A History of the Spanish Lexicon A Linguistic Perspective by Steven N. Dworkin

A History of the Spanish Lexicon
This page intentionally left blank
A History of the
Spanish Lexicon
A Linguistic Perspective
STEVEN N. DWORKIN
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide in
Oxford New York
Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto
With offices in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam
Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
# Steven Dworkin 2012
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Data available
Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn
ISBN 978–0–19–954114–0
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Contents
Preface
Language abbreviations
1 Language contact and the history of the Spanish lexicon
2 The lexical impact of the pre-Roman languages of the
Iberian Peninsula
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
2.5
2.6
2.7
2.8
2.9
2.10
Historical background
The pre-Roman languages of the Iberian Peninsula
Pre-Roman languages and Latin
Basque and Celtic loanwords
Selected examples
Selected etymological controversies
Cases of lexical rivalry
Pre-Roman loanwords and suffixal derivation
Modern Basque and Spanish
Summary
3 The Latin base of the Spanish lexicon
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
3.5
3.6
3.7
3.8
Preliminaries
Latin lexical items limited to Hispano- and Luso-Romance
Etymological controversies
Lexical survivals in Spanish, Portuguese, and Rumanian
Lexical innovations
Lexical diversity in Ibero-Romance
Latin–Greek contact in the Iberian Peninsula
Summary
4 The Germanic component of the Spanish lexicon
4.1
4.2
4.3
4.4
4.5
4.6
Historical background
Germanic strata in the Spanish lexicon
Gothic loanwords in Hispano-Romance
Etymological controversies
Lexical rivalries
Gothic loanwords and the suffix -engo
viii
x
1
18
18
19
21
26
29
31
38
40
41
42
44
44
46
49
51
53
58
60
63
65
65
67
70
73
76
77
vi
Contents
4.7 Flemish/Dutch, German, and Scandinavian loanwords
4.8 Summary
5 The Arabic component of the Spanish lexicon
5.1 Preliminaries
5.2 Quantitative considerations
5.3 Previous scholarship
5.4 Hispano-Arabic/Hispano-Romance language contact
5.5 Chronological considerations
5.6 Etymological controversies
5.7 Lexical rivalries
5.8 Grammatical categories of Arabisms
5.9 Semantic issues
5.10 Arabic–Romance hybrids
5.11 Arabisms in al5.12 Lost Arabisms
5.13 Arabisms in modern Spanish
5.14 Spanish Hebraisms
5.15 Summary
6 The impact of Gallo-Romance on the Spanish lexicon
6.1
6.2
6.3
6.4
6.5
6.6
6.7
6.8
Background
Medieval Gallicisms: Nouns, adjectives, and verbs
Medieval Gallicisms: Function words and suffixes
Early modern Gallicisms
Gallicisms: Eighteenth to twentieth centuries
Reactions against Gallicisms
Gallicisms in New World Spanish
Summary
7 The influence of Italian on the Spanish Lexicon
7.1
7.2
7.3
7.4
7.5
Preliminaries
Medieval Italianisms and etymological controversies
Italianisms in early modern Spanish
Italianisms in New World Spanish
Summary
8 Latinisms in Spanish
8.1 Preliminaries
8.2 Periodization
77
80
81
81
83
85
86
89
91
95
100
104
106
107
108
111
113
116
118
118
120
125
128
129
135
136
137
139
139
140
143
155
156
157
157
159
Contents
8.3
8.4
8.5
8.6
8.7
8.8
Early Latinisms
Late Medieval and Renaissance Latinisms
Form class and lexical rivalries
Failed Latinisms
Learnèd Hellenisms
Summary
9 Portuguese and Catalan loans in Spanish
9.1 Lusisms
9.2 Etymological controversies
9.3 Phonological clues to Lusisms
9.4 Lusisms in regional Spanish
9.5 Catalan loanwords in Spanish: Background
9.6 Catalanisms: Analytical problems
9.7 Catalanisms: Form class
9.8 Summary
vii
160
164
167
176
178
180
182
182
183
187
190
191
193
197
198
10 Lexical borrowings from the New World
10.1 Background
10.2 Reception and integration of New World borrowings
10.3 Etymological controversies
10.4 Vitality in contemporary European Spanish
10.5 Summary
200
200
203
207
209
210
11 Anglicisms in Spanish
11.1 Historical background
11.2 Earliest Anglicisms
11.3 Anglicisms 1800–1950
11.4 The influence of American English 1950–
11.5 Reactions to Anglicisms
11.6 Semantic Anglicisms and loan-translations
11.7 Integration and derivational productivity
11.8 Gay sex, drugs, and the Internet
11.9 Summary
212
212
213
215
217
219
220
223
225
228
12 Some final thoughts
230
References
Index
238
271
Preface
The diachronic study of the Spanish lexicon has a long and proud history.
Work in this area has traditionally taken the form of articles and notes
published in journals and homage volumes. Whereas some studies concentrated on identifying the origin of the word or word family at issue, others
focused on later aspects of its evolution as part of the Spanish vocabulary.
The specialist who today seeks to write a synthesis of even one facet of the
history of the Spanish lexicon stands on the shoulders of giants. As will be
clear to any reader of this book, it relies heavily (though not uncritically) on
the prodigious research carried out by such illustrious predecessors as Juan
Corominas, Federico Corriente, Ernst Gamillscheg, Johannes Hubschmid,
Henry and Renée Kahane, and my own mentor and Doktorvater Yakov
Malkiel, among others. I remain in their scholarly debt.
Upon completing a project of this nature, it is always a pleasure to
acknowledge and thank those colleagues who have contributed in various
ways with their scholarly expertise. I am especially grateful to Gloria Clavería
Nadal, René Pellen, Ralph J. Penny, and Christopher Pountain, who read the
entire manuscript in various earlier iterations, and who made many valuable
suggestions on its content, presentation, and style. I also wish to express my
thanks to the following who read and commented on individual chapters, or
supplied me with materials to which I did not have easy access, or who invited
me to lecture on the history of the Spanish lexicon at their universities: James
Adams, Pedro Álvarez de Miranda, Manuel Ariza Viguera, Myriam Benarroch, David Bunis, Rafael Cano Aguilar, Dolores Corbella, Cristóbal Corrales
Zumbado, Clara Curell Aguilà, Josefa Dorta, María Teresa Echenique Elizondo, Benjamin Fortson IV, Javier García González, José María García
Martín, Patricia Giménez-Eguibar, Anthony Grant, Monroe Z. Hafter, Johannes Kabatek, Franz Lebsanft, María Angeles López Vallejo, Barbara De
Marco, Ryan Szpiech, Fernando Tejedo Herrero, André Thibault, Sarah G.
Thomason, and Roger Wright. Needless to say, I alone am responsible for all
errors.
I wish to mention here the late Ray Harris-Northall, taken from us far too
soon. Ray was a reader for Oxford University Press of my original book
proposal, and sent to me a series of comments and suggestions that have
stood me in good stead. I also wish to thank Professor Martin Maiden, who
facilitated my initial contacts with Oxford University Press, and John Davey
Preface
ix
who has been a patient and encouraging editor, despite my tardiness in
getting the finished product to his desk. Alex Rosenthal assisted me with
some basic research in the earlier stages of this project, and Justin Dykhouse
was always available to solve computer problems as they arose.
I also wish to express my deep and heartfelt appreciation to my wife Carol
for her love and understanding during all phases of this project. This book is
a synthesis of the research that I have been doing for most of my scholarly
career, all of which has been spent with her. For her support and devotion
over the forty years that we have been together, I affectionately dedicate this
book to Carol.
Language abbreviations
Alav.
(Alavés)
And.
(Andalusian)
Ar.
(Arabic)
Arag.
(Aragonese)
Ast.
(Asturian)
B.
(Basque)
Béarn.
(Béarnese)
Cal.
(Calabrian)
Campid.
(Campidanese)
Cat.
(Catalan)
Cl.
(Classical Latin)
E.
(English)
Engad.
(Engadine)
Fr.
(French)
Frk.
(Frankish)
Gal.
(Galician)
Gasc.
(Gascon)
G.
(German)
Gk.
(Greek)
Goth.
(Gothic)
Gr.-Lat.
(Graeco-Latin)
Heb.
(Hebrew)
Hisp.-Ar.
(Hispano-Arabic)
Ir.
(Irish)
It.
(Italian)
JudSp.
(Judeo-Spanish)
Lat.
(Latin)
Lig.
(Ligurian)
Log.
(Logudorese)
MIr.
(Middle Irish)
N.It.
(Northern Italian)
Language abbreviations
Nav.
(Navarese)
Neap.
(Neapolitan)
OArag.
(Old Aragonese)
OCat.
(Old Catalan)
Occ.
(Occitan)
OFr.
(Old French)
OHG
(Old High German)
OIt.
(Old Italian)
OProv.
(Old Provençal)
OPtg.
(Old Portuguese)
OSp.
(Old Spanish)
Prov.
(Provençal)
Ptg.
(Portuguese)
Rioj.
(Riojan)
Rum.
(Rumanian)
S.Fr.
(Southern French)
Sant.
(Santanderine)
Sard.
(Sardinian)
Sic.
(Sicilian)
S.It.
(Southern Italian)
Sp.
(Spanish)
Tusc.
(Tuscan)
xi
This page intentionally left blank
1
Language contact and the history
of the Spanish lexicon: General
and methodological questions
By virtue of the status of Spanish as a Romance language, the
historical inherited core of its lexicon comes from the social and
regional varieties of Latin spoken without interruption in Hispania
from the time of the arrival of the Romans in 218 BC. Over time, the
speakers of the local types of Latin, and later their Romance continuations, came into contact with different languages in the Iberian
Peninsula. First they encountered the different pre-Roman languages
in use during the early years of the Roman presence, then later
Germanic (mainly Gothic), and Arabic, followed by northern and
southern varieties of Gallo-Romance, as well as its own peninsular
Romance neighbors, Galician-Portuguese and Catalan. In the late
medieval and early modern period (i.e. c.1400–1650), as Spanish was
carried abroad beyond the territorial confines of its homeland, it
came into contact with Italian, Flemish, German, and the many
indigenous languages of the New World. In more recent times,
Spanish experienced contact in Europe and the New World with
British and US English. Additionally, throughout its history as a
written language, Spanish was influenced by the model (accessible
only to a handful of speakers) provided by the written registers of its
historical predecessor, Latin. All these languages contributed to the
vocabulary of Spanish. As well, speakers continually increased the
lexical resources of Spanish by creating neologisms through internal
processes of derivational morphology, mainly affixation (especially
2
A history of the Spanish lexicon
suffixation) and compounding and, to a much lesser extent, through
sound symbolism or onomatopoeia.
Within Romance linguistics, the study of the lexical consequences
of language contact has a long history, going back to the work carried
out in the first decade of the twentieth century by the Dutch Romanist J. J. Salverda de Grave (1906, 1907), and later by his students. I do
not intend to critically review here the extensive literature on lexical
borrowing in the Romance languages in general or Spanish in particular. For the most part such studies have viewed this facet of language
contact in terms of cultural, social, intellectual, and political history.
Scholars saw loanwords as valuable indicators of cultural needs and
realities, which served as raw material for analysis by historians who
sought to evaluate the impact of one culture on another. They studied
such lexical items as cultural artifacts and symbols rather than as
linguistic signs that form part of a system, with the relevant lexical
items classified by real-world semantic categories. This approach is
certainly legitimate, but ignores an important dimension of the
phenomenon.1 The entry of a neologism in a language, whether as
the result of internal derivational and creative processes or of borrowing, is an example of lexical change, a process which includes
both the addition to and elimination of elements from a language’s
lexical stock, as well as the various types of semantic change which a
word might undergo in the course of its history (Dworkin 2006b,
2011a). Lexical change, regardless of its nature and origin, is a category of linguistic change and must be studied from this perspective.
Many relevant studies written by Romanists in general or Hispanists in particular in the second half of the twentieth century paid no
heed to the linguistic insights on language contact and borrowings
provided in such seminal studies as Haugen (1950) and Weinreich
(1953), written within the framework of American structural linguistics.2 Such recent contributions to the history of the Spanish lexicon
1
For a reasoned critique, with substantial bibliography, of this approach to loanwords in the
history of the Romance languages, see Hope (1962/63) and Goddard (1977). Goddard’s essay
(p. 105) contains a list of the published dissertations produced within this framework by
Salverda de Grave’s students.
2
“The study of loan-words and lexical borrowing in the Romance languages remains largely
unaffected by the progress which has been made in the investigation of language-contact and
Language contact and history
3
as the essays in the second volume of the Enciclopedia lingüística
hispánica (1967),3 as well as the individual chapters or subsections on
lexical borrowings in the various iterations of Rafael Lapesa’s magisterial Historia de la lengua española (last definitive edition, 1980, oft
reprinted; original edition 1941), and the relevant contributions in the
recent collaborative Historia de la lengua española coordinated by
Rafael Cano (2004) are, for the most part, conceived and written in
the culturally-slanted framework described above. Notable exceptions are various essays by T. E. Hope (1962/1963, 1964), culminating
and synthesized in the final chapters of his opus magnum on borrowings in both directions between French and Italian (Hope 1971), and
in scattered studies on intra-Romance word borrowing by K. A.
Goddard (1977, and, with specific regard to Spanish, 1980).4 Both
scholars argue that loanwords have to be treated as linguistic signs
that enter and become integrated into a linguistic system, and that
the decision to borrow words from another language is but a form of
creating neologisms (neology), on a par with internal lexical creation
through derivational processes. Recourse to a borrowing is, in theory,
never the only option available to speakers, even when a label for a
new material reality is needed. In the numerous instances when a
lexical borrowing is culturally or socially motivated, its introduction,
incorporation, and diffusion in the recipient language are linguistic
processes. With respect to such loans, the language historian may
always ask why speakers of the recipient language did not attempt to
fill the lexical gap through such strategies as semantic change in an
already existing word (a practice followed, for example, by the Spanish at the outset of the colonial experience to label unfamiliar New
interference phenomena at all levels” (Goddard 1977: 101). This statement remains valid for
recent studies of the history of the lexicon of individual Romance languages which continue to
be lists of words arranged chronologically or by the source from which they entered the
recipient language, e.g. for Catalan, Bruguera (1985), for Portuguese, Messner (1990), for Italian,
Zolli (1975), for French, Wise (1997), and for Spanish, Messner (1976, 1979, 1989).
3
The chapters on Arabisms (Steiger 1967, a summary of Steiger 1932) and Gallicisms (Pottier
1967) describe in some detail the adaptation of the relevant loanwords to the sound system of
Spanish.
4
Data from Spanish and other Romance languages play a significant role in Sala’s discussion
(1998: 229–301) of the linguistic aspects of lexical borrowing resulting from language contact.
4
A history of the Spanish lexicon
World realities, e.g. pavo ‘peacock’ > ‘turkey’) or through internal
creation of a neologism, perhaps through the coining of a paraphrase.5 The concept of a “necessary loan” (see below) is misguided.
In the view of both Goddard and Hope, lexical defectivity, a linguistic
condition, is the ultimate cause for borrowing, which is a linguistic
solution for the problem at hand. I shall discuss many of these issues
later in this chapter and throughout this book.
The linguistic consequences of language contact have been at the
forefront of current research in historical linguistics. Recent work in
this area has operated with the concept of “contact-induced language
change” (Thomason and Kaufman 1988: Ch. 3, Thomason 2001,
Winford 2005). Studies within this framework tend to focus on the
role of language contact in the actuation and diffusion of phonological, morphological, and syntactic change. Romance linguists have
paid little, if any, systematic or explicit attention to lexical borrowing
as an instantiation of contact-induced language change.
There does not exist a synthesis written from a predominantly
linguistic perspective on the evolution of the Spanish lexicon, especially with regard to the history of loanwords. This book seeks to
partially fill this gap. It will limit its purview to changes in the lexical
stock of the Latin/Hispano-Romance continuum brought about
by language-contact situations undergone in the course of its more
than two-millennium-long history. The study of the internal formation of neologisms through derivational morphology and the causes
and role of lexical loss in the history of the Spanish vocabulary are
topics that merit separate book-length treatment.6 Nor will this book
systematically discuss other valid linguistic issues such as the adaptation of loan words to the phonological system of Spanish (an issue
especially relevant to the study of the integration of Arabisms,
5
Winter-Froemel (2008: 21) refers to this alternative to borrowing as a contact-induced
independent innovation in the recipient language.
6
Such studies of lexical creation in Spanish through word-formation as Nord (1983), Laca
(1986), Lang (1990), and Rainer (1993) are essentially synchronic in scope. Pharies (2002) studies
in alphabetic order the history of each suffix individually and is not a diachronically-slanted
synthesis. The literature is replete with historical studies of individual suffixes; cf. Pharies
(1994). Dworkin (2011a) offers a general overview, with much abundant bibliography, of lexical
loss in Romance, with emphasis on Spanish, as does Giménez (2011: 22–45).
Language contact and history
5
Gallicisms, and, today, of Anglicisms) or the processes of gender
assignment, especially with respect to borrowings from nonRomance languages.
Several general issues pertaining to the introduction, incorporation, and diffusion of neologisms merit discussion here. In all cases of
lexical borrowing there is a source or donor language and a host or
recipient language (in this case, Spanish).7 The introduction and
incorporation of loanwords has two distinct sides: the borrowing
process itself and the consequences on the lexical structure of the
recipient language. The lexicon of a language is open-ended and is
the least stable, least systematic segment of the language’s structure,
and thus more open to novelties introduced from the outside. For
this reason, lexical borrowing as a process does not lend itself to neat
or rigid classification. It has long been observed that nouns are most
easily borrowed, followed by verbs (or at least verbal bases),8 and
adjectives (not necessarily in that order). Loans into the recipient
language can take one of two general forms: the actual borrowing and
integration (complete or partial) of the word itself or the transfer of
the source item’s meaning (in part or in whole) to a lexeme
already present in the recipient language, i.e. a semantic loan or a
loan translation/calque. The historical study of these phenomena has
given rise to a myriad of descriptive labels (be they in English, a
Romance language, or German), sometimes with subtle distinctions
between them. Under the general heading “loans”, Kiesler (1993: 509)
distinguishes between, among others, “loan word”, “foreign word”,
“foreign phrase”, “semantic loan”, “calque”, “loan translation”, “loan
rendering”, “loan creation”, “foreign phrase”, “blended phrase”,
“translated phrase” (i.e. a phrase translated literally from the donor
7
Haspelmath (2008: 46) states, “It is now customary to use the terms recipient language for
the language that acquires a loanword and donor language for the language that is the source of
the loanword”. I shall follow this practice throughout this book.
8
Spanish and the other Romance languages borrow the verbal base from the donor language
and add the appropriate local verb morphology. Wohlgemuth (2009: 87–9 and throughout)
labels this accommodation strategy “direct insertion”. For discussion of more complex strategies used by other languages in verb borrowing, see Wohlgemuth (2009).
6
A history of the Spanish lexicon
language), and “rendered phrase” (i.e. a phrase translated freely from
the donor language).9
The extralinguistic relationship between the donor language and
the recipient language (in this case, Spanish/Hispano-Romance)
plays a major role in the borrowing process. Are the two languages
on an equal footing in their political, social, economic, and cultural
relationship, or is one considered to be superior in terms of the
diverse factors that constitute sociolinguistic prestige? In the long
run, sociolinguistic factors are probably far more important than
structural or typological similarities in determining the degree and
nature of borrowing, especially of lexical items. Thomason and Kaufman (1988: Ch. 4) establish and elaborate a five-point scale of borrowing. Only the first two or three categories appear to be
immediately relevant to lexical borrowings in Spanish: (1) casual
contact, which involves lexical borrowing only, usually of non-basic
vocabulary; (2) slightly more intense contact, in which borrowing of
function words occurs; and, (3) more intense contact, in which
derivational suffixes can be peeled off from loan words and added
to the recipient language’s inventory of such elements. The applicability of these categories to the language-contact situations that have
had an impact on the history of the Spanish lexicon will be evaluated
in the individual chapters.
On a case-by-case basis, can the linguist determine whether speakers of the donor language or speakers of the recipient language
initiated a particular borrowing? In the possible case of borrowings
initiated by speakers of the donor language, was the innovation
imposed on the (initially unwilling or resistant?) speakers of the
recipient language? Such problems are basically impossible to study
empirically for contact situations in the past.10 The acceptance of a
loanword by individual speakers and finally its incorporation into
9
Kiesler’s chart offers the term in German, English and Spanish. Winter (2005: 33) offers a
different set of terms in German based on the writings of the Germanist Werner Betz, before
introducing yet other labels and classifications (2005: 46, 49). Jansen (2005: ch. 3) critically
reviews the terminological debate, and proposes a new classification. See also Gómez Capuz
(2004, 2005: 11–17).
10
Thomason (2004) discusses the issues and difficulties posed by the study of language
contact in the remote past.
Language contact and history
7
and diffusion through the lexicon of the broader speech community
represents an instance of deliberate linguistic change. Purposeful
resistance to change can manifest itself in the refusal to borrow
words, even when there is clearly a gap in the lexicon of the recipient
language (Thomason 2007),11 a situation that does not occur in the
history of the Romance languages. The level of bilingualism in a
contact situation must also be considered. At a minimum, some
speakers of the recipient language would have had to be conversant
with the donor language’s lexical resources, although this situation
need not imply widespread functional bilingualism. Myers-Scotton
(2002: 242) claims that code switching is a crucial mechanism in
lexical borrowing, especially in the case of so-called “core borrowings”, words for which there are already signifiers in the recipient
language (see below). Thomason (2003: 695) states, “Code-switching
is a (perhaps the) major route by which loanwords enter a language”.
In the few cases where speakers of the donor language (e.g. the preRoman languages of the Iberian Peninsula, except Basque, or, a few
centuries later, Gothic) gave up their speech in favor of Latin or early
Hispano-Romance, they may have brought lexical items from their
first language with them as part of the language-shift process of
acquiring and mastering their new tongue. Often an invading language will absorb local names for animals, plants, and physical
features of the terrain (see Chapter 2 on pre-Roman languages),
whereas, in contrast, the speech of a conquered people will absorb
military terminology from the language of the conquerors (cf. Germanic military terminology absorbed into varieties of provincial
Latin). The genetic relationship between the donor and recipient
languages may possibly facilitate borrowing of recognizable cognates.
As I shall discuss in the chapter on Gallicisms, it is likely that at some
point in the medieval period (c.1000–1100), speakers of northern
Hispano-Romance and of southern Gallo-Romance may have felt
11
Thomason (2007: 48) cites the example of Montana Salish, a North American native
language, whose speakers steadfastly refuse to borrow words from the surrounding dominant
English culture. Native words are semantically adapted in order to give labels to new products
and material realia, e.g. the word for ‘automobile’ means literally ‘it has wrinkled feet’, (a
reference to the appearance of tire tracks), and the verb ‘to drive a car’ literally means ‘to make
an animal go straight’.
8
A history of the Spanish lexicon
their local vernaculars to be regional variants of the same language.
Members of the Hispano-Romance speech community may not have
felt borrowings from French, Old Provençal, Portuguese, and Italian
to be palpably foreign lexical items. However, the lack of genetic
affiliation and typological affinities certainly did not prevent the
influx and adoption of numerous Arabisms.
The medium of transmission of the word in question may play a
role here. At the outset of the linguistic history of the Latin–Spanish
continuum, all borrowings from the pre-Roman languages and,
immediately after the end of the imperial Roman presence in the
Iberian Peninsula, from Germanic, reflect contact at the level of the
spoken language. However, as Spanish evolved into a written language and became a vehicle for administration and for the transmission of knowledge, it came into contact with languages that enjoyed a
written tradition, namely Arabic, northern and southern varieties of
Gallo-Romance (Old French and Old Provençal), Italian, and later,
English. Borrowings from these languages came through both the
spoken and the written language. Late and post-medieval borrowings
from Classical Latin came almost exclusively from written sources.
Goddard (1969: 339) claims that most post-medieval borrowings from
contemporary vernaculars (be they from French, Italian, or English)
entered Spanish by way of the written language and then spread
slowly to the speech of the educated and later to the general vocabulary (especially as literacy increased in twentieth-century Spain). In
the case of some recent borrowings from English, television, movies,
musical recordings, and the Internet may have been the media for
their entry into Spanish (and other European languages). Indigenous
American vocabulary initially entered Spanish through direct oral
contact with the native population by explorers and missionaries, but
in many instances reached Spain first in the written reports of the
earliest explorers and conquistadores (e.g. the famous case of canoa
‘canoe’, the first New World word recorded in a Spanish dictionary,
Nebrija’s Spanish–Latin compilation, c.1495, already set down in
Columbus’s Diary and in that explorer’s famous and widely circulated letter (1493) to Luis de Santangel; see Chapter 10).
Language contact and history
9
Traditional loanword studies distinguish borrowings that filled a
gap in the lexicon of the recipient language (especially when the word
served to designate a new product, technique, or other realia
unknown to speakers of the recipient language), and borrowings
that expressed concepts or realia for which the recipient language
already possessed a signifier. Over the years, linguists have used
various labels for this distinction, e.g. “necessary” versus “luxury”
loans, or “cultural” versus “core” borrowings,12 a reflection of the
prevalent tendency to view loanwords as cultural symbols rather than
as linguistic signs (Goddard 1969: 341–2, 1980: 8).
So-called core borrowings raise some interesting linguistic issues.
Although she presents no empirical evidence for this claim, MyersScotton (2002: 239) argues that such items first enter the recipient
language when bilinguals introduce them as singly-occurring codeswitching forms. Rarely is a core borrowing a perfect synonym for the
already present local term, matching every facet of its connotative
and denotative load. The rivalry between referentially similar terms
already present in the recipient language and borrowings will constitute a major theme throughout the various chapters of this book.
