premere, con=
regere, ex=, con=
(excorrigere)
Ø
104
e/
i
scindere, prae=
(praescindere)
Ø
prescindir
i
prescindir
i
sistere, con= (cōnsistere)
Ø
consistir
i
consistir
i
sistere, re= (resistere)
Ø
resistir
i
resistir
i
stinguere, dī= (distinguere)
Ø
distinguir
i
distinguir
i
stinguere, ex= (exstinguere)
Ø
extinguir
i
extinguir
i
struere, con=(construere)
Ø
construir
i
construir
i
struere, īn= (īnstruere)
Ø
instruir
i
instruir
i
(reterere))
Ø
derretir
i
derreter
e
tribuere, at= (attribuere)
Ø
atribuir
i
atribuir
i
vādere, ē= (ēvādere)
Ø
evadir
i
evadir
i
vādere, in= (invādere)
Ø
invadir
i
invadir
i
vertere, con= (convertere)
Ø
convertir
i
converter
e
i
arrepender-se
e
terere, de= (deterere
poenitere, re= (poenīre,
re=)
repentirse /
arrepentirse
105