Puerto Rican Spanish and its particularities

[Pāṇini]

I know that there’s a lot of love for Romance languages here on the CBB and I’d like to add my little bit to the Teach and Share pile. Here’s a brief rundown of the eccentricities of my native tongue, the variety of Spanish native to the island of Puerto Rico.

First, the broad strokes. While there is no consensus on how to classify the diverse varieties of New World Spanish, it seems to me that a general lowland/highland dichotomy is as good a place as any to start. As a rule of thumb, lowland varieties (such as those of the circum-Caribbean and River Plate regions) greatly resemble the speech of southern Spain and the Canaries and tend towards consonantal lenition. On the other hand, highland varieties (such as those of the Mexican Plateau and the Andes) bear closer resemblance to the speech of Northern Spain and rather tend towards vowel reduction. While highland Spanishes tend to show evidence of influence from local indigenous languages, such as Nahuatl in Mexico City and Quechua and Aymara in the Andes, lowland Spanishes are often shaped by non-Hispanic migration, either voluntary (as with Italians in Buenos Aires) or forced (as with enslaved Africans in the Caribbean). Puerto Rican Spanish is a lowland dialect of the Caribbean: as such, it is especially similar to the Spanish of Panama and Cuba, and somewhat less so to that of the Dominican Republic and the northern littoral of Colombia and Venezuela.

The history of Puerto Rico is somewhat unique in Latin America. The original inhabitants of the island were an Arawakan people known to modern scholarship as the Taínos; their population was decimated within fifty years of Columbus, and their labor replaced with that of enslaved Africans. Puerto Rico and its larger sister Cuba remained under Spanish control until and throughout the 1800s, even while the continent suffered the vicissitudes of revolution. When the second wave of colonialism reared its ugly head during the latter half of the century, the United States took over the overseas possessions of the vestigial Spanish Empire in 1898. Puerto Rico, an unincorporated territory of the United States, has had varying degrees of self-governance since then. All this to say that, due to a confluence of historical reasons, Puerto Rican Spanish has little indigenous influence, some African influence, and a century-long superstratum in American English.

[Pāṇini]

Phonology

Puerto Rican Spanish has a reputation for being hard to understand, especially for the non-native speaker: a rapid cadence, frequent elision of consonants and even syllables, and dissimilarity to the highland varieties of Spanish most often taught abroad tend to lead to intelligibility problems. Some time ago, I read a tweet about a young American and future linguist landing in San Juan and being surprised and very confused when somebody pronounced the phrase está ahí al lado ‘it’s over there’ as [ta‿i al ˈlaŏ]. This might be a good opportunity to demystify a bit.

In many if not most phonetic regards, Puerto Rican Spanish is a typical lowland Spanish variety. It shares the general American traits of seseo and yeísmo, in which Castilian /θ ʎ/ merge into /s ʝ/. This new merged /s/ is frequently aspirated or even dropped in coda position: the realization [h] is typical before unvoiced consonants, [ɦ] before voiced consonants, and in rapid speech [∅] utterance-finally or between vowels, e.g.:

¿Tú fuiste a Las Marías?
[tu ˈfwih.tĕ‿a laɦ maˈɾi.a]
2SG go-2SG.PERF to DEF-FPL Mary-PL
Did you go to Las Marías**?

Phonemic /d/, already a dental approximant [ð] in most positions even in more prestigious varieties, is almost always elided in coda position. vert is also often dropped in certain words and in the past participles of most verbs (though not all).

Estoy perdido. Querido, ten la mitad del helado.
[(eɦ)ˈtoĭ pelˈdi.o ‖ keˈɾi.ðo tẽn la miˈta ðe.l‿eˈla.ðo]
COP.1SG lose-PERF.PTCP-M
love-PERF.PTCP-M have-IMP the.F half of=DEF.M ice-PERF.PTCP-M
I’m lost. Have half the ice cream, dear.

These consonantal elisions sometimes interact with a general avoidance of hiatus: nada [na] ‘nothing’, lado [laŏ~lau] ‘side’. This is typical of the circum-Caribbean, as is dropping the first syllable of estar ‘to be (one of two Spanish copulas)’ and the last syllable of para ‘to, towards’. This avoidance of hiatus also contributes to diphthongization of the common verbal suffix -ear, as in marear ‘to get dizzy’ or hanguear ‘to hang out’ (from the English).

Estamos en el otro lado, pero vamos para allá y hangueamos.
[ˈtã.mŏ‿ẽɰ̃‿e‿ˈlo.tɾo ˈlaŏ pe.ɾo βã.moh paˈɟa‿ĭ haŋˈgĭa.mo]
COP-1PL LOC the.M other.M side but go-1PL to there and hang-1PL
We’re on the other side, but we’ll go over there and hang out.

Highland /x/ is exclusively realized /h/, as in most of the Caribbean. Phonemic /ʝ/ is often realized [dʒ] word-initially and [ɟ] between vowels. There is only one coda nasal /N/, lightly nasalizing a previous vowel, homorganic with a following consonant, [ɰ̃] between vowels, and [ŋ] phrase finally.

Josean y Pilar ya están trayendo pan.
[ˈho.siãɰ̃‿i piˈlaɭ dʒa ehˈtãn tɾaˈɟẽn.do pãŋ]
Josean and Pilar already COP-3PL bring-PRES.PTCP bread
Josean** and Pilar are already bringing bread.

Finally, Puerto Rican Spanish is fairly well-known in Latin America for its unusual realization of the Spanish rhotic. Trilled /r/ is strongly devoiced [r̥]; outside of the San Juan area, it is typically in free variation with a guttural /x/. Coda /r/ is very frequently [l~ɭ] before a consonant or utterance-finally, so much so that outsiders often mockingly dub the island Puelto Lico. In the San Juan area, coda /r/ is occasionally an approximant [ɻ~ɻ͡ɭ]. Coda /r/ is always [ɾ] intervocalically.