When dealing with such borrowings that occurred in the distant past,
it may not be possible to determine with any degree of accuracy the
extent to which affective factors (e.g. the perceived prestige of a
Latinism vis-à-vis its vernacular rival, the alleged greater expressivity
of the loanword) may have played a role in core borrowings. On the
other hand, it is probably safe to state that Gallicisms and Anglicisms
in modern Spanish that exist alongside Spanish signifiers for the
referent at issue reflect the status of French and of English at the
time of the borrowing, and give to the speaker a certain air of
cosmopolitanism and sophistication. It is also worth inquiring into
the extent to which the entry of a loanword caused a lexical item
already present in the recipient language to undergo a major semantic change or even to fall into disuse.
12
In the history of Spanish linguistic thought, this distinction appears as early as the Diálogo
de la lengua of Juan de Valdés (c.1535), who contrasts neologisms that entered Spanish “por
ornamento” and “por necesidad”.
10
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Loanword studies have operated with a valid distinction between
unintegrated borrowings, i.e. words that speakers still recognize or
perceive as foreign (although they may well have become items of
frequent use), a status often reflected today for recent borrowings in
retention of the original pronunciation and/or morphology (often
reflected visibly in their orthographical representation and by the use
of italics, e.g. parking, footing), and integrated borrowings, items that
have fully adapted to the phonological and morphological norms of
the recipient language. The non-native status of the latter category is
recognizable usually only to linguists and speakers who have studied
the history of the language.13 Nevertheless, at the outset, most loanwords must have at first been perceived and been recognizable as
intruders from the outside, a situation observable today in Spanish
with regard to recent borrowings from French and English. As noted
earlier, a possible exception may be borrowings from other Romance
languages such as Italian, and perhaps to a lesser extent neighboring
Portuguese and Catalan, whose contributions to the Spanish lexicon
may not have been felt from the outset by speakers (or, perhaps
better, by writers) to be palpably foreign. As a word becomes fully
integrated, its origins become opaque and all aspects of its further
formal and semantic evolution follow the normal patterns and tendencies of the recipient language. Its ability to spin off a large number
of derivatives or to acquire new and figurative senses merely indicates
its vitality and degree of complete integration in the recipient language, and, consequently, has nothing to do with its foreign origin.
The integration of loanwords can affect the phonological and
morphological structures of the recipient language. Through the
course of regular sound change involving elimination of the posttonic vowel in words showing antepenultimate stress, the overwhelming majority of spoken Latin words that came into HispanoRomance through oral transmission show penultimate syllable stress.
The influx of Arabisms and Gallicisms with word-final stress
increased the frequency of this pattern in Hispano-Romance. In
13
An exception for lay speakers may be the many Spanish Arabisms that begin with the
segment al- (though not all Spanish nouns in al- are of Semitic background, e.g. almeja ‘clam’,
almena ‘a parapet or battlement between two openings’, almuerzo ‘lunch’; see Chapter 5).
Language contact and history
11
like fashion, the entry of Latinisms and Italianisms in the early
modern period increased the number of Spanish nouns and adjectives with antepenultimate stress.14 Latinisms also reintroduced ambisyllabic consonant clusters into Spanish with their consequent
influence on patterns of syllable structure and on the inventory of
permissible syllable-final consonants. As will be discussed in the
appropriate chapters, Arabisms and borrowings from Old and Modern French and Old Provençal played a crucial role in the adaptation
of the suffixes -í and -aje respectively, as did French and Italian in the
diffusion in Spanish of -esco. Borrowings from Classical Latin significantly increased the suffixal repertory of Spanish, creating sets of
suffixal doublets derived independently through oral transmission
and later learnèd borrowings from the same Latin source. Although
borrowings did not introduce any new elements to the phonemic
inventory of Spanish, they may have in some cases increased the
frequency of a given phoneme, e.g. the role of Arabisms, Gallicisms,
and possibly Latinisms (via ecclesiastical pronunciation) in the frequency of occurrence of the voiced palatal affricate /dʒ/, especially in
word-initial position. Gallicisms would have contributed to the
increased frequency of /tʃ/, once again, notably in word-initial
position.
The Mediterranean basin was an important route for the transmission of cultural and lexical innovations. Through commerce, language-contact situations, multilingualism, and the existence of a
Mediterranean lingua franca, words could easily migrate from one
language to another. Loanword studies distinguish between the
immediate (or direct) and remote (or distant) origin of loanwords.
For the purposes of this book loanwords in Spanish will be classified
according to the language from which they directly entered the
recipient language. Thus, to give but one example, although azul
‘blue’ and naranja ‘orange (fruit)’ can be traced back to Persian
(and beyond), they entered Spanish from Arabic and can be
14
The Spanish label for this pattern, esdrújulo, is itself an Italianism. The term originally
designated a twelve-syllable verse with stress on the tenth or antepenultimate syllable. Alonso
López Pinciano, in Filosofía antigua poética (1596), and Luis Alfonso de Carvallo, in Cisne de
Apolo (1602), specifically refer to its Italian origin (CORDE), as does Fernando de Herrera in his
Anotaciones a Garcilaso (1580), all cited in Terlingen (1943: 92).
12
A history of the Spanish lexicon
legitimately classed as Arabisms. This distinction is especially important in evaluating the influence of Greek on the Spanish lexicon.
Almost all Greek bases in Spanish and their cognates in other
Romance languages entered as part of the Latin lexical patrimony
rather than through direct contact at the spoken level with Greek.15
At times the route followed by a loanword is not crystal clear, as is the
case of many Germanic loans or of the earliest Anglicisms in Spanish
that may have entered the Iberian Peninsula through French, or the
role that French and Catalan may have played in the transmission of
Italianisms; see the discussion in the relevant chapters. A similar
problem arises with numerous modern Anglicisms, when it is once
again difficult to determine whether the item in question came into
Spanish directly from English or by way of French. Particularly
problematic are modern international technical neo-Latinate and
neo-Hellenic formations, characteristic of the nascent natural and
social sciences found since the eighteenth century, in addition to
Spanish, in a variety of European languages such as English, French,
and German. Were the relevant items created independently in
Spanish, or were they borrowed (perhaps through translations of
scholarly works)? If so, in which language were they first coined
and which route did they follow into Spanish? In other words, do
such pan-European forms (e.g. nouns in -ismo and -ista indicating
political, cultural, and artistic movements, and their adherents and
practitioners) result from monogenesis or polygenesis?
Romanists have paid little systematic attention to the semantic side
of lexical borrowing. Such borrowing, be it through oral contact or
from written sources, takes place in the context of discourse. Consequently, a word is rarely borrowed with the full semantic load it
carried in the donor language. The recipient language will take the
word with only one of its donor-language meanings, ignoring its
other senses, secondary uses and connotations. The narrower semantic range of a suspected loanword in the recipient language vis-à-vis
the wider semantic scope of its putative source may be a clue to a
possible borrowing. The selection of the meanings by speakers and
15
A handful of items may have entered varieties of spoken Latin through contact with the
Greek-speaking colonies in the region of Marseilles; see Chapter 3 and Wartburg (1937).
Language contact and history
13
the changes immediately undergone by the word as part of its
incorporation into the recipient language are an important facet of
the semantics of loan words.16 Later semantic changes undergone by
the item in question form part of its history as a member of the
lexicon of the recipient language. Using examples taken from
English, Durkin (2009: 167–8) shows that a loanword may continue
to undergo the semantic influence of the donor language centuries
after its entry into the recipient language. Meaning can be borrowed
without the actual signifier from the donor language. Speakers of the
recipient language can add semantic features of items in the donor
language to the semantic load of a word already present in the
lexicon, especially if they perceive, rightly or wrongly, some kind of
affiliation (formal similarity, interlanguage cognates, translation
equivalency) between the elements in question. As I shall show in
the chapter devoted to Arabisms, the meaning of several Spanish
expressions involving purely Romance words may reflect the semantics of an underlying Semitic model. In the modern period, Spanish
words already present in the language have acquired meanings taken
from their Italian, French, and English cognates. In such cases of
semantic loans and calques, there usually exists a high degree of
formal similarity that facilitates association between the elements in
question.
Although no longer a central discipline, etymology has enjoyed a
long and illustrious tradition within Romance historical linguistics.
Over time, this strictly diachronic approach to the lexicon has
evolved from the search for and identification of word origins to
the preparation of detailed and thorough lexical biographies which
cover all facets of a given word’s formal and semantic evolution
(including, when appropriate, the circumstances of its demise). Etymology conceived as diachronic lexicology plays a key role in the
study of the various layers or strata that have come together to
constitute the Spanish lexicon. An analysis and an evaluation of
the impact of these diverse sources must rest on a firm foundation
of accurate etymologies. As I shall demonstrate throughout this book,
16
Thibault (2004) discusses with concrete examples these questions with regard to French
loanwords in New World Spanish.
14
A history of the Spanish lexicon
the precise origins of a fair number of lexical items are still the subject
of much scholarly disagreement. In the case of lexical borrowings,
these differences of opinion can take various forms. In some instances, scholars may assign the same word to quite different languages of origin. I offer here some examples: matar ‘to kill’ and loco
‘crazy’, for both of which Latin and Arabic bases have been seriously
suggested; aleve ‘treacherous, perfidious’, for which recognized experts have proposed Germanic and Arabic etymologies; and the tree
names álamo ‘white poplar’ and aliso ‘alder’, for which etymologists
of the stature of Corominas and Gamillscheg have advocated preRoman and Germanic etyma respectively. In other cases, specialists
may agree on the donor language while differing on the precise
etymon from the donor language (which is the case with many
Arabisms). With regard to Spanish words of incontrovertibly Germanic background, experts often differ as to whether a word represents a vestige of the local Gothic brought into the Iberian Peninsula
in the fifth century AD or a later adaptation of one of the many words
of Germanic stock found in medieval varieties of Gallo-Romance.
The solution chosen for each controversial case will unavoidably
color the overall quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the lexical
impact exercised by the various languages with which the Latin/
Spanish continuum has come into contact over the course of its
history.17 Consequently, I shall not offer any quantitative or statistical analysis of loanwords in Spanish of the type found in Messner
(1974: 82–8). The study of the history of loanwords in Spanish
can itself contribute to the refinement of research in the broad field
of diachronic lexicology. It is conceivable that the examination or
discovery of broad patterns in the history of Spanish loanwords may
help to resolve some difficult etymological cruxes, or, at least, to
evaluate and perhaps eliminate some of the proposed hypotheses.18
17
Space limitations as well as the structure of this book rule out monographic discussion of
the etymologically controversial items discussed here. As appropriate, I shall present select
relevant philological and historical data and discussion of previous conjectures.
18
See Dworkin (2008b, 2009b) for a discussion of how insights provided by cognitive
semantics and lexical and loanword typology may help to evaluate competing etymological
hypotheses.
Language contact and history
15
It would be appropriate to say a few words here about the Loanword Typology Project conceived and directed by Martin Haspelmath (in collaboration with Uri Tadmor) at the Max Planck Institute
for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. This project seeks to
determine whether there are semantic fields in which loanwords
can be found with greater frequency than in others and semantic
fields in which borrowings rarely occur. This cross-linguistic inquiry
involves forty-one languages representing a wide variety of language
families. Rumanian is the only Romance language surveyed for this
project (Schulte 2010). The twenty-four semantic fields investigated
were based on the categories designed by the late Mary Ritchie Key
for her Intercontinental Dictionary Series, which in large part reflect
those used in Buck’s comparative dictionary of Indo-European synonyms (1949). The database consists of 1460 items.19 The analysis of
the project database presented in Haspelmath and Tadmor (2010)
confirms that nouns are the most frequently borrowed items, followed by adjectives, verbs (or at least verbal bases), and adverbs.
Function words (e.g. prepositions, deictics, and personal pronouns)20
are rarely borrowed. The preposition hasta ‘until, as far as’, and the
lexicalized ojalá, both Arabisms, and the negator jamás ‘never’,
possibly a borrowing from French, are among the few exceptions
found in modern Spanish. The cross-linguistic data indicate high
rates of borrowability in the following semantic fields: clothing and
grooming, religion and belief, the house, law, agriculture and vegetation, social and political relations, food and drink. These domains are
all areas subject to a high degree of intercultural influence. The fields
with the lowest rates of borrowability are emotions and values,
motion, kinship, spatial relations, body parts, and sense perception,
semantic areas that are universal to all human societies (Haspelmath
and Tadmor 2010: 64).21 I have attempted to apply the project’s
19
A detailed description of the project, the questionnaire, and the methodology appears in
Haspelmath and Tadmor (2009: 1–34).
20
Although very rare in European languages, the borrowing of personal pronouns is
documented with some frequency in various Southeast Asian and neighboring Pacific languages (Thomason and Everett 2005). Among examples from Indo-European languages are the
borrowing in Old and Middle English from Old Norse of the pronouns they, their, them.
21
On the basis of the findings of the Loanword Typology Project, Haspelmath and Tadmor
(2009: 69–74) have drawn up what they label as “The Leipzig–Jakarta list of basic vocabulary”,
16
A history of the Spanish lexicon
criteria to Spanish in a series of recent studies examining adjectival
loanwords in the recipient language (Dworkin 2008a, 2008b, 2009b).
Ideally, the impact of the various languages with which Spanish has
been in contact should be assessed from both the quantitative and
qualitative perspective. However, the raw numbers of loanwords can
be misleading on several grounds. The historical record offers numerous borrowings that are documented so infrequently that the analyst
may question the extent to which they ever formed part of the active
vocabulary of speakers. Many such loanwords are concrete technical
terms that only a small segment of the speech community may have
known and used.22 I shall report in the relevant chapters on certain
studies of the vitality of selected lexical strata (specifically Arabisms,
Gallicisms, and Anglicisms) in the educated late-twentieth-century
speech of selected Spanish-speaking capital cities. However, to what
extent is the origin of a lexical item even recognizable to the average
speaker, and would such knowledge play a role in its use in the spoken
language? Once a borrowing takes root in the lexicon, its historical
origin is irrelevant to its further formal and semantic evolution in the
recipient language.
I have arranged this book according to the various lexical strata
that comprise the Spanish lexicon, almost all of which are the subject
of individual chapters. The book follows the history of each lexical
layer in chronological order: words of pre-Roman origin, the Latin
core, words of Germanic origin, Arabic origin, followed by borrowings from Gallo-Romance (a label employed here to designate both
Old French and Old Provençal, as well as their modern varieties),
Italian, the indigenous languages of the New World, Portuguese,
Catalan, and, finally, English.23 Whereas borrowings from the prewhich consists of one hundred word meanings whose signifiers in a given language are almost
never borrowed. This list, based on empirical linguistic data, is meant to replace the venerable
Swadesh Lists, first drawn up c.1955, based largely on their compiler’s intuitions. With regard to
Spanish, only one item on the Leipzig–Jakarta and Swadesh lists, the concept “dog” is possibly
represented by a loanword, namely etymologically controversial perro, possibly of pre-Roman
origin (for discussion see Chapter 2); cf. also Cat. gos ‘dog’.
22
Such is the case, for example, of many of the Arabisms recorded with only one or two
attestations in the fascicules of DEM.
23
The chapter on Germanic words contains a short section devoted to borrowings from
Flemish and German in the (early) modern language. The few possible medieval borrowings
from Hebrew are discussed at the end of the chapter devoted to Arabisms.
Language contact and history
17
Roman languages, Germanic (essentially Gothic), and Arabic were
limited to identifiable periods in the past,24 the influence of French in
its medieval and modern varieties has been ongoing from the time of
the first significant contacts between speakers of the two sister
Romance systems around the tenth century. In like fashion, the
introduction of borrowings from Classical Latin has been a continual
process (although, as with Gallicisms, with varying degrees of intensity over time). Strictly speaking, the same holds for borrowings from
Italian, although the majority of Italianisms go back to the period of
intense Hispano-Italian contacts in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Anglicisms clearly represent the largest group of lexical
borrowings into contemporary European and American Spanish.
Although sporadically documented in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, loanwords from English do not enter Spanish in massive
quantities until the second half of the twentieth century.
Each chapter of this book has the same general structure. I first
offer a broad overview of the relevant historical and social background to the particular lexical stratum under study, followed by a
brief critical overview of the most important studies on the topic. The
main body of the chapter is devoted to a discussion of the various
linguistic issues raised by the particular group of loanwords, with
selected examples, which, for the most part, will come from the
standard language, although I will comment on items restricted to
regional varieties of Spanish as appropriate. Space does not allow for
monographic treatment of individual word histories. Although many
relevant examples will be offered in the course of the analysis and
discussion found in each chapter, I make here no pretence of compiling anything representing complete lists of words borrowed from
the donor language under discussion. Each chapter will identify
reliable scholarly works to which the reader can turn for numerous
additional examples.
24
Strictly speaking, borrowings from Basque constitute an exception, as contact between
some form of Basque and the Latin/Hispano-Romance continuum has been constant for over
two millennia. As I shall discuss in Chapter 2, it is next to impossible to determine when a
Basque word, documented for the first time in the medieval or pre-modern language, actually
entered Spanish.
2
The lexical impact of the preRoman languages of the Iberian
Peninsula
2.1 Historical background
The history of the Spanish lexicon begins in the year 218 BC, with the
arrival of Roman soldiers and their language, Latin, in the Iberian
Peninsula. As a direct consequence of the outbreak of the second
Punic War with Carthage, Rome decided to attack and capture the
territory held by its Punic enemies along the eastern and southern
coasts of the Iberian Peninsula. The invading Roman troops arrived
on the eastern coast near the Greek trading colony of Emporion and
by 206 had gained control of, and began to colonize, the coastal and
adjacent inland regions as far west as the old Phoenician city of
Gades (modern Cádiz). This area rapidly underwent the dual processes of cultural Romanization and linguistic Latinization, with the
consequent rapid extinction of the languages spoken by the preRoman local inhabitants. The Romans immediately turned their
attention to adding the central, northern, and far western portions
of the Iberian Peninsula to their relatively young empire (then consisting only of sections of the Italian Peninsula as well as Sicily and
Sardinia, gained in the First Punic War). This phase of territorial
expansion met with greater military and social resistance from the
Celtic and Basque inhabitants of central and northern Iberia. The
lands held by the Celts came under Roman domination only after the
battle of Numancia (133 BC). In 19 BC the Emperor Augustus
declared that all of the Iberian Peninsula was under Roman rule,
although in reality Roman political control over the regions in the
Pre-Roman languages
19
north, inhabited by the ancestors of the Basques, may have been at
best nominal. Recent historical and archeological research, summarized in Echenique Elizondo (2005, 2008) and Echenique Elizondo and
Sánchez Méndez (2005: 62–75) has called into question the long-held
assertion that the northern Cantabrian regions of the Iberian Peninsula experienced a far less intense degree of Romanization and
Latinization than the southern and central regions.
During the two centuries of the consolidation of Roman power in
the Iberian Peninsula, the different regional and social varieties of
Latin employed by the new political masters and cultural leaders
came into contact and co-existed (over varying lengths of time)
with the diverse languages spoken prior to the arrival of the Romans.
At the outset, oral communications between speakers of Latin and
these unfamiliar languages must have been rudimentary, involving
gestures and individual lexical items, with perhaps the creation of
some form of relatively short-lived highly simplified pidginized Latin,
which may have become (partially) creolized (at least as used by
native speakers of the pre-Roman languages). Scholars no longer
accept the hypothesis of a pre-Roman linguistic unity in the Iberian
Peninsula. Epigraphical evidence, in the form of inscriptions, legends
on coins, and gravestones, as well as the local indigenous names of
places, persons, and divinities recorded in Latin sources, bespeak the
existence of various non-Indo-European and Indo-European languages in the Iberian Peninsula prior to the introduction of Latin.
Specialists are not at all in agreement on the nature and geographical
distribution of these languages. A discussion of the various competing hypotheses is beyond the scope of this work; a useful overview is
found in Villar (1999, 2000: esp. Ch. 18).
2.2 The pre-Roman languages of the Iberian Peninsula
A substantial corpus of short texts in a non-Indo-European language
(or a group of related varieties), traditionally labeled Iberian, has
been found in eastern and southern Spain, notably in Navarre,
regions of Aragon north of the Ebro, Catalonia, Valencia, and Andalusia. The overwhelming majority of these inscriptions are written in
a script comprised of signs from the Phoenician and Greek writing
20
A history of the Spanish lexicon
systems, used partly as an alphabet and partly as a syllabary (with
respect to stops and the following vowel), and which has only been
partially deciphered and interpreted. A handful of Iberian inscriptions have been found written with the Latin alphabet. Scattered texts
from central and western regions of the Iberian Peninsula have
preserved vestiges of a variety of continental Celtic set down in the
Iberian script. Linguists, archaeologists, and historians have used the
label “Celtiberian” to refer both to this Indo-European language and
to its speakers. Some scholars have argued for the presence in the
Iberian Peninsula of a pre-Celtic Indo-European language, variously
labeled as Ligurian, Illyrian, or Sorotaptic, a hypothesis that has
found no supporters (Villar 1999: 59–63). A handful of inscriptions
from western Spain and Portugal offer samples of an Indo-European
language, traditionally called Lusitanian, with features reminiscent of
Celtic. Prósper (2002) argues that this language shows structural
affinities with the Italic branch of the Indo-European family. Inscriptions have also preserved samples of the Greek spoken at the trading
colony of Ampurias on the Peninsula’s east coast. Latin inscriptions
from southern Spain contain non-Latin personal names that cannot
be linked to Iberian or any of the Indo-European languages spoken in
the northern and central regions of the Iberian Peninsula. Untermann (1975–2000) gathers together this corpus of inscriptions.
Although there are no texts, archaeological, onomastic, and toponymic evidence bespeaks the presence in the Iberian Peninsula of an
ancestor of Basque, probably spread over a somewhat wider part of
the northern Iberian Peninsula than the Basque-speaking regions of
modern Spain. In the Middle Ages Basque was spoken throughout La
Rioja, in parts of the province of Burgos, and in the valleys of
the Upper Pyrenees, possibly extending as far east as the (now
Catalan-speaking) Aran Valley (see Trask 1997: 36–40, Echenique
Elizondo and Sánchez Méndez 2005: 119–32). Specialists have now
abandoned the hypothesis, once defended by such distinguished
specialists as W. von Humboldt, E. Hübner, H. Schuchardt,
and R. Menéndez Pidal among others, that Iberian represents an
ancestor of Basque, a language whose genetic affiliation has not been
determined with any degree of certainty. Taking as their starting
Pre-Roman languages
21
point alleged lexical isoglosses involving Basque, the Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula, Italian dialects, and languages spoken in the Alps, the Balkans, and North Africa, numerous linguists
(including several eminent Romanists such as R. Menéndez Pidal, V.
Bertoldi and especially J. Hubschmid, the most active scholar of this
group with regard to the pre-Roman layer of the Spanish lexicon)
have operated over the years with a vague undocumented entity
conceived of as a very early substratum language spoken throughout
the European and African lands bordering the Mediterranean basin.
Its alleged lexical traces are found principally in names of places,
plants, mountains, and waterways. Although in most cases Hubschmid may well have accurately identified Spanish lexical items of preRoman origin, the specific etymologies and bold lexical connections
that he proposes in numerous articles and monographs have been
greeted with considerable skepticism (often expressed in a very
polemical fashion; for an overview and critical discussion of the
Mediterranean substratum hypothesis, see Craddock 1969, as well
as the searching assessment of Hubschmid’s etymological methodology and probings in Malkiel 1962). Recently Theo Vennemann has
posited the existence of a widespread pre-Indo-European substrate
language that he labels Vasconic, of which Basque is the sole survivor
(see the papers collected in Vennemann and Noel Aziz Hanna 2003).
Vennemann has not linked any Basque lexical items that may have
come into Spanish to this supposed ancestral language. At least one
Spanish specialist in the study of Basque–Romance linguistic contacts has stated that, in her view, Vennemann’s theory is based on
solid linguistic arguments and deserves serious attention (Echenique
Elizondo 2005: 71, 2008). Other experts (e.g. Trask 1997: 364–8, Baldi
and Page 2006) do not share her positive opinion.
2.3 Pre-Roman languages and Latin
With the exception of Greek, the vehicle of a culture much admired
and imitated by the Romans, the Roman elite and the administrators
in the provinces made no effort to learn the languages of the conquered and subjugated peoples. From the outset it was incumbent
upon the native population to learn at least enough Latin to be able to
22
A history of the Spanish lexicon
communicate at a basic level on specific concrete issues with their
new masters, who, nevertheless, did not impose the use of Latin by
force. The speakers of the pre-Roman languages initiated the decision
to abandon the use of their native tongues. Latin may have first
spread in urban settings to the political and social elite of the native
tribes.1 It is reasonable to assume that some Roman soldiers acquired
a working knowledge of some of the local languages through
extended contact with the native populations and marriage with
local women. There is no evidence concerning language choice and
use in households consisting of Roman soldiers and native women in
the early years of the Roman presence, or on the nature of the
language learned by the children born in such marriages. Might it
have been some form of a creolized Latin that would have been
treated with scorn by native Romans? Chroniclers and historians
do not inform us directly about language preferences in the Roman
province of Hispania, or about the extinction or survival of preRoman languages that lacked any degree of sociolinguistic prestige
in Roman Spain. Writing around AD 7, the Greek geographer Strabo
(3.2.15) acknowledges the presence of various languages in the Iberian
Peninsula and claims, with specific reference to the Turdetani, that in
the Roman province of Baetica (southern Spain) the natives had
already forgotten their native tongue. The latest attestations of Iberian script are on coins from Osicerda (from the period of Caesar)
and a bilingual inscription on a stone from Saguntum from the early
Augustan period. Iberian inscriptions from the first century BC have
been found in the ruins of Iesso (modern Guissona, in the province
of Lérida [Lleida]; see Pera Isern 2005). Polomé (1983: 524) suggests
that the defeat of the rebellious Spanish forces in the Sertorian War
(80–72 BC) may have played a role in the decline of the use of that
linguistic entity traditionally labeled Iberian. There is no documentary evidence to support Polomé’s hypothesis (1983: 523) that Punic
continued to be spoken in Cadiz and Cartagena (Nova Cartago) at
the time of Caesar Augustus (though that language survived well into
1
The essays in Cooley (2002) offer valuable insights on the diffusion of Latin in the
territories conquered by the Romans; with regard to the Iberian Peninsula, see Edmondson
(2002).
