Puerto Rican Spanish and its particularities

[Lambuzhao]

Lateralization is quite interesting feature. …
Also worth noting is that while Lateralization is a prominent feature of Puerto Rican Spanish, it is quite old in the roots of Spanish. A select number of words that have word-final or coda–final /r/in Latin transmogrified them to /l/ in Spanish.
E.G.
arbor, arborem ➡︎ árbol
marmor, marmorem ➡︎ mármol
peculiare ➡︎ pegujal
≈ (Medieval Lat) azurium ➡︎ azul

Aren’t many of those, examples of liquid-dissimulation? Like, no word with two or more liquids can have two rhotics without a “lambdic” (lateral liquid) between them somewhere, nor have two lateral liquids without a rhotic in between them somewhere?

It could be dissimulation in the Latin to Spanish, for sure. , Puerto Rican, and (and any other Spanish variants that exhibit robust lambdaization) are not constrained by that double liquid-dissimulation.

[Lambuzhao]

Noteworthy is that azurium ➡︎ azul is not technically a bi-liquid dissimilation.

[Salmoneus]

It's also not a sound change that actually happened [EDIT: I mean, it didn't happen as stated. /r/ did become /l/ in this word in the history of Spanish, but the word doesn't come from Latin and the sound change would have happened, so far as I understand it, after the dissimulation process that took place earlier in the history of Spanish] - the borrowing was from Spanish (and/or Italian?) into Latin, not vice versa.

I don't know, but I would guess that the culprit in this case is hypercorrection. Word pairs like arbor/arbol survived for a long time, and I would guess that people assumed azur likewise had a double azul? And knew that arbol was more fasionable than arbor, so likewise assumed azul was more fashionable than azur?

[Salmoneus]

Sorry I never replied to this. I wasn't able to reply immediately, and when I came back to it I didn't feel I had anything meaningful to contribute. Rude of me not to have thanked Panini for his efforts, though.

*sigh*
Why can't I write poetry? It's always sort of irritated me that I have absolutely no facility for it.

I’m sorry to hear about your poetic struggles. I feel the same way about alliterative poetry in the Germanic mold—I simply cannot make it flow. For the record, there’s no shame in writing blank verse! Unrhymed iambic pentameter has been the idiom of choice for most Anglophone poets since Marlowe, and the aesthetic zeitgeist has as of late been somewhat dismissive of rhyming poetry.

Sure, anyone can write "poetry"... but it's not really poetry, so there's no point.
[also, then I'd have to blame my lack of creativity and my shallow vacuity, rather than my linguistic limitations, and that's less comfortable...]

(don't worry, Germanic poetry doesn't flow!)

...except of course that the Spanish prototypical octosyllable has eight syllables, whereas the English octosyllable (i.e. usually ‘iambic tetrameter’) with a feminine rhyme (which very rarely happens) has nine syllables, so they’re not really parallel!

I wonder if your sense of the Spanish octosyllable’s Weirdness might lie partly in a confusion of terms. In Gallo-Romance, where most unstressed final vowels are lost, the prototypical line ends in a masculine rhyme. Castilian and Tuscan, on the other hand, preserved most final vowels; in their poetic traditions, the prototypical line is feminine**. (I’ll be using French spellings for Gallo-Romance meters and Spanish spellings for Ibero-Italian meters so as to maintain them distinct.) So, as you’ve said, the French décasyllabe is equivalent to the Italian endecasílabo. However, the Gallic counterpart to the Spanish octosílabo would be the Gallo-Romance heptasyllabe.

You're right that I was getting mislead on the historical side by my assumption that the two 'octosyllables' were in some way related, which presumably they are not.
Indeed, it should really be the French octosyllable that I'm confused by historically-speaking. The heptasyllable - which I didn't realise was even a thing - is presumably the regular development of the Classical trochaic tetrameter. Is the French octosyllable an innovation, then, or a borrowing from somewhere else?
[relatedly: why do lots of French long lines have the caesura after the sixth syllable, when the fourth is more diachronically expected?]

But the underlying weirdness I was feeling is actually just the abandoment of metre and syllabicity and the creation of a line governed only by "the final stress in on the seventh syllable", which has nothing to do with most other poetic traditions.