Pilar se fue y regresó bien rápido.
SJ: [piˈlaɻ͡ɭ se ˈfŭe‿ĭ r̥e.ɰɾeˈso biẽn ˈr̥a.pi.ðo]
non-SJ: [piˈlal se ˈfŭe‿ĭ xe.ɰɾeˈso biẽn ˈr̥a.pi.ðo]
Pilar REFL go.3SG.PERF and return-3SG.PERF well fast
Pilar went and came back really fast.

Footnotes:
1. Las Marías is a small municipality in west-central Puerto Rico.
2. A nickname for José Antonio, but in recent years often a given name.

[Creyeditor]

Interesting, I didn't actually know any variety with lateral for the rhotic. Also, the nasal neutralization is interesting because it seems to be a dialect-defining feature in many languages.

[VaptuantaDoi]

Very interesting and well presented! I'm looking forward to seeing more.

[Pāṇini]

Interesting, I didn't actually know any variety with lateral for the rhotic. Also, the nasal neutralization is interesting because it seems to be a dialect-defining feature in many languages.

Caribbean Spanish tends to do strange things to coda rhotics: in the Dominican Republic they are sometimes palatalized [j], and in Cuba they are often either elided or cause the gemination of a following consonant.

On second thought, I'm not sure that any Spanish variety has more than one coda nasal; */ŋ/ is not phonemic in any dialect that I'm aware of, and I can't come up with any examples of syllable-final /m/ that aren't followed by a labial consonant. For that matter, if coda */ɲ/ exists then it is vanishingly rare.

[Pāṇini]

Morphology

This will be a short post: most of the rest of what I want to cover is syntax or would be covered better in a series of posts on internal variation and social dynamics. Feel free to ask me anything!

On the whole, Puerto Rican Spanish morphology varies little from the standard language. A notable exception, common to the Caribbean region, is the plural in -ses, applied to words ending in stressed open syllables.

¿Serían cuatro cafeses entonces?
[seˈɾi.ãŋ ˈkŭa.tɾo kaˈfe.seɦ ẽnˈtõn.se]
¿Ser-ía-n cuatro cafe-ses entonces?
COP-COND-3PL four coffee-PL then
Four coffees, then? (lit., Would they be four coffees then?)

It is unclear whether this is a genuine double plural, e.g., café-s-es, or whether it derives from a reanalysis of the word having an elided final /s/, e.g. cafez-es. Regardless, the -ses plural compensates for that weakening of coda /s/.

Loaned English nouns ending in consonants tend to get one of two treatments: the zero-marked plural or pluralization in -es. These appear to be in free variation; the name of a now-defunct movie theater in the southern city of Ponce, the Ponce Twins*, was freely interpreted as either los Ponce Twin or los Ponce Twines.

Of the three Spanish verbal conjugations, the only productive one is -ar. Regardless, forming new verbs in Puerto Rican Spanish requires a verbalizing suffix, typically the neutral -ear, though a causative suffix -izar is also common.

Ella está boicoteando a la compañía esa.
[ˈe.ɟa‿ĕhˈta βoĭ.koˈtĭãn.do a la kõm.paˈɲi.a ˈe.sa]
Ella está boicot-ea-ndo a la compañía es-a.
3FSG.NOM COP.3SG.PRES boycott-VBLZ-PRES.PART to the.F company that-F
She’s boycotting that one company.

Though many lowland Spanishes, including a few of the circum-Caribbean, use vos** as an informal or semi-informal second person singular pronoun, such a usage is unheard of in Puerto Rico, where tú and usted are used exclusively as informal and formal pronouns. The second person plural pronoun is ustedes, rather than European vosotros.

Footnotes:
1. This name was somewhat controversial in its day, as the Ponce Twins had not two but three movie screens.
2. Voseo, and the diversity of Latin American second person pronouns, is a complicated topic for another day. Suffice it to say that early modern Spanish had three second person singular pronouns—tú, vos, and usted, in order of formality—and different ones fell into disuse in different parts of Hispanophonia.

[Esneirra973]

Thanks for making this post! As someone of Cuban descent, I can discern a lot of similarities with my dialect, so it's really cool to read through.

[Pāṇini]

Thanks for making this post! As someone of Cuban descent, I can discern a lot of similarities with my dialect, so it's really cool to read through.

I'm glad it's been well-received! Were you the individual who posted about their future Cuban Spanish 'lang a while back on the board? I loved that project.

[Esneirra973]

Thanks for making this post! As someone of Cuban descent, I can discern a lot of similarities with my dialect, so it's really cool to read through.

I'm glad it's been well-received! Were you the individual who posted about their future Cuban Spanish 'lang a while back on the board? I loved that project.

Sorry, just saw this now. Yep, that was me! I'm glad you liked the project, I actually had a lot of fun with it.

[Pāṇini]

With school and now the holidays, this thread has been derailed a little bit. There's a lot of interesting syntactic and sociological phenomena that I've yet to cover, but this format makes me want to do a complete overview, which I can by no means do. I'd love to turn this into a bit of an AMA rather than a full-fledged schematic grammar.

Christmastide is the great celebration of Puerto Rico, a joyful season stretching from late November to mid-January, replete with folk music and the smell of coconut. I wish you all a lovely winter solstice,

¡felices Pascuas y prospero año nuevo!
[feˈli.seh ˈpah.kwas i ˈpɾoh.pe.ɾo‿ˈa.ɲo ˈnwe.βo]
happy-PL Passover-PL and prosperous-M year new-M
happy holidays and a prosperous new year!

[Lambuzhao]

¡Ohe!
¡Felices fiestas con paz y bien!

As a high-school teacher of a high school of overwhelmingly Caribbean Latino population, I have many heritage and native speakers from Puerto Rico (and Dominican Republic, and some from Cuba, as well as from the Centroamerican shores of the Caribe as well).