Pre-Roman languages
23
Imperial times in Sardinia and Roman north Africa; see Adams 2003:
209–45). The absence of written texts does not mean that the languages in question had ceased to be used as a means of oral communication among the indigenous population, especially in the lower
social strata. Tacitus reports in his Annals (4.45.2) that a peasant from
Termes in Hispania Citerior arrested for the murder of the Roman
official L. Calpurnius Pino in AD 25 answered, under torture, his
interrogators in his native language (sermone patrio; Adams 2003:
280).
Pre-Roman names of persons and divinities turn up in the Latin
epigraphic record from the Iberian Peninsula. Among the few preRoman words found in Latin inscriptions is the noun paramum
(which turns up in a second-century AD inscription from León; for
discussion, see Adams 2007: 425–6), source of Sp. páramo ‘high
plain’. Occasional lexical items appear in Latin texts. The chapter
dedicated to mining techniques in the provinces of northern Spain in
Book 23 of Pliny the Elder’s Historia naturalis offers in Latinized garb
such pre-Roman words as arrugia ‘shaft and pit in a gold mine’,
corrugus (which seems to share the same root as the preceding word,
so may explain the masculine gender of the Spanish and Portuguese
reflexes of ARRUGIA, namely arroyo/arroio) ‘canal, water conduit in a
mine’, segutillum ‘a kind of earth which was supposed to indicate the
presence of gold’, apitascudis ‘gold dust’ (Oroz 1996: 210), tasconium
‘a white clay-like kind of earth’, gangadia ‘a hard mixture of earth and
clay’, palagae ‘gold ingots’, talut[at]ium ‘superficial indication of gold
under the earth’, urium ‘mud dragged by water’ (possibly related to
Basque ur ‘water’), striges ‘a small clump of gold’, thieldones ‘type of
Spanish horse’ (for a discussion of the origins of these terms see Oroz
1996 and Adams 2003: 450–54, 2007: 235–37). Adams (2003: 453)
adduces ternagus ‘exploratory shaft found in a mine’, set down in
the Lex Vipascensis, a text from Lusitania. Romanists widely accept2
that arrugia underlies Sp. arroyo, Ptg. arroio ‘stream, brook’.3 It
2
Meier (1984: 32–3, 1988: 86–94) rejects the analysis of ARRUGIA as a pre-Roman word and
sees in this form a member of the family of RUGA ‘wrinkle, crease’.
3
Reflexes of ARRUGIA are also found outside the Iberian Peninsula; cf. Friulian roggia, Val
Gardena roia, Venetian roza, which presuppose a variant *RUGIA. DES (I: 127, s.v. arróyu)
records for Sardinian such items as arróyu, arròya ‘low watery place’, arroa water-filled gorge or
24
A history of the Spanish lexicon
seems possible that corrugus lives on in Spanish as cuérrago ‘riverbed’
and that Sp. gándara ‘low wasteland, wilderness’ is ultimately traceable to gangadia. Other words likely to be of pre-Roman origin turn
up centuries later in the Latin of the seventh-century bishop of
Seville, Saint Isidore (d. 636), e.g. cama ‘bed’,4 sarna/serna ‘type of
rash’, capanna (> cabaña ‘type of rural cottage or hut’).
The occasional pre-Roman word from the Iberian Peninsula managed to spread beyond the local varieties of spoken Latin and became
incorporated into the language of the Roman Empire. Soldiers and
government officials returning to their homes in Italy, as well as
merchants who traveled between Rome and the Iberian Peninsula,
would have played a role in the diffusion of such lexical items.
According to Pliny (Historia naturalis, 8, 217), the noun cuniculus
‘rabbit, hare’ originated in a pre-Roman language spoken in Hispania. In addition to Sp. conejo, Ptg. coelho, this noun underlies It.
coniglio, OFr. conil, and, outside the Romance domain, OHG küniclin, künin, Ir. coinin, Welsh conicl (DELL, s.v. cuniculum). The
famous orator Quintilian (AD 35–100), a native of Calahorra (La
Rioja) stated that the colloquial adjective gurdus ‘thick, heavy,
clumsy, awkward’, the source of Sp./Ptg. gordo ‘fat’, Fr. gourd
‘numb, stiff’, as well as Italian dialect forms (REW: s.v. gurdus), is
of Hispanic origin, a claim for which DELL and Vaan (2008: s.v.
gurdus) declare there exists no independent evidence. Lat. plumbum
‘lead’, the source of Sp. plomo, Ptg. pombo, It. piombo, Fr. plomb, may
have originated in a language of the Iberian Peninsula, known in the
ancient world for its lead mines.
Lexical items originating in a pre-Roman language of the Iberian
Peninsula could have followed one of two routes into spoken Latin.
The newly arrived speakers of Latin may have borrowed and adapted
to their needs pre-Roman words to fill lexical gaps in their own
language with regard to the physical realities of the local landscape,
ravine’, roya ‘lurzina d’acqua’. According to its author, the antiquity of these forms in Sardinian
dialects rules out borrowing from Spanish; Wagner posits a pre-Roman *ROGIA. Although
ARRUGIA seems not to have survived in the spoken Latin of Gaul, FEW (fasc. 148: 343–4) posits
a diminutive *ARRUGULA to account for a series of forms found in the Gascon area of France.
4
Isidore (19.22.29) uses cama in an attempt to etymologize the noun camisia ‘shirt’ (of Celtic
origin): “camisias vocari quod in his dormimus in camis” (quoted in Adams 2007: 427).
Pre-Roman languages
25
the flora and fauna, as well as clothing, artifacts, customs, and
agricultural and mining techniques of the indigenous population.
As the speakers of the pre-Roman languages gradually abandoned
their native tongues in favor of Latin, they may have retained during
the period of language shift specific characteristic words of their
mother tongues and integrated them into their newly acquired
Latin, which at that stage was still a second language, in many cases
only partially mastered by its new learners. Although this subtle
distinction may be valid in theory, in practical terms it is impossible
to determine which of these two paths a given pre-Roman word
followed on its way to integration into the vocabulary of spoken
Hispano-Latin. Let us take the example of Sp./Ptg. cama ‘bed’. Speakers of Latin already had at their disposal LECTUS ‘bed’, the source of
Fr. lit, Cat. llit, Sp. lecho, Ptg. leito, It. letto. Cama seems to have
originally designated a small bed (of straw?) close to or laid out on
the ground. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (20.11.2) state “Cama
est breuis et circa terram” and then indicate the Greek term for such a
bed. Did the native word enter Latin as a borrowing used to designate
a humble type of local bed, or did speakers of the pre-Roman
language simply retain this common word as part of the Latin that
they were in the process of acquiring?5 The same question arises with
respect to perro ‘dog’ (if indeed it is a word of pre-Roman origin), in
view of the widespread survival in Romance of reflexes of Lat. CANIS,
which also came into Spanish as can.
Our knowledge of the structural details of the pre-Roman languages and of their vocabularies, as well as the sociolinguistic details
of the nature of their contact with Latin is, at best, sketchy. This
situation makes it difficult to link with any high degree of assurance
those Spanish lexical items of possible pre-Roman origin with actual
documented or reconstructed bases in a specific pre-Roman language. Nevertheless the standard manuals of the history of the
Spanish language as well as the two versions of the etymological
dictionary prepared by J. Corominas, DCELC (1954–7) and
DCECH (1980–91, in collaboration with J. A. Pascual) offer
5
Isidore (20.11.2) derives cama from a Greek base, a derivation that is viewed as a strong
possibility by Velázquez Soriano (1984: 516–17).
26
A history of the Spanish lexicon
numerous lexical items designated as being of pre-Roman origin
(“voces prerromanas”). In many cases, entries in these dictionaries
declare that a word is of “unknown” or “uncertain” origin, a judgment often qualified with “perhaps” or “probably of pre-Roman
origin”. In many cases the classification of a lexical item as a word
of pre-Roman origin is the solution of last resort, invoked when there
seems to be no acceptable base in Latin, or in any other language with
which the Latin/Hispano-Romance linguistic continuum has been in
contact that will account in a principled way for the genesis of the
form in question. I repeat the following statement made in Craddock,
Dworkin and Poghirc (1980: 196–7): “There is no philosophically
perceptible difference between saying that a word is of unknown
origin and saying that a word comes from an unknown language”.
2.4 Basque and Celtic loanwords
Words that can be securely related to documented Basque forms pose
a major chronological problem. Basque and its ancestral variants
have been in contact with spoken Latin and its Hispano-Romance
continuations for over two millennia6. It may often be difficult to
determine if a word of Basque origin entered the language during the
period of the Roman occupation (a time when numerous Latin words
entered varieties of Basque) or during the subsequent medieval
period of Basque–Romance contact, a situation which many experts
believe led to the particular linguistic configurations of Castilian visà-vis neighboring varieties of Hispano-Romance (Echenique Elizondo 1987, and, from a polemical and extreme perspective, López
García 1985). Thus, with respect to Spanish, Basque has acted over the
centuries both as a substratum and as an adstratum language.
Although Basque has had a long history as a spoken language in
the Iberian Peninsula, the first extensive texts from both France and
Spain date only from the sixteenth century. Prior to that time, in
addition to personal and place names, scattered examples of Basque
6
Some scholars have proposed that Basque entered the Iberian Peninsula only during the
Imperial period or even in the High Middle Ages; see Schmoll (1959) and Untermann (1983).
González Ollé (2004) critically surveys the various hypotheses proposed concerning the entry
and spread of Basque in the Iberian Peninsula.
Pre-Roman languages
27
words turn up in tenth-century documents from the church of
Valpuesta (Burgos), e.g. anderazo, anderaza, muino, ozoa, jaunso,
abayza (Echenique Elizondo 2005: 76), in an eleventh-century Latin
document from Guipuzcoa, in the early thirteenth-century poetry of
Gonzalo de Berceo, a native of La Rioja (e.g. bildur ‘fear’, çatico ‘crust,
crumb’),7 as well as in two short phrases in the eleventh century
Glosas Emilianenses (Trask 1997: 42–5). As noted above, the toponymic and onomastic evidence indicates that prior to the arrival of
the Romans, the territorial extension of earlier varieties of Basque in
the Iberian Peninsula was much greater than the Basque-speaking
regions of modern Spain, extending to the eastern Pyrenees and as far
south as the Ebro Valley. The limits of the western extension of
Basque remain unclear. Very little is known about the linguistic
situation in the west of the Iberian Peninsula prior to the arrival of
the Romans. The presence in Portuguese and Galician of scattered
words of possible Basque origin8 may indicate some proximity of
Basque to the northwest corner of the Iberian Peninsula or, as some
specialists have posited, the existence of a common linguistic substratum spoken from Aquitania (modern Gascony) to Gallaecia in
the northwest corner of the Iberian Peninsula. Alternatively, the
westward spread of words of Basque origin into Galician may result
from the later influence of medieval varieties of northern HispanoRomance, especially as Galicia formed part of the early Kingdom of
León (and, after 1230, of the Kingdom of Castile and León). To give
but one example, would such an analysis mean that such a basic
adjective as Ptg. esquerdo ‘left’ is in reality an adaptation of
Sp. izquierdo? The absence of esquerdo from pre-fifteenth-century
7
Berceo employs bildur in a jocular fashion in a personification of fear (don Bildur) in his
Milagros de Nuestra Señora 292d. The noun çatico/zatico turns up in the same poet’s Vida de
Santo Domingo de Silos 105d and Sacrificio de la Misa 275d, as well as in the fourteenth-century
Libro de buen amor 247b (note also the Old Spanish derivative çatiquero ‘palace official in
charge of bread’). CORDE offers other scattered late medieval and sixteenth-century examples
of çatico; Nebrija’s Spanish-Latin Dictionary contains an entry ‘çatico de pan’; Covarrubias’s
Tesoro labels çatico as ‘vocablo español antiguo’.
8
Iribarren (2002: 469–70) cites a number of such items (all of which display the suffixal
element -Vrr-), e.g. cachorro ‘pup, whelp’, cencerro ‘cowbell’, chatarra ‘old iron’, gabarra
‘launch to transport freight to a boat’, modorro ‘drowsiness’, zamarra ‘sheepskin jacket’. She
claims that Castilian was responsible for the westward spread of the suffixal element of Basque
origin.
28
A history of the Spanish lexicon
sources (see IVPM) may well support this hypothesis of esquerdo as a
late medieval Spanish loanword that ultimately ousted OPtg. s~eestro.
Trask (1997: 416–21) calls into question or specifically rejects proposed Basque (as opposed to other possible pre-Roman) etyma for
the following Spanish words: anchoa, ‘anchovy’, azcona ‘dart’,9 becerro ‘yearling calf ’,10 bizarro ‘gallant, brave’, boina ‘beret’, cazurro
‘rude, unsociable, malicious’, chamorro ‘close-cropped’, chaparro,
‘small, bushy oak shrub’, guijarro ‘pebble’, laya ‘agricultural implement’, mogote ‘isolated mound’, nava ‘broad plain’, parra ‘trained
grapevine’, perro ‘dog’, pizarra ‘slate’, sapo ‘toad’, sarna ‘rash, itch’,
sarrio ‘Pyrenean chamois’, sarro ‘incrustation, deposit’, vega ‘fertile
plain’, zarza ‘blackberry, bramble’, zorro/zorra ‘fox’.
Words of possible Celtic origin pose a similar analytic problem.11
As a result of sometimes intense Latin–Celtic contacts in Gaul and in
the northern parts of the Italian Peninsula, a considerable number of
Celtic words became part of the spoken Latin of the Roman Empire
and were subsequently inherited by various Romance languages.
Such Spanish words as alondra (OSp. alo[d]a) ‘lark’ < ALAUDA, camisa
‘shirt’ < CAMISIA, carro ‘chariot, cart’ < CARRUS, cerveza ‘beer’ < CERVISIA
(all with cognates in other Romance languages), represent the descendants of Celtic words incorporated into the vocabulary of spoken
Imperial Latin12 and do not result from Latin–Celtic language contact in the Iberian Peninsula. The analyst also has to winnow out
words ultimately of Celtic origin that may have entered Spanish later
as loanwords from other languages (such as French, Portuguese, or
Galician, languages in whose lexical history varieties of continental
Celtic have played a significant role). Spanish words that do not have
Romance counterparts outside the Galician–Portuguese linguistic
9
The presence of azcona in Berceo’s Vida de Santa Oria (81) has led some scholars to see
this noun as an early Basque loanword in medieval Hispano-Romance (Cavestany 1976: 382).
10
DCECH rejects the proposed Basque etymology for becerro and, instead, advocates a
genetic connection with the family of Lat. IBEX ‘chamois’, namely an alleged derivative *IBICERRRA/IBICIRRA, involving the pre-Roman suffixal element -err.
11
The majority of forms found in Celtic inscriptions from the Iberian Peninsula are
individual or family names. The meaning of many common nouns remains unknown. Wodtko
(2000) records and discusses all lexical items, none of which seem to have survived in HispanoRomance, found in Celtic inscriptions from Spain.
12
After Greek, Celtic (especially Gaulish) was the most common source of loanwords into
Latin (Adams 2003: 184–200).
Pre-Roman languages
29
domain and that seem to have identifiable cognates in recorded
varieties of Celtic or which can be linked to reasonably secure
proto-Celtic roots may well represent the direct influence on the
local varieties of Hispano-Latin of Hispano-Celtic (a language documented in inscriptions ranging from c.200 BC to the second century
AD and written in an adaptation of the Iberian script). Hubschmid
(1960b: 149) stresses the small number of Hispano-Celtic words that
have survived in the Romance varieties of the Iberian Peninsula.
Corominas (1972a: 210–26) considers the following items, among
others, to be Celtic words limited to the Romance varieties of the
Iberian Peninsula: álamo (see below) ‘white poplar’, amelga, ‘plots of
land dividing a field to facilitate even sowing’, beleño ‘henbane’, berro
‘watercress’, breña ‘rugged, uneven brambly ground’, belesa ‘leadwort’, cambija ‘water tower’, gancho ‘hook’ (orig. ‘small curved
branch’), garza ‘heron’, légamo ‘slime, mud’, liria ‘birdlime’, rodaballo ‘brill, seabass’, serna ‘cultivated or sown field’, sel ‘mountain
pasture’, silo ‘underground cave, silo’13, terco (see below) ‘stubborn,
obstinate’, tranca ‘cudgel, club; beam’, tranzar ‘to break, break off’.
2.5 Selected examples
Lengthy registers of Spanish words of pre-Roman origin can be
found in Hubschmid’s (1960a, 1960b) contributions to vol. 1 of the
Enciclopedia lingüística hispánica. These two studies, devoted respectively to non-Indo-European and Indo-European pre-Roman bases
represent a synthesis of his scattered writings up to that time14 on the
pre-Roman lexical elements of the Iberian Peninsula and their
genetic affiliation with alleged widely scattered cognates found in
Italy, the Mediterranean basin, the Alps, and the Caucasuses.
Although many specialists have called into question the precise
links and alleged donor languages posited by Hubschmid, most
agree that he has indeed correctly identified many words of pre13
The presence of silo in Berceo’s Vida de Santo Domingo de Silos (704d) led Lanchetas
(1900, quoted in Cavestany 1976: 381) to link the Spanish noun to Basque zilo/zulo. DCECH
argues that the Spanish and Basque forms cited here both go back to the same Celtic base.
14
Malkiel (1962: 150n1) offers a handy list of Hubschmid’s most important studies. In two
extended critical evaluations of Hubschmid’s etymological writings, Malkiel (1962, 1971) directs
the reader to other reactions from qualified experts.
30
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Roman origin found in the Romance varieties of the Iberian Peninsula. Villar (1999: 63) lists just under 180 words attributed to preRoman origin in DCECH. He also includes a substantial number of
words classed by Corominas and Pascual as “de origen desconocido”,
some of which he suspects may go back to pre-Roman languages.
Almost all the Spanish words of pre-Roman origin that entered
local varieties of Latin are nouns that refer to the concrete physical
realities of life in the Iberian Peninsula: physical features of the
terrain, meteorological phenomena, plants, tree names, domesticated
and wild animals, foodstuffs, clothing, social practices. Cross-linguistic studies have shown that often in cases of military invasions, the
language of the conquerors often borrows, from the speech of the
subjugated, words in these specific concrete semantic fields. Many
such items are restricted to the northern dialects (Asturian, Leónese,
Navarrese, Aragonese) of Spanish, often with cognates in Galician,
Portuguese, and Catalan. Although words of pre-Roman origin must
have been present in the spoken vernaculars of the Iberian Peninsula
for some two thousand years, many failed to penetrate the written
registers of medieval and early modern varieties of HispanoRomance and are recorded for the first time only in the modern
period, often in modern reports on dialect fieldwork or in dialect or
regional dictionaries. I offer here selected examples of Spanish words
of probable pre-Roman origin from the semantic fields listed above
(although the origin of some of these items continues to be controversial; see below). For the purposes of this exposition, I shall not
differentiate between words of Indo-European and non-Indo-European origin.
Physical features of the terrain: alud, ‘avalanche’, breña ‘ragged,
uneven or brambly ground’, berrueco15 ‘granite crag or cliff ’, charco
‘puddle’, coto ‘enclosed land’, cueto ‘craggy hill’, barranco ‘ravine,
deep gorge’, barra ‘sandbar at a river’s mouth’ barro ‘mud’, lama
‘mud’, losa ‘flagstone’, mogote ‘hillock, knoll’, morro ‘hillock, mound’,
15
I find unconvincing the phonological and morphological arguments adduced by Nieto
Ballester (2003) in an attempt to link berrueco to the family of Lat. PETRA, specifically to an
alleged *PETROCCUS/PETROCCEUS.
Pre-Roman languages
31
mota ‘mound, rise, hillock’, sarro, ‘deposit, crust’, pizarra ‘slate’,
trocha ‘narrow forest path’, vega ‘fertile plain’, zarza ‘brambles’.
Trees, plants, and crops: abedul ‘birchwood’, agalla ‘gallnut’, álamo
‘white poplar’, aliso ‘alder’, arándano ‘cranberry’, beleño ‘type of
plant’, berro ‘watercress’, breña ‘fiber’, chaparro ‘young oak’ (cf.
Basque tsapar), coscojo ‘kermes gall’, mata ‘type of plant’, carrasca
‘holm oak, holly oak’, suero ‘whey’.
Wild and domesticated animals: ardilla ‘squirrel’, becerro ‘yearling
bull, calf ’ (see below), borrego ‘yearling lamb’, cegajo ‘male goat two
years old’, cigarra ‘cicada’, galápago ‘giant tortoise’, morueco ‘ram’,
perro ‘dog’, sapo ‘toad’, zorro ‘fox’ (see below).
Agricultural life and products: amelga ‘plots of land dividing a field
to facilitate even plowing and sowing’, borona ‘cornbread’, OSp.
busto16 ‘meadow, cowfield’, boñigo ‘cow excrement’, cencerro ‘cowbell’, colodra ‘milking pail’, lleco ‘unploughed land’, serna ‘cultivated
field’, sirria ‘goat or sheep excrement’.
Clothing and objects of daily life: abarca ‘type of sandal’, aro ‘hoop,
ring’, borracha ‘wine pouch’,17 cama ‘bed’ (orig. ‘straw bed on the
floor’?), cambija ‘circular water storage container’, gorra ‘cap’, manteca ‘lard’ (whence mantequilla ‘butter’), támara ‘brushwood’, toca
‘type of headdress’, zarria ‘sandal thong or leather strap’.
2.6 Selected etymological controversies
Although most specialists in Spanish etymology recognize the presence of pre-Roman lexical items, they do not all agree on which
words come from the pre-Roman languages of the Iberian Peninsula.
The Bonn Romanist Harri Meier and his students took an extreme
counterposition, rejecting almost all pre-Roman bases. In their place
they offered undocumented Latin bases, for the most part alleged
derivatives of authentic Latin word families. The etymologies rest on
very tenuous semantic connections and, on the formal side, resort to
16
For a detailed discussion of this word’s etymology, see Hubschmid (1964).
Corriente (1999: 488, s.v. borracha) rejects the Arabic etymon defended by Corominas and
suggests a link with Lat. BURRUS ‘reddish’, connoting the facial color of a drinker. However, most
specialists agree that borracho ‘drunk; drunkard’ derives secondarily from substantival
borracha.
17
32
A history of the Spanish lexicon
an unwarranted generalization of unpredictable and sporadic sound
shifts and patterns of suffixal derivation.18 The possible substratal
origin of some words remains a subject of scholarly controversy.
Here I shall summarize the debate surrounding only a few problematic cases. No new data of which I am aware have come to light that
would now either tip the scales in favor of one of the competing
hypotheses or lead to the proposal of a new solution.
The scholarly debate surrounding the origin of Sp./Ptg. álamo
‘white poplar’ illustrates some of the methodological problems facing
the student of Spanish diachronic lexicology seeking to assess the
impact of loanwords. The phonetic similarity between the Latin tree
name alnus ‘alder’ and álamo led various specialists to seek to link
these two items. All realized that straightforward phonetic evolution
of the Latin noun would have yielded *alno or perhaps auno/*ono/
*ouno in early Hispano- and Luso-Romance. To get around this
difficulty, García de Diego (1922: 149) posited a blend of ALNUS with
ULMUS ‘elm tree’. The rare -lm- cluster of the resulting *ALMUS > *ALMO
would have been resolved through insertion of an a, thus leading to
the creation of álamo (however, note the survival of such items as
alma ‘soul’ and yelmo ‘type of helmet’). He refers vaguely to the
possible influence of Arabic in the outcome álamo. Perhaps favoring
an etymology involving ALNUS is Nebrija’s Latin gloss in his Spanish–
Latin dictionary of álamo negrillo as alnus, a translation which
DCECH classes as an outright error, and of no value in determining
the etymology of the Spanish noun.
Skeptics have noted that this hypothesis poses several problems.
There is no unequivocal independent evidence for the survival of
ALNUS in the spoken Latin of the Iberian Peninsula. The designation
for that tree in Spanish is aliso, judged to be a descendant of Goth.
*ALISI (Gamillscheg 1934: 381, a hypothesis that the same expert labels
‘doubtful’ in 1967: 87), or of pre-Roman origin (DCECH). I have
found no independent evidence for the alleged OSp. alno recorded in
REW (#376). The genetic link between ALNUS and Fr. aune is open to
question. DELF claims that as a designation for the ‘alder’ aune is
18
For a discussion of Meier’s approach to etymology, see Malkiel (1986) and Dworkin (1989,
1992).
Pre-Roman languages
33
more recent than ver(g)ne, of Celtic origin, and that aune is of
Germanic background, namely Frk. *ALIRA, cf. G. Erle. Opponents
of the blend between ALNUS and ULMUS note that the two trees are in
no way alike and both differ considerably from the tree known today
as álamo, a situation which rules out the alleged blend. Two alternative analyses involving early borrowings have come forth. Bruch
(1930: 417), followed by Gamillscheg (1967: 87), operate with Goth
*ALMS, while DCECH (s.v. álamo) leans toward a blend involving Lat.
ALBUS ‘white poplar’ with Celtic ELMOS/LEMOS.