It's true that feminine lines do occur in French and English poetry. But:

- in these languages, feminines start out as, ultimately, retentions/restorations of the original metre, while masculines are catalectics caused by sound change
- these feminines probably come from a reanalysis of older poetry (i.e. they didn't understand the elision rules in older poetry so imitated feminines that weren't originally there)
- these feminines were licensed by a change in poetic analysis, with the syllabic rule being reinterpreted as a metrical rule. Instead of "add a syllable", the English feminine rule is "replace a final iamb with an amphibrach"
- feminines were probably seen as 'odd', and show up first and primarily in weird elite poetry, NOT in popular songs and poems, where they're still very rare at least in English

Whereas the Spanish poems I don't understand the origin of, and they include 'double-feminines' that can't be licensed by restoration/retention of old metres, and apparently they're common in popular genres. So I'm not sure they're the same phenomenon at all. And they don't seem to be tied to the rise of a strict metrical system - they seem like an independent, "dependent syllabicity" constraint.

Having said that, I'm increasingly wondering whether actually English poetry also uses this rule, at least in the case of iambic pentameter. That is, maybe iambic pentameter is underlyingly just "stress on fourth syllable, final stress on tenth syllable", the iambic tendency is just a historical accident following from those rules (and later a secondary regulating factor), and the metrical analysis is just a neoclassical 'English should be like Latin' affectation...?

[I just scanned 20 random lines of blank verse from Richard II, using naive assumptions rather than metrically-sophisticated analysis. Interestingly, seen one way Shakespeare was definitely sticking to iambic pentameter. There were no catalectic or acephalic lines, and only one extrametrical feminine, and I suspect that might be a phonological thing ("listen" with the final syllabic /n/ not counted as a syllable; a little later, in the lines I wasnt' scanning officially but looked at, the same happens with "nation". On the other hand there's also a weird line where I think he might be scanning "imitation" as four syllables... but that might also be a joke, as a character is complaining about Englishmen pathetically trying to imitate Italian fashions...). Other than the first beat sometimes being stressed (7/20), the other weak beats were almost never stressed (3, 5 and 7 only twice, and 9 only once). Beats 4 and 10 were stressed 19 times, and beat 8 was stressed all 20 times. Beats 2 and 6 were more variable, but still stressed 16 times each. So that looks like a really strong iambic pattern...
...except that somehow only 6 of the 20 lines (7 if you count the possible feminine) were straightforward iambic pentameter! What this means is that (at least in this little speech) Shakespeare seems to have been avoiding pure iambic pentameter, while spreading the anomalies around so that (other than the possible stressed first syllable) no secondary pattern was formed instead and the iambic pentameter form emerges, as it were, from a sea of exceptions, by process of elimination. So this passage has a strongly iambic pentameter feel, even though only about a third of the lines are true iambic pentameter. In fact, in 20 lines, only twice does a pure iambic pentameter line follow another pure iambic pentameter line. So not only are the 'errors' spread out evenly between the syllables, but the non-erroneous lines are spread out through the speech (rather than clumping into blocks of 'wrong' and 'right' metric lines that might stand out). This all seems much too even to be coincidence... but it doesn't really support my idea of metricality being entirely secondary, even if it's not absolute]

The French octosyllabe you describe has been borrowed on occasion into the Ibero-Italian tradition as an eneasílabo. It tends to scan poorly in both Spanish and Italian and has never been popular in either.

Would you mind (if you read this!) explaining in what way it scans poorly? Is it hard to make lines with stressed eighth syllables? Does it tend to put caesuras in strange places? Does it just lead to variable or disfavoured rhythms?

All this said, the Spanish octosílabo lies at the end of a long and chaotic history of native Spanish verse. The earliest Spanish verse, attested primarily** in the twelfth-century Cantar del mío Cid, is anisosyllabic: it has two or three stresses and five to ten syllables per (feminine) hemistich. Long stretches of poem bear the same assonant rhyme. Over the course of the Middle Ages—possibly due to the influence of Provençal or Arabic models—this epic meter straightened out into the vernacular romance, in which each hemistich is an octosílabo.

What somehow didn't occur to me when I first read this post was.... hang on, that's Old English you're describing!

