Couldn't be more perfect

[muckefuck]

Last night my bedtime reading was Ralph Penny's Variation and change in Spanish. I forget why I originally reached for it--to check on the distribution of yeísmo in Spanish America, perhaps? In any case, I found myself more engaged by his historical treatment of the reasons for disparities between American and Peninsular Spanish in the distribution of the simple past and present perfect (pp. 158-161). I've written before about how I find the American (specifically, Mexican) usage totally baffling at times. Penny notes that "The reader will later recognise that American English differs from British English, in this regard, in approximately the same way that American Spanish differs from most varieties of Peninsular Spanish." But his prototypical illustration of American usage, Hoy llovío todo el día, sounds just as odd to me in English (i.e. "It rained all day today").

In any case, the truly surprising thing is that such sentences are apparently equally typical of the Spanish of northwestern Spain--including the Canaries. This makes promiscuous use of the simple present one of the very few widespread features of American Spanish which is not also common to Western Andalusia. I learned from Lipski's book on the isleños that a significant number of American colonists originated in the Canaries since (a) like most smaller islands, they soon developed an overpopulation problem and (b) they were the first stop on the transatlantic route to Havana. So that gives us a plausible route by which this feature got to America. (The Canaries were also heavily settled from Western Andalusia and Extremadura and so shares many features--e.g. seseo, yeísmo, aspiration, generalisation of Ustedes, etc.--with these dialects.)

The other interesting tidbit was a hierarchy copied from Martin Harris of the evolution in meaning of the present perfect in Romance:

1. A present state resulting from a past action.
2. Current relevance[*] of the past situation indicated by the participle (also marked for duration, repetition).
3. Past action with present relevance (but unmarked for duration, repetition, etc.).
4. Past situations without present relevance.

Harris (or Penny) puts Standard French at rung 4, Standard Peninsular Spanish and Standard Italian at 3, and Northwestern Peninsular Spanish/Canarian/American Spanish "arguably" at 2. So the second surprising thing about the American usage is that it may actually represent a conservative feature rather than the innovation I've always considered it to be.

The fact that this hierarchy was specifically created with Romance in mind notwithstanding, right away I began thinking where to slot other languages. Southern German (dialect and Standard), for instance, obviously belongs alongside French on rung 4. (Northern German I can't speak to because I don't understand the use of the perfect in those varieties.) As stated earlier, many varieties of American English are arguably at 2 as well. Only one language I know immediately presented itself as a candidate for the first rung, namely Irish. (Or perhaps I should say "Late Traditional Irish", because it appears the Irish answer to the perfect may be spreading rapidly under influence from English.)

So although I've looked at this book several times since receiving it for Hogmanay (thanks again, monshu!), it still has much more to reveal to me. Incidentally, if you're at all interested in the evolution of Spanish--or even Iberian Romance generally--from Latin, you could hardly do better than to purchase Penny's A history of the Spanish language. So clear and concise, I consider it a model for all other grammatical histories to follow.


[*] Astute observers will note the appearance of the old weasel word "relevance" so commonly invoked in explanations of the perfect. (If it's not relevant, why talk about it at all?) But earlier Penny discusses the usage more in terms of boundedness.