The origin of perro ‘dog’ is a longstanding crux of Spanish etymology, for which diverse etyma (pre-Roman base, Massaliotic Greek,
onomatopoeic formations) have been proposed. H. Meier (1975: 294–
304) and H. Bürsch’s (1982) respective attempts to derive perro from
Latin bases, namely ASPERARE ‘to incite’ and VERRES ‘swine’, present
insuperable phonological and semantic difficulties.19 Krüger (1956)
and, in response, Hubschmid (1959) independently posited differing
pre-Roman bases for Sp. corro ‘circle of spectators’ and corral ‘enclosed area’, as well as the numerous members of this word family
found in Western Spanish dialects, Galician, and Portuguese. Malkiel
(1989), on the other hand, sought to revive the link with Graeco-Latin
CHORUS and CHORALIS proposed in 1611 by Sebastián de Covarrubias in
his Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española. Whereas Corominas
proposed a Celtic origin for Sp. colmena, Ptg. colmeia ‘beehive’,
Malkiel (1984) linked the nouns at issue to Lat. CRUMENA ‘a type of
purse’ (see also Chapter 3). Specialists have viewed OSp. comblueça/
conborça (and its other formal variants) ‘concubine’ as a word
of Celtic origin. Malkiel (1985) suggested deriving this word family
from *CONVORTIA (assuming conborça to be the original form), a
deverbal noun derived from CONVORTERE, the historical predecessor
of CONVERTERE. Meier (1984: 81) links the medieval Spanish and
19
It is worth noting as a possible parallel that etymologically obscure Sp. cachorro ‘whelp,
young pup’ may be genetically connected to Basque txakur ‘dog’. Iribarren Argaiz (1995: 410–11)
summarizes the debate on the origin of this word and lists numerous dialect variants. Is Cat. gos
‘dog’ also of pre-Roman origin? As he did with regard to the genesis of Sp. perro, the author of
the DECAT (s.v. gos) suggests an onomatopoeic origin for the Catalan noun and the many
alleged Romance reflexes of that same base that he adduces. I note as a parallel that the
etymology of E. dog is a long-standing crux of English diachronic lexicology.
34
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Portuguese forms to the family of CONVERSARE ‘to live, abide, dwell’.
Meier (1984: 68) challenged the pre-Roman (Celtic?) origin of Sp.
bruja, Ptg. bruxa ‘witch’ and its Catalan (bruixa), Gascon (broucho,
brouche), and southern French (bruèis[sa], breicha, broucha) cognates. The phonetic and semantic changes that he proposes in order
to derive these nouns from the family of *VERSIARE/*VORSIARE stretch
the bounds of credulity. Whereas OSp. bruxa is first attested c.1445 in
two treatises by Lope de Barrientos (CORDE),20 the Catalan and
Gallo-Romance forms appear at least a century earlier. This chronological disparity may support the possibility that the Spanish form is
a borrowing from north of the Pyrenees and not a direct local
descendant of a pre-Roman base (Cazalbou 2000; for detailed discussion of the various proposed substratal bases and cognates in
other language families, see DCECH: s.v. bruja and the lengthy
entry in DECAT: s.v. bruixa). With regard to the origin of arándano
‘cranberry’, opinion is divided between the substratal base defended
by Hubschmid and Gk. (via Latin) RHODODENDRON; see Szemerényi
(1963: 416–17).
Given the social and cultural conditions of the contact between
spoken Latin and the pre-Roman languages, the absence of abstract
nouns of immediate pre-Roman background comes as no surprise.
Consequently, the proposed substratal origin of nouns referring to
abstract qualities must be carefully considered. DCECH argues for
the Celtic origin of Sp. brío ‘gallantry, bearing; enthusiasm, vigor’, a
noun documented as early as the thirteenth-century Alfonsine Estoria de España, as well as in medieval Portuguese (see IVPM: 2, 24a).
Yet, given the stronger impact of Celtic in southern Gallo-Romance
and the use of OProv. briu in such troubadours as Arnaut Daniel and
Foulquet de Marseilles, it seems reasonable to view the Spanish and
Portuguese nouns as Provençalisms, possibly of Celtic origin in the
immediate donor language (DELF: s.v. brio).
There are very few Spanish adjectives and verbs of pre-Roman
origin. Almost all specialists agree that Sp. izquierdo, Ptg. esquerdo,
20
The early fifteenth-century Escorial glossary (Castro 1936) employs bruxa to gloss Lat.
no[c]tigina (entry 1537) which Castro interprets as ‘mujer nocturna’. The Palacio glossary (entry
112) turns to xorguina to define the same Latin base.
Pre-Roman languages
35
Cat. esquerre ‘left’, and their southern French cognates go back to the
pre-Roman source which gave Basque ezquer.21 At first one may
rightly wonder why the languages of the Iberian Peninsula borrowed
a substratal word to designate the concept ‘left’ and to replace the
local reflexes of Lat. SINISTER, namely OSp. siniestro, OPtg. se~estro. It is
well known that the word for ‘left’ in many cultures acquired negative
and taboo associations and was often replaced; cf. the replacement of
OFr. senestre by gauche < OFr. gauchir of Germanic origin (and the
negative meaning acquired by gauche in English). The route followed
into Spanish by the adjective zurdo ‘left-handed; awkward, clumsy’ is
not clear. The sole medieval example that I have found of this form
appears without context as çurdo in Pero Guillén de Segovia’s latefifteenth-century rhyming dictionary La gaya ciencia (ed. Casa Homs
1962: 212a10). Use of this adjective becomes frequent only in the early
modern language. Phonetic and semantic considerations militate
against Lat. SURDUS ‘deaf ’, the etymology proposed by Diez (1853) in
EWRS and defended in Meier (1984: 211). DCECH proposes a connection with the family of Basque zur/zurrun, but suggests that the
late appearance of zurdo bespeaks later Basque–Romance contact
rather than a borrowing from Roman times. If related, do Gal. mao
xurda ‘left hand’, Ptg. surro, churro, churdo possibly indicate an
earlier origin, or the westward diffusion of the term from Castilian?
The lack of cognates outside the Iberian Peninsula of cognates to Sp.
cazurro (OSp./Ptg. caçurro), ‘gross, crude’, and chamorro ‘closecropped’22 as well as the concluding segment -urro/-orro may point
to a pre-Roman origin for both adjectives.
Three different hypotheses have sought to explain the genesis of
Sp. terco ‘stubborn’. DCECH (s.v. terco) linked terco to Cat. enterch
21
The Indo-Europeanist O. Szemerényi (1963: 413) suggested considering the possibility that
izquierdo and the related Portuguese, Catalan, and Basque forms reflect a conflation of the roots
underlying Lat. SCAEVUS ‘left’ and SINISTER (with some degree of formal support from their polar
opposite DEXTER).
22
In the medieval language this adjective was used as a pejorative nickname for the
Portuguese. It is first documented in the mid-fourteenth-century Poema de Alfonso Onceno
as a substantivized adjective (“fija fue de una chamorra/que salió mala cristiana”, ed. Victorio
1991: 1783cd) in rhyme with forra. It is unclear whether it here refers to a woman of Portuguese
origin. The word at issue refers to the Portuguese in a composition by Villasandino included in
the Cancionero de Baena (“chamorros que, sin medida, buscan lo que fallarán”, ed. Dutton and
González Cuenca 1993: #69, v.7).
36
A history of the Spanish lexicon
‘stiff, rigid’ (discussed at great length in DECAT: s.v. enterch), Béarn.
terc ‘cruel, treacherous’, and It. terchio/tirchio ‘miserly, crude’ and
saw in this alleged Romance word family the reflexes of a Celtic base
*TERCOS, preserved in MIr. terc, Welsh taerc ‘miserly, scarce’. This
analysis presupposes that the proposed Celtic base entered the spoken Latin of the Iberian Peninsula. The absence of examples of terco
until the late fifteenth century certainly weakens this analysis. H.
Meier (1960: 292–5) also linked terco and tirchio but analyzed them as
backformations at the level of spoken Latin from *TRIC(C)ULARE <
*TRICARE < TRICAE ‘trivia; obstacles’. Taking an entirely different tack,
Malkiel (1948) had proposed that terco was spun off as a backformation from the rare verb entercar, a doublet of enternegar < INTERNECARE ‘to kill’. DCECH also suggests a Celtic origin for Sp. brusco, as
well as for its French and Italian cognates brusque and brusco. It is
unlikely that the Spanish adjective results from direct contact
between Celtic and local varieties of spoken Hispano-Latin. Sp.
brusco is attested only twice in the medieval language, in a translation
of Plutarch prepared in the scriptorium of the Aragonese Juan
Fernández de Heredia, and in a mid-fourteenth century Traducción
de la “Historia de Jerusalem abreviada” de Jacobo de Vitriaco, a
situation which may indicate that the Spanish adjective is an early
Italianism, specifically a borrowing of the adjective brusco ‘bitter (of
wine); rude, gruff’, itself a metaphorical adaptation of the plant name
brusco ‘butcher’s broom’ (cf. the similar analysis of Fr. brusque in
Bloch-Wartburg and DHLF: s.v. brusque, and Hope 1971: 168).23
Terlingen (1943) does not include brusco in his inventory of Spanish
Italianisms. Whereas DCECH derives the adjective tosco ‘rude,
rough, crude’ from Lat. TUSCUS ‘Etruscan’, Hubschmid (1962: 126–9)
argues that the Spanish adjective (as well as Cat. tosc) is a later
development of the noun tosco/tosca indicating a type of porous
23
Possibly complicating this analysis is the presence of adjectival brusco in the fourteenthcentury Galician Cronica troyana and in works written in a variety of western Leónese
(sayagués) by Juan del Encina and Lucas Fernández. Adjectival brusco existed alongside the
phytonym brusco ‘butcher’s broom’, attested several times in a late-fifteenth-century translation
of Gordonio. Although in DCECH Corominas toyed with the possibility that the adjective may
be locally derived, with a metaphorical change of meaning, from the plant name, his later
DECAT (s.v. brusc) favors a non-native origin of Sp. brusco.
Pre-Roman languages
37
limestone and hard earth, which he links to a pre-Roman family
represented by Basque toska ‘white clay’. One might include here
OSp. mañero ‘sterile, infertile’, linked to *MANNUARIUS
MANNUS ‘a
kind of small Gallic horse’, believed to be a pre-Roman loanword in
Latin (although specialists differ on the donor language; for discussion, see Marcos Marín 1984, 1985).24 Although MANNUS is found
outside the Iberian Peninsula, *MANNUARIUS, seems to be a local
innovation reconstructed on the basis of mañero, which has no
cognates elsewhere (cf. Ptg. maninho).
Corominas (1976: 126) identifies a number of Spanish verbs that he
believes to be of pre-Roman origin. He attributes directly to Celtic,
atollar ‘to get bogged down’, OSp. baratar ‘to deal, negotiate’ (the
source of the OSp. noun barato ‘dealing; fraud’, which in turn
acquired in the late medieval language adjectival function as barato
‘cheap, inexpensive’), OSp. agorar/(en)gorar ‘to incubate an egg,
hatch’ (on the assumption that the verb underlies the adjectives
güero/huero ‘rotten, bad’), tascar ‘to scotch, swingle (flax); to
champ (at the bit)’, tranzar ‘to break off, cut off ’, and to Basque,
barruntar ‘to spy’,25 socarrar ‘sear, scorch’, mellar, ‘nick, notch, chip,
dent’, zurrar ‘to dress leather; thrash, beat, spank’. The verbs atollar,
mellar, socarrar, and zurrar exist alongside the nouns tollo, mella,
socarra, and zurra, and it is distinctly possible that these verbs were
derived within Hispano-Latin or later in Hispano-Romance from the
corresponding nouns, themselves possibly of pre-Roman origin.
Corominas claims that Sp. virar ‘to turn’ ultimately goes back to a
Celtic base, but that the late first appearance of virar (in Columbus’s
Diary, according to CORDE) and its use as a nautical term indicate a
borrowing from Fr. virer or Ptg. virar. In both languages the verb at
issue is documented well before the first attestation of Sp. virar. The
first appearance of the verb in Columbus’s Diary may support the
proposed Portuguese origin, given the Admiral’s lengthy residence in
Portugal before coming to Spain.26 DCECH suggests (with all due
24
In the fifteenth century mañero gave way to the Latinism estéril; cf. Dworkin (1998: 2–4)
and Chapter 8, below).
25
See Harris (1972) for an analysis of the Basque etymology.
26
Note also the noun virazón ‘sudden change in the wind’, documented also in Columbus’s
Diary, probably an adaptation of Ptg. viraç~
ao. The verb virar enjoyed a certain degree of vitality
38
A history of the Spanish lexicon
caution) a possible Celtic origin for the verb buscar ‘to search, look
for’, restricted to Spanish and Portuguese. Does the rarity of Old
Spanish primary verbs of indisputably pre-Roman origin suffice to
cast doubt on, if not invalidate, the hypothesis that buscar goes back
to a still unidentified substratal base? Corominas treats as a case apart
the verb arrancar orig. ‘to defeat, disband’, mod. ‘to snatch, grab’,
declaring it to be of Sorotaptic origin (1976: 126), for which he
identified alleged Slavic and Baltic cognates. This analysis differs
completely from that offered in his first etymological dictionary,
DCELC (1954–57). Then he grouped together the Spanish verb, as
well as Gal. derrancar, arrincar, OProv. desrancar, and Cat. arrencar,
and explicitly declared the Spanish form to be an adaptation of the
Catalan or Provençal verbs, themselves denominal formations from
the family of OFr. renc/reng (mod. rang), OProv. renc, of Germanic
origin.
2.7 Cases of lexical rivalry
A number of words of pre-Roman origin existed alongside referentially similar words of Latin origin. Although cama may have originally indicated a humble rustic straw bed, it appears to have very
early become a semantic equivalent of lecho (< Lat. LECTUS), and, with
time, became the basic designation for ‘bed’ in both Spanish and
Portuguese. Medieval texts offer many more examples of lecho than
of cama. Both substratal perro and inherited can enjoyed considerable vitality in the medieval language, although instances of can far
outnumber those of perro. It is very difficult to determine whether at
this time there existed a subtle semantic distinction between the two
terms. Although the texts seem to employ both nouns as synonyms,
there may have been subtle connotative distinctions; for example, in
its earliest attestations perro is frequently used as an insult and even
as a nickname (although can is also so used, often with reference to
in fifteenth-century Portuguese (see IVPM: s.v. virar). Hubschmid (1962) adduces a lengthy
series of Spanish dialect forms that he claims are members of the virar family and which could
not conceivably result from the borrowing of a French or Portuguese nautical term. Is it
possible that the dialect forms reflect a local pre-Roman base, while standard virar is a
loanword?
Pre-Roman languages
39
Jews and Muslims).27 Does the heading “Qui matar perro o podenco o
todo can” from the Fuero de Salamanca indicate that perro once denoted
a subcategory of can? Thirteenth- and fourteenth-century legal codes
(fueros) show an interesting regional distribution of perro and can. The
former is found in texts originating in Castile and León whereas can is
almost the exclusive term in Navarro-Aragonese sources, e.g. Vidal
Mayor, Fuero de la Novenera, Fuero de Navarra, Fuero General de
Navarra. I do hasten to point out that abundant instances of can also
turn up in Castilian and Leónese fueros. The entry for can in Nebrija’s
Spanish–Latin dictionary (c.1495) equates can with perro. In his Diálogo
de la lengua (c.1535), Juan de Valdés voices his preference for can
over perro. Argote de Molina included can in his list of archaic words
appended to his 1575 edition of the fourteenth-century Conde Lucanor.
The ability of the pair perro/perra to distinguish unequivocally biological
gender and to produce a diminutive (OSp. perriello/perriella) may have
played a role in the eventual triumph of perro over can.
The initial attestations of Sp. zorro/zorra ‘fox’ are from the mid
fifteenth century and appear almost exclusively in the feminine,
employed in cancionero poetry, with reference to idle, immoral
women (cf. mod. zorra ‘prostitute’).28 Only the feminine zorra appears as an entry in Nebrija’s Spanish–Latin dictionary, where it is
equated with raposa and glossed by vulpes. DCECH may well be right
in stating that zorro/zorra secondarily became a euphemistic designation for the dreaded fox (cf. raposo so used). Old Spanish employed
gulpeja/vulpeja < VULPECULA (a diminutive of Lat. VULPES) and raposo
(still used in Portuguese), related to rabo ‘tail’, to designate the fox.
The late initial documentation of zorro leads to the question whether
this word goes back to early Roman Spain or whether it is a later
borrowing from Basque, a derivation, as noted above, challenged by
Trask (1997: 421).29 Like perro and zorro, gusano ‘worm’, abundantly
27
Montero Curiel and Montero Curiel (2005: 146–51) cite several examples of perro employed as an insult in poems found in the Cancionero de Baena. Kahane and Kahane (1960: 133
= Kahane and Kahane 1979: 45) point out that today Gasc. pèrriu designates a small ugly dog.
28
One instance of zorro used pejoratively turns up in a poem included in the Cancionero de
Antón de Montoro: “don zorro, crudo pastor” (ed. Ciceri 1990: #LXIXb, v. 32).
29
Far from convincing is the unprovable hypothesis in DCECH that zorro goes back to a
verb zorrar (whose authenticity I have been unable to verify), allegedly of onomatopoeic origin.
40
A history of the Spanish lexicon
documented since the earliest texts, has no cognates in other
Romance languages. As specialists have failed to identify a convincing etymon for this noun, DCECH suggests that gusano is of preRoman origin. Regardless of its genealogy, gusano succeeded very
early in ousting OSp. vierme, the descendant of Lat. VERMIS, which has
thrived elsewhere in the Romance languages (Ptg./It. verme, Cat.
verm, Fr. ver, Rum. vierme; see REW: #9231).
2.8 Pre-Roman loanwords and suffixal derivation
The influx of words of pre-Roman origin may have also played a role
in the genesis of some Spanish suffixes or suffix-like word-final
sequences (suffixoids). Hubschmid has sought to demonstrate that
-asco/-asca (as in chubasco ‘rain shower’, peñasco ‘rocky crag’, borrasca ‘storm at sea’) and -usco/-usca (as in pardusco ‘brownish’,
negrusco ‘blackish’, blandusco ‘somewhat bland’), were peeled off
from pre-Indo-European lexical items.30 Borrowings resulting
from contact between Basque and the Latin–Hispano-Romance continuum are responsible for the genesis in Spanish and its northern
regional varieties of the suffixal elements -arro/-arra, -orro/-orra,
-urro/-urra, which at the outset represented the adaptation to
Spanish morphological norms of Basque loanwords in -ar, -(k)or,
and -ur/-urru. Such items are found in great abundance in northern
varieties of Spanish, a category which includes early Castilian. Bilingual speakers then attached these word-final elements to Romance
bases, creating genetically hybrid formations. Such forms and the
derivational models that they provided moved south in the Middle
Ages with the Reconquest (see Pharies 2002: 104–6, 108–9, 445–7,
537–8, who offers numerous examples of dialect forms and closely
follows the historical analysis offered in Iribarren Argaiz 1995, a
University of Florida dissertation written under Pharies’ direction).
30
Malkiel (1971: 477) urges analysts to distinguish between instances where -asco, -isco, -usco
in older formations may go back to pre-Roman sources from cases where these suffixes may go
back to Latin sources (which may have been remodeled on the older elements).
Pre-Roman languages
41
2.9 Modern Basque and Spanish
Regional dialects (especially Navarese) spoken in the north of the
Iberian Peninsula contain numerous lexical items that reflect ongoing contact with Basque. The following handful of selected examples
comes from Iribarren Argaiz (1995):
Nav. abarra ‘carrasco’ < ABAR ‘branch’, Nav. aborral ‘paraje fresco
para las borregas’ < ABARO ‘refugio para el ganado’, Rioj. achurra
‘azadilla que se emplea para las labores de la escarda’ < AITZUR ‘azada
[hoe]’, Nav. apurra ‘migaja de pan’ < APUR ‘migaja’, Nav. banabarra
‘alubia o judía’ < BABANABAR ‘id’, Nav. biarra ‘necesidad’ < BIAR/BEAR
‘necesidad’, Nav. biscarro ‘un viejo bien conservado’ < BIZKOR ‘fuerte,
con salud’, Ast./Sant./Arag. cabarra ‘garrapata’ < KAPAR ‘garrapata’,
Alav. cacarro ‘agalla de roble’ < KAKO ‘rama secundaria’, Nav. cancarro ‘huesudo’ < KANKARRO ‘gandul’, Nav. cimurro ‘mezquino, roñoso, avaro’ < TXIMUR ‘frunce, arruga; tacaño’, Nav. tapurras ‘migajas’
< PAPUR ‘migaja, trozo’, Nav. tirritarra ‘diarrea’ < TIRRI-TARRA ‘onomatopéyico del cuesco’, Nav. txangarro ‘chabisque’ < TXANGAR ‘corvejón’, Nav. zaborra ‘suciedad, porquería’ < ZABOR ‘suciedad,
escombros, residuos’. Oñederra (2004: 1112–14) offers examples of
modern Basque loanwords in popular registers of the local Spanish
of San Sebastián, e.g. aldisco ‘changing’, chachu ‘somewhat silly’,
chorua ‘maddish’, chinchua ‘formal’, chucuna ‘neat, tidy; beautiful’,
hamalau ‘boastful; content’, siricar/chiricar ‘to incite, arouse’, tener
una sartara ‘to be mentally unbalanced’. Oñederra adduces instances
of what she labels “roundtrip loans”, Basque borrowings from Spanish that later re-entered the local Spanish, e.g. kaletarra ‘city dweller’
(< B. kale < Sp. calle ‘street’), itxura ‘aspect, look’ (< B. itxura < Sp.
hechura ‘form, shape’).
A small number of Basque words have entered modern Spanish.
Such items refer to political, economic, social, and material realities
of Basque life. Examples include aberzale ‘a national political and
social movement’, boina ‘beret’ (documented in the second half of the
nineteenth century in such writers as Benito Pérez Galdos, Pedro
Antonio Alarcón, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez), chapela ‘a type of beret’,
chirimiri ‘fine, gentle drizzle’, chistu ‘Basque musical instrument’,
chistulari ‘Basque music played to a chistu and small drum’, ikurriña
42
A history of the Spanish lexicon
‘official flag of the Basque Country’, maqueto ‘a non-Basquespeaking Spanish immigrant to the Basque Country’. The Royal
Spanish Academy of the Language has admitted these words into
DRAE.
2.10 Summary
There can be no doubt that many words from languages spoken in
the Iberian Peninsula prior to the arrival of the Romans entered the
regional dialects of Hispano-Latin and continued down into the
medieval and modern varieties of Hispano-Romance. The presence
of such words is one of the features that differentiates at the level of
the lexicon the variety of Latin at issue from other regional varieties
spoken throughout the Empire and that marks the beginning of the
lexical differentiation of the Hispano-Latin/Romance continuum.
The study of these lexical items is fraught with numerous difficulties,
as the historian of the language is operating with elements taken from
languages about which very little is known with any degree of
certainty, a situation which leaves room for both informed and
unbridled speculation. Often the proposal of a pre-Roman origin
for a word is the solution of last resort, which indicates that the
word is really of unknown origin. Clearly these words all entered the
recipient language, Latin, through direct oral contact with speakers of
the local indigenous languages. In light of the sociohistorical circumstances of the contact between the language of the conquerors and
the new subjects of the still nascent Roman Empire, it is not
surprising that almost all the words of pre-Roman origin refer to
concrete realities of the local terrain, flora, fauna, foods, dress, customs, etc. Although they may not form part of the so-called “core” or
“basic” vocabulary of standard Spanish or its regional dialects, many
such items continue to exist and thrive in the Romance vernaculars of
Spain. The quantity of these words certainly raises the possibility that
in many instances the speakers of the indigenous languages of the
Iberian Peninsula, who by far outnumbered the Roman administrators, soldiers, and colonists, brought with them much of their native
vocabulary as part of the process of language shift involved in the
abandonment of their mother tongues in favor of Latin, clearly the
Pre-Roman languages
43
language of political power and social prestige. In other words,
speakers of Latin may not have actually borrowed large quantities
of words from the new and unfamiliar languages with which they had
come into contact. The almost complete absence of primary verbs
and adjectives of indisputable pre-Roman origin may suffice to call
into question etymological hypotheses that propose such bases for
words falling into these two categories.
3
The Latin base of the Spanish
lexicon1
3.1 Preliminaries
Those lexical items inherited from the spoken Latin of the Roman
Empire constitute the historical core of the Spanish vocabulary. The
majority of Spanish words inherited through oral transmission from
Latin have cognates in at least one of the Romance languages spoken
outside the Iberian Peninsula. Indeed, most Romanists have argued
for the fundamental lexical unity and relative lexical stability of the
spoken Latin of the empire,2 with the understanding that, over time,
some members of a set of competing lexical items fell into disuse in
different regions while surviving in others (though usually undergoing some degree of semantic change in the process). The number
of Latin words that survive through oral transmission in all the
Romance languages is far exceeded by those whose areal distribution
is limited to a subset of the members of the language family. According to Munteanu Colán (2008: 21–2), of the approximately 6700 orally
transmitted Latin bases recorded in REW, 1300 have survived in all
the Romance languages, while 4000 live on in several Romance
languages, whereas some 1500 items are found in only one Romance
language. Stefenelli (2011: 568) notes that the Thesaurus Linguae
Latinae contains approximately 50000 entries, which indicates that
a relatively small percentage survived at all in the Romance
languages.
1
An earlier and shorter version of this chapter appeared as Dworkin (2009a).
For a discussion of the notion of lexical stability in the transition from Latin to the
Romance languages, with numerous examples and quantitative analysis, see Stefenelli (2011).
2
The Latin base
45
Spanish contains a large number of words of Latin origin that,
although widely used in Imperial Latin, are now found only in the
Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula, or have vernacular
cognates only in scattered Romance-speaking regions. In addition
to its local pre-Roman element, in what ways did the lexical component of the spoken Latin of Roman Spain differ from that of other
varieties of the language spoken throughout the vast territory of the
Roman Empire? To what extent does the lexical differentiation of
Spanish from its sister languages originate in the composition of the
vocabulary of the regional and social varieties of the spoken Latin of
the Iberian Peninsula? This chapter seeks to cast some light on these
important questions.
