Tags: Language.
Early Modern Spanish—also called classical Spanish or Golden Age Spanish especially in a literary context—is the variant of Spanish used between the end of the fifteenth century and the end of the seventeenth century marked by a series of phonological and grammatical changes that transformed Old Spanish into Modern Spanish.Notable changes from Old Spanish to early Modern Spanish include (1) a readjustment of the sibilants (including their devoicing and changes in their place of articulation) and (2) the phonemic merger called yeísmo in phonology as well as in grammar (3) the rise of new second-person pronouns (4) the emergence of the se lo construction for the sequence of third-person indirect and direct object pronouns and (5) new restrictions on the order of clitic pronouns.Early Modern Spanish corresponds to the period of Spanish colonization of the Americas and thus it forms the historical basis of all varieties of New World Spanish.