In the course of the development of what are called today the Romance languages, consonants have retained similarities to Latin and also exhibited divergences from such, as well as among themselves. It is well attested that intervocalic consonants underwent lenition in Ibero-Romance, most famously in the case of the class of obstruents. Geminates from Latin, particularly -PP- /pː/, -TT- /tː/, and -CC- /kː/ reduced to singleton segments /p t k/ as distinctive consonant length was lost. Their singleton counterparts -P- /p/, -T- /t/, and -C- /k/ became voiced /b d g/. Additionally, the voiced obstruents -B- /b/, -D- /d/, and -G- /g/ were frequently lost when found in intervocalic position. It can be said that intervocalic position was an “unprivileged” position for stop consonants as Latin evolved to Ibero-Romance, in contrast to word-initial position being “privileged” as Martinet (1952) describes.

Possibly as notable as the lenition of obstruents, the Latin sonorants /l/ and /n/ (represented orthographically as -L- and -N- respectively) often underwent peculiar phonological changes in intervocalic environments. It bears noting that some of these changes, such as lenition and dissimilation, were observed in some languages but not in others. Various linguists (Bergquist 1977; Lief 2006; Tsukada 1989; et al.) have documented how /l/ and /n/ have evolved from Latin to the modern languages, both in isolation and alongside their geminate counterparts /lː/ and /nː/ (Latin orthographic -LL- and -NN- respectively). What is of interest is that it is still unclear how two languages, such as Spanish and Portuguese, can undergo distinct phonological changes even though the areas where each language is spoken are in such close proximity. For example, what might be a difference in the underlying grammar of each language that caused intervocalic /l/ to be lost in Portuguese but not in Spanish?

This paper will address two issues. First, it shall delineate the most notable changes that these Latin phonemes underwent, the phonotactic rules that conditioned these changes, and, additionally, the similarities and differences between Spanish and Portuguese. Comparisons and parallels in other Romance languages will be drawn as needed. Second, following the example of Holt (2007), Optimality Theory principles will be applied in order to attempt to illustrate a governing force behind these distinct changes, treating the relationship between geminate-singleton phonemic pairs as one of codependence instead of one of disjunction.

Spoken Latin, being the primary predecessor (an earlier state) of all Romance languages, bequeathed to them a robust repertoire of consonantal phonemes. Almost all of these phonemes survived into Spanish and Portuguese. Latin also featured geminate counterparts of singleton consonants, representing them orthographically by the doubling of that consonant. Geminates, as consonants of longer duration, provided a coda to the preceding syllable (closing or “checking” the syllable) while at the same time forming the onset of the following syllable (Baker 2006; Holt 1997; 1999). These geminate segments, then, formed minimal pairs with singleton segments. The presence of minimal pairs is proof that geminates were not simply allophones of singleton phonemes but instead were distinctively phonemic in their own right, as noted in the following examples.

In examining the class of sonorants that persisted from Latin into Ibero-Romance, specifically Spanish and Portuguese, we see that /m n ɾ l/ remain as consonantal phonemes and that the glides [j w] remain as allophonic variants of the high vowels /i u/. For the purposes of this investigation, I shall pay specific attention only to intervocalic /l lː n nː/ for the following reasons:

Phonemic length distinction, whether consonantal or vocalic, was lost in Spanish and Portuguese, and so the speakers of the earliest variants of these languages sought to maintain the former singleton-geminate contrast so as to avoid confusion. A possible explanation of the merger of -MM- and -M- can be found in Lloyd (1987: 243), who notes that occurrences of -MM- were very rare, as were those of -DD- and -GG-. The rarity of these geminates is further seen in the relative lack of minimal pairs involving -M- and -MM-, a fact not attributable to -L-/-LL- and -N-/-NN-. For these reasons, they being the higher frequency of -LL- and -NN- compared to other sonorant geminates and the relative robustness of minimal pairs between them and singleton -L- and -N-, -LL- and -NN- did not merge with their singleton counterparts -L- and -N- in the same manner as -MM- with -M- (Holt 2007).