For some specialists, the date of the arrival of Latin is crucial to
understanding certain distinctive features of the Spanish lexicon. As
language constantly changes over time, the Latin brought into the
Iberian Peninsula by the earliest soldiers and colonists in 218 BC
doubtless contained lexical items that, with the passage of time, fell
into disuse in Rome and were no longer part of the Latin vocabulary
brought much later into Gaul (middle of the first century BC) and
Dacia (early second century AD). Some such words, which were
already archaic from the perspective of the Classical Latin of the
first century AD, had clearly taken root early in the colloquial speech
of Roman Spain. These older items, as well as many other words
typical of Republican and early Imperial spoken Latin, were not all
dislodged by later neologisms coined in and diffused from the urban
political and cultural centers of the empire such as Rome, Milan,
Lyons (ancient Lugdunum), and Trier (ancient Treveris).
For these reasons, manuals on the history of the Spanish language
often characterize the lexicon of Spanish Latin as both archaic and
conservative (e.g. Lapesa 1980: 89–96). For Bonfante (1999: 134),
“archaic” refers to the chronologically early Latin that was the starting point for Spanish and Portuguese, while “conservative” refers to
resistance to later innovations. In my view it would be more accurate
to state that the social and regional varieties of Latin spoken in the
Iberian Peninsula retained some lexical features that originated in an
earlier layer of Latinity and rejected some (but certainly not all) of the
46
A history of the Spanish lexicon
later innovations that eventually integrated themselves in Gaul and
Italy. As I shall show below, some of these neologisms probably
reached the Iberian Peninsula, but failed to win acceptance or to
oust their lexical predecessors. In addition, Latin speakers in the
Iberian Peninsula independently created local lexical innovations.
Therefore, it would be both inaccurate and misleading to declare
that the lexical (and, for that matter, non-lexical) linguistic features of
the Latin of the Iberian Peninsula reflect principally the Latin imported in the years immediately following the arrival of Roman
soldiers in 218 BC (see Adams 2007: Ch. VI). I shall also address
later in this chapter, with examples of differences between Spanish
and Portuguese on the one hand, and between Spanish and Catalan
on the other, the question of the homogeneity in vocabulary of the
spoken Latin of the Iberian Peninsula.
3.2 Latin lexical items limited to Hispano- and Luso-Romance
The following Spanish and Portuguese words either have no orally
transmitted cognates outside the Iberian Peninsula or have congeners
only in Sardinian, Sicilian, and/or central and southern varieties of
Italian, all territories where Latin was introduced several decades
before the arrival of the Romans in the Iberian Peninsula. Many of
these items in all likelihood go back to Latin bases brought into the
Iberian Peninsula by the first waves of Roman occupiers, while the
others represent retentions of words eventually replaced by neologisms elsewhere in the ROMANIA, a process which Adams (2007: 31,
and throughout) refers to as lexical shrinkage:
acechar (OSp. assechar), Ptg. asseitar ‘to lie in wait for, to ambush’ < *ASSECTARE (Cl.
ASSECTARI ‘to attend to, follow, accompany’), ajeno, Ptg. alheio ‘of another’ < ALIENUS
‘other’, asar, Ptg. assar ‘to roast’ < ASSARE ‘to roast’, atar ‘to bind’ < APTARE ‘to fit,
accommodate, adjust’, ave, Ptg. ave ‘bird’ (also OCat. au, Sard. ae ‘eagle’) < AVIS
‘bird’, barrer ‘to sweep’ < VERRERE ‘to scrape, sweep, brush, scour’, cabeza, Ptg. cabeça
‘head’ < CAPITIA ‘hole in a tunic through which the head passes’, callos ‘tripe’ (found
in such early Roman writers as Plautus and Nevius) < CALLUM ‘hardened thick skin
on animal bodies’, centeno, Ptg. centeio ‘rye’ < CENTENUM ‘a kind of grain’ (see Adams
2007: 553–4) , cerraja ‘corn sow thistle’ < SARRALIA ‘type of wild lettuce’ (Adams 2007:
239–40), cieno ‘mud, slime’ < CAENUM ‘dirt, filth, mud’, cojo, Ptg. coxo ‘lame’ < COXUS
‘lame’, OSp. collaço (mod. -azo) ‘type of farm laborer; child who shares a wet nurse
The Latin base
47
with another’ < COLLACTEUS ‘foster brother’, Sp./Ptg. comer ‘to eat’ < COMEDERE ‘to eat
up entirely’,3 denostar ‘to insult, offend < *DEHONESTARE, feo, Ptg. feio ‘ugly’ < FOEDUS
‘repugnant’, hablar ‘to speak’ (OSp. fablar), Ptg. falar < FABULARI ‘to speak’,4 heder,
Ptg. feder ‘to stink’ < F(O)ETERE ‘to stink’, hormaza ‘brick wall’, hormazo ‘heap of
stones’ < FORMACEUS ( FORMA),5 lamer, Ptg. lamber ‘to lick’ (cf. Sard. làmbere) <
6
LAMBERE ‘to lick’, lejos ‘far’ < LAXUS ‘loose; spacious’, Sp./Ptg. lindar ‘to border on’ <
LIMITARE ‘to enclose within a boundary’, loza, Ptg. loça ‘fine earthenware pottery’ <
LAUTIA ‘magnificence, splendor’, OSp. madurgar (mod. madrugar), Ptg. madrugar ‘to
get up early’ < *MATURICARE (MATURUS ‘early’), medir ‘to measure’ < MÉTIRE (Cl.
7
METIRI), OSp. pescudar ‘to investigate’ < PERSCRUTARE (Cl. -ARI) ‘to examine, investigate’, pierna, Ptg. perna ‘leg’ < PERNA ‘ham’,8 porfía ‘stubbornness; dispute, challenge’
< PERFIDIA ‘betrayal’, preguntar, Ptg. perguntar ‘to ask, to question’ < PERCUNTARE ‘to
inquire, interrogate, investigate’, quemar, Ptg. queimar ‘to burn’ (ultimately traceable
to CREMARE?; cf. Arag./Cat. cremar), recudir ‘to respond, recount’ < RECUTERE, reo,
orig. ‘accused’, later ‘criminal’ < REUS ‘defendant, prisoner’, rostro, Ptg. rosto ‘face’ <
9
ROSTRUM ‘bird’s beak; animal snout’, seso, Ptg. siso ‘sense, intelligence’, trigo ‘wheat’ <
10
TRITICUM ‘wheat’, vacío, Ptg. vazio ‘empty’ < VACIVUS ‘empty’ (Adams 2007: 392–3).
One might add here the noun COMEDO (gen. COMEDONIS) ‘glutton’ if it were indeed the
etymon of Sp. comilón, Ptg. comilão ‘glutton, heavy eater’, both attested for the first time in the
sixteenth century. This late initial dating calls into question direct descent from COMEDO. It
seems more reasonable to view comilón as a deverbal creation based on the verbal stem of
comer, created in the same way as, among others, dormilón ‘sleepy-head’
dormir, and
rompilón
romper (cf. Malkiel 1958: 153). Indeed, comilão may well be a borrowing from
Spanish.
4
On the later vitality of FABULARI in Latin, see Adams 2007: 383–5. Scattered Romance
reflexes turn up in the hapax faular found in Old Provençal and the Old Bolognese noun
fablança (see FEW: III, 345–6, and Adams, above, who suggests that FABULARI provided the
FABELLA.
model for the coining of FABELLARE
5
For discussion of FORMACEUS as used by Isidore of Seville, see Adams (2007: 237–8) and
references therein.
6
According to REW (#4918), metathesized *LASCUM survived in varieties of Italo- and
Gallo-Romance.
7
Wagner (DES: s.v. medire) suggests that the Sardinian verb is a borrowing from Spanish
and is rarely used. The favored word is Log. mesurare, Campid. mesurai.
8
Although PERNA has survived in other Romance varieties, its use as the designation of the
‘human leg’ is peculiar to Spanish and Portuguese; see Adams (2007: 389–91), and FEW (s.v.
PERNA).
9
Adams (2007: 385–9) seeks to demonstrate that the semantic history of ROSTRUM in
Spanish does not necessarily reflect the use of that word in early Latinity. The noun also
turns up in Petronius and in African writers.
10
Wagner (1953) offers examples of such forms taken from the conservative rural dialects of
northern Spain; selected examples include Ast. dimir ‘to knock fruit off trees with long poles’ <
DEMERE ‘to take off, take away, remove, subtract’; Arag./JudSp. concieto ‘pregnant woman’s
cravings’ < CONCEPTUS ‘conception (of a child)’. A careful etymological analysis of the lexicon of
the Romance varieties of Asturias, León and Upper Aragon is sure to yield further lexical relics
of the Latinity of the Iberian Peninsula; for some examples, see Malkiel (1949, 1954, 1955: 63–8).
3
48
A history of the Spanish lexicon
I wish to stress here that, although the Spanish and Portuguese
words listed above seem not to have cognates in the Romance
languages spoken outside the Iberian Peninsula, the Latin forms
were widely used throughout the Roman Empire and were not
peculiar to the Latin of the Iberian Peninsula. In the Imperial period
it is inaccurate to speak of a Hispano-Latin that lexically differed
significantly from other contemporary varieties of the language.
Roman writers born and raised in Spain, such as Columella, Martial,
and Seneca, wrote in an urbane Roman Latin that did not betray their
provincial origins.
Antonio Tovar has written extensively on the alleged archaic
nature of the lexicon of Latin as spoken in the Iberian Peninsula.
This scholar has taken Latin texts written in the first two centuries of
the Roman presence in Spain by authors who spent time in the
Iberian Peninsula and has mined them for lexical items that appear
rarely in Classical Latin and have left reflexes in Spanish and Portuguese. Tovar (1968a, 1969a) notes that the De agricultura of Cato the
Elder, who arrived in Hispania in 195 BC, contains such technical
terms as LABRUM ‘basin, tub’, MUSTACEUS ‘must-cake’, POCILLUM ‘small
cup’, TRAPETUM ‘olive mill’, VERVACTUM ‘fallow field’, ultimately the
source of Sp. lebrillo ‘washbasin, deep pan’, mostachón ‘type of small
sugar bun’, trapiche ‘olive mill’ (also present in southern Italian
dialects and Sicilian), pocillo ‘vessel sunk in the ground in oil mills
and wine presses’, and barbecho, Ptg. barbeito ‘fallow field’ (also Log.
barvattu). Cato also employs MATERIA with its original meaning
‘wood’, a sense preserved today only in Sp. madera, Ptg. madeira,
as well as in medieval Gallo-Romance; see FEW (fasc. 78, s.v. MATERIA). The father of Roman satire, Lucilius (180–103 BC), who was
present in Hispania at the siege of Numantia (134 BC), employs
ROSTRUM ‘snout, beak’, the source of Sp. rostro ‘face’, in an insulting
way to refer to the human face, GUMIA, which survives as Spanish
gomia ‘bogeyman; glutton’, and DEMAGIS, the source of Sp. demás, Ptg.
demais, Cat. demés,11 PASSUS, past-participle of PANDERE, and source of
the OSp. adverb paso ‘slow; in a low voice’, and of the noun pasa
11
On DEMAGIS and GUMIA, see Adams (2007: 734–77 and 383, resp.).
The Latin base
49
‘raisin’ < UVA PASSA (Tovar 1969b). Certain older words typical of
Hispanic Latinity that have survived into the Romance vernacular
turn up in later Roman writers of Spanish origin, e.g. Seneca, Columella: APTARE > atar ‘to bind’ (Tovar 1968b), VULTURNUS ‘south wind’ >
bochorno ‘extreme heat’, BIFERA ‘bearing fruit twice a year; twofold’ >
breva ‘early fig’, MANCIPIUM ‘legal formal possession of a thing’ > Sp./
Ptg. mancebo ‘young person’; orig. ‘slave, servant’ (Tovar 1968b),
TRITICUM > trigo ‘wheat’.
The above examples, however, do not necessarily demonstrate the
archaic nature of the lexicon of the regional and social varieties of
Latin spoken in Spain. Adams (2007: 370–402) notes that almost all
the Latin words cited here also appear in texts of Republican and/or
Imperial Latinity written outside the confines of the Iberian Peninsula. What sets these items apart is their survival only in the Romance
languages of the Iberian Peninsula (or in the Iberian Peninsula as well
as scattered areas such as southern Italy, Sardinia, and Dacia), a
phenomenon that may result from lexical selection at a much later
date in the Latin–Romance evolutionary continuum. The use of the
term “archaic” in this context is dangerous. It implies a point of
comparison with some other standard or norm. For the speaker of
Latin or Romance in the Iberian Peninsula who employed the above
words, these lexical items were an integral part of everyday speech
and, in the relevant local speech communities, were not archaic
throwbacks to the language of an earlier time.12 They are archaic
only if the point of comparison is the lexical selections eventually
made elsewhere (such as the future homes of Gallo- and ItaloRomance).
3.3 Etymological controversies
Several other words found exclusively in the Iberian Peninsula, all
long-standing etymological cruxes, merit comment here, as some of
them may hark back to the earliest Latinity of Hispania and Lusitania. Most scholars have linked the verb tomar, found only in Spanish
and Portuguese, to Lat. AUTUMARE ‘to state, affirm’. This base presents
12
Cf. the discussion of the alleged archaic nature of New World Spanish in Lerner (1974).
50
A history of the Spanish lexicon
too many serious phonetic and semantic difficulties to be convincing
as the etymology of tomar. Malkiel (1976a)13 has proposed AESTUMARE,
the documented historical predecessor of AESTIMARE ‘to value, evaluate’, as the source of tomar. On the basis of a passage in Paulus ex
Festo, he argues that speakers of early Latin associated the initial
syllable of AESTUMARE with the noun AES ‘copper, bronze, money;
payment, reward’. If speakers (incorrectly) analyzed AESTUMARE as a
compound, they conceivably could have extracted a verb *TUMARE
before older AESTUMARE gave way to AESTIMARE (whose Spanish reflex
estimar is a Latinism, documented abundantly in the medieval language; OSp. asmar, esmar, OPtg. osmar are Gallicisms < OFr. asmer,
esmer, rather than native reflexes of AESTIMARE). Various unconvincing reconstructed Latin bases have been proposed to account for
OSp. comborça, combrueça, comblueça ‘concubine’. DCECH advocated a Celtic *COMBORTIA/COMBROTTIA. Malkiel (1985) chose to posit a
Latin *CONVORTIA, a conceivable deverbal noun based on documented
VORTERE, the predecessor of VERTERE, a verb family which left an
abundant progeny in the Romance languages. Two rival hypotheses
seek to explain the origin of the verb matar ‘to kill’, restricted to
Spanish and Portuguese. Some scholars, following the lead of Friedrich Diez (1853), derive matar from the archaic Latin verb MACTARE
‘to offer a sacrifice’14, while a number of distinguished Romanists,
agreeing with a hypothesis launched by the Lusist Carolina Michaëlis
de Vasconcelos (1893–4), argued for the Arabic origin of the Spanish
and Portuguese verb. Michaëlis de Vasconcelos sought to derive
matar from a key Arabic term associated with the game of chess,
MAT ‘he is dead’ (cf. Sp. jaquemate, E. checkmate). DCECH views OFr.
mater ‘vanquish, defeat’, OFr. mat ‘downtrodden, defeated; dull (of
color)’, and It. matto ‘silly, foolish’ as cognates of matar, and seeks
(unconvincingly) to link all these items to a rare and colloquial
13
Earlier Malkiel (1975a: 264–7) had supported deriving tomar from a Gothic base, echoing
the suggestion made by Diez (1853). Malkiel (1990a) offers the reader a critical survey of
previous etymological conjectures on the origin of tomar.
14
Actually this derivation of matar was first proposed by Sebastian de Covarrubias in his
Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611), and was accepted by the compilers of the socalled “Diccionario de autoridades” (1726–39), the first dictionary issued by the newly-founded
Real Academia Española de la Lengua.
The Latin base
51
adjective MAT(T)US. Although the derivation of matar from MACTARE
presents no problems on the semantic side, this etymology has been
attacked on formal grounds, since MACTARE would have been expected
to yield Sp. *mechar, Ptg.*meitar through processes of regular sound
change. I have presented evidence (Dworkin 2003) which may demonstrate that in some varieties of Republican Latin spoken in the
Iberian Peninsula, MACTARE may indeed have been flanked by *MAT15
TARE, which, over time, would have yielded matar. Sp. colmena and
Ptg. colmeia ‘beehive’ lack cognates outside the Iberian Peninsula. On
the basis of Ast. cormena, Malkiel (1984) linked colmena and colmeia
to Lat. CRUMENA ‘a type of purse’ (whose shape was reminiscent of a
beehive). Unlike AESTUMARE, VORTERE, and MACTARE, CRUMENA, attested
as early as Plautus, enjoyed a longer life in Latin, but still may
represent a relic of that first layer of Latinity brought to the Iberian
Peninsula. If OSp. encobar ‘to obstruct, to submit to’16 indeed continues Lat. INCUBARE as proposed by Colón (1958; reprinted 2002:
307–332), it may represent the sole orally transmitted Romance reflex
of the Latin verb. If these conjectures are valid, the words discussed
above are further examples of Spanish lexical items whose origins
seem to lie in the earliest lexical layers of the Latin brought to the
Iberian Peninsula.
3.4 Lexical survivals in Spanish, Portuguese, and Rumanian
A small number of Latin words have survived in the Romance
varieties of the Iberian Peninsula and in Rumanian, in some cases
also leaving scattered traces elsewhere in the former Roman Empire.
The Iberian Peninsula and Dacia represent the western and eastern
extremes of the territories of the Roman Empire where Latin survived
as a spoken language, the provinces geographically furthest removed
from the centers of linguistic diffusion. Whereas the Iberian Peninsula was colonized very early in the history of Roman expansion,
15
While seemingly unaware of my 2003 essay, Oroz (2007: 72–82) presents in greater detail
phonetic arguments and textual evidence from Latin sources to support the derivation of matar
from MACTARE.
16
Kasten and Cody (2001: 277) treat the examples of encobar found in Alfonsine texts and
the one instance found in the Libro de buen amor as genetically distinct homonyms.
52
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Dacia was not occupied until the first decade of the second century
AD, and was among the first territories abandoned by Rome as the
empire began to contract. Lat. AFFLARE ‘to blow or breathe on’, lives on
in Sp. hallar (OSp. fallar), Ptg. achar, and Rum. afla ‘to find’ as well as
scattered southern Italian dialects. Lat. ANGUSTUS ‘narrow’ gave Sp./
Ptg. angosto and Rum. îngust; Lat. ARENA ‘sand’ survives as Sp. arena,
Ptg. areia, Rum. arina; Lat. FORMOSUS ‘shapely’ yields Sp. hermoso
(OSp. fermoso), Ptg. formoso, Rum. frumos ‘pretty’; Lat. FERVERE ‘to
boil’ is the source of Sp hervir (OSp. fervir), Ptg. ferver, Rum fierbe;
Lat. HUMERUS ‘shoulder’ became Sp. hombro, Ptg. ombro, Rum. umăr;
Lat. CASEUS ‘cheese’ lives on as Sp. queso, Ptg. queijo, Rum. caş (as well
as Sard./Sic. casu). Sp. yegua, Ptg. égoa, Cat. egua, Rum. iapă ‘mare’
are the sole modern survivors of EQUA ‘mare’ (cf. also OFr. ieve). The
reflexes of Lat. MENSA ‘table’ continue to designate that item in
Spanish, Portuguese (mesa) and Rumanian (masă), whereas Lat.
TABULA, ‘plank’ became the standard designation for table in French
(table) and Italian (tavola).17 Although some of the phonetic details
require further study, it seems reasonable to claim that Sp. bostezar
(OSp. bocezar) ‘to yawn’ goes back to Lat. OSCITARE ‘to open the
mouth wide, to gape’, which has survived in Rum. uşta (see Walsh
1997, REW: s.v. OSCITARE). Lat. PETERE ‘to seek’ is the source of Sp./Ptg.
pedir ‘to ask for, request’, Rum. peți ‘to woo, seek in marriage’. Lat.
ROGARE yielded Sp./Ptg. rogar, Rum. ruga ‘to beg’ (while its reflex OFr.
rover gave way to Fr. prier).
The conclusions to be drawn from the preservation of some Latin
lexical items only in the Iberian Peninsula and in Dacia have to be
weighed carefully. In formulating his famous and controversial
norme spaziale (‘areal norms’), the Italian Romanist Matteo Bartoli
stressed that aree laterali (‘marginal areas’), geographically far
removed from the centers of culture and linguistic innovation,
tended to preserve earlier linguistic stages. Within the context of
the linguistic history of the Roman Empire, Gaul and Italy constituted the central area and the cradle of linguistic innovations,
whereas the Iberian Peninsula and Dacia represented lateral areas.
17
MENSA lives on in French as moise ‘carpenter’s worktable’, and has also left reflexes in such
isolated areas as S.It./Sard. meza, Engad. maisa (REW: #5497; FEW).
The Latin base
53
Instances of apparently conservative lexical retention in the Iberian
Peninsula and in Dacia were among Bartoli’s prime examples in support of his hypothesis (1925).18 The mere fact that the Iberian Peninsula
represents the western end of the continental territory of the empire
does not mean that it was totally isolated from its cultural and linguistic
centers. The Romans had undertaken the conquest of southern France
(Gallia Narbonensis) in 121 BC to provide a land link between Italy and
the Iberian Peninsula. Although the Iberian Peninsula was easily
reached by sea from Italy, the spread of linguistic features over time
requires a land route over which there is constant linguistic contact that
allows the innovations to flourish and spread (Bonfante 1999: 125).
Nevertheless, the sea can also be an important route of linguistic
diffusion (Kahane and Kahane 1951).
The history of Roman Spain shows that this territory participated
actively in the life of the empire and was not an isolated, forgotten
province. Beginning with Diocletian’s Tetrarchy reform in AD 293,
Hispaniae became the name of one of the four dioceses—governed by
a vicarius—of the prætorian prefecture Galliae (“the Gauls”, also
comprising the provinces of Gaul, Germania, and Britannia), after
the abolition of the imperial Tetrarchs under the Western Emperor.
The dioceses comprised the five peninsular Iberian provinces (Baetica, Gallaecia, and Lusitania, each under a governor styled Consularis; and Carthaginiensis and Tarraconensis, each under a Praeses),
along with the Insulae Baleares (also under a Praeses). The alleged
conservative nature of some elements of the Latinity underlying the
Spanish lexicon does not necessarily result from geographical or
cultural isolation.
3.5 Lexical innovations
To judge by the lexical choices observable in varieties of Gallo- and
Italo-Romance, the Latin bases which live on in the Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula were replaced elsewhere by neologisms, some of which must have entered Hispano-Latin but failed to
18
For a critical overview of Bartoli’s theories, as well as references to contemporary critical
reactions, see Iordan et al. (1970: 273–8).
54
A history of the Spanish lexicon
take root. Outside the Iberian Peninsula, FABULARE gave way to PARABOLARE ‘to recount a parable’, as can be seen in Fr. parler, It. parlare.
However, since Sp. palabra ‘word’ goes back to PARABOLA ‘allegorical
tale’, it is not unreasonable to assume that the word family of PARABOLARE was present in Hispano-Latin (OSp. parlar is a GalloRomance loanword). Many parts of the Roman Empire chose to
replace CAPUT ‘head’ as an anatomical designation (although the
Latin word has survived with secondary meanings, as in Sp. cabo
‘headland, cape; end’). One of the most widespread substitutes was
the noun TESTA ‘earthenware pot’, which, through a jocular metaphor,
acquired the meaning ‘skull’ (documented in Latin) and then ‘head’;
witness Fr. tête, It. testa. The presence and vitality in Old Spanish
through the end of the fifteenth century of tiesta ‘head’ shows that
Lat. TESTA so used must have been present in spoken Hispano-Latin
but failed to dislodge older cabeza (OSp. cabeça) < CAPITIA ‘hole for
the head in a tunic’, a member of the family of Lat. CAPUT.
The local reflexes of AUDIRE fell into disuse in Medieval French
(OFr. oïr) and became obsolete in Italian (udire), and were replaced
by the reflexes of INTENDERE and SENTIRE, namely Fr. entendre and It.
sentire respectively, whereas in Spanish, native entender ‘to understand’ and sentir ‘to feel’ have never threatened Sp. oír, Ptg. ouvir.
This change probably occurred within the recorded histories of
French and Italian rather than within the Imperial Latin period.
Although Sp. miedo, Ptg. medo ‘fear’ reflect conservation of older
METUS, PAVOR (cf. Fr. peur, It. paura) also entered the Latin of the
Iberian Peninsula, as can be seen in OSp. pavor ‘fear’, despavorido
‘fearful’. Whereas AFFLARE (perhaps used metaphorically as a hunting
term with the meaning ‘to sniff out the trail’) ousted INVENIRE and
REPERIRE as the basic verb ‘to find’, the innovation TROPARE, the
probable source of Fr. trouver, It. trovare (see DELF and DHLF: s.v.
trouver), may never have found its way into the spoken Latin of the
Iberian Peninsula; OSp. trobar ‘to find’, abundantly documented in
medieval texts, is a Gallicism. There is no evidence that colloquial
MANDUCARE ‘to chew’, the source of Fr. manger, It. mangiare, Cat.
menjar ‘to eat’ (the latter two, in all likelihood, Gallicisms; cf. OIt.
manicare), ever threatened the local reflexes of COMEDERE.
