Orígenes del Español; Estado lingüístico de la península ibérica hasta el siglo XI. Pp. xii + 579. By RAMÓN MENÉNDEZ PIDAL. Madrid, 1926.

Heretofore the history of the origins of the Spanish language did not go beyond the documents and literary monuments of the twelfth century. The Silos glosses published by Priebsch in ZRPh in 1895 furnished the first important materials previous to the eleventh century that were known to Spanish philology. New discoveries, investigations and studies have enabled Menéndez Pidal to go quite extensively into what had been up to the present an unknown past in the origins of the Hispanic languages and dialects.

Origenes del español is epoch-making in the history of Romance philology. Its contents may be briefly summarized as follows:

I. The texts of the early documents: Glosas Emilianenses (early tenth century glosses from San Millán in the Castile-Navarre region) now published for the first time; Glosas Silenses; four tenth and eleventh century documents from Leon; three tenth and eleventh century documents from the Castile-Leon frontier region; three eleventh century documents from Castile; two of the eleventh century from Aragon; abundant linguistic phenomena recorded in miscellaneous early documents of Arabic and other sources. Pp. 1-49.

II. A masterly study of the above linguistic materials in the light of comparative Romance philology. Pp. 50-433.

III. A study of the political and linguistic history of Spain from the fall of the Visigothic monarchy in 711 to the end of the eleventh century. Pp. 434-97.

IV. A clear and concise account of the outstanding characteristics of Castilian, that develops rapidly, reaches its complete normal development in the tenth century, through the reconquest destroys Mozarabic (the Spanish of the regions conquered and occupied by the Arabs), triumphs over Leonese and Aragonese, and finally becomes the official language of most of the Spanish territory. Pp. 497-529.

V. A brief history of the development and formation of Spanish chronologically considered in its most important dialectic manifestations: Visigothic Spanish, Asturo-Mozarabic, Leonese, and Castilian. Pp. 529-42.

VI. General conclusions derived from the above studies. Pp. 543-74.

It is difficult to give in a brief review a just account of the importance of this publication for Romance philology. The unique opportunity

of having discovered so many new and valuable documents of the tenth and eleventh centuries has been fully appreciated by the master mind of Menéndez Pidal and the detailed and definitive studies that have been made by him from these materials, although presented in an orderly and logical manner, are so complicated and so extensive that one is lost in the attempt even to summarize the more important problems involved and treated with such exquisite erudition. In the following paragraphs the reviewer hopes that he has at least called attention to a few of the outstanding problems.

In general one may state that the epoch-making value of Menéndez Pidal's new book is due to: (1) the discovery and study of numerous Vulgar Latin and early Hispanic Romance forms that were formerly either theoretically constructed or entirely unknown; (2) the study of the above new forms to interpret phonetic processes not well understood heretofore; (3) a definite study of the outstanding characteristics of the various Hispanic dialects of the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries; (4) the new and important discovery that in the Leonese of the tenth century there are abundant documentary evidences of three written languages, a) Low or School Latin, b) Romance or popular Leonese, c) Vulgar Latin, such as was probably spoken at the Visigothic court at Toledo in the seventh and eighth centuries; (5) new evidence to prove that in Castilian accented Latin Ŏ developed into uó > uá > uä > ué and not into uó > uỡ > ué as some philologists had believed; (6) new and very probable theories concerning the Castilian change of secondary m'n to mr > mbr: (7) important and conclusive evidence for Oscan influence in Castilian phonology; (8) evidence to support the Cantabrian or Iberian theory of Castilian f-> h-, and a detailed study of this phenomenon in subsequent epochs; (9) new data on the history of the suffix -ĕllu in Castilian; (10) new and important data on the early history of intervocalic -ct-, -lt- in Castile; (11) a brief yet valuable account of the development of Latin atonic suffixes in Castilian; (12) abundant materials, for the most part new, on early Spanish morphology; (13) new lexicographical data studied from the viewpoint of semasiology and geography; (14) convincing historical and linguistic proof that Visigothic Spanish did not die in the regions conquered and occupied by the Arabs, as Baist and others have thought, but that it lived until the beginning of the eleventh century when the Castilians began to reconquer the land; (15) evidence that this language of the Mozarabic Spaniards from the eighth to the eleventh century was retarded Romance speech, Vulgar Latin of the seventh and eighth

centuries, and that this speech was carried to Leon by the Mozarabs in the tenth century, where it had a brief existence by the side of the already developed Leonese and the Scholastic Latin of the time; (16) a clear and logical presentation of a transcendental fact hitherto unknown to philologists, 'namely, that Hispanic speech was in general uniform in all parts of Spain up to the time of the Arabic invasion of 711 and that this uniformity was continued to the eleventh century, except in Castile, where there appears a linguistic evolution in the tenth and eleventh centuries that differentiates it rapidly from the other linguistic regions.

A discussion of some special problems follows:

The development §§12-18 of ai>e in Castile. Of the utmost importance are the studies directed towards the establishment of definite chronologies for the various phonetic developments. Even in cases where lack of uniformity in development appears Menéndez Pidal has been able to establish the chronology for various phonetic forms. The first case in question is the development of Latin ai, secondary, into e in Castile. In Central Castile the extreme development was reached in the tenth century for most of the cases of ai < -act-, -ariu, where no cases of ai, ei, aito, eito, airo, eiro, are found at all, then in -a(v)i, where we find abi, ai, e in the same century, and lastly in vaika, Vigila, that still have beica, Veila in the eleventh century. In the case of ai <-ági, -axi the ei persists until the thirteenth century. The ai, ei stages are found of course in early Leonese and ei still appears in modern Portuguese. As for Mozarabic Spanish Menéndez Pidal finds evidence for the existence of the ai stage in most of the above cases as late as the eleventh century.

