Early Modern Spanish (also called classical Spanish or Golden Age Spanish, especially in literary contexts) 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), (2) the phonemic merger known as yeísmo, (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. Meanwhile, Judaeo-Spanish preserves some archaisms of Old Spanish that disappeared from the rest of the variants, such as the presence of voiced sibilants and the maintenance of the phonemes and . Early Modern Spanish, however, was not uniform throughout the Spanish-speaking regions of Spain. Each change has its own chronology and, in some cases, geography. Slightly different pronunciations existed simultaneously. The Spanish spoken in Toledo was taken as the "best" variety and was different from that of Madrid. Phonology From the late 16th century to the mid-17th century, the voiced sibilants , , lost their voicing and merged with their respective voiceless counterparts: laminal , apical , and palatal , resulting in the phonemic inventory shown below: The phoneme (from Old Spanish initial ) progressively became silent in most areas, though it still exists for some words in varieties of Andalusia and Extremadura. In several modern dialects, the sound is the realization of the phoneme ; additionally, in many dialects it exists as a result of the debuccalization of in syllabic coda (a process commonly termed aspiration in Hispanic linguistics). In the Americas, the Canary Islands, and almost all of Andalusia, the apical merged with laminal (the resulting phoneme is represented as ). In central and northern Spain, shifted to , and the apicoalveolar sibilant was preserved without change and so it can be represented phonemically as ). Some authors use the transcription and for and/or for . Many dialects have lost the distinction between the phonemes and in a merger, called yeísmo. Both