The Latin base
55
Nevertheless, MANDUCARE may have been known to speakers in the
Iberian Peninsula; this verb appears frequently in the Peregrinatio
Aetheriae, probably written in the late fourth century, possibly by a
Spanish nun (Väänänen 1987: 155, and, displaying greater caution,
Adams 2007: 342–53). In Gallo- and Italo-Romance, FORMOSUS
‘shapely’ gave way to BELLUS (originally a diminutive of BONUS
‘good’), as can be seen in Fr. beau/belle, It. bello; however Sp. bello
is in all likelihood a borrowing from southern Gallo-Romance (see
Chapter 6).19 Latin CAECUS ‘blind’ survived in the Iberian Peninsula as
Sp. ciego, Ptg. cego, and did not give way to reflexes of ORBUS and the
phrase AB OCULIS (cf. Cat. orb, N.It. orbo, Fr. aveugle). Despite the
presence of AVIS, the local reflexes of PASSER ‘sparrow’, namely Sp.
pájaro, Ptg. pássaro, did not have to fend off the innovative diminutive AVICELLUS, the source of Fr. oiseau, It. uccello, as the general label
for ‘bird’.
The spoken Latin of the Iberian Peninsula also produced local
innovations with regard to lexical selection or semantic evolution.
Two such cases were studied by Jud (1925–6), essays viewed as classics
in the annals of Romance historical linguistics. The Latin verb EXTINGUERE ‘to extinguish, put out (a flame, light)’ did not survive in the
Latin of the Iberian Peninsula. Speakers turned to the verb PACARE ‘to
pacify, quiet’, which underwent an innovative semantic change; its
prefixed reflex, apagar, is the basic verb meaning ‘to extinguish’ in
Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan. Since the verb is so used in all
three languages, it seems reasonable to project this innovation back
onto the Latinity of the Iberian Peninsula. The same seems true for
the Spanish and Portuguese verbs (d)espertar ‘to wake up, to awaken’,
which represents a local development, namely the creation of a verb
EXPERGISCI ‘to
*EXPERTARE from the Latin past-participle EXPERTUS
awaken’, vis-à-vis the triumph in Italo- and Gallo-Latin of EXVIGILARE
(cf. It. svegliare, Fr. éveiller) and of the family of EXCITARE in
Rumanian, southern Italian varieties, Rhaeto-Romance, and Sardinian. Jud also adduces as further examples of lexical innovation in the
19
Regular oral transmission of BELLUS in Hispano-Romance would have yielded *biello,
which would have reduced to *billo; cf. SELLA > OSp. siella > silla ‘saddle, seat’, CASTELLUM > OSp.
castiello > castillo ‘castle’.
56
A history of the Spanish lexicon
spoken Latin of the Iberian Peninsula the coining of the phrase
(TEMPUS) VERANUM ‘spring time’, the source of Sp. verano, Ptg. verão
‘summer’20 (as opposed to the conservation of Lat. AESTATEM, as in Fr.
été, It. estate; cf. also [TEMPUS] AESTIVUM > Sp. estío, Cat. estiu). This
situation led Jud on one occasion to wax poetic about the dual nature
of Hispano-Latin, conservative and at the same time, innovative:
“Toute bonne mère de famille sait apprécier la haute valeur
d’une tradition saine et auguste qui résume les experiences recueillies
par les ancêtres; mais elle doit savoir appliquer les réformes nécessaires là où c’est indispensable” (1925: 191). The abundant documentation of OSp./OPtg. cras ‘tomorrow’ indicates that the Iberian
Peninsula joined Sardinia (Log. kras) and some southern Italian
regions (krai) in preserving Lat. CRAS. In Spanish and Portuguese
cras eventually gave way to the descendant of what seems to be a local
Latin lexical innovation, namely *MANEANA (cf. Sp. mañana, Ptg.
amanhã ‘tomorrow; morning’), derived from adverbial MANE
‘(early) in the morning’, which survived in Rumanian as mîine
and in French and Italian as demain, domani < DE MANE (note also
OIt. mane ‘morning’).
The spoken Latin of the Iberian Peninsula seems to have followed
its own course with regard to the lexicalization of several phrases
involving a head noun and a following adjectival modifier. In the
phrase FRATER GERMANUS the adjective indicated that the male siblings
in question had the same biological mother and father. Whereas
forms based on FRATER and SOROR went on to become the basic
word for ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ in French and Italian (Fr. frère, soeur,
It. fratello, sorella), the three Romance languages of the Iberian
Peninsula substantivized the adjective GERMANUS/GERMANA, giving
rise to Sp. hermano/hermana, Ptg. irmão/irmã, Cat. germà/germana.
Early Medieval Latin charters from Italy show a similar evolution of
GERMANUS which failed to take root (Aebischer 1937). The phrase
AGNUS CORDUS (found in Varro and Pliny) referred to a lamb born
late in the season. Throughout most of the Roman Empire Lat.
20
In medieval and early modern Spanish verano designated the months corresponding to late
spring and early summer, while estío referred to the remaining months of summer. Originally,
primavera was used for the beginning months of that season (DCECH: s.v. verano).
The Latin base
57
21
was replaced by its diminutive AGNELLUS (It. agnello, Prov.
agnel, Cat. anyell, Fr. agneau, Rum. miel). In the spoken Latin of the
Iberian Peninsula AGNUS CORDUS was replaced by *CORDARIUS, which,
as a noun, gave rise to Sp. cordero, Ptg. cordeiro (Cat. corder is a
borrowing from Spanish). In like fashion speakers of Hispano-Latin
eliminated the noun in the phrase (NON) NATA RES, lit. ‘not a born
thing’, creating the pronominal negator Sp./Ptg. nada ‘nothing’.
Whereas Lat. MALA/MELA lived on in various Romance languages as
the name of the apple (It. melo, Log. mela), the Latin of the Iberian
Peninsula opted for the label MALA MAT(T)IANA (with the adjective
referring to a certain Caius Mattius, a reputed horticulturist
described by Pliny, XV, 49), and subsequently substantivized the
qualifier, giving rise to Sp. manzana (OSp. maçana), Ptg. macã.
The noun POMA also was present in the spoken Latin of the Iberian
Peninsula; Aebischer (1948: 102) cites the frequency of the noun
pomares in ninth- and tenth-century documents. There are scattered
instances of poma in Medieval Spanish sources,22 although the noun
seems to have indicated other fruits and never became the basic term
for ‘apple’ outside the Catalan region (cf. Cat. poma ‘apple’). The
Tesoro of Covarrubias (1611) glossed poma as ‘manzana’, but then
went on to describe its use as a term to denote various sorts of appleshaped glass containers and flasks.
Although Lat. QUAERERE ‘to seek’ survived in most Romance languages, only in Spanish and Portuguese did it acquire the meaning ‘to
want’, and only in the former did it come to mean ‘to love’. There is
no strong evidence that Lat. VOLERE (Cl. VELLE) survived as an independent verb in the spoken Latin of the central and western Iberian
AGNUS
Lat. AGNUS survived in Northern Ptg. anho, Gal. año; note also Sp. añino ‘yearling lamb’,
which can be reasonably analyzed as a diminutive based on *año < AGNUS or año ‘year’. Rare
OSp. añel is a borrowing from Old French. Lat. CORDUS was substantivized and lives on in
Tusc. cordesco, Neap. cordisko, and Cal. curdascu ‘late-born lamb’ (see Rohlfs 1979: 195–6).
22
La granada es el fruto de un arbol que ha unas mançanas llenas de grano por de dentro &
son ordenadas debaxo de la covertura muy ordenadamente & por esto es llamada poma o
maçana de granada segund dize Isidoro a los .xviii. libros. (Libro de las propiedades de las cosas);
njngun ombre no sabe la fin nj supo por que dios lo leuo do el qujso e el sera testigo al dia del
judicio e dizen algunos que el es en logar mjsmo de do adam fue gitado la hora quel antiguo
enemjgo del humanal linage lo decibio por la poma o fruyto vedado que comjo (Libro del
Tesoro. Girona, Catedral 20a5); ca la gentileza que es prestada es como la poma cortada, que
muestra de fuera aquello que non es de dentro (Cancionero de Juan Fernández de Íxar).
21
58
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Peninsula. Can the rare OSp. indefinite forms sivuelqual, sivuelque
‘whatever, any’, sivuelquando ‘whenever’ (not attested after the early
thirteenth century) be interpreted as the last vestiges of an Old
Spanish verb cognate with Cat. voldre/voler ‘to want’ (cf. Cat.
qualsevol)?
In some instances the lexical innovations took the form of novel
derivatives of widespread Latin bases. Unique to the Latin of the Iberian
AMARUS ‘bitter’, which, with
Peninsula is the diminutive AMARELLUS
reference to the skin color attributed to an excess of bile, came to give
Sp. amarillo, Ptg. amarelo ‘yellow’. Speakers of Hispano-Latin coined
from CINIS ‘ash’ a derivative *CINISIA, the source of Sp. ceniza, Ptg. cinza
‘ash’ (as opposed to Fr. cendre, It. cenere, direct descendants of the Latin
primitive). Alongside Latin COR, the source of OSp. cuer, Fr.coeur, and
It. cuore ‘heart’, the language created a derivative (whose exact nature is
controversial) that underlies Sp. corazón, Ptg. coração. A derivative of
Lat. NAS ‘nose’, namely NARICAE ‘nostrils’ (cf. It. narice, Cat. nariu, so
used) came to designate the ‘nose’, as can be seen in Sp./Ptg. nariz.
Possibly unique to the Iberian Peninsula is the coining of the verb
*ORDINIARE
ORDO, which gave rise to Sp. ordeñar, Ptg. ordenhar ‘to
milk’. However Walsh (1987) challenges the need for the hypothetical
base and sees in the Spanish verb an early borrowing from Portuguese
(see Chapter 9).
3.6 Lexical diversity in Ibero-Romance
What was the extent of lexical diversity within the spoken Latin of the
Iberian Peninsula? Following the lead taken by Menéndez Pidal in his
Orígenes del español, Hispanists have operated with the fundamental
lexical unity of Hispano-Latin, a view challenged over the years by
Germán Colón (e.g. 1976, 2002). Colón points to a number of lexical
differences between Spanish and Portuguese on the one hand, and
Catalan on the other. An examination of the lexical unity of HispanoLatin must take into account the presence of given lexical items in the
various regional varieties of the language and possible local variation
in the semantic scope of the word at issue. Do the lexical differences
of Catalan with respect to its Peninsular neighbors result from
choices made by the speech community during the Roman period,
The Latin base
59
or do they reflect selections among competing variants made later in
the history of pre-literary Catalan under the concomitant heavy
influence of southern Gallo-Romance?
In many cases the Latin etymon of the relevant Catalan form lives
on (perhaps with a different meaning) in Spanish and Portuguese.
Some examples: Cat. nebot ‘nephew’ goes back to Lat. NEPOS, the
source of Sp. nieto, Ptg. neto ‘grandson’, the basic meaning of the
Latin etymon. In addition to Cat. estiu ‘summer’, AESTIVUS also gave
off Sp. estío ‘summer’ (today a literary word alongside popular
verano). Lat. VESPERA, the etymon of Cat. vespre ‘evening’, also produced Sp. víspera (OSp. viéspera). Although Cat. prender ‘to take’ is
the semantic equivalent of Sp./Ptg. tomar, its Latin base, PRAEHENDERE,
lives on with a different semantic range in Sp./Ptg. prender. Spanish
and Portuguese contain cognates of Cat. demanar and pregar. The
following list offers selected examples of differing lexical choices
between Catalan on the one hand and Spanish and Portuguese on
the other. The Catalan lexical items line up well with their French
cognates (cousin, neveu, été, vêpres, matin, poêle, lit, oiseau, prune,
prendre, vouloir, prier, demander, parler, manger).
Cat.
Sp.
Ptg.
cosí
primo
primo
nebot
sobrino
sobrinho
estiu
verano
verão
vespre
tarde
tarde
matí
mañana
manhã
paella
sartén
sartã
llit
cama
cama
ocell
pájaro
pássaro
pruna
ciruela
ameixa
prendre
tomar
tomar
voler
querer
querer
pregar
rezar
rezar
demanar
preguntar
perguntar
parlar
hablar
falar
menjar
comer
comer
60
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Colón (1976: 144–5) lists several Latin bases that, in his view, left
orally transmitted reflexes only in Catalan: CATARRHUS > cadarn ‘cold’,
CONFIGERE > confegir ‘join together’, CONGEMINARE > conjuminar ‘to
arrange, adjust’, DELIRIUM > deler ‘strong desire’, IGNORARE > enyorar
‘to miss, feel nostalgia for’ (borrowed into modern Spanish as añorar), INDAGARE > enagar ‘incite’, ODIARE > ujar ‘to tire’, PACIFICARE >
apaivagar’ to pacify’, REPUDIARE > rebutjar ‘to reject’, *TARDATIONE >
tardaó ‘autumn’.
There seems to have been a high degree of lexical unity among the
varieties of Latin that underlie Spanish and Portuguese. With regards
to words of Latin origin, differences between these languages usually
reflect choices made later in the history of both languages. For example, whereas Portuguese has retained esquecer ‘to forget’, its Old
Spanish cognate escaecer (usually found in texts from western
Spain) has disappeared.23 Although preto continues to be the basic
Portuguese word for ‘black’, OSp. prieto is rarely used in that way.
Silva Neto (1952: 269–70) offers a handful of examples of words that, in
the Iberian Peninsula, live on through oral transmission only in
Portuguese (and, in some cases, in neighboring Galician and varieties
of Asturian): Ptg. eido < ADITUS, OPtg. fornigar < FORNICARE, OPtg.
forniço < FORNICIUM, Ptg. colmo, Ast. cuelmo ‘stem’ < CULMUS ‘stalk,
stem’, Gal. domear ‘to tame’ < DOMINARE ‘to tame’ (cf. Sp. domar ‘to
tame’ < DOMARE), Ptg./Gal. adro ‘patio, churchyard’ < ATRIUM ‘entrance
room’, Gal. asomade/asemade ‘suddenly, finally’ < SUMMATIM ‘slightly,
summarily’, Gal. con ‘large rock’ < CONUS ‘cone’, Ptg. esbuxar ‘to move
from a place’ < EXPULSARE, Ptg. noitibó ‘nocturnal bird’ < AVIS *NOCTI24
VOLA, Gal. rubi(a)r/arrubir ‘to go up, ascend’ < RUPES ‘rock’.
3.7 Latin–Greek contact in the Iberian Peninsula
It is appropriate to discuss in this chapter the influence of Greek on the
Spanish lexicon of the Roman period. It is well known that numerous
23
Most medieval examples of this verb turn up in texts written in western Spain (e.g. the
Leónese MS O of the thirteenth-century Libro de Alexandre) and in fifteenth-century translations of Old Galician–Portuguese texts such as the Cantigas de Santa Maria and the La
demanda del Sancto Grial. Scattered examples are also found in the Alfonsine General estoria.
24
On the last five items listed here, see the appropriate vignettes in Piel (1953).
The Latin base
61
Hellenisms entered and took root in the Latin of Rome and, as
integrated elements of the spoken and written Latin lexicon, spread
through the Roman Empire and survived into the Romance languages.
From the point of view of the immediate source of such words in
Spanish, they are, of course, part of the patrimonial lexical stock
inherited from Latin and, later, of Latinisms borrowed from written
Latin. There seem to be very few (if any) sure instances of Hellenisms
that live on only in Spanish or Portuguese. The small Greek-speaking
trading colonies that existed along the east coast of the Iberian Peninsula in pre-Roman times seem to have had minimal impact on the
Spanish lexicon, leaving only a handful of toponyms on the northeast
coast (e.g. Ampurias, Rosas [earlier Rhodas]). A possible exception is
Sp. seta (OSp. var. xeta) ‘mushroom’, which may have originally
meant ‘moss, mildew, pond scum’ (cf. the use of xeta to gloss Lat.
ULIGO ‘moisture, marshy quality of the earth’ in the fourteenth-century
Glosario de Toledo (ed. Castro 1936). Corominas (1947: 97–100; also
DCECH: s.v. seta) traces this noun to a Greek base SEPTÁ, which meant
‘rotten things’ and probably entered Latin as a technical term of
botanists or doctors. Hubschmid (1955: 19–24) posits an early Greek
immediate origin for Sp. colodra ‘milk pail; wooden container for
measuring wine’ (a solution supported by Malkiel 1962: 166–7, who
critically assesses earlier proposed Latin etyma). Spanish seems not to
have preserved any vestiges of the Greek spoken prior to the arrival of
the Romans in the Greek trading colonies established on Spain’s
eastern coast. The short-lived presence of Byzantine Greeks in southeastern Spain in the sixth century had no direct linguistic consequences (although elements of Byzantine Greek later entered
Spanish in the Middle Ages through the intermediary of other languages such as Italian, Catalan, and Arabic as a result of the circumMediterranean diffusion of Byzantine Greek terminology). Greek
words borrowed by Arabic and later brought into the Iberian Peninsula will be treated in the chapter on Arabisms.
I wish to draw attention here to a handful of Spanish lexical items
that may reflect the influence on regional varieties of Latin of the
Greek spoken in and diffused from the nearby Massaliotic Greek
colony of Marseilles, founded c.BC 600. The few words in question
62
A history of the Spanish lexicon
are found principally in Ibero- and Gallo-Romance, and, occasionally, in northern Italian varieties, all areas where contact between
Latin and Massaliotic Greek could have taken place. Sp./Ptg./Cat./
Prov. cara, OFr. chière (preserved in the expression faire bonne
chère), and Lig. ka ‘face’ go back to a Massaliotic base. Wartburg
(1952: 39–40) suggests that the -d- of Sp. pedazo, Ptg. pedaço, and Cat.
pedas ‘piece’ indicates that these nouns continue the variant PITACIUM
(cf. the Helenism PITTACIUM ‘a small piece of fabric or leather’, which
left reflexes in Italo-Romance dialects), which sprang up in the Greek
of Marseilles and entered nearby varieties of spoken Latin. The
Hellenism SPARTUM is well documented in written Latin; its survival
only in Sp./Ptg. esparto, Cat. espart ‘esparto grass’ led Wartburg (1952:
24) to posit Massaliotic Greek as the starting point for its entry into
the Latin of the Iberian Peninsula. He attributes (1952: 7) a similar
role to Massaliotic Greek in the transmission into the Latin of the
Iberian Peninsula of the Hellenism *CALANDRIA, the source of Sp.
calandria, Ptg. calhandra, Cat. calandra ‘type of lark’. At least two
Spanish borrowings from Catalan seem to have had their origins in
Massaliotic Greek: trébol (Ptg. trevo) ‘clover, trefoil’, OSp. avol ‘evil,
bad’ (Wartburg 1952). As noted in Chapter 2, Kahane and Kahane
(1960) have argued for a Massaliotic Greek origin for Sp. perro ‘dog’
and some of its putative southern French and Gascon cognates.
Adams (2007: 404–5) allows for the possibility that the Hellenism
PELAGUS ‘sea, open sea’, entered the Latin of the Iberian Peninsula and
southern Gaul via contact with local Greek. The noun gave rise to Sp.
piélago, Ptg. pego, Cat. pèlag, and OProv. peleg. Corominas does not
specifically link seta (discussed above) to the Greek of Marseilles.
In this context Sp./Ptg. tío, ‘uncle’ and tía ‘aunt’ merit discussion.
Scholars have long recognized that THIUS/THIA are later Hellenisms
that are not found in the classical language and that may not have
been widely diffused in the spoken language of the Empire. Although
zio/zia (older tio/tia) are today the standard Italian designations for
‘uncle/aunt’, Aebischer (1936) has shown that these terms diffused
from the southern regions of Italy, where contact with Greek was an
important part of the local linguistic reality, and displaced in northern and central Italy the reflexes of Lat. AVUNCULUS ‘maternal uncle,
The Latin base
63
mother’s brother’ and AMITA ‘paternal aunt, father’s sister’, as well as
the noun barba, possibly of Germanic (Langobardic) origin.25 According to Aebischer, the Hellenism spread by sea routes from
southern Italian coastal ports to Sardinia (as tiu, ziu and yiu; see
DES: 2, 549) and the Iberian Peninsula, where the masculine THIUS is
first attested in the Etymologiae (9.6.15) of Isidore of Seville (who
specifically identifies it as a Hellenism; Sofer 1930: 113–14), and where
it and its feminine ousted AVUNCULUS and AMITA, both abundantly
attested in inscriptions from Imperial Spain (Aebischer 1978: 25).
Scattered vestiges of only the feminine THIA turn up in older Béarnese,
Gascon and Provençal documents (FEW: fasc. 107/108, s.v. THIA);
otherwise reflexes of AVUNCULUS and AMITA dominate in varieties of
Gallo-Romance. However, should one discount the possibility that
the presence of THIUS and THIA in the spoken language of the Iberian
Peninsula reflects independent local contact with spoken Greek?
Similar questions can be raised concerning the route into HispanoRomance taken by Old Spanish maguer(a) ‘although’. Almost all
specialists since Diez, EWRS, agree that the Spanish conjunction
and its Romance congeners (It. magari [dialectal macari, mancai],
Rum. măcar) reflect a grammaticalization of Greek MAKARIE
MAKARIOS ‘happy, blessed’. Was the Greek form absorbed into the
spoken Latin of the Roman Empire, or does it reflect local contact
with Greek in Italy, Dacia, and the Iberian Peninsula?
3.8 Summary
Like all languages employed by a large number of speakers scattered
over a vast geographical territory, the spoken Latin of the Roman
Empire displayed significant regional and social variation at all levels
of linguistic structure. This variation certainly did not impede communication across the empire. On the lexical side a large portion of
the Spanish lexicon of orally transmitted Latin stock has cognate
25
Not all specialists have accepted the Germanic origin of barba ‘uncle’. One group holds that
the noun is a semantic extension of Lat. BARBA ‘beard’. Aebischer (1978: 57) offers relevant
discussion and bibliography. Rohlfs (1979: 147–9) offers a pan-Romance overview of the designations for ‘uncle’ and ‘aunt’. For further discussion and additional bibliography, see Cortelazzo
and Zolli (1979–88: I, s.v. barba2).
64
A history of the Spanish lexicon
lexical items in other Romance languages outside the Iberian Peninsula. The preceding two chapters have focused on features that
characterize the lexicon of the systems that we may label as “Hispano-Latin” and that may have played a role in the lexical differentiation of Hispano-Romance with regard to its sister languages. The
entry—either as loanwords or lexical retentions—of words from the
pre-Roman languages of the Iberian Peninsula brought to the Hispano-Latin lexicon items not found in other regional varieties of that
language. The retention of Latin vocabulary that, with time, fell into
disuse elsewhere in the Roman Empire, is another feature that characterizes the history of the Spanish lexicon. Some of these items may
directly reflect the Latinity of the third century BC, the time of the
first Roman settlement in the Iberian Peninsula. However, it would
be misleading and inaccurate to characterize the Latin lexical base of
Hispano-Romance as archaic. It is reasonable and accurate to state
that the Hispano-Latin lexicon retained lexical items that failed to
survive elsewhere, giving way to other local lexical innovations. This
chapter has also demonstrated the presence in Spanish of lexical
items that reflect innovations within the Hispano-Latin of the Empire
and add to its distinct lexical profile. Certainly the seeds of the
differentiation of Hispano-Latin with regard to other varieties at
the level of the lexicon were sown during the period of the Roman
presence in the Iberian Peninsula.
4
The Germanic component of the
Spanish lexicon
4.1 Historical background
As a result of the unstable political situation in Roman Spain, bands
of Germanic tribes, Alani, Suevi, and Vandals, crossed the Pyrenees
from southern Gaul in September 409. The consequence of this initial
wave of Germanic invaders was, according to Richardson (1996: 300),
“the end of Roman Spain”, at least in geopolitical terms. The Suevi
and the Hasding Vandals occupied Gallaecia, the Alani, Lusitania,
and Carthaginensis, and the Siling Vandals, Baetica.1 Territorial
rivalry between these groups led to political instability and violence,
with the Suevi gaining the upper hand and the Vandals rapidly
abandoning the peninsula for North Africa. Suevi dominance lasted
until the arrival of the first wave of Visigoths. The Visigoths, originating in the region near the Baltic Sea, had entered and taken
control of the Roman province of Dacia during the reign of Aurelius
(AD 270–5), from which they were forced to flee west in AD 376 in
the face of the invading Huns. They eventually reached Rome, which
they sacked in 410, and then moved on to Gaul, and the Iberian
Peninsula, where they first arrived in 456 under their king Theodoric
II. By c.475 the last Roman territories in Hispania fell into the hands
of the Visigoths. The Visigoths had already established their kingdom
in Gallia Aquitania at Toulouse, where the Roman Emperor Honorius had let them settle as a reward for their help against the Vandals,
1
Scholars today no longer accept the analysis of the place name Andalucía as an Arabicized
version of the Germanic name of this tribe; for discussion and bibliography see Bossong (2002).
Noll (1997) recently defended this traditional etymology.
66
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Alani, and Suevi. However, only after the Franks under Clovis had
driven the Visigoths out of France in 507 did they settle in Spain in
significant numbers, establishing Toledo as the seat of the Visigothic
monarchy that would rule the Peninsula until the Muslim invasion
of 711.
