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During the 19th century the old palatal 'l' of French definitively gave way to /j/. During the same period, Spanish underwent a similar evolution, but the process of substitution of /j/ for /y/ found itself in a less-advanced stage than in French; indeed, certain varieties of present-day Spanish still maintain these two phonemes. Examining works that during the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries were addressed to the teaching of French to speakers of Spanish, the article concentrates on the difficulties that the authors encountered in presenting this dying or already deceased phoneme, the French palatal 'l,' to an audience that, although it still possessed this phoneme, had begun to find it difficult to distinguish the diverse phonetic realizations that the Spanish /j/ was acquiring. The time difference in the evolution of this phenomenon of dephonologization in French and, with some delay, also in Spanish led the authors of these textbooks to misunderstandings and errors in the treatment of the disappearing or vanished former palatal 'l' of French. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]