What shall follow is a survey of the distinctions that arose in Spanish and Portuguese. Though both Spanish and Portuguese maintain the Latin contrast, the evolution of said contrast diverged significantly. Portuguese tended more toward a pattern of simplification of geminates and elision of singletons, whereas Spanish exhibited retention of singletons and fortition of geminates by means of palatalization.

Previous studies by Jacobs (1994; 1995), who investigated sound change in French, and Holt (1997; 1999; 2003; 2007), whose work involved change from Latin to Hispano-Romance, have given OT accounts for said evolutionary changes. In each study, the aforementioned authors claimed that the re-ranking of constraints in the language’s grammar accounted for diachronic phonological evolution in the respective languages. Jacobs’ works showed various parametric changes in syllable structure and consonant clustering between Latin, Gallo-Romance, and Old French, as well as accounting for the loss of enclisis.

Of particular interest to the current study are Holt’s (2003; 2007) analyses of /l n/ preservation and /lː nː/ palatalization in Hispano-Romance. Holt’s position is that the change in consonants between Latin and Hispano-Romance – as well as Galician-Portuguese – is primarily due to the loss of segmental length distinction in Latin. This loss of distinction of length (as well as vowel quality) caused long mid vowels in Latin to persist as closed vowels in Spanish and short mid vowels in Latin to become open vowels in Old Spanish and diphthongs in Modern Spanish when in tonic position. Similarly, almost all geminates simplified to singletons and retained their articulatory features. Geminate sonorants, however, evolved in the manners mentioned in the previous section. Portuguese, through the simplification of its geminate sonorants, avoided phonemic merger due to the fact that intervocalic /l n/ were lost in prior stages. This reasoning is based on Flemming’s (1996; 1997; 2006) Dispersion Theory, which explains that maximizing contrast with the least amount of articulatory effort is paramount in language.

To account for the maintaining of contrast between the geminate and singleton sonorants, Holt defines the following OT constraints and the associated hierarchy:

Hereafter, my analysis is based on the following assumptions of the moraicity of consonants from Holt (1999), which I briefly summarize here:

Given the two positions in syllable structure that a geminate occupies, in my own transcriptions I will present geminates in phonological form as /Cː/ and in phonetic form as [C.C] for reasons of clarity regarding syllable structure. It can also be understood that both /Cː/ and [C.C] imply the presence of a mora.

A hierarchy such as in (56), states Holt, causes geminates to be lost and merger to be avoided, while allowing features of phonemes to be changed. Below is the associated tableau, from Holt, showing these constraints in effect:

In Holt’s tableau, candidate (a) represents the status quo, or the latest stage of Latin (and possibly an early stage of Ibero-Romance) during which moraic sonorants were still permissible. This faithful candidate is rejected due to /nː/ bearing a mora, as it is in coda position of one syllable while in onset position of the next. Candidate (b) is rejected in that it fails to maintain contrast between the geminate and singleton consonants. Therefore, candidate (c) is selected by way of only violating the low-ranking faithfulness constraints.

While the proposed constraint hierarchy does give the desired result in Holt’s analysis, the use of NMS as a high-ranking constraint is not without its faults. The purpose of the constraints in an OT analysis is to represent universal parameters as hierarchical arrangements unique to a particular language. For example, a language that does not allow codas would have a constraint such as *CODA as strictly undominated in any constraint ranking. Holt presents NMS as an inviolable constraint in this particular analysis of Old Spanish, one of several defined as a “conspiracy” against coda moraicity. However, the problem with this particular analysis is that sonorants are frequently found in coda position in Spanish (cf. cantar, pernil, colchón), thus possibly granting them moraic status due to this position (Holt 2003; following Hayes 1989).6 It appears that Holt is using NMS specifically for his analysis of geminates versus singletons, but its lack of universality must be accounted for in light of the examples above.