Except for the local Basque-speaking population, these Germanic
tribes were the first non-Latin speakers with whom the late Imperial
Hispano-Roman population came into contact. Although the Visigoths became the political rulers of the Iberian Peninsula, this conquering people did not attempt to impose its language upon the new
subjects; rather they seem to have completely abandoned their native
Germanic tongue in favor of Latin, a language shift that had started
(and perhaps had been for all intents and purposes completed) well
before they settled in the Iberian Peninsula. The small surviving
corpus of Gothic includes no text from the territory of the future
Spain.2 The occasional Gothic word turns up in Latin garb (e.g. esca,
stringes) in two major works from sixth-century Spain, Isidore of
Seville’s Etymologiae (written shortly before his death in AD 636) and
the Leges Visigothorum (AD 654). Indeed, there is no way of knowing
to what extent Gothic was still spoken in the Iberian Peninsula at the
time of the Muslim invasion of 711.3 The eleventh-century Historia
Pseudoisidoriana states that the Gothic monarch Recesewinth (649–
672) was highly learnèd in the language of the barbarians (“sapientissimus in lingua barbara”, Piel and Kremer 1976: 29); however it is
unclear whether this passage refers to the king’s active use of the
language or whether he was knowledgeable about the previous existence of the then already extinct language of his ancestors. After
entering the Roman Empire, the Goths had acquired Latin alongside
their native East Germanic language and had been converted to
2
Köbler (1989: xi–xv) surveys the small corpus of extant Gothic texts. The roots found in
Germanic place names of the Iberian Peninsula throw little light on the lexicon of the local
Gothic population, as they are based on tribal or personal names and often go back to the
period of the Reconquest of Muslim Spain; see Sachs (1932) and García Sánchez (2007: 57–61).
3
It has been suggested that upon the conversion in 587 of King Recaredo to Roman
Catholicism, all Arian liturgical and doctrinal books written in Gothic were burned (Kremer
2004: 137). Collins (2004: 242) declares categorically, “[T]here is no evidence for the use of
Gothic in Spain in the sixth and seventh centuries”. For a parallel discussion on the paucity of
evidence for the use of Langobardic in Italy at that time, see Everett 2003: 100–29).
The Germanic component
67
Christianity in the fourth century by the Bishop Ulfilas (c.310–c.383),
although until 587 they were followers of the Arian heresy. The
local Hispano-Roman population far outnumbered the Gothic newcomers. According to Kremer (2004: 135), estimates regarding
the Gothic portion of the population range from one Goth to thirty
Goths for every one hundred Hispano-Romans. Although at
the outset the doctrinal differences between the Arian Goths and
Hispano-Romans loyal to the teachings of the Roman Church may
have minimized social, and consequently linguistic, contact between
the two groups, this separation seems to have broken down before
Recaredo’s conversion. There seems to be no compelling reason why
the local Latin-speaking majority of the population would have
bothered to acquire Gothic. If it even existed, bilingualism must
have been minimal. On the basis of sixth-century Gothic cemeteries,
Thompson (1969: 132) concludes that this people lived between the
upper reaches of the Ebro and Tagus rivers, in the triangle between
the cities of Palencia, Toledo, and Calatayud. It is unknown in what
proportion Goths lived in the cities and in the countryside. There are
almost no toponyms of Germanic origin that go back to the period of
Visigothic Spain. Most such place names result from the Reconquest
and usually consist of a Germanic proper name or of the label of one
of the Germanic tribes (Godos, Godojos, Gudillos, Revillagodos, Bandaliés). There are almost no toponyms that reflect Visigothic nouns
or adjectives.
4.2 Germanic strata in the Spanish lexicon
It is not surprising that the linguistic impact of Gothic on the spoken
Latin of the Hispano-Roman population was minimal.4 Nevertheless,
the presence in Spanish of Germanic, specifically Gothic, elements is
undeniable.5 The analyst can identify three different strata of
4
There are few compilations of Germanic loans in Spanish. The most detailed lists of
borrowings allegedly taken directly from Visigothic are Gamillscheg (1934: 381–5), revised and
summarized in Gamillscheg (1967). The most recent synthesis is Hilty (2005).
5
I note for the historical record the lists of Spanish words of allegedly Gothic origin
included by Andrés de Poza in Chapter 10 of his De la antigua lengua, poblaciones y comarcas
de las Españas (1587) and by Bernardo José de Aldrete in his Del origen y principio de la lengua
castellana o romance que oi se usa en España (1605). In all fairness to Poza and Aldrete, many of
68
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Germanic elements in the Spanish lexicon. As a result of the Roman
practice of hiring and settling foreign troops in its frontier regions to
protect its borders, Latin had been in contact (especially in border
areas) with various Germanic languages since the first century AD.
As a result, certain Germanic words relevant to such spheres as
military activity entered the vocabulary of Imperial Latin and were
diffused throughout the provinces. Adams (2003: 447–50) cites from
inscriptions socerio/suecerio ‘brother-in-law’, brutes/bruta ‘daughterin-law, young married woman’ (cf. Fr. bru ‘daughter-in-law’). Only a
handful of Germanic words are attested in Latin authors: alces ‘elk’,
ganta ‘small white goose’, melca ‘spiced curdled milk’, vanga ‘type of
spade’, framea ‘type of spear’, gl(a)esum ‘amber’ sapo ‘soap’ (Colón
2007b: 287, Green 1998: 182–200).6 Adams (2003: 449) notes in the
Latin of Anthimus, a Greek doctor resident at the Italian court of the
Gothic king Theodoric the Great, such items as bradonis ‘piece of
meat’ (cf. OFr. braon, OProv. brazon ‘piece of meat suitable for
roasting’), brido ‘calf of the leg’, the aforementioned melca, and
sodinga ‘roasting spit’. Consequently, from the perspective of the
history of the Romance languages, such words that survived into the
Romance vernaculars can be classed as inherited Latin vocabulary of
Germanic origin. The second group of Germanic words is formed by
those items that entered local varieties of Latin as a result of direct
contact with the Germanic peoples who gradually took control of
the various provinces of the disintegrating Western Roman Empire.
With regard to Spanish, Gothic loans are the main elements to be
considered in this category. There exists a third stratum of Germanic
words in Spanish, namely later borrowings from Gallo-Romance of
words that, in the history of that language, are of Germanic background.
the words that they identify are of Germanic background, although not necessarily direct
borrowings from Gothic; on Aldrete, see Söhrman (2009), who also indicates that a similar
list of alleged Gothic loanwords is found in the writings of the seventeenth-century historian
Padre Juan de Mariana. Lope Blanch (1977b) examines the Germanic etymologies proposed by
Covarrubias.
6
GANTA has lived on as OFr. jante, Prov./Cat. ganta ‘stork’ (REW: #3678); MELKA possibly
survives in the Nuorese variety of Sardinian as merka ‘mixture of cooked and curdled fresh and
sour milk’ (REW: #5471a); VANGA is the source of It. vanga ‘spade’ (REW: #9137). SAPO became
pan-Romance in scope, giving rise to Fr. savon, Sp. jabón (OSp. xabón), Ptg. sabão, It. sapone.
Some specialists think SAPO may actually be a Celtic loanword in Latin.
The Germanic component
69
The lexical impact of Germanic (specifically Frankish) was much greater
in Gaul than in the Iberian Peninsula. This chapter will conclude with
a discussion of the few words borrowed from German, Dutch/Flemish,
and Scandinavian languages in the early modern period. English loanwords will be treated separately (see Chapter 11).
It is not easy to determine with complete certainty to which of
these three strata of Germanic elements a specific Spanish word
belongs. Although specialists may agree that a word is indeed of
Germanic origin, they often differ as to its exact provenance in the
individual languages. The presence of a particular item in a large
number of Romance languages (except Rumanian) may seem to
bespeak its presence in Imperial spoken Latin. Cognates of Sp.
albergar ‘to lodge, shelter’, albergue ‘lodging, shelter’, guerra ‘war’,
yelmo ‘helmet’, rico ‘rich’,7 blanco ‘white’, fresco ‘fresh, cool’, guardar
‘to keep, preserve’, guarecer (OSp. guarir) ‘to cure’, rapar ‘to plunder,
snatch; scrape shave’, robar ‘to rob’, among others, turn up in
Portuguese, Catalan, French, and Italian,8 and scholars consider
most to be early Germanic loans in Latin. However I believe that
one cannot rule out the possibility that some (though not necessarily
all) of these items may have spread early with the Carolingian Empire
from France into the Iberian Peninsula and Italy. To cite but two
specific cases, Müller (2005) presents compelling evidence to demonstrate that the Germanic base underlying Spanish guerra and its
Romance cognates first entered the Latin of Gaul and then later
spread throughout the former Empire during the Carolingian period.
As for Sp. blanco and Ptg. branco, I would not wish to rule out their
possible origin as an early borrowing of Fr. blanc,9 displacing
7
Gamillscheg (1934: 226, 375) links Fr. riche to Frankish RîKI, the Spanish and Portuguese
forms to Gothic REIKS, and It. ricco to a possible blend of RîKI with Lombardic RîHHI. In like
fashion, REW lists a Gothic base for Sp./Ptg. rico, a Frankish etymon for Cat./Occ. ric, and a
Langobardic source for It. ricco.
8
Cf. Ptg. albergue, Cat. alberg, It. albergo; Fr. guerre, Ptg./It. guerra; OFr. heaume, It. elmo,
Cat. elm; Fr. riche, Ptg. rico, Cat. ric, It. ricco; Fr. blanc, Ptg. branco, It. bianco; Fr. frais, Ptg./It.
fresco; Fr. guarder, Ptg./Cat. guardar, It. guardare; Fr. guérir, Cat. guarir, It. guarire; Ptg./Cat.
rapar, It. rapare; OFr. rober, Ptg. roubar, Cat. robar, It. rubare. DCECH treats Sp. robar as an
early Germanic loan in Latin, but views rapar as a direct borrowing from Gothic and implies
that Sp. ropa, Ptg. roupa ‘clothing’ go back to a Gothic base originally meaning ‘booty’.
9
Gamillscheg (1934: 37) also views blanco and branco as borrowings from Gallo-Romance.
70
A history of the Spanish lexicon
inherited OSp./OPtg. alvo (cf. DEM: fasc. 21, s.v. albo, and IVPM:
fasc. 1, s.v. alvo), both of which seemed to enjoy a fair degree of
vitality. Colón (2007b: 287) states that the presence of a Germanic
word in French, Spanish, and Portuguese points clearly to a borrowing from Gallo-Romance into the Romance languages of the Iberian
Peninsula. In the case of Gothic words found in Occitan, Spanish,
and Portuguese, one must decide if they represent separate local
borrowings from Gothic or whether the Spanish and Portuguese
items are later loanwords from southern French. This issue affects
the analysis of such items as arenga ‘harangue’, Sp./Ptg. bramar ‘to
roar’, Sp. bregar, Ptg. brigar ‘contend, struggle’, brotar/brote ‘to bud/
bud’,10 Sp. tregua, Ptg. tregoa ‘truce’. With regard to Sp. espeto ‘spit
for roasting meat’, DCECH classes it as a direct borrowing from
Gothic, while Hilty (2005: 475) sees it as an early Germanic loanword
in Latin. DCECH declares OSp./OPtg. guarir to be Germanic borrowings that already formed part of the spoken Latin of the Iberian
Peninsula, whereas other workers (e.g. Dworkin 1985) analyze these
verbs as Gallicisms (cf. OFr. g(u)arir ‘to cure’, mod. guérir). In some
cases a given Spanish word of possible Gothic origin may have a
French cognate of Frankish origin, in which case each word may
represent an independent Germanic borrowing in the recipient language. DCECH vacillates between classifying Sp. esquina ‘edge, territorial limit’ > ‘corner’ as a direct borrowing from Gothic or as an
adaptation of Occ. esquina, of Germanic background and cognate to
Cat. esquena, Fr. échine, It. schiena ‘shin’. Do Sp./Ptg. estribo ‘stirrup’
descend from a Gothic base cognate to the Frankish source of OFr.
estrieu (later estrief), mod. étrier, OProv. estreup/estrieu, Cat. estrep,
or is estribo an adaptation of the Provençal and Catalan nouns?
4.3 Gothic loanwords in Hispano-Romance
It seems safe to attribute to direct contact with Gothic those words of
Germanic origin that are found only in Spanish and Portuguese. The
number of such items seems to be small, less than a dozen according
10
Opinion is divided as to whether brotar is derived from brote or whether brote is a
deverbal noun.
The Germanic component
71
to Colón (2007b: 287), who attributes uncontested Gothic origin to
Sp. agasajar ‘entertain lavishly’, ataviar ‘to adorn, attire’, ganso
‘goose’, and OSp. lu(v)a (cf. Ptg luva, which has survived into the
modern language) ‘glove’, ousted in the late medieval language by
guante (itself a Catalan loan of Germanic background).11 Hilty (2005)
lists the following twenty-two items as direct Gothic borrowings:12
casta ‘race of animals’ < *KASTS, sayón13 ‘feudal official’ < *SAGJIS, OSp.
and dial. esquilar ‘to shear’ < SKAIRAN, escatimar ‘to skip, scrimp, give
sparingly’ < *SKATTJAN, espito ‘T shaped stick on which paper is hung
to dry’ < *SPITUS (to be distinguished from espeto ‘spit for roasting
meat’, see above), gana ‘desire’ < GANÔ, bando ‘group, faction’ <
BANDWÔ, barragán ‘young man’ < BARRIKA(NS), gaita ‘bagpipe’ (from
Goth. GAITS ‘goat’, whose skin was used in the manufacture of this
instrument; cf. G. Bockpfeife, S.Fr. cabreto), ganso ‘goose’ < GANS,
látigo ‘whip’ < LAITHTUG, OSp. lúa ‘glove’ < LÔFA, roano ‘reddish
colored (horse)’ < RAUDA, ripia ‘slab of wood; strip of wood used in
roofing’ < RIBJO, OSp. escancianero ‘cup-bearer’ < SKAGKJA, escanciar
‘to pour wine’ < SKAGKJAN (see below), espuela ‘spur’ < SPAÚRA, guadaña ‘scythe’ (! guadañar ‘to mow, cut with a scythe’) < WAITHANEIS,
guardián ‘guardian (rank in certain convents)’ < WARDJA, galardón
‘reward, prize’ < WITHRALAUN. All these Spanish words have Portuguese and/or Catalan cognates. According to Hilty, the following
three items of Germanic origin are found only in Spanish: lastar ‘to
pay money for someone else; to pay for another person’s fault’ <
LAISTJAN, rehilar ‘quiver, tremble; whiz, whir’ < REIRAN, guadapero
‘wild pear tree’ < WALTHUPAÍRS.
Ernst Gamillscheg, the author of the most detailed (though now
dated) study of the impact of Germanic on the Romance languages
11
In the view of DCECH, Cat. guant is the immediate source of guante in medieval
Hispano-Romance. The Glossarium Mediae Latinitatis Cataloniae records an early-tenthcentury example of Latinized guantus (Gómez Rabal 2010: 109), while DECAT offers thirteenth-century examples of Cat. guant. The CORDE data indicate that guante is first documented in the late-fourteenth-century translation Libro de Palladio prepared in a variety of
Aragonese by the Catalan Ferrer Sayol. It then appears regularly in fifteenth century cancionero
poetry. Scattered examples of lu(v)a are found through the end of the fifteenth century. Only
guante appears in Nebrija’s Spanish–Latin dictionary.
12
Here I present the Gothic etyma in the form employed by Hilty in his study.
13
This noun appears as saio in the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville and as sagio in the Lex
Visigothorum.
72
A history of the Spanish lexicon
(1934–6) attempts to divide Spanish and Portuguese words of Gothic
origin into two categories. The first consists of lexical items that
already formed part of the Latin spoken by the bilingual Goths
when they began to settle the Iberian Peninsula from their base in
Toulouse, and thus have Romance cognates outside the Iberian
Peninsula in territories occupied by the Goths (1934: 355–98).
Words which penetrated the regional and social varieties of Hispano-Latin somewhat later as a result of the establishment in the
sixth century of the Gothic kingdom based in Toledo comprise the
second group. This division assumes that the Visigoths continued to
speak Gothic (albeit briefly) in the Iberian Peninsula, and implies
that they retained many of these words when they definitively abandoned their Germanic tongue in favor of the local varieties of Latin.
This situation reflects an example of lexical transfer motivated by
speakers of the donor language. Gamillscheg (1934: 381–4, 1967: 87–9)
attributes a direct Gothic origin to the following Spanish items, which
he places in his second chronological category:14 álamo ‘type of
poplar’ < ALMS,15 amainar ‘to weaken, flag’, originally ‘to lower or
shorten the sails’ < AF-MAGINÔN, ataviar ‘to adorn, dress richly’ < AT16
TAUJAN, ayo ‘tutor’ < HAGJA, OSp. barrunte ‘spy’ < BAR-RÛNITTÔN,
casta, cundir ‘to flow, spread (of a liquid)’ < KUNDJAN, espito, OSp.
escancio ‘cupbearer’ (flanked by escanciar ‘to pour wine’), esquilar,
eslabón ‘link (of a chain)’ < SNÔBÔ, gana, ganso, gavilán ‘sparrow
hawk’ < GABILA, grima ‘disgust, annoyance’ < GRIMMS, hato ‘everyday
clothes’ < FATA,17 lastar, lozano ‘handsome’ < FLAUTJAN (discussed at
length in Malkiel 1947), marta ‘marten’ < MARTHUS, tapa ‘cover’ <
TAPPA, tascar ‘gnaw, nibble, champ at’ < TASKÔN, toldo ‘awning covering the quarterdeck of a ship’ > ‘awning’ < TULD.
Galician and Portuguese contain a handful of items of possible
Germanic origin that seem not to have cognates in Spanish. In the
14
Here I reproduce the Gothic etyma as set down by Gamillscheg.
We have seen in Chapter 2 that some scholars deem álamo to be of pre-Roman origin.
Other experts have operated with a blend of the tree names ALNUS and ULMUS. I mention
merely for the record Fray Diego de Guádix’s attempt c.1593 to derive álamo from Arabic.
16
For discussion of the debate concerning the origin of the family of barruntar, barrunte see
Harris 1972, who advocates a Basque origin.
17
While acknowledging the Germanic origin of hato, Corriente (1997, 2008: s.v. fato) posits
the semantic influence of Hispano-Arabic h. áz. z. .
15
The Germanic component
73
cases of Gal. laverca ‘lark’, Ptg. britar ‘to break’, and OPtg. trigar ‘to
push’, specialists have proposed rival (Suevian vs Gothic) sources (for
references, see Baldinger 1972: 170–1). Gothic origins have been
proposed for Gal. escá ‘measure of grain’ (Pensado 1961) and Ptg.
agarimar ‘to cuddle; tuck in’ (Piel). According to Hilty (2005: 476) the
following nouns of Germanic origin are restricted to Galician–Portuguese: Gal. brétema ‘fog’, Ptg. fona ‘spark’, OPtg. malado ‘vassal
subject to certain obligations’.
4.4 Etymological controversies
Not unexpectedly, some specialists have challenged some of these
posited Germanic etymologies. Whereas Gamillscheg operates with
Gothic etyma for álamo, broza ‘brushwood, underbrush’, and bramar
‘to bellow, roar, howl’, other experts such as the authors of DCECH
and Hubschmid suggest that they are of pre-Roman origin. As was
the case with pre-Roman etymologies, Harri Meier and his students
sought to replace most proposed Germanic bases with reconstructed
Latin etyma (which often took the form of alleged suffixal derivatives
of attested Latin forms). Hilty (2005: 474) finds Meier’s (1984: s.vv.)
reservations concerning the Gothic origin of angazo, ataviar, and
sacar convincing, although he does not necessarily agree with the
suggested reconstructed spoken Latin alternatives (*HAMICA, *APTATI18
VUS
APTUS, SACCARE) . On the basis of the original use of sacar as a
legal term with the meaning ‘to obtain judicially; to exempt’, Corominas (1951) had linked this verb to the documented Gothic legal
term SAKAN ‘to dispute, rebuke, reprimand’ (Köbler 1989: 463), rejecting the long-accepted connection with the family of Lat. SACCUS. The
derivation of Sp. gaita ‘bagpipe’ from Gothic GAITS ‘goat’ (DCECH)
has met with skepticism on the part of Piel (1956: 368n9) and Meier
VAGIRE ‘to cry,
(1984: 116), who proposes as etymon *VAGITARE
squall; sound’ (though, as usual, he fails to explain the formal side
of the proposed evolution). Malkiel (1954–5, with elaborations in
1989) challenges the long-accepted hypothetical Gothic etymon of
18
Corriente (1999: 487, s.v. ataviar) rejects the Arabic etymon proposed for this verb in
DRAE and supports the Gothic etymon TAUJAN ‘do, act, perform’ (Köbler 1989: s.v. tau-jan).
74
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Sp. cundir (OSp. condir) ‘to flow, ooze’, proposing in its place Lat.
CONDIRE ‘prepare, season, pickle’. Malkiel himself (1947) traces Sp.
lozano, Ptg. loução ‘arrogant’ > ‘handsome’ to the family of the
Gothic verb FLAUTJAN ‘to brag, boast’. Malkiel’s teacher Gamillscheg
(1967: 89) accepts this hypothesis, but H. Meier (1950: 188–91) and the
authors of DCECH (s.v. loza) reject it. Both, independently, analyze
lozano as a metaphorical derivative of loza ‘fine earthenware; crockery, porcelain’, ignoring the fact that lozano clearly meant ‘arrogant’
in its earliest attestations in Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora
(CORDE). Might the fact that semantically related orgullo/orgulloso
‘pride/proud’ and ufano ‘vain, proud’ are of Germanic origin
(although both may have entered Spanish from Gallo-Romance, or,
in the case of orgullo, from Catalan [DCECH]) support the proposed
Gothic etymology of lozano? Malkiel’s suggestion to link OSp. trocir
‘to pass’ from Lat. TRADUCERE (1956, 1983) is more convincing on
formal and semantic grounds than the Gothic *THRUKKJAN originally
advocated by Diez in EWRS and defended a century later in DCECH.
Many of these disputed Gothic etyma go back to Diez and the first
edition of his pioneering Etymologisches Wörterbuch der romanischen Sprachen (1853) and consequently have acquired with time
a certain degree of venerability, especially in those cases where the
Germanic etymology was further endorsed in the two editions of
Meyer-Lübke’s Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Malkiel
(1986) claims that escancio and its family, as well as the variant
echán, although of Germanic background, are adaptations into medieval Hispano-Romance of OFr. eschançon.
Colón (2007c) argues that Sp. amainar is a borrowing from Portuguese, where this verb is a nautical Gallicism, thereby implicitly
rejecting Gamillscheg’s proposed Gothic etymology. The initial documentation of amainar in the Confisión del amante, translated from
a Portuguese source, and its use as a nautical term in the Diary of
Columbus’s first voyage, strengthen the possibility of Portuguese
as the immediate source of the Spanish verb. DCECH suggests a
Catalanism related to OProv. amainà, OFr. amaisnier, a hypothesis
pointedly rejected by Colón (2007c). DCECH classes toldo as a
Gallicism of Germanic background; Kahane and Kahane (1961:
The Germanic component
75
473–6 = 1979: 72–5) support the position taken by their teacher,
Gamillscheg.
Following upon the etymon suggested by Spitzer (1946), DCECH
(s.v. aleve), Corriente (1999: s.v. aleive), and Hilty (2005: 185) advocate
an Arabic base for Sp. aleve, Ptg. aleive ‘treachery’, whereas Gamillscheg supports the Germanic origin (originally suggested by
Diez in his EWRS) of these words from the family of Gothic LÊWJAN.19
The -í of neblí ‘kite, sparrow hawk’ seems to indicate the transmission
through Arabic of a Germanic base found also in OFr. nieble, It.
nibbio (cf. Kahane and Kahane 1961: 468–470 = 1979: 67–9, Corriente
1999: s.v. neb(l)í). Opinion is divided as to the origin of the adverbial
adrede ‘on purpose, deliberately’, documented in Spanish since the
mid thirteenth century in the legal treatises El Setenario and Espéculo
de las leyes written at the court of Alfonso X. Meyer-Lübke (REW:
#2648) suggested a borrowing of Cat. adret. In both DCELC
and DCECH Corominas proposed direct derivation from a Gothic
prepositional phrase AT *REDS, a hypothesis rejected by Spitzer (1963)
who proposed a very complicated (and unconvincing) evolution
from the family of OSp. redrar ‘to repeat’ < REITERARE.20 The weak
nature of the contact between Gothic and spoken Latin in the Iberian
Peninsula may well lessen the possibility of the borrowing of a
prepositional phrase. Espinosa Elorza and Sánchez Lancis (2006)
study in some detail the history of adrede and its synonyms in Old
Spanish and suggest that it goes back to the family of DIRECTUS
‘straight’, and that it entered Castilian from either Aragonese or
Catalan. On the basis of the variants adedre, adredre documented
in manuscripts from the Alfonsine Royal Scriptorium, Corriente
(2008a: 34, 2010: 52–3) cautiously proposes a Hispano-Arabic origin
for adrede. DCECH suggests that the mournful interjection guay
19
Although aleve has, for all intents and purposes, fallen into disuse, its derivatives alevoso
‘perfidious, treacherous’ and alevosía ‘perfidy’ have continued to maintain a degree of vitality.
In about 1535 Juan de Valdés declared the noun aleve to be archaic, and in 1611 Covarrubias
described aleve as a frequently used word in the older language. This word was revived
mistakenly as an adjective (perhaps incorrectly associated with the adjective leve ‘light’). The
proposed Arabic etymon allegedly accounts for the genesis of the family of OProv. a(i)p and
Ptg. eiva ‘defect’.
20
Spitzer (1963: 459) explicitly acknowledged the inadmissibility of his earlier attempt to
derive adrede from Cat. adretscient. His recourse to the family of ITER recalls Tuttle’s (1923:
475) attempt to derive adrede from that same Latin base.
76
A history of the Spanish lexicon
‘woe unto’, attested since the middle of the thirteenth century and
now restricted to the language of poetry, may well go back to
documented Gothic WAI, cognate with G. Wehe, Lat. vae (Köbler
1989: s.v. WAI). It seems to me that the Latin VAE, described in DELL
(s.v. vae) as being of Indo-European origin21 and characteristic of
spoken Latin, can equally well account for Spanish guay as well as its
cognates Rum. çai, It. guai (which enjoyed sufficient vitality to cast
off the verb guaiare and the noun guaio). In contrast, Corriente (1999,
2008a: s.v. guay) claims that the Spanish form, flanked by the noun
guaya ‘wailing’ and the rare verb guayar ‘to wail’ (attested once in
Sebastián de Horozco, Libro de los proverbios glosados [1570–79])22
goes back to Hispano-Arabic WAY. According to the data available in
CORDE, guaya occurs with some frequency in texts written by
Sephardic Jews, and Horozco specifically links guaya with the speech
of the Jews, circumstances that might support Corriente’s etymology.