Very interested to see & share some linguistic nuggets here.

Hasta entonces… ¡Que no aprietes los aguacates!

Héctor Lavoe y Yomo Toro - Monserrate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fAjO08Rgww

[gorjim]

Very interesting and well presented! I'm looking forward to seeing more.

Absolutely agree. I recently started learning Puerto Rican Spanish and Panini's posts are really helpful and interesting. Thanks and keep going.

[Pāṇini]

Case study: the décima

Puerto Rico prides herself in the décima, a complex ten-line stanza hailing back to the Spanish Baroque. Long moribund in its native land, regional variants of the décima tradition have been carefully preserved from New Mexico to Argentina, where singers improvise verses to the sound of plucked strings. In Puerto Rico, the form is inextricably associated with the mountainous interior and its folk music (música típica).

The décima comprises ten eight-syllable* lines, divided into a quatrain and a sestet. This lopsided division is at odds with the rhyme scheme (ABBA ACCDDC), which would typically imply a division into quintets; the result is a rather musical effect. The last line or couplet of a décima are often a pie forzado (lit., ‘forced foot’), a prompt upon which a composer or trobador (improvisor) must build the poem. In the most complex décima form, the composer takes an introductory quatrain and writes four décimas, using each line of the quatrain as a pie forzado.

Today, we will look at a well-known composed décima from the song “Arrímese mi compay”, by Tony Croatto** and Silverio Pérez (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQojILxrqTQ).

Arrímese, mi compay,
y suba por la vereda—
haga usted un alto en la brega
y tráigase a la comay.
Yo pondré mi le-lo-lai
y usted un acorde sencillo
mientras nos dan un pocillo
de café, de aquí, colado;
ahora que usted ha llegado,
irse no va a ser sencillo.

Spoiler:

Arrímese, mi compay,
[aˈr̥i.me.se mi kõmˈpaĭ]
come_near-3SG.IMP=REFL | my compadre
Come around, my compadre,

In Iberian societies, lifelong friendships are traditionally consecrated by mutually godparenting children, an institution known as compadrazgo. The godfather of one’s child earns the title compadre, lit. ‘co-father’; likewise, the godmother of one’s child is one’s comadre, or ‘co-mother’. These are often abbreviated to compay and comay in non-standard Spanish.

Note from the third-person verbs that this compadre is being addressed with the formal second-person pronoun usted. The speech of the Puerto Rican interior and its denizen, the jíbaro, stereotypically generalizes the use of the V pronoun. Elsewhere in Puerto Rico, it is sometimes generalized to peers/intimates in moments of anger or outrage.

y suba por la vereda—
[i ˈsu.βa poɽ la βeˈɾe.ða]
and ascend-3SG.IMP by the path
and walk up the path—

haga usted un alto en la brega
[ˈa.ɰa‿ŭhˈte‿ũɰ̃‿ˈal.tŏ‿ẽn la ˈβre.ɰa]
make-3SG.IMP 2SG(V) a halt in the struggle
take a break from your hard work

As in most lowland Spanishes, the final /d/ of usted is often dropped in casual speech. The elision of usted and un in the third line, and consequently the meter of the line as a whole, hinges on this pronunciation. Dropping a consonant to permit an elision would be blasphemous in classical Spanish verse.

Elsewhere in Hispanophonia, bregar is an archaic verb meaning ‘to struggle’. In Puerto Rico, its meaning has drifted towards the sense ‘to deal, to handle, to manage, to cope’. La brega, the corresponding noun, refers to the hard work of everyday life, putting out fires and dealing with annoyances.

y tráigase a la comay.
[i ˈtɾaĭ.ɰa.se a la koˈmaĭ]
and bring-3SG.IMP to the comadre
and bring the comadre with you.

Yo pondré mi le-lo-lai
[dʒo põnˈdɾe mi le.loˈlaĭ]
I place-1SG.FUT my le_lo_lai
I will sing my le-lo-lai

Le-lo-lai refers to the nonsense syllables used by trovadores at the beginning and end of songs

y usted un acorde sencillo
[ĭ‿uhˈte‿ũɰ̃‿aˈkol.de sẽnˈsi.ɟo]
and 2SG(V) a chord simple
and you will play a simple chord

mientras nos dan un pocillo
[ˈmĭẽn.traɦ‿noɦ‿ˈdãɰ̃‿ũm‿poˈsi.ɟo]
while us give-3PL a small_cup
while they give us a little cup

A pocillo is a small cup for strong black coffee, the kind typically used for espresso in Italy.

de café, de aquí, colado;
[de kaˈfe ‖ dĕ‿aˈki ‖ koˈlaŏ]
of coffee | from here | filtered
of down-home filtered coffee;

Café colado is literally ‘filtered coffee’; the elision of the medial /d/ makes it clear that the reference is to coffee brewed traditionally with a cloth filter. De aquí is the typical phrase in Puerto Rico for a local rather than imported product; it is a favorite of advertisers due to its folksy, down-home connotations.

ahora que usted ha llegado
[aŏ.ɾa ke‿ŭhˈte‿ða‿ɟeˈɰaŏ]
now that 2SG(V) have.3SG arrive
now that you have arrived,

dirse no va a ser sencillo.
[ˈdil.se no‿βa sel sẽnˈsi.ɟo]
go.INF=REFL NEG go-3SG to be.INF simple
leaving is not going to be easy..

Dirse is also classic jíbaro speech, a rural variant of irse, ‘to leave’.

For more information on the décima, I strongly recommend Uruguayan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler's TED talk (https://www.ted.com/talks/jorge_drexler ... anguage=en). As far as the music of the Puerto Rican interior, the Cuatro Project (http://www.cuatro-pr.org/front) is the quintessential online resource in both Spanish and English.