For the change au > o, §19, the developments are in most respects parallel. For original Latin au Castilian shows o from the tenth century while Mozarabic keeps au unchanged. Mozarabic influence accounts for the presence of both au and ai in Leonese. With respect to au < -alt, -alb, -alc, §21, there is great irregularity. The presence of double forms like otro < alteru and alto < altu in Castile Menéndez Pidal believes to be due to a purely learned development in alto because altu actually did become oto in popular words, as in the place name Villota found by the side of Villalta, both in the province of Burgos.

Of transcendental importance and interest is the treatment of accented ŏ, §§22-25. In Cantar de mío Cid Menéndez Pidal had expressed the opinion that in the Cid and Reyes Magos (both of the twelfth

century) Ŏ had become uó.

Now he seems slightly inclined to the opinion that it was merely the undiphthongized o. This conclusion is reached in view of the fact that in Castile uó is extremely rare and that uá is never found. On page 144 of Origenes del español, however, Menéndez Pidal states that the authors of the Cid and Reyes Magos probably knew the various diphthongizations uo, ua and ue. This statement is based on the evidence that one obtains from the Glosas Emilianenses where one finds uamne, uemne < homine, and from an eleventh century document where we find Ŏ represented by o, uo, ua, and ue. Again on page 146 he states: 'El juglar de mío Cid debía de usar formas romances, y por tanto uó, mezclando algunos latinismos con o.' But if as Menéndez Pidal has now shown Castilian had reached the stage ue in the tenth century the Cid is certainly in this respect not Castilian. Neither is the twelfth century text of the Reyes Magos. The presence of uó in the Cid would be due as Menéndez Pidal suggests to Leonese influence, but why Leonese influence only in this special phenomenon? For the Reyes Magos the reviewer prefers the explanation given by Menéndez Pidal in Cantar de mío Cid as probably due also to Leonese influence, but also believes that it could be ué.

With respect to the phonetic history of o> ue Menéndez Pidal has a new theory that is final and conclusive. Although Castilian reaches the extreme development ué in the tenth century, with sporadic cases of uó even later in the frontier regions, Leonese and Aragonese show a regular series of uó, uá, ué. Heretofore the development uá was hardly recognized by philologists as a regular phonetic form and usually considered as a sporadic development of uó. But it is now demonstrated that that uá appears in the Glosas Emilianenses, is more common than uó in Aragonese documents of the eleventh century, and is quite common in Leon. Our author considers this stage of diphthongization as a regular, middle-stage development. For the tenth and eleventh centuries he finds uó the most frequent, uá the next most frequent and ué the least frequent development, and that documentary series has furnished him the key to the chronology of the change and the development Ŏ > uó > uá > ué is established. The phonetic process is simple and convincing. The velar o of uó by dissimilation becomes velar a and to complete the dissimilation velar a becomes front ä and this then reaches the stage e, the dissimilation of original u+o becoming complete. This destroys of course the theory of Ascoli, accepted by Meyer-Lübke and others that the development was Ŏ > uó > úo > úe 1 Cantar de mio Cid: texto, gramática y vocabulario, Madrid, 1908-11, §5.

> ué, and the Celtic theory of Goidanich that the development was Ŏ > uó > uö > ue.3

With respect to the history of accented ě, which is in general the same as that of ŏ, one finds also new data: the frequency of ia in Leon, the antiquity of ie in Castile and Aragon (ninth and tenth centuries), the presence of both ie and the archaism e in Mozarabic, etc. Of special interest is the evidence presented to show that the development ě > iei in the suffix -ěllu took place in Castilian in the tenth century despite the fact that in the formal literary documents it does not appear generalized until the fourteenth century. Menéndez Pidal believes that the presence of ié in the written language until the fourteenth century in Castilian may be due to Leonese influence. The statements usually made by philologists (Bourciez, Zauner, Hanssen, Baist, etc.) that this change took place in Castilian at the end of the thirteenth and at the beginning of the fourteenth centuries are therefore wrong.

Of the greatest interest and importance for Romance philology is the discovery and study of a series of phonetic forms that reveal the presence of a third written language in Leon during the tenth century used side by side with scholastic Latin and popular Leonese, §§32-34. According to the conclusions of Menéndez Pidal these forms are for the most part archaisms that continue Mozarabic speech such as was spoken and written by the Visigothic Spaniards in the beginning of the eighth century. Here belong: (1) words that retain the posttonic vowel with regular development of the accented vowel or with regular voicing of the intervocalic voiceless explosive, siéculos, cómide, pacifigas; (2) forms such as the above but with popular development also in the posttonic vowel, 'vocal con timbre vulgar', quéncoba < còncoba, púdeda < putida, or with a changed vowel and different (though phonetically equivalent) consonant, diabulo, ribolus, tabola; (3) forms that retain the pretonic vowel and voice the medial voiceless explosive, pretonic unchanged, comidesa, eredidade, vowel with 'timbre vulgar', leterado, pobolatos.

The evidence submitted in §35 for the primitive difference in development of final ō and u tends to show that the generally accepted view that these were blended into a closed o in Vulgar Latin does not hold.

2 A. Gl. Itai. 4. 402. The explanation given by Menéndez Pidal for the presence of úo, úe in Leonese and in Sicilian in the so-called cases of 'realce acentual y énfasis' does not explain the final definite u and i < Latin accented ǎ and è in Sindanés (south of Miranda do Douro). See Leite de Vasconcellos, Estudos de philologia mirandesa, Lisboa, 1900, §§50, 58.

'L'origine e le forme della dittongisazione romanza, Halle, 1907, pp. 36ff., and Meyer-Lübke, Grammaire I §211.