Phonetics, phonology, and orthography of medieval Hispano-Romance

Abstract

This chapter describes the phonetics, phonology, and the orthographic practices of Old Spanish. It first identifies the vocalic and consonantal phonemes of the medieval language. The following sections describe specific phonetic and phonological issues such as possible allophonic variation between stressed and unstressed vowels, apocope of word-final /-e/, the formation and evolution of new and unfamiliar consonant clusters in the medieval language through vowel syncope, word-final consonant groups resulting from vowel apocope, the phonetic nature of word-initial /f-/, the nature of affricate consonants, and the possible first manifestations in the late medieval language of seseo and yeísmo. The chapter concludes with an overview of the wide orthographic variation in the earliest texts and the attempt to regularize to some degree spelling practices starting in the mid-thirteenth century.