Footnotes:
1. In Spanish, not all eight-syllable lines will have eight literal syllables. Versos octosílabos may have seven syllables and end in a word with ultimate stress, eight syllables and penultimate stress, or nine syllables and antepenultimate stress.
2. Croatto was a transplant to Puerto Rico. A lifelong singer and entertainer, he was born in Friuli during the Second World War and soon emigrated to Uruguay. After touring the Americas and Europe during the ‘60s with his siblings, he settled in Puerto Rico and eventually began to sing the folk music of what would become his adoptive home. All this to say that these phonetic transcriptions are of my own idiolect rather than what Tony sings; his accent was a little all over the place.

[Salmoneus]

This form of verse is unknown
in the history of poetry
in English; although it seems
to me that its rhythms fit
this tongue surprisingly well...

Sorry, got distracted there, and obviously I was ignoring the rhyme scheme. It's just that this is an idea I hadn't encountered before: a poetic form in which the defining length feature isn't the number of syllables or the number of stresses or even the number of feet, but simply the location of the final stress (in this case, the final stress of the line must fall on the seventh syllable). It feels like something that should exist in English, since it accomodates several 'problems' of English verse:
- although iambic metre is the natural default rhythm of English, actual English also includes a lot of irregular stresses, including sequences of multiple unstressed syllables, and lacking this feature makes strict iambic verse sound repetitive and artificial
- as a result of these multiple unstressed syllables, it's also difficult to stick to a purely syllabic metre while retaining a relationship with stress; but without a tie to stress, syllabic metres are artificial, with no relationship to the spoken rhythms
- but a purely stress-counting metre can likewise lead to wildly varying line lengths: "hate things breaking" and "in the illuminating history of the reciprocals" are both lines with three stresses, and juxtaposing can certainly create a certain effect, but it's a ather wearying one...
- because English tends to destress 'unimportant' words and has a clear distinction between three stress levels rather than two, it's often not entirely clear how many stressed syllables a line really has (and reciting with the 'offiicial' stresses can sound artificial and mechanical).

This sort of 'final stress' rule, on the other hand, effectively limits the line length to within a certain window, while still having the line breaks relate to natural stress patterns and allowing a degree of metric freedom. Having the final stress fall on an odd syllable, meanwhile, in a mostly iambic language, forces the poet to add an irregularity into each line (either a trochaic line or a line with two consecutive syllables of the same length); while ignoring the stress patterns in the rest of the sentence bypasses debates about what should be counted as a stress in most instances.

[I've been thinking a bit recently about how different poetic lines could be used to translate (or indeed compose) epic verse into English, which is a problem that I don't think has ever been resolved satisfactorily: older poets went for fixed metres, which sounded stilted and repetitive when stretched to epic lengths, while newer ones tend to go for no form at all, which feels like cheating and removes a lot of the feel of it being a poem and not just a novel. Others try to create new principles, as with the common translation of the Kalevala, where the translator pontificated a fair bit about the importance of making the translation poetic, but in the end just went for the rule "all lines have either 5, 7 or 9 syllables", which to me seems... way too loose. Because although it does have the advantage of introducing some variety while keeping lines vaguely similar in length, it's so unnatural to English that it's virtually invisible. Whereas this sort of stress-placing rule seems to have the effect of creating realistic 'broken metre' that feels almost like metre (presumably iambic trimeter) that's constantly being pulled apart by irregularities, as natual speech is.]


Sorry, I know that's not what this thread is about!

Although I'm also curious whether you know where that rhyme scheme came from? Octosyllabic verse usually uses couplets, and other mediaeval continental verses often use repeating short stanza patterns; whereas if you take the decima scheme as based on couplets you have to explain the initial and final lines; but if you take it as based on quintains you have to explain why the second is the inverse of the first. I like the effect, but it feels a bit out of place in its context, so far as I understand it...

[Pāṇini]

This form of verse is unknown
in the history of poetry
in English; although it seems
to me that its rhythms fit
this tongue surprisingly well...

Thanks for replying, Salmoneus!
I hadn’t stopped to consider
that this verse might seem off-kilter
in English, if not erroneous.
This meter—simple, harmonious—
governs the popular lyric
(romantic, tragic, satiric)
of the Spanish-speaking world:
thus the décima unfurls,
and so ends my panegyric.

This sort of syllabic verse is the rule in the Western Romance tradition. Lines of eight syllables or less require an accent only on the prototypically penultimate syllable; in Spanish these are referred to as versos de arte menor. Lines longer than these—versos de arte mayor—typically have light accentual restrictions preserving their poetic rhythm.

Supreme among the versos de arte mayor is the eleven-syllable line, or verso endecasílabo. As an import of the Italian Renaissance, it is typically used in sonnets, ottava rima, and other Italianate poetic forms. The stress constraints of the line (always on the tenth syllable, never on the fifth or ninth, typically on the fourth or sixth) render its rhythm almost identical to the less strict forms of English iambic pentameter.

Extending this analogy makes Romance verse considerably less mistifying to the Anglophone:
- a rhyme ending in a stressed syllable (the Spanish aguda, ‘sharp, acute’) is equivalent to the English masculine rhyme. Compare Garcilaso’s Sonnet 27, “Amor, amor, un hábito vestí” /aˈmor aˈmor un ˈa.bi.to besˈti/ (“Love, love, I put on a habit”) with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”.
- the prototypical rhyme, with a syllable following the stress (the Spanish llana, ‘shallow’), is equivalent to the English feminine rhyme. Compare Garcilaso’s Sonnet 23, “En tanto que de rosa y azucena” /en ˈtan.to ke de ˈro.sa‿i a.suˈse.na/ (“So long as the rose and the lily”) with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20, “A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted”.
- the edge case of a rhyme in which two syllables follow the stress (the Spanish esdrújula, from It. sdrucciolo ‘slippery’) is vanishingly rare in rhymed verse. In English, this problem is typically resolved by counting the last unstressed syllable as a light stress. Compare Borges’ “Herman Melville”, line 18 “...y el gusto, al fin, de divisar a Ítaca.” /i‿el ˈgus.to‿al fin de di.biˈsar a ˈi.ta.ka/ (“and the pleasure, at last, of spotting Ithaca”) with Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, book 14, line 123, “His wife and son will not trust travelers ...”
- Spanish lines with an odd number of syllables tend towards iambic rhythms—those with an even number favor (though less strongly) a trochaic pulse. I tend to see the Spanish eight-syllable line as being caught between two rhythmic poles. One is a dactylic trimeter, as in Corretjer’s “Boricua en la luna”: “Desde las ondas del mar” /ˈdes.de las ˈon.das del ˈmar/ (“From the waves of the sea”). The other, a trochaic tetrameter, as in that poem's second line, “que son besos a su orilla” /ke son ˈbe.sos a su‿oˈɾi.ɟa/ (“that are kisses to its shores”).

