Talk:Early Modern Spanish

The term "Middle Spanish"
It is misleading for Wikipedia to present a phrase like "Middle Spanish" as if it were a commonly used term in language history. If you google the phrase you get almost entirely hits in which "middle Spanish" refers to the intermediate level in the study of the modern language by English-speakers, or in which the words "middle" and "Spanish" fall together by chance, as on the webpage of a Spanish class in a middle school. The headline "Maiden Middle Spanish Club Supports Relay for Life" introduces a story that begins "Thanks to the efforts of the Maiden Middle School Spanish Club...". A school called St. Patrick's has a webpage titled "Elementary and Middle Spanish". There are many references to "middle Spanish tutoring", but no one is earning a living today by teaching people to talk like Cervantes. The phrase is primarily a synonym of "intermediate Spanish". It is not a standard historical-linguistic term. (Middle English and Middle French are a different story.)

I have found only two articles in the scholarly literature that use the phrase "Middle Spanish" to refer to what is conventionally called "classical Spanish" or, more recently, "early modern Spanish". The phrase apparently originated with Kiddle (1977), who used it in the title—but nowhere in the body!—of his article. It was adopted from Kiddle by Romero (1995), but by no one else, insofar as I can determine.

Penny (2002) uses the phrase "early modern" (followed by "Spanish", "standard Spanish", "spelling", and "period") thirteen times, but never "Middle Spanish". Spaulding (1943: 172) uses the phrase "Golden Age Spanish" once, but, so far as I can tell, never "early modern", "classical", or "middle". Keniston (1937: xi) maps his intended project into four periods ("Middle Ages" [1200-1500], "sixteenth century" [1500-1600], "modern period" [1600-1900], and "contemporary period" [1900-])—but, so far as I can tell, Keniston never uses the term "middle Spanish". Pountain (2002) makes many references to the "Golden Age" and to "Golden-Age Spanish", but, so far as I can determine, never to "middle Spanish".

If it's a common term that should be presented to encyclopedia readers, please show me the evidence, as, for example, by citing five additional serious authors who have used the phrase.

The phrase "auric Spanish" has even less legitimacy as a term (I'm referring to its use in English). So far as I can determine, the only places where the words "auric" and "Spanish" occur as a phrase (as opposed to falling together accidentally) are those derived from a literal translation of the Spanish-language Wikipedia's article "Español medio". That article cites "español áurico" as a synonym. Writers in English about Spanish literature have long used the term "Golden Age Spanish", and there is no justification for this encyclopedia to invent a new term.

It would be beyond the scope of this note for me to comment on the currency of "el español medio" as a historical-linguistic term in in Spanish. I would only caution Google searchers to disregard those hits where it means "the average Spaniard".


 * Keniston, Heyward (1937). The Syntax of Castilian Prose: The Sixteenth Century. University of Chicago Press.


 * Kiddle, Lawrence B. (1977). "Sibilant Turmoil in Middle Spanish (1450-1650)". Hispanic Review, 45 (1977), 327-336.


 * Penny, Ralph (2002). A History of the Spanish Language. Cambridge University Press.


 * Pountain, Christopher (2002). A History of the Spanish Language through Texts. Routledge.


 * Romero, Joaquín (1995). "An Articulatory View of Historical S-aspiration in Spanish". Haskins Laboratories Status Report on Speech Research, 1994-1995, SR-119/120, 255-266.


 * Spaulding, Robert K. (1943). How Spanish Grew. University of California Press.

(I'm changing the following to italics because the problem has been solved and I don't know the convention for "strikethrough" to cross out the words.)

''P.S: The contents of this article are valuable; only its title should be changed, to "Early modern Spanish" (the Google Books Ngram Viewer shows that this is now a more frequent term than "Classical Spanish"). I would appreciate technical help to change the title. Kotabatubara (talk) 19:27, 24 February 2013 (UTC)'' Kotabatubara (talk) 01:38, 26 February 2013 (UTC)

"Unergative and unaccusative verbs"
The rather over-literal translation of this article from Español medio originally included in its introduction a reference to "the equalization of the compound forms of unergative and unaccusative verbs". I deleted the phrase, partly because of the obscurity of its intended meaning, and partly because there was no follow-through to unpack it in the body of the article. I believe it refers to a concept that is worthy of appearing in this article, but only if it can be (1) expressed in traditional grammatical terms, rather than those of transformational/generative grammar, and (2) further explained with examples in the body of the article. I am not prepared to develop the point myself at present. Anyone interested in doing so, I would advise to read the "Discusión" page of Español medio. There, under the topic "Claridad", one discussant suggests that "la equiparación de las formas compuestas de los verbos inergativos e inacusativos" refers to "la pérdida de distinción entre los auxiliares ser y haber en la formación de los tiempos compuestos" and points out that only a generative grammarian would understand the terms used. Kotabatubara (talk) 02:24, 26 February 2013 (UTC)

RFE phonetic symbols
The above-mentioned "Discusión" page points out two additional issues: (1) the questionable status of "español medio" as a language history term (which has been resolved for this English version by the title change from "Middle Spanish" to "Early Modern Spanish"); and (2) an issue that still affects this version in English: the dual use of RFE (Revista de Filología Española) and IPA (International Phonetic Association) phonetic symbols (the discussant recommends exclusive adherence to the IPA). Kotabatubara (talk) 02:24, 26 February 2013 (UTC)