Another possible issue with Holt’s constraint hierarchy is the positioning of MAX, IDENT, and DEP as tantamount in violability. If, for instance, we posit a candidate (d) alongside the previous candidates (a–c) that shows the observed outcome from Galician-Portuguese as a possibility in Old Spanish – that is, Latin /nn/ > /n/ and Latin /n/ > Ø – but leave the rankings the same, the result of an OT analysis is a tie:

Here, proposed candidate (d) incurs two low-ranked violations of MAX, which under the same constraint ranking is equal to candidate (c) incurring one violation each of MAX and IDENT. This analysis would have the outcomes from Spanish and Portuguese equally valid and thus predicting variation, though historical data do not bear this out. What this outcome proves is that, in order for the desired outcome to surface in Spanish, prohibition of deletion (MAX) must be superior to prohibition of feature change (IDENT) instead of equal to it.

Based on Holt’s premises, the current study will restate geminate simplification and merger avoidance from Latin to Old Spanish to Spanish. This study also aims to analyze the evolution from Latin to Portuguese by way of OT. More particularly, the goals are twofold:

The working hypothesis is that the diachronic changes from Latin to Spanish and from Latin to Portuguese can be conditioned with the same set of constraints but reordered in order to accurately reflect said changes and differences – in essence, the very purpose of Optimality Theory (Archangeli 1999).

Though Holt’s (2007) study is the baseline, crucial to the current study is the avoidance of the markedness constraint NMS in favor of other constraints that more accurately reflect the phonology of the languages in question. Finally, the possibility of a single set of constraints conditioning both geminates and singletons in either language will be considered.

There remains the question of whether constraints for geminates and singletons can be harmonized in order to motivate the correct outcomes for both Spanish and Portuguese from a Latin input. The purpose behind proposing a model that includes both geminate and singleton segments is that the observed changes of geminates were a direct result of how singleton /l n/ were treated in each language. On the surface, it appears that such a harmony would be relatively straightforward to attain, given the similarities between the two languages. Both Spanish and Portuguese, for example, abandoned geminates in favor of singleton consonants that functioned only as onsets of syllables instead of being both onsets and codas. So it would seem that an evolution from Latin to either present day language would involve a change in parameters that disallowed codas. Yet while in Portuguese sonorant consonantal codas were frequently eliminated or at least weakened – as evidenced by the velarization of [l] > [ɫ] (and, one step further, vocalization to [w]) in coda position (Ferreira & Holt 2014) as well as the loss of final [n] resulting in nasalization of the previous vowel – the case was not the same in Spanish, in which consonantal codas at the phonemic level are much more readily tolerated.8

Thus a common constraint set to condition the desired outcomes in both languages becomes difficult to devise. Therefore, a reworking of Holt’s (1997; 2007) analysis may be the best course.

Instead of retaining NMS from Holt’s analyses, there is a need to use a different context-free phonological constraint suitable for both languages. More specifically, this high-ranking constraint will militate against geminates in both Spanish and Portuguese. For this analysis, I will once again use Rose’s (2000) NO-GEM constraint, to be styled as *GEMINATE in this paper in line with Pajak (2009), and define our constraint hierarchies below:

Reiterating and expounding upon a point from section (5.2), I note that geminates did not exist in a phonemic fashion in Old Spanish or Galician-Portuguese. According to chronologies suggested by Resnick (1981) and Penny (2008), long consonants outlasted long vowels; whereas vowel length was lost in Late Spoken Latin, consonantal assimilation was still common during the same stage, yielding such developments from Classical to Late Latin as GYPSU(M) > *yesso (surviving into Medieval Spanish), IPSŌS > essos (ibid.), and alumnus > alunnos. Findings such as these suggest that although loss of length distinction affected all segments in the path from Latin to Ibero-Romance, the link between vowel length loss and degemination may not be as strong as originally assumed or postulated.