Tradition ascribes the invention of the décima to Vicente Espinel (b. Ronda, 1550; d. Madrid, 1624) and his 1591 poetic anthology Diversas Rimas. Judging from the variety of late-medieval ten-line stanzas—the Portuguese glosa and the Castilian copla real, both back-to-back quintains—it seems likely that Espinel’s principal contribution was codifying the break after the fourth line and fixing the rhyme scheme. Though Vicente Espinel only published ten décimas in his life, the great poets of the Siglo de Oro (Lope de Vega, Cervantes, and Quevedo among them) credited him with the décima, which bears the alternative name espinela in his honor.

[Sequor]

Supreme among the versos de arte mayor is the eleven-syllable line, or verso endecasílabo. As an import of the Italian Renaissance, it is typically used in sonnets, ottava rima, and other Italianate poetic forms. The stress constraints of the line (always on the tenth syllable, never on the fifth or ninth, typically on the fourth or sixth) render its rhythm almost identical to the less strict forms of English iambic pentameter.

I've always thought the name "hendecasyllabics" for this poetic form very funny. I mean, in practice, in Spanish poetry, the line often has 10 syllables (due to the last word being stressed on its final syllable), not 11. In French hendecasyllabics, it may well be over half the lines have 10 syllables. And in Italian and Spanish, a line can have 12 if the last word is stressed on the third-to-last syllable (parola sdrucciola / palabra esdrújula), though poets seem to avoid this.

I've heard rumours that over in the Catalan world, the Romance "hendecasyllabics" are usually called "decasyllabics" (decasíl·lab). Catalan Wikipedia seems to confirm this...

[Salmoneus]

Spoilerised to as to reduce disruption to good people who are actually engaging appropriately with the topic of the thread...

Spoiler:

This form of verse is unknown
in the history of poetry
in English; although it seems
to me that its rhythms fit
this tongue surprisingly well...

Thanks for replying, Salmoneus!
I hadn’t stopped to consider
that this verse might seem off-kilter
in English, if not erroneous.
This meter—simple, harmonious—
governs the popular lyric
(romantic, tragic, satiric)
of the Spanish-speaking world:
thus the décima unfurls,
and so ends my panegyric.

*sigh*
Why can't I write poetry? It's always sort of irritated me that I have absolutely no facility for it. Not the lack of artistic sensibility, mind you, I take that for granted - almost nobody can write good poetry. And I'm OK with rhythm - indeed, although it doesn't normally come naturally, I do find that if I've been watching a Shakespeare play, or even reading on, I instinctively try to speak in pentameter for a little while afterward. But I have no ability to produce rhyme, whatsoever. In particular, although I can try, by blundering into a word, racking my brains for rhymes for an hour, and then giving up and trying another grammatically correct word, and so on, the meaning must then follow after whatever rhyme I happened to be able to find, rather than the poem being written to a pre-intended meaning; and likewise, I could never leap into a rhyme-word like 'lyric' that isn't the most obvious word to end the line in the mere hope of being able to find a rhyme or two.

I remember Pope wrote about his poetic ability being innate and apparent from a young age - "I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came" (where the 'numbers' are his age's word for metrical and rhyming rules); and as an established poet, he could whip up verses to illustrate any poetic phenomenon on the drop of a hat. I can only assume something similar must have been the case with WS Gilbert as well (“I can quote in elegaics all the crimes of Heliogabalus / In conics, I can floor peculiarities parabalous”). But for me, the opposite has always been true, sadly. Which is annoying - I like the semantic concentration of poetry, and admire its memorable nature and its trancelike continuity in longer poems, and if I had any talent at all in it I'd love to experiment with narrative verse in different forms... but I don't. A poem like the one you just posted would literally be one of the proudest accomplishments of my life...

ANYWAY...

This sort of syllabic verse is the rule in the Western Romance tradition. Lines of eight syllables or less require an accent only on the prototypically penultimate syllable; in Spanish these are referred to as versos de arte menor. Lines longer than these—versos de arte mayor—typically have light accentual restrictions preserving their poetic rhythm.
[...]
The stress constraints of the line (always on the tenth syllable, never on the fifth or ninth, typically on the fourth or sixth) render its rhythm almost identical to the less strict forms of English iambic pentameter.
[...]
the prototypical rhyme, with a syllable following the stress (the Spanish llana, ‘shallow’), is equivalent to the English feminine rhyme.

I actually think you may be underestimating how weird this is!

Generally, syllabic verse has lines with a set number of syllables (allowing for occasional stylistic deviations). The number or location of stressed syllables doesn’t normally define the syllabic line – although there may be cadential rules specifying stress locations at the end of each line. This makes sense, because syllabic verse usually occurs in languages where stress isn’t important in general.
Accordingly, Classical Latin and Greek syllabic verse, AIUI, is genuinely syllabic – there’s a fixed number of syllables per line.
Likewise, when Old Irish borrowed the concept of syllabic verse from Latin, it produced genuinely syllabic verse – even though the specific preferred form (heptasyllables) wasn’t taken from Latin, and even though Old Irish itself was stress-timed. Indeed, like many syllabic verse systems, Old Irish syllabic verse had fixed cadences: within a given poem, every line ended with the same pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, with no variation allowed.

