The Disappearance of the Indefinite Hombre from Spanish

Abstract

to survive in Spanish presents a linguistic enigma. In Latin, homo was made to serve on rare occasions as an indefinite subject, and it continued so to function in the early periods of the Romanic languages. Today it remains only in French, in Catalan, and in some Italian dialects.' With the varied orthography of (h)ome, (h)omme, (h)ombre, etc., it persisted in Spanish as late as the sixteenth century. Since grammarians do not indicate the approximate date of its disappearance nor assign reasons therefore, it will be the purpose of the present discussion to do so.2