Note that the positional markedness constraint MOP was added as well, in contrast to Holt’s work. This is to avoid a degeminated consonant being assigned to a coda position versus an onset position in the output syllable.10 In order to distinguish between segment deletion and mora deletion, I add MAX(μ) as a violable constraint. Finally, I include MAX(ONSET[+son]) as a positional faithfulness constraint in (76) which should be ranked higher in Spanish than Portuguese; intervocalic /l n/ are always onsets and were routinely lost in Portuguese but not Spanish.11

With the above considerations in mind, the appropriate constraint rankings for each language are below in (77–78). Both languages hold in common the strict dominance of *GEMINATE and *MERGE, as neither language continued to permit geminates, nor did they allow geminates to merge with their singleton pairs in most cases. Where the languages diverge is in the next level of constraints. Since in Spanish no sonorant onsets elided as they did in Portuguese, MAX(ONSET[+son]) is higher-ranking in Spanish. Similarly, since no places of articulation changed in Portuguese, IDENT-IO(PLACE) is higher-ranking in Portuguese. The remaining constraints in Spanish – IDENT-IO(PLACE), MAX(μ), MOP – are low-ranking, as shown in (77), and have little effect on the outcome; however, they are included so that the evolutionary outcome of the segments in Spanish are properly modeled. In decreasing hierarchical importance, Portuguese tends toward open syllables, elision of sonorant onsets, and light syllables, which justifies the ranking below in (78).

The tableaux are constructed following Holt’s pattern, using the Latin geminate/singleton minimal pair as the input and the resultant Spanish/Portuguese evolutions as the output. Note that the five candidates (a–e) are identical so as to better illustrate the divergence of the two languages.

As expected, in each tableau the faithful candidate (a) fails due to conserving the geminate from Latin, which is an inviolable condition. The next candidate follows the pattern of geminate simplification found elsewhere in Spanish in that the long consonant becomes solely the onset of the following syllable, e.g., CUPPA [kup.pa] > copa [ko.pa] ‘cup’. However, (b) results in phonemic merger, causing another violation.13 Candidate (d) is discarded due to the geminate simplifying to remain a coda instead of an onset, which is the more privileged syllabic position in Spanish and Romance in general. Finally, candidate (e) results in two violations of deletion constraints: elision of the singleton consonant results in an onset-less syllable, and reduction of the geminate to a singleton deletes its mora. The winning candidate (c) is what is desired, as it is what was observed from Latin to Spanish.

Below are the tableaux with the constraints re-ranked according to observations from Portuguese.

In the case of Portuguese, candidates (a) and (b) fail for the same reasons as in Spanish: geminates neither remained viable nor merged with singletons. Since place of articulation of geminates never changed in Portuguese, candidate (c) is undesirable. Candidate (d) violates the pattern of Portuguese to assign intervocalic consonants to onset instead of coda positions. Finally, candidate (e), reflective of the reality of the evolution of the language, is the winning candidate.

Therefore, the six constraints listed above are sufficient to illustrate the variation in phonological evolution of Spanish and Portuguese from Latin as it pertains to the singleton-geminate pairs /l lː/ and /n nː/. As it is established that neither language tolerated geminates as Latin did, nor was phonemic merger a possibility, the parameters in force had to condition segment deletion and changing of place of articulation. Constraints against changes in place of articulation were weaker and more violable in Spanish than Portuguese, as evidenced not only here but also in instances of velarization of previously palatal sonorants (e.g., OCULU > [oʎo] > ojo [oxo] ‘eye’). Conversely, constraints against sonorant deletion were weaker and more violable in Portuguese than Spanish, while articulatory features tended to remain in place (e.g., OCULU > olho [oʎo]). We see, as a result, that an identical set of constraints conditions divergent results in different languages if the hierarchy of said constraints is altered.

Via an optimality-theoretic approach to predicting and modeling diachronic change, it has been shown, by modifying Holt’s (2007) work, how the complementary relationship between geminate and singleton consonants – particularly sonorants – can be maintained from Latin to modern Romance languages with one set of conditions. We see that from Latin to Ibero-Romance, preservation of singleton sonorants as a general rule was preeminent in Spanish but not so in early varieties of Portuguese, in which these segments were lost. In a broad view of geminate simplification from Latin to Spanish and Portuguese, the principal motivating force was the loss of length distinction in the latter languages, which in turn caused formerly geminated segments to adapt in such a way as to avoid phonemic merger and confusion.

Overall, the change in grammar between two variants of the same language represents a change in underlying parameters from the old to the new in two languages. By similar virtue, changes in underlying parameters cause new, divergent languages to emerge from a common ancestor, especially in the case of the Ibero-Romance languages of Portuguese and Spanish.