Now, when we look at Old French, at first the ‘syllabic’ poetry seems like chaos. There are two main forms of long-ish, syllabic lines, which we can call the decasyllable and the octosyllable, but the actual number of syllables, going by what is written on the page, seems to vary wildly. And yes, this includes both masculine and feminine endings, with the feminine lines often being longer.
And then if we look at Middle English (eg Chaucer) the situation is exactly the same.
However, all this variation can be immediately eliminated at a single stroke with one simple theory: many word-final schwas were not pronounced.
Firstly, we can assume that all unstressed word-final schwas are deleted when they precede a vowel in the following word.
Next, we can assume that some word-final schwas are optionally deleted before a consonant, most often with function words (which tend to erode more quickly), and in Middle English also some disyllabic nouns. [while we’re at it we can also delete word-internal schwas in some very common words – in chaucer, “every” is always treated as disyllabic]
These two rules almost completely eliminate line variability, with one key exception: there are sometimes “extra” schwas before a pause. In Middle English, this occurs at the end of lines (i.e. feminine endings), while in Old French it can occur either at the end of the line OR at the caesura after the fourth syllable (this caesura was less prominent in Middle English poetry). So, we can add one final, eminently plausible pronunciation rule: schwa is not pronounced before a pause.
These rules, phonologically and diachronically plausible, mean that virtually 100% of Old French decasyllabic lines have 10 syllables, and almost as many Chaucerian lines also have 10 syllables, while virtually 100% of Old French octosyllabic lines have 8 syllables. [Chaucer’s rule was actually, it seems, slightly different: although he usually didn’t pronounce word-final schwa, there are some lines that are 9 syllables plus a final schwa, suggesting that sometimes, perhaps simply as a metrical cheat, he did pronounce it – this would be equivalent to how later English poets didn’t usually pronounce the schwa in -ed endings, but occasionally did (as -èd) for metrical reasons. It also looks as though, very occasionally, Chaucer used acephalic lines where the first unstressed syllable is missing; but this is apparently controversial and there are usually alternative reading to avoid these.]
We can even plausibly derive this common Anglo-French decasyllable from Latin hendecasyllabic verse, in three (unattested, I think? but plausible) stages:
1: all lines have 11 syllables
2: most lines have fewer than 11 syllables due to variable loss of schwas. Since most line-internal schwas are retained, most lines end up with 10 syllables
3: the 10-syllable line is accepted as standard, and all lines have 10 spoken syllables, even though some are written with 11, 12 or even more orthographic syllables (because schwas are written though not pronounced)
This produces a common Anglo-French syllabic poetry with several features:
1: although some lines are written with extra orthographic syllables, all lines are probably pronounced with only 10 syllables
2: the ‘extra’ syllables can occur throughout the line: before vowels in both traditions, at the end of lines in both traditions, and before the caesura in Old French (meanwhile, particularly in Middle English, there are also some ‘missing’ syllables before consonants)
3: the ‘extra’ and ‘missing’ syllables are all the same: unstressed schwa open syllables
4: even if you think some line-final schwas WERE pronounced in some way, it’s clear that they belong to a class of syllables that was in some way ‘eligible’ for elision, that would be elided in other contexts, and that were unusually ‘weak’ or ‘light’ in their pronunciation
5: in Old French, the elidable syllables, when pronounced at all, have another distinct property: they are the only final syllables that don’t bear stress. So there’s a clear distinction between schwa and everything else.
6: the lines retain their iambic character, keeping stress on the fourth and tenth syllables (in decasyllables) and the fourth and eighth (and usually sixth) in octosyllables.
7: the system can be derived directly from Latin by simple loss of unstressed schwa in specific contexts