More accurately: Old Germanic metre is famously "sprung", composed of lines with two hemistiches, each with 2 or 3 stresses but any number of unstressed syllables. [assuming that when you say 'two or three', you mean that each poem, or at least each block of lines, has either two or three stresses in each hemistich, not that it varies randomly hemistich-by-hemistich]. And a lot of use of alliteration and assonance to unite lines and/or connect lines to one another.

So this makes me wonder whether early Spanish verse is actually Visigoth in origin!

From there, perhaps people generalised that each 3-stress hemistich tended to have 7-9 syllables, and the final stress tended to be in the last three syllables for phonological reasons, so at some point decided to tie those two rules together? Or perhaps they generalised to 8 syllables with penultimate stress (matching vernacular and imported Romance tetrameters), and then the variability rules are a later invention or import? But either way, because they were developing this form out of sprung rhythm and there were many possible arrangements of stress in the earlier syllables, that's why they didn't develop a conventional metrical rule?

Then again, maybe it's unrelated to the Visigothic tradition, and it's actually just the vernacular Romance tradition reasserting itself. The collapse of the Latin metrical system might have reduced people directly to counting syllables, with irregular rhythms developing because the ictus was not specified for in the inherited metres. My reservation there, though, is that Late Latin and Mediaeval Latin poetry WAS increasningly stress-based, and mediaeval Latin poetry in particular had extremely robust and regular rhythmic patterns, so it would be weird if vernacular poetry didn't follow it, if that's where the problems originated.

[Confutatis, maledictis / Flammis acribus addictis / Voca me cum benedictis , etc.]

It’s true that Dante eschews masculine or—God forbid!—sdrucciolo rhymes in his poetry. This avoidance is probably stylistic in nature; most authorities believe the extrametricality rule to be of Italian origin, and these hypo- and hypermetrical lines are used frequently in Italian poetry before and after Dante. The thirteenth-century misogynistic tirade “Proverbia super natura feminarum”, written in alexandrines of heptasílabo hemistichs, uses internal sdrucciolo rhyme-words frequently. Similarly, long stretches of Sannazaro’s Arcadia, written in the late fifteenth-century, are written in sdrucciolo endecasílabos. I include the first lines of both here (translations and transcriptions are my own**):

Bona çent, entendetelo, / perqué ‘sto libro ai fato:
per le malvasie femene / l’aio en rime trovato,
quele qe ver’ li omini / no tien complito pato...

Spoiler:

/ˈbɔ.na tsent en.tenˈde.te.lo ‖ perˈke sto ˈli.brŏ‿ai ˈfa.to/
/per le malˈva.zie ˈfe.me.ne ‖ ˈl‿a.jŏ‿en ˈri.me troˈva.to/
/ˈkwɛ.le ke ver li ˈɔ.mi.ni ‖ ˈno tiɛn komˈpli.to ˈpa.to/

But I'm skeptical that this is the same phenomenon, because this is suspiciously tetrametrous. This is a line of 15, split into halves of 8 and 7 which was the foundation of popular Latin poetry from the Republic through to the middle ages:

scis amorem, scis laborem | scis egestatum meam - Plautus, ~200BC ("you know my love; you know my labours; you know my poverty")
postquam Crassus carbo factus | Carbo crassus factus est - anonymous wit, ~90BC ("since Crassus tuned to ash, Carbo has grown fat")
nostis hic rumpit tenebras | hic tenebras pectoris - Florus, ~100AD ("this dispels the darkness of night; this other, that of the heart")
et croco solum rubebat | et lucebat liliis - Tiberianus, ~350 ("and the earth was reddened with crocuses, and brightened by lillies")
apparebit repentina | dies magna domini - anonymous, ~650 ("there will suddenly appear the great day of the Lord")
claustra carnis praesto frangi | clausa querit anima - Peter Damian, ~1050 ("the imprisoned soul seeks for the bars of the flesh to be suddenly ruptured")

It's even heavily imitated in English:
Glorious things of thee are spoken | Zion, city of our God

So when I see a poem in a Romance language divided into 8|7 lines, I automatically assume that this is not 7|7 with an extrametrical syllable in the first half of every line, but that this is the old 8|7 line again (which is originally 8|8 with the last syllable lost, although I've seen a theory that originally originally, i.e. in Proto-Indo-European, this is actually 8|8 with the first syllable lost and the caesura shifted forward).

