John Lihani calls the pronunciation of the h «uno de los problemas más enmarañados y enredados de la lingüística española... En cualquier época que escojamos y cualquiera que sea la región de España, la historia de la h- procedente de la f- latina ha sido distinta» (El lenguaje de Lucas Fernández [Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1973], p. 122). Lihani presents a helpful overview of the problem, pp. 122-49 and 169-71. The h is also discussed by R. Thomas Douglass, «The Letter H in Spanish», Hispania, 70 (1987), 949-51, and in the works cited in note 3 and in later notes in this article.

The u and v were first used as we do today, with u only a vowel and v a consonant, in 1726 (Lapesa, p. 422). Until that time they were «dos dibujos de una sola letra» (Alonso, De la pronunciación medieval a la moderna, I, 15). V was used at the beginning of a word and u in the middle, producing such forms as vna, vua (uva), huuo, etc. The word huevo would have been written veuo, and could be read as vevo, i.e. bebo. To avoid this potential confusion, the convention was adopted of adding an initial h to words beginning with ue: Huesca, huerto, hueso, etc.

Eduardo Benot, Prosodia castellana y versificación (Madrid: Juan Muñoz Sánchez, n. d. [1982]), II, 392.

Walter Poesse, The Internal Line-Structure of Thirty Autograph Plays of Lope de Vega (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1949), p. 62. There is an important review of Poesse's book by W. L. Fichter, HR, 18 (1950) 269-73.

As source, lacking an available electronic text, I have used Carlos Fernández Gómez' Vocabulario de Cervantes (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1962), which does not modernize spelling.

The Compositors of the First and Second Madrid Editions of Don Quixote Part I (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1975), chart one, between pp. 10 and 11. Flores studies the words hábito-ábito, huvo-uvo, hombro-ombro, ahí-aí.

This device is studied by Francisco López Estrada, «La risible Fermosura, un rasgo de la comicidad inicial del Quijote», Anthropos, 100 (1989), vi-ix.

For discussion of hiatus and synalepha, and the roles of word stress and aspirated h (/f/) in them, see Benot (supra, note 23), II, 389-99; S. Griswold Morley, «Ortología de cinco comedias autógrafas de Lope de Vega», Estudios eruditos in memoriam de Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín (1875-1926) (Madrid: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad Central, 1927-30), I, 525-44, especially pp. 536-39; and Poesse (supra, note 24), pp. 61-63. Some more recent bibliography and a history of the topic were provided by Homero Serís in one of his last writings, the new chapter on «Ortoepía» in his Manual de bibliografía de la literatura española, segundo fascículo de la primera parte, «1968 printing» [actually second edition] (New York: Las Américas, 1968), pp. 917-22.

I have used as sources the Viage del Parnaso, all the verse in Don Quixote, and the «Canto de Calíope».

For Introduction and references, see A Study of Don Quixote, pp. 53-54, n. 23.