Then we can compare these to Spanish “octosyllables”:
a: lines inarguably have different numbers of syllables
b: the ‘extra’ syllables can only occur at the end of the line, with no analogue to the ‘extra’ syllable allowable after caesurae in OF, and with the contaction of sequential vowels being a general feature of the language rather than something specific to poetic metre; there are no ‘missing’ syllables
c: the ‘extra’ syllables can contain any vowel, or sometimes multiple syllables in a row, and presumably sometimes also closed syllables with final consonants
d: the ‘extra’ (extrametrical) syllables are not phonologically different from the metrical syllables; they are not specifically weak or light, or even eligible for elision AIUI (contractions of two vowels typically seem to still notate both vowels, unlike the complete obliteration of the schwa in Anglo-French poetry)
e: there is no inherent phonological difference between the phonemes in extrametrical syllables and other normal phonemes as there is in OF – they just happen to have been at the end of a line
f: the lines do NOT retain their iambic quality, and do NOT keep stress on the fourth and eight syllables! Instead, stress is on an odd-numbered syllable
g: so far as I can see the system can’t easily be derived from Latin.
And then, of course, there’s the really massive difference: Anglo-French octosyllables have eight syllables! That is, they must have eight, even though sometimes they’re written (and perhaps arguably pronounced with in some way) nine syllables. Whereas Spanish ‘octosyllables’ have only seven syllables – that is, they must have seven, even though sometimes they have eight or nine. That seems like a pretty major difference, that makes it hard to see Spanish ‘octosyllables’ as part of the same tradition as the Anglo-French ones!
Notably, two of these big differences – being one syllable shorter, and having stress on the odd syllable – are NOT true of Spanish hendecasyllables, which basically have the same length and stress patterns of Anglo-French decasyllables. It’s just the extrametricality rules that are weird there. But those hendecasyllables, you say, are a later learned borrowing from Italian, so it’s not a surprise they work differently from the native octosyllables. But this reinforces that the Spanish octosyllables probably aren’t just a borrowing from Italian either, since the hendecasyllables borrowed from Italian didn’t pick up these big oddities.
For what it’s worth, I also had a look at Dante’s Italian. And I found that, yes, in theory you could analyse Dante as having the Spanish extrametricality rule... but you probably shouldn’t. That’s because I scanned through at least 1,000 lines, if not 2,000, and only came across 2 masculine couplets. So yes, Dante COULD write a ‘hendecasyllable’ with only 10 syllables but stress on the final syllable, but he clearly didn’t regard this as a normal part of his metre (I know final stress isn’t the norm in Italian anyway, but he uses such words far more frequently line-internally, indicating he’s intentionally avoiding them at line-ends for metrical reasons). Instead, he seems to use this as an occasional ornamental variation for shock value (3 of the 4 lines I found were direct speech reports of people crying out to God, which may be relevant).
I don’t know if this becomes more commonplace in later Italian poetry?
All I can think of is a really convoluted path to the Spanish octosyllable:
1: French starts using octosyllables
2: Italian starts occasionally using an acaudate line as a rare ornament in its hendecasyllables
3: Italian uses acaudate lines more often in its hendecasyllables?
4: Spanish borrows French octosyllables, but completely ignores their stress rules and isn’t aware of the weakly or non-pronounced schwas
5: Spanish borrows Italian hendecasyllables (NOT French decasyllables)
6: Spanish borrows the Italian habit of using acaudate lines in hendecasyllables?
7: Spanish applies the Italian acaudate lines to the French octosyllables, effectively resulting in a line that has had the final syllable cut off TWICE?
This feels pretty tenuous, to be honest. In particular, it requires the Spanish to have borrowed the octosyllable only verbally, not in writing, and at the same time not to have noticed the stress requirements. Because otherwise you’d expect Spanish octosyllables to be the same length as Anglo-French ones: eight syllables with a possible ninth, not seven syllables with a possible eighth.
Alternatively, could it be that the Spanish form is simply a native tradition of some sort, and only coincidentally and confusingly wound up being called an octosyllable?
You probably know all this, but for the sake of completeness I’ll fill in the Anglo-French gaps:
In England, after the loss of schwas entirely, Chaucer and his contemporaries came to be see as simply bad poets – the principle of syllabic lines was so strong that any deviation from this had to be seen as a failure of technique. Accordingly, hypermetric lines disappeared entirely from English poetry.
Hundreds of years later, in the Elizabethan era, poetry in English was being analysed differently. It was now seen as primarily metric, not syllabic. This opened up the way for variations in line length to occur again, and the “feminine” line was invented. This essentially replaces the final iamb of a line of iambic pentameter with an amphibrach – syllable count increases, but the number of feet remains the same [likewise, iambs could sometimes be replaced by anapaests]. However, the technique was not really part of the underlying metre of the English forms. Most Elizabethan poets refused to do it at all, and those who did usually used the technique sparingly, as an ornamental variation, rather than as a core technique. It was also only applied to the long line, now called an iambic pentameter, and (virtually) never to the the short octosyllabic line, now called an iambic tetrameter [or to the very long line, the iambic heptameter, usually written as paired lines of four and three feet]. Significantly, the pentameter was the more ‘literary’ genre and the more associated with foreign and court culture, whereas the tetrameter and heptameter were associated more with native, popular poetry (folk songs, nursery rhymes, hymns, etc), emphasising that the feminine line was not seen as a ‘normal’ part of English poetry. In later centuries, of course, all English poetic rules gradually broke down and all variations became more common.
Meanwhile, at some point the French seem to have started robustly pronouncing all their schwas when pretentiously reciting poetry (even as they were lost in speech), other than those before a vowel, and as a result realised that a lot of their old poems had lines with the ‘wrong’ number of syllables. They embraced this, and wrote lots of lines with these ‘feminine’ syllable counts. However, they did not treat this as an accident of word choice (the product of the stress position in the final word), but as a systematic part of metre, with the choice of masculine and feminine lines dictated by metre (usually in alternation).
[incidentally, mediaeval Irish also used the alternation of masculine and feminine line endings, but in Irish they’re all the same length anyway, it’s just the stress location that differs. Because Irish used properly syllabic verse, damnit!]





Just to pick up on a few English poetry points:

the prototypical rhyme, with a syllable following the stress (the Spanish llana, ‘shallow’), is equivalent to the English feminine rhyme.

...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!

. In English, this problem is typically resolved by counting the last unstressed syllable as a light stress. Compare Borges’ “Herman Melville”, line 18 “...y el gusto, al fin, de divisar a Ítaca.” /i‿el ˈgus.to‿al fin de di.biˈsar a ˈi.ta.ka/ (“and the pleasure, at last, of spotting Ithaca”) with Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, book 14, line 123, “His wife and son will not trust travelers ...”

More generally, in English any unstressed syllable can generally be counted as stressed if the metre demands it: English accentual metre is more about NOT having undoubtedly stressed syllables in weak positions. And 21st century English poetry of course is often ‘laxer’ than older forms. Having said that, I’m not sure I’d actually read that line that way – I’d read the stress on ‘trust’ and ‘trav’ (i.e. replacing the final ‘–‘– with –.–‘‘, a substitution that wouldn’t have been allowed for Shakespeare, particularly in final position, but that doesn’t seem implausible in the 21st century. I feel this partly because the natural rhythm (both due to emphasis and the weight of the syllable) falls on ‘trust’, and because, while many dactyls can indeed be read cretically, it feels really odd to do so in cases when doing so actually transforms the vowel quality fom COMMA to NURSE, which feels like a totally different vowel. [there’s debate over the extent to which people do or should actually stress unstressed vowels that the metre says should be stressed, but instinctively people do so quite strongly, and poets generally bear this in mind even if they’d recite the line more subtly]. Anway, tangent!

I tend to see the Spanish eight-syllable line as being caught between two rhythmic poles.