Similarly, lines where the first hemistich is full and ends with a dactyl and the second line is catalectic and ends with a trochee make up a sizeable chunk of the Carmina Burana (although there the preferred line is 7|6):

In Fortune solio | sederam elatus
prosperitatis vario | flore coronatus
quicquid enim florui | felix et beatus
nunc a summo corui | gloria privatus
("Once I sat raised up on Fortune's throne, crowned with the varied flowers of wealth; yet though I once flourished, happy and blessed, I fall now from the peak, deprived of glory")

Or:
Veris leta facies | mundo propinatur
hiemalis acies | victa iam fugatur
in vestitu vario | Flora principatur
("The merry face of springs turns to the world; vanquished, sharp winter flees; bedecked in varied colours, Flora reigns")

And even in German:
Chramer gip die varwe mir | die min wengel roete
("Shopkeep, give me colour to make my cheeks red")

The Carmina Burana also has 8|7 lines, but for those the monks swapped the cadences, with a trochee in the first half and a dactyl in the second (closer to the classical form):
O Fortuna, velut luna | statu variabilis

But my point is that both the catalectic (n+1)|(n) line and the idea of alternating cadences of trochees and dactyls can be seen in popular mediaeval verse, so the Italian lines you quote here, although unusually free in the rhythm outside the cadences, I would still attribute to conventional Latin-derived poetic traditions.

The key point to make is that in this poem, as in the forms I've mentioned, both the syllable count and the cadential rhythm are determined by their position in the poem: i.e., it's metrical. As indeed is the case with feminine lines in modern French. Whereas in your Spanish form, both cadential rhythm and syllable count vary in a way not rigidly determined by the form of the stanza - i.e. the additional syllables are extrametrical. And indeed there doesn't seem to be any metrically-determined characteristic of these Spanish poems? That's what feels weird to me!


Anyway, sorry to argue about such a minor point, particularly as you obviously know a lot more poetry than I do!

[Pāṇini]

Forgive my own late—and very long—reply. Here are a couple tidbits from Gasparov’s “A history of European versification” that might shed some light on the situation. I will be using his notation from now on: a number indicating the syllable count and the letters m, f, and d indicating masculine, feminine, and dactylic/double feminine endings respectively. Between straight brackets, a vertical line indicates a caesura; a hyphen, a long syllable; a forward slash, a stressed syllable; a lower-case U, a short or unstressed syllable; and a lower-case X, an anceps syllable.

- The Italian 11f endecasillabo [x x u / | u / u x u / u] is derived from a Late Latin 12d dodecasyllable [x x u / u | x x x u / u u], itself deriving Classical 5f+7d iambic trimeter [x - u - x | - u | - x - u x]. The dactylic rhyme of the 12d dodecasyllable drops a syllable and becomes the classical Italian feminine rhyme.
- The French 10m décasyllabe [x x x / (u) | x x x x u / (u)] is similarly descended from the Late Latin 12d dodecasyllable, dropping a further unstressed syllable at the end.
- Gasparov posits that the French 8m octosyllabe derives from the Late Latin 8d octosyllable [x x x x x / u u] (e.g., “Aeterne rerum conditor”), itself originating in the Classical 8d iambic dimeter [x - u - | x - u x], undergoing a stress shift in careful pronunciation to [x x x x x / u /]. He cites a 10th c. octosyllabic poem, “La passion du Christ” with the macaronic lines, “‘Crucifīge, crucifīge,’ / crident Pilat trestuit ensems”—to fit with the rest of the poem’s meter, the Latin must be pronounced “crucifigé, crucifigé"
- The 6m+6m alexandrine is indeed suspiciously tetrametrous! It too derives not from Sal’s 8f/7m septenarius but from the 8d iambic dimeter, this time dropping the final dactyl. [x x x x x / (u u)]. This form probably crystallized in high medieval Italy and was later imported into France, which is why it is a separate meter from the octosyllabe.
- Lots of writers have suggested that early Spanish versification is in fact Germanic in origin, and it seems to be the prevailing hypothesis (though it isn’t really verifiable).
- The Spanish 8f/7m [x x x x x x / (u)] is then chalked up to the Late Latin 8f/7m septenarius (e.g., “Pange lingua gloriosi”), itself originating in the Classical trochaic septenarius [- x - x | - x - x || - x - x | - u -] (e.g.. “postquam Crassus carbo factus”).
- The English 10m iambic pentameter was introduced (by no less of a luminary than Chaucer) in imitation of the Italian 11f and French 10m, within the slightly different system of syllabo-tonic verse, which systematically alternates stressed and unstressed syllables.

