La inflexión revisitada o Elogio de la comparación

The present paper attempts to rethink the old and yet still unresolved problem of Spanish metaphony in a Romance perspective. I argue that metaphony of low-mid vowels was at the beginning a diphthongization (LĔCTU > *lieito), followed by various processes of monopthongization (> cat. llit, esp. lecho, port. leito). In line with Menéndez Pidal’s approach, metaphony of high-mid vowels is considered to be later, and often to not have occurred because the palatalization process had eliminated the metaphonic context. Explanations are then offered for some special cases like cuña, cigüeña, lucha, mucho, etc. I maintain that metaphonic contexts include not only yod, but also waw, and final -I and -U. Differences between Iberian varieties can be explained by the evolution of final -U, which opened earlier in Castilian, Aragonese and Catalan, later in Galician-Portuguese, and is still preserved in Asturian.