This is a big part of why it struck me so much, and why it feels so unusual. English metrical verse may, of course, have variations now and then, but it is never bipolar: it is either one thing or it is another. Lines may even alternate metres, but they can’t simply be free to choose. And specifically, although a few poems are written in dactyls or anapaests, the vast majority are written in bisyllabic feet (in fact, the vast majority are in iambs: if you add iambic pentameter to iambic tetrameter and iambic heptameter, you’ve probably got 90% of English verse between 1400 and 1900, with most of the remainder trochaic). So the idea of a metre that both allows each line to be different AND actively forces the presence of a trisyllabic foot is pretty exciting!
It’s also ultimately why I think the Spanish line is Weird, not only historically but typologically: it can’t be analysed either as truly syllabic OR truly accentual-syllabic (i.e. metrical, with feet). Because both the number of syllables and the number of feet can vary, and not just as occasional shock-value ornamentation.


Anyway, sorry for the prolonged rambling and the unwarranted distraction from your actual topic...

[Pāṇini]

*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.

...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. Here’s the first stanza of an Old Occitan canso by Peire Vidal (tr. Paden) that uses such a meter:

Ab l’alen tir vas me l’aire
qu’ieu sen venir de Proensa;
tot quant es de lai m’agensa,
si que quan n’aug ben retraire
ieu m’o escout en rizen,
e·n deman per un mot cen;
tan m’es bel quan n’aug ben dire.

Spoiler:

/ab l‿aˈlen ˈtir vas me ˈl‿ai.re/
/k‿jɛu sɛn veˈnir de pruˈen.sa/
/tut kan es de lai m‿aˈdʒen.sa/
/si ke kan n‿audʒ bɛn reˈtrai.re/
/jɛu mo esˈkut en riˈzɛn/
/en deˈman per yn mut sɛn/
/tan m‿es bel kan n‿audʒ bɛn ˈdi.re/

With my breath I draw toward myself the breeze
that I feel coming from Provence;
all that is from there pleases me,
so that when I hear [people] speaking well of it
I hear it with a smile,
and in exchange for one word I ask for a hundred;
I am so happy when I hear [people] speaking well of it

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.

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. Compare the first lines of the Cantar to that of the c. 1500 Romance del rey moro (transcribed in contemporary Old Spanish, tr. me):

De los sos ojos / tan fuertemientre llorando,
tornava la cabeça / e estávalos catando.
Vio puertas abiertas / e uços sin cañados...

Spoiler:

/de los sos ˈo.ʒos ‖ tan ˈfuɔr.te.miɛn.tre ʎoˈɾan.do/
/torˈna.va la kaˈbe.tsa ‖ e esˈta.va.los kaˈtando./
/bio ˈpuɔr.tas aˈbiɛr.tas ‖ e ˈu.tsos sin kaˈɲa.dos/

Crying so much from his eyes,
he turned his head and looked around—
he saw open gates and unlocked doors...

Passeávase el rey moro / por la ciudad de Granada.
Cartas le fueron venidas / como Alhama era ganada;
las cartas echó en el fuego / y al mensajero matara.

Spoiler:

/paˈsea.va.ze‿l rei ˈmoro ‖ por la tsiuˈðad de graˈna.da/
/ˈkar.tas le ˈfue.ɾon veˈni.das ‖ komŏ‿alˈha.mă‿e.ɾa gaˈna.ða/
/las ˈkar.tas eˈtʃo‿ĕn el ˈfue.go ‖ ĭ‿al men.saˈʒe.ɾo maˈta.ɾa/

The Moorish king was walking around the city of Granada.
Letters came to him, for Alhama had been conquered;
he threw the letters in the fire and would kill the messenger.

For what it’s worth, I also had a look at Dante’s Italian. And I found that, yes, in theory you could analyse Dante as having the Spanish extrametricality rule... but you probably shouldn’t. That’s because I scanned through at least 1,000 lines, if not 2,000, and only came across 2 masculine couplets. [...] I don’t know if this becomes more commonplace in later Italian poetry?

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/

Good people, understand why I have made this book:
for wicked women I have composed it in rhyme,
[for] those who have not fulfilled their pact with men...

Ergasto mio, perché solingo e tacito
pensar ti veggio? Oimè, che mal si lassano
le pecorelle andare a lor ben placito!

Spoiler:

/erˈgas.to miŏ ‖ perˈke‿s.soˈlin.go‿ĕ ˈta.tʃi.to/
/penˈsar ti ˈved.dʒo‿ĭˈmɛ‿k.ke mal si ˈlas.sa.no/
/le pe.koˈrɛl.le‿ănˈda.re‿ă lor bɛn ˈpla.tʃi.to/

My Ergasto, why do I see you thinking
quietly and lonesomely? Ay me, how poor this is, when they let
even the little lambs go out at their pleasure.

FOOTNOTES
1. Although, oddly enough, not in Portuguese, where the decassílabo does in fact correlate with the French decasyllabe (and the Spanish endecasílabo). Portuguese poetry is roughly as Italianate as that of Spain, and has a similar amount of unstressed final vowels, so the reason for this counting incongruity is unknown to me.
2. “Proverbia” is written in an archaic variety of Venetian. Sannazaro's language, the reason for his Arcadia’s wide renown, happily blended Old Tuscan with Latin and its author’s native Neapolitan language. Translating these passages was both edifying and mystifying.

[Lambuzhao]

Interesting, I didn't actually know any variety with lateral for the rhotic. Also, the nasal neutralization is interesting because it seems to be a dialect-defining feature in many languages.

Lateralization is quite interesting feature. Nowadays, Bad Bunny capitalizes on this in his songs Though he is not the first exponent of lateralized Puerto Rican Spanish, he uses it when singing his lyrics.

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

I have earlier posts about this here
viewtopic.php?p=274242#p274242

and here
viewtopic.php?p=115589#p115589


This process is quite a fruitful tree with very deep roots.

[eldin raigmore]

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?