The treatise on the history of spanish by B. de Aldrete (1606) as the first textbook of romance philology

Abstract

The paper analyses the role of B. de Aldrete’s treatise “Del Origen y principio de la lengua castellana o romance que oi se usa en España” (1606) in the development of Romance philology. The XVII-century author writes about the most important aspects of internal and external history of Spanish, such as: pre-Romance Spain and substratum languages; Roman conquest and romanization; Hispanic Latin; German conquests of Spain; Arabic conquest and the Reconquista; formation of kingdoms in the north and state-building processes; sociolinguistic situation in Spain; the role of Spanish in the New World; changes from Latin to Spanish in phonetics and morphology; sources of Spanish lexis; early written texts; territorial, social, functional variation of Spanish. Apart from the aspects of Spanish philology, B. de Aldrete pays attention to the formation and functioning of Pyrenean languages: Catalan, Galician, and Portuguese. However, B. de Aldrete does not limit himself to examining Ibero-Romance languages. Many aspects of the history of Spanish are shown against a wider, Romance background, bearing in mind the earlier tradition (the Antiquity, in the first place). He also confronts Spanish with other Romance languages and Latin. The analysis of the first treatise on the history of Spanish makes one reconsider B. de Aldrete’s contribution to the development of language description models and the bases of Romance philology. The treatise sets up a model of Romance philology as a full-fledged philological discipline.