I’d also like to clarify a couple things on my part:
- The double feminine/sdrucciolo/dactylic line ending is in practice very rare in Spanish poetry—it is learned as part of the package of rules of Spanish versification that you might learn in school (more on that in a second). It is more common to see a décima written with all dactylic verses than seeing them scattered about a standard poem. This is not the case for the masculine rhyme, which is rather common.
- Unless a poet is being very deliberate about an iambic [x x x / u / u / (u)] or dactylic [u / u u / u u / (u)] accentuation pattern, it is very easy for the Spanish 9f eneasílabo to feel like a poor attempt at the native and infinitely more common 8f verse.

Now we can trace the origins of the Spanish 8f octosílabo’s Weirdness:
- Spelunking the most remote depths of Castillian verse, we have the meter of the Cid and similar epic poetry, of likely Germanic origin. This is a meter of two or three stresses per hemistich, with even hemistiches rhyming imperfectly.
- In Italy, the 7f + 7f alexandrine evolves out of two lines of the Late Latin 8d octosyllable put together. It is quickly replaced by an 11f endecasillabo, evolving from the Latin 12d dodecasyllable. Both these meters’ Latin antecedents have, as their default, dactylic endings; though in their ordinary forms, both the alexandrine and endecasillabo have lost a final unstressed syllable, the dactylic/sdrucciolo/double feminine ending remains an acceptable variation in certain genres.
- Over the course of the Middle Ages, certainly after the model of the Catholic hymnal and possibly with the influence of the Occitan and Arab traditions, Spanish epic meter is domesticated into an 8f/7m line [x x x x x x / (u)]. The other stress(es) in the line may go on any anceps syllable, likely a remnant of the earlier epic practice. Around this time, the octosyllable spreads to certain formes fixes like the quintain and its derivative, the glosa/copla real.
- Around 1500, Italian versification practices are imported wholescale into Iberian poetry. At this point, following the model of the alexandrine and endecasillabo, Italian poetry has generalized the rule that a prototypical feminine rhyme may be replaced with a masculine or dactylic.* It is at this point that the décima espinela, a copla real with a break after the fourth line, is codified.
- Over time, these Renaissance Italian versification practices become codified as The Rules of Spanish elite poetry, and become part of the curriculum for schoolchildren in Spain and Latin America. As a result, elite and semi-elite octosyllables may occasionally be 9f lines.

I hope that clears everything up a bit!

Footnotes:
1. From Beltrami’s 2011 “La metrica italiana”, tr. mine:
“Equating the lengths of verses with masculine, feminine, or sdrucciolo rhymes, provided that the final stressed syllable is in the same position, is an evident practice in all Italian versification, even if older literature is not at all clear about this point (compare Beltrami 1990). Still, in Italian poetry as much as Gallo-Romance, it is not in the least true that masculine, feminine and sdrucciolo verses are always substitutable, that is, to be exchanged indifferently, in any sort of text. One needs instead to observe that, in the absolute prevalence of feminine rhymes in the Italian tradition, the ‘casual’ or ‘free’ use of masculine or sdrucciolo rhymes is proper above all to non-lyric meter (one sees for example very few masculine or sdrucciolo verses in the Divine Comedy); otherwise masculine or sdrucciolo rhymes are employed for the most part following a precise conceit. One sees the conceit of a sonnet with all sdrucciolo verses ... the bucholic sdrucciolo terza rima ... the sdrucciolo blank verse of sixteenth century comedy ... [and] the ode/canzonetta. All these uses of masculine and sdrucciolo verses are linked to the metrical and literary genre, as may be better seen in the section on each form.”