The Emergence of Palatal Sonorants and Alternating Diphthongs in Old Spanish

Abstract

The loss of contrastive vowel length in Late Latin is argued to have given rise to important changes in the consonantal system, whereby moraic status was affected according to increasing sonority: first was the reduction of obstruent geminates and the vocalization of syllable-final velars and l, then the simplification of the sonorants nn, ll to n, l in Galician/Portuguese but to palatal ñ, ll in Spanish, where merger avoidance was an issue.