DCELC and DCECH suggest that the OSp. adjective brozno ‘rough,
rude’ goes back to a Gothic *BRUKEINS derived from the attested root
BRIKAN ‘to break’.
4.5 Lexical rivalries
On occasion a word of Germanic origin existed alongside a referentially similar item of Latin background. If ganso ‘goose’ is a borrowing
from Gothic, it must have existed for a millennium at the level of
the spoken language before surfacing in a composition included
in the Cancionero de Baena, where it is used pejoratively as an
adjective. Nebrija’s Spanish–Latin dictionary equates ganso with
ánsar, the designation favored in medieval sources.23 The noun
ganso next turns up in Juan de Encina’s translation of Virgil’s
Bucolics, in rhyme position with descanso. The adjective lozano
originally meant ‘arrogant’ before becoming a term to indicate
21
In addition to the aforementioned Gothic wai, DELL lists Celtic, Lithuanian, Armenian,
and Avestan cognates of Lat. vae.
22
The one example of guayar cited by CORDE from Heredia’s Gran Crónica de Espanya
seems to be a scribal error for guiar (see Gilkison Mackenzie 1984: s.v. guayar).
23
For discussion of the possibility that Lat. AUCA ‘goose’ (cf. Fr. oie, It. oca) survived as part
of compounds in rural varieties of Hispano-Romance see Malkiel (1949: 439).
The Germanic component
77
physical good looks, thus entering into competition with inherited
hermoso and the Gallicism bello.24
4.6 Gothic loanwords and the suffix -engo
The entry into the Iberian peninsula of Visigothic/Germanic anthroponyms and toponyms may have played a role in the genesis of the
suffix -engo, which speakers came to apply to a relative handful
of Romance nouns to form relational adjectives. Within Germanic,
-ingôs, when added to a personal name originally, functioned as a
patronymic or, in place-names, was used to identify the owner of a
property or territory. Unfortunately there is little direct evidence
from the Iberian Peninsula for such Gothic place-names, which
may well have been overlaid by Arabic toponyms after AD 711. Their
probable existence in the Iberian Peninsula is extrapolated from the
abundance of such forms in Italy and southern France. The relevant
Spanish nouns and adjectives formed by adding -engo peeled from
toponyms include abadengo ‘pertaining to an abbey’, abolengo ‘lineage,
ancestry’, frailengo ‘pertaining to monks or friars’, friolengo ‘sensitive to
cold’, mayorengo ‘belonging to an official’, monengo ‘rustic person’,
mujerengo ‘effeminate’, payengo ‘resident of El Payo (León)’, realengo
‘royal, royal patrimony’, villarengo ‘native of Villardompardo’ (Pharies
1990: 89–90). Although the ultimate Germanic origin of -engo so used is
generally accepted (Pharies 1990: 87–126, summarized in Pharies 2002:
209–12), the details of the functional shift involved still remain unclear,
as none of the Germanic forms in -ing seem to have survived in
Spanish. I would not dismiss the possibility that the suffix represents
a local adaptation of Cat./Prov. -enc.
4.7 Flemish/Dutch, German, and Scandinavian loanwords
Since the end of the Visigothic kingdom in Spain (AD 711), Germanic
languages other than English have had little effect on the Spanish
lexicon. Lapesa (1992: 45–7) demonstrates that Sp. bigote ‘moustache’
reflects the use of the oath Bei Gott ‘by God’ uttered by Swiss
24
Both lozano and bello have become common Spanish family names (apellidos).
78
A history of the Spanish lexicon
mercenaries who came into Spain in 1483 to participate in the siege of
Granada undertaken by the Catholic kings.25 According to the entry
for bigote in Covarrubias’s Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española
(1611), this German etymology goes back to Fernando Sánchez el
Brocense: “Sánchez Brocense, bigote, nombre tudesco, vale per
deum, y jurando, se asen de los mostachos” (ed. Maldonado, s.v.
bigote). The noun is first attested in the entry bigot de barva (glossed
as mustax) in Nebrija’s Spanish–Latin dictionary. However, can direct
derivation from Fr. bigot be definitively ruled out? Covarrubias himself derived the noun in question from Fr. bigot, which he (fancifully?)
defined as little bread and sugar rolls made for children in the shape of
the long hairs found over the upper lip, similar to the pastry known as
mostacho made in Italy. He also makes reference to the facial hair over
the upper lip of superstitious hypocrites, which is the actual meaning
of the French noun. Lapesa (1980: 411–12) also lists as early modern
borrowings from German the verb trincar to drink’26 and the latesixteenth-century noun brindis ‘a toast’ (an adaptation of the phrase
ich bringe dir’s ‘I bring it to you’), and views (p. 459) such expressions
as voluntad de poder ‘willpower’, visión del mundo ‘worldview’, espacio vital ‘living space’ as modern calques of German Wille zur Macht,
Weltanschauung, and Lebensraum.
Despite Spanish–Flemish contacts resulting from the presence of
Spanish troops and government officials in the Low Countries in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and of Flemish merchants and
tradesmen in Spain, very few Flemish/Dutch words entered Spanish
directly (Basanta and Vangehuchten 2009).27 The majority of such
words in Spanish passed through French on their way to Spanish,
25
Baist (1893) had attributed the use of the oath to German soldiers who had accompanied
Charles V to Spain in the sixteenth century. André Thibaut has pointed out to me that in Swiss
German the preposition bei is pronounced [bi], which accounts neatly for the vowel of the
initial syllable of bigote.
26
I have been unable to garner any information on the history of this verb, which is
probably genetically distinct from the etymologically obscure homonymous nautical term
trincar ‘to lash together’, to which DCECH (s.v.) devotes a lengthy entry. Cortelazzo and
Zolli (1979–88: s.v. trincare2) gloss the Italian verb trincare ‘to consume alcoholic beverages
avidly and in excess’, document its presence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and
separate it from the nautical verb trincare, which they view as a Spanish loanword.
27
I shall not include here those words of Flemish origin found only in the written (and
spoken?) Spanish of Spaniards residing in the Low Countries during the Spanish period (1555–
1706); cf. Verdonk 1979.
The Germanic component
79
and thus should be treated as Gallicisms. Vidos (1972) attributes
directly to Flemish the noun escaparate ‘cabinet for storing delicate
objects used by women’ > ‘store display window’,28 the obsolete
caramesia ‘popular party’, used by soldiers serving in Flanders, and
the nautical term boya ‘buoy’,29 while remaining unsure whether
Sp. dique ‘dike’,30 amarrar ‘to moor a ship’ are direct borrowings
from Flemish or entered Spanish through French.31 The Spanish
noun dique is first attested several times in a collection of earlysixteenth-century documents from Bilbao. Gonzalo Fernández de
Oviedo uses dique in his Sumario de la natural y general historia de
las Indias (1526) with specific reference to “el dique de Jelanda, cerca
de la Villa de Mediolburque” (CORDE). Vidos (1965: 255–8) also links
Sp. orinque ‘buoy rope’ directly to Flemish rather than analyzing that
noun as a borrowing from Fr. orin (itself a borrowing from Flemish).
Colón (2002: 79–80, 340–53) challenges this analysis, noting fifteenthcentury examples of this noun in Spanish and Portuguese, well before
the period of direct contact between Spanish and Flemish/Dutch and
the first attestations of Dutch oorring, Vidos’s proposed etymon. The
same author (2002: 87) advocates deriving Sp. duna ‘sand dune’
directly from Dutch rather than from French (cf. Varela Merino
2009: 1081–6). There is no doubt that flamenco ‘Flemish’, first attested
abundantly as the plural flamenques in the last quarter of the fifteenth
century in Lope García de Salazar, Istoria de las bienandanzas y
fortuna, and in its modern guise once in Alonso de Santa Cruz,
Crónica de los reyes católicos (CORDE) was borrowed from that
language, and it is very likely that the use of flamenco to indicate a
type of dance and song associated with Andalucía and its gypsy
population is a semantic development of the ethnonym. Much
more controversial is the possible genetic relation with the bird
28
The first dictionary to record escaparate is Captain John Stevens’s A New Spanish and
English Dictionary (London 1706), which defines the Spanish word as “a press for cloathes or
the like” (NTLE: s.v. escaparate). The Royal Spanish Academy’s first dictionary, the Diccionario
de autoridades, declares escaparate to be a Germanic word (“de origen teutónico”).
29
Vidos (1972: 236) insists that Fr. bouée ‘buoy’, although borrowed from the same Flemish
word that gave Sp. boya, is not the source of the Spanish noun.
30
DCECH and Colón (2002: 85–6) view dique as a direct borrowing from Dutch, whereas
Varela Merino (2009: 1061–71) leans toward classifying this noun as a borrowing from French.
31
Vidos does not count as borrowings from Flemish Old Spanish textile names such as ypre,
gante, brujas derived from the Flemish names of the cities where they originated.
80
A history of the Spanish lexicon
name flamenco ‘flamingo’, first attested only as the plural flamenques
in two works of don Juan Manuel from the 1330s, namely his Libro del
caballero y del escudero and Libro de la caça. Opinions are divided as
to whether modern flamenco so used reflects a comparison of the
bird’s well-known color with perceived reddish complexion and hair
of northern Europeans or whether it continues a combination of Lat.
FLAMMA ‘flame’ with the Germanic suffix -ing, with the starting point
for its diffusion in the Romance languages being OCat. flamench
(mod. flamenc) attested already in the thirteenth century (Colón
2004: 329–31).32
The few Scandinavian words found in Spanish entered as modern
borrowings from French or English: banquisa ‘ice floe, icepack’, desmán ‘disorderliness, misfortune’, edredón ‘eiderdown’, esquiar ‘to
ski’, eslálom ‘slalom’, fiordo ‘fjord’, géiser ‘geyser’, narval ‘narwhal’,
reno ‘reindeer’.
4.8 Summary
It may be misleading, if not inaccurate, to talk about direct language
contact between speakers of the Hispano-Latin/Hispano-Romance
continuum and Gothic in the centuries between the fall of the Roman
Empire and the Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. There is
no concrete evidence for the persistence of Gothic as a spoken
language in the Iberian Peninsula during this period. It is reasonable
to consider the possibility that the Visigoths, already Christianized
and Latinized, brought into the Iberian Peninsula a variety of spoken
Latin characterized by the presence of Germanic lexical items retained during the (perhaps still ongoing) process of shift from Gothic
to Latin. The study of the impact of Germanic on the Spanish lexicon
illustrates the importance for diachronic analysis of the distinction
between the immediate source of a loanword in the recipient language and its more remote ancestry. The majority of the Germanic
roots found in Spanish entered as borrowings from other languages,
especially medieval and modern varieties of Gallo-Romance.
32
Vangehucten (2004) surveys the various hypotheses offered over the years to explain the
origins of flamenco in all its senses.
5
The Arabic component of the
Spanish lexicon
5.1 Preliminaries
In AD 711 the course of Spanish history underwent a major change that
was to leave its imprint on all facets of life in the Iberian Peninsula—
political, social cultural, intellectual, religious, and linguistic. That fateful
year witnessed the first wave of Muslim invaders, for the most part
Berber-speaking1 recent converts to the new faith, who crossed the Strait
of Gibraltar and, in a mere seven years, succeeded in conquering and
occupying almost the entire Iberian Peninsula. On the linguistic side, the
result of this cataclysmic event, viewed by many local Christians as some
form of divine punishment, was a period of constant language contact,
which was to last more than seven centuries, between local varieties of
Romance and different varieties of colloquial Arabic that were brought
into the Peninsula by successive waves of Arabs from the Middle East
and which were to form the base of colloquial Hispano-Arabic or Andalusian Arabic, described by Corriente (1977: 6) as a “bundle of dialects
resulting from interference by local stock and interaction of the Arabic
dialects brought along to Spain in the eighth century by some thousands
of Arabs”. Hispano-Arabic was the first of the colloquial vernaculars
to be written down with any frequency (Harvey 1971: 81). In addition
1
Two scholars have recently called into question the role of Berber-speaking Muslims.
Winet (2006: 119–27) claims there is no reliable data on the number of Berber speakers who
settled in Spain. In her view, the Islamicized Berbers who settled in the Iberian Peninsula spoke
a variety of vernacular Hispano-Arabic with a certain quantity of Berber lexical items that could
have entered Hispano-Romance as Arabisms. She also notes that Arabization began in the cities
of the Iberian Peninsula and that the Berbers settled in rural areas. Wright (forthcoming) makes
the bold claim that the Berbers who did enter Spain during the early years of the Muslim
presence actually spoke a North African variety (now lost) of Romance.
82
A history of the Spanish lexicon
to the contact at the level of the spoken language, the written language that
was employed for the transmission of the Muslim faith and of the vast
repertoire of Arabic scientific knowledge—the Classical Arabic of the
Qur’ān—came to play a significant role in the linguistic history of Spanish. With the passage of time and the Christian Reconquest (reconquista)
of the territories under Muslim control, Arabic came to be less and less
employed in Spain. Nevertheless, Arabic–Romance language contact
persisted as a daily reality in some regions until the final conquest of
Granada on January 2, 1492 and the definitive expulsion of the remaining
Moriscos in 1609 (until which time Arabic continued to be spoken, at
times covertly, by some members of the Morisco community in the
former Kingdom of Granada and in the Valencian region). The few
sixteenth-century texts in written Arabic from Valencia reflect the realities of the local spoken vernacular rather than the norms of written
Classical or Qur’ānic Arabic (Harvey 1971 and Vincent 1993–4).
Owing to the major structural and typological differences between
the two languages in contact, it is not surprising that Arabic failed to
leave its mark on the phonology and morphosyntax of HispanoRomance. Nevertheless, its impact on the Spanish lexical stock has
been significant. In addition to actual borrowings from spoken and
written channels of Arabic lexical items of Semitic stock, I shall count
as Arabisms the many loanwords from other languages which
entered the Iberian Peninsula as part of Arabic (e.g. azul ‘blue’,
naranja ‘orange’, espinaca ‘spinach’, zaguán ‘doorway’, of Persian
origin; azúcar ‘sugar’, alcanfor ‘camphor’, of Indian background;
alambique ‘still’, alquimia ‘alchemy’, both Hellenisms in Arabic
(reflecting the impact on written Arabic of translations of major
Greek works of learning)), and even borrowings from Latin (many
of which reached Arabic by way of Greek and Aramaic/Syriac; see
Bergua Cavero 2004: 100–7), such as albérchigo ‘type of peach’ (<
[MALUM] PERSICUM), albaricoque ‘apricot’ (< PRAECOQUUS), both discussed at length in Hasselrot (1941), and alcázar ‘castle, fortress’ (<
2
CASTRUM), atún ‘tuna’ (< THUNNUS), ajenabe ‘mustard’ (< SINAPIS).
2
In contrast, some Arabic medical terms found their way into Spanish (and other European
languages) via late medieval Latin, e.g. algebra ‘setting of broken bones’ (first attested in the 1495
Traducción de la cirugía mayor de Lanfranco [see CORDE]) < Lat. ALGEBRA < Ar. ALJABR, and
nuca ‘nape of the neck’ (also first attested in late-fifteenth-century medical texts) < Lat. NUCHA <
Ar. NUXAS.
The Arabic component
83
5.2 Quantitative considerations
The Arabic impact on the history of the Spanish lexicon must be
evaluated in both quantitative and qualitative terms. Arabisms represent the second largest component of the lexicon. Lapesa’s (1980:
135) inflated but often-quoted figure of four thousand Arabisms
includes formal variants, derivatives coined within Spanish (e.g.
alcalde ‘governor of a castle’, later ‘mayor’ ! alcaldesa ‘lady
mayor’, alcaldía ‘post of governor of a castle’) and the numerous
Arabic place names found in Spain. Solà-Solé (1968: 276) operates
with an approximate figure of 850 lexical bases of Arabic background.3 Several scholars have recently compiled lengthy lists of
Arabisms that, though absent from the standard language, live on
today in regional varieties of Hispano-Romance, including northern
dialects spoken in areas that remained free from Muslim occupation
or were under Arabic domination for only a few decades (e.g. Corriente 1998a for Aragonese and Galician, García Arias 2006 for
Asturian, and Garulo 1983 for Andalusian).4 Many Arabisms found
in medieval sources were at best ephemeral and may never have
taken root in the spoken language. The twenty-six fascicules of
DEM (cf. Dworkin 1994, 2004) offer numerous examples of such
terms documented only on a handful of occasions, often in only one
text, usually a technical treatise in the fields of agriculture or astronomy: abnue ‘type of jackal’, abiqueceti ‘impotence’, (a)xataba ‘pínula
de la alidada’. The number of Arabisms that have become items of
frequent use in the modern language, though sizeable, is relatively
small (for some examples, see below).
The question posed in Kiesler (2003) (“¿Hay más arabismos en
español o en portugués?”) strikes me as otiose, as the answer is
dependent both on the criteria used to define “Arabism” and on the
For a critical survey of such attempts to quantify Arabisms, see Kiesler (1994: 69–74).
Most Arabisms found in Basque are loanwords from Spanish, e.g. alkate ‘mayor’ (< Sp.
alcalde), almaiz ‘mortar’ (< Sp. almirez), azafrai ‘saffron’ (< Sp. azafrán), anega ‘measure of
grain’ (< Sp. fanega), and zainhori ‘carrot’ (< Sp. zanahoria); see Trask (1997: 262–3), who
suggests that Basque gutun kutun ‘letter, epistle’ and arra ‘palm tree’ entered the language
directly from Arabic, as neither item is attested in Hispano-Romance.
3
4
84
A history of the Spanish lexicon
chosen moment in the history of both languages. However, it is
instructive to compare which Arabisms are found in Spanish, Portugese, and Catalan, as against those that are found in only one or
two of these languages. It is also useful to determine which Arabisms
eventually fell into disuse in one language while surviving in one or
both of the other two languages.
Kiesler (1993a: 14–19) compares shared Arabisms among modern
Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, and Italian. His starting point is a list
of one hundred Arabisms in Portuguese. Spanish and Portuguese
share fifty-four of these Arabisms, e.g. azúcar/açúcar ‘sugar’, adobe/
adobe ‘adobe’, ajedrez/xadrez ‘chess’, alcahuete/alcaiote ‘pimp, procurer’, aldea/aldeia ‘village’, alhucema/alfazema ‘lavender’, alfeñique/
alfenim ‘type of sweet’, alfiler/alfinete ‘straight pin’, algodón/algodão
‘cotton’, aljófar/aljôfar ‘type of pearl’, almohada/almofada ‘pillow’,
argolla/argola ‘ring’, almacén/armazêm ‘warehouse, store’, arroz/
arroz ‘rice’, ataúd/ataúde ‘coffin’, atún/atum ‘tuna’, aceite/azeite
‘oil’, arrecife/recife ‘reef’, barrio/bairro ‘neighborhood’, bellota/bolota
‘acorn’, bujía/bugia ‘candle’, hasta/até ‘until, as far as’, jarabe/xarope
‘syrup’, limón/limão ‘lemon’, naranja/laranja ‘orange’, zanahoria/
cenoura ‘carrot’,5 zarco/zarco ‘blue-eyed’. The following Arabisms
are found only in Ptg. (Kiesler 2003: 263): acém, adelo, alecrim,
algema, almece, azinhaga, baraço, ceifa, chué, zoina. Early modern
Portuguese continued to receive new Arabisms as a result of contact
with Muslim populations in Africa and India (see Benarroch 2003).
Kiesler (1992) offers a similar comparison between Arabisms in
Spanish and Catalan, taking as his point of comparison one hundred
Catalan Arabisms. Catalan shares sixty-nine such items with Spanish,
e.g. azucar/sucre ‘sugar’, adalid/adalil ‘leader’, halagar/afalagar ‘to
flatter’, albarán/albarda ‘saddle pack’, albaricoque/albaroc ‘apricot’,
aljibe/aljub ‘cistern’, arroz/arros ‘rice’, azote/assud ‘lash with a whip’,
azar/atzar ‘chance, fate’, acémila/atzembla ‘beast of burden’, albornoz/barnús bathrobe’, barrio/barri ‘city district’, almacén/magatzem
5
The Portuguese form seems not to have been documented in Old Portuguese, to judge by
its absence from IVPM. DELP (s.v. cenoura) considers it to be a borrowing from neighboring
Spanish.
The Arabic component
85
‘warehouse, store’, espinaca/espinac ‘spinach’, racha/ratcha ‘gust of
wind’, sandía/síndria ‘watermelon’, taza/tassa ‘cup’.6
5.3 Previous scholarship
The Arabic component of the Spanish lexicon has received considerable scholarly attention. The reader can turn to several sources for
lengthy lists of Spanish Arabisms. The compilations of Dozy and
Engelmann (1869) and Eguílaz y Yanguas (1886) are today only of
antiquarian interest; many of the Arabic etymologies proposed
in these works have not stood up to modern scrutiny. Neuvonen
(1941), originally the author’s doctoral dissertation, is limited to
Arabisms found in selected thirteenth-century texts. Steiger (1967)
is organized around the phonetic adaptation of the borrowings to the
system of the recipient language, the topic of his doctoral dissertation
(cf. Steiger 1932). Steiger (1948) offers numerous examples in his
lexical discussion of Arabisms. Maíllo Salgado (1983) records and
discusses Arabisms first documented in the period 1300–1514. Two
recent dictionaries are broader in their scope. Kiesler (1994) lists and
compares Arabisms found in Spanish and Italian. The most thorough
and authoritative lexicon is Corriente (1999), revised, expanded, and
translated into English as Coriente (2008a). Both versions of Corriente’s compilation record in the relevant entries Arabisms found in
Spanish, its regional varieties, Portuguese, and Catalan. Corriente
stands apart from its predecessors through his presentation of Hispano-Arabic rather than Classical Arabic etyma. The bibliographies
in this work will guide the reader to the many studies by Corriente
and by other scholars on individual Arabisms.7 Winet (2006) offers a
lengthy list of Arabisms as well as a thorough critical review of
previous scholarship on relevant questions of language contact and
Arabic–Romance bilingualism.
6
Coromines (1936) analyzes selected Arabisms in Catalan. Also relevant here are the
commentary on Catalan Arabisms in Corriente (1997) and the comparisons of Arabisms in
the three Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula in Colón (1999; reprinted in 2002: 45–54).
7
García González (2008a: 258–60) offers a helpful and concise critical overview of these
studies.
86
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Most studies examine and illustrate the Arabic contribution to the
Spanish lexicon from a cultural perspective, showing that, not surprisingly, many Arabisms are nouns designating material and cultural innovations introduced into the Iberian Peninsula from the
Middle East, for which the Hispano-Romance of the time had no
suitable terms.
These works are essentially lists compiled alphabetically or according to semantic field, with no attempt made to distinguish chronological strata, social levels, routes of transmission, the specific
Andalusian-Arabic source (as opposed to the Classical Arabic etymon), and the vitality or degree of integration into Spanish or
Portuguese. Despite the abundant literature on the (perhaps somewhat overstated) convivencia of Romance-speaking Christians with
Arabic-speaking Muslims and Jews, relevant sociolinguistic and
other linguistic questions pertaining to the nature of Romance–
Arabic language contact and the consequent bilingualism have only
recently been raised (see especially García González 2007, 2008a,
2008b). The rivalry between referentially similar Romance and Arabic terms merits discussion. What processes of semantic change are
observable in Arabisms? Do these neologisms show derivational
productivity, often an indicator of integration into the lexicon of
the recipient language? Does the loss by the beginning of the sixteenth century of Arabic words recorded with some frequency in
earlier sources reflect a form of linguistic anti-Semitism, with reference to both Muslims and Jews, in the newly reunified Christian
Spain? This chapter will treat some of these matters.
5.4 Hispano-Arabic/Hispano-Romance language contact
The linguistic situation in Muslim Spain was complex, and it changed
over time.8 Many of the first Muslim invaders were bilingual speakers
of their native Berber and of the recently imported Arabic. Within an
Islamic culture Arabic was the prestige language and Berber rapidly
8
López-Morillas (2000) presents a clear exposition of the language situation in Muslim
Spain.
The Arabic component
87
faded into the background9 in the face of Andalusian Arabic, one of
the earliest documented varieties of vernacular Arabic. Whereas
very little is known about rural Andalusian Arabic, its urban varieties
seem to have been fairly uniform. Hispano-Arabic was also colored
lexically by the Andalusian Romance spoken by the newly conquered
Christian population of Al-Andalus (see García Gómez 1968, Galmés
de Fuentes 1975, Ferrando Frutos 1995). This variety of Romance, long
known as Mozarabic, is the direct continuation of the Latin brought to
Baetica by the Romans. Corriente prefers to name this Romance
variety romanandalusí, a label which slowly is gaining wider acceptance among Hispanists (e.g. Winet 2006: 140). It enjoyed low social
prestige, and its phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and lexical structures were heavily influenced by Arabic (Corriente 2008b: 100).
Arabic was clearly the dominant spoken language among Muslims,
Jews, and Christians in Al-Andalus in the first centuries of Muslim
rule. There were mass conversions from Christianity to Islam. Other
Christians, though remaining true to their faith, adopted Arabic as
their daily vernacular, and Romance monolingualism became
increasingly rare. It is likely that among bilingual Christians, Arabic
was the dominant language. Paul Albar of Cordoba (Alvaro
de
Córdoba) bemoaned that the Christians had forgotten their language
to the point that “you would not find among a thousand of them one
person who could write a letter to a friend in Latin which is free from
error. As for writing Arabic, you will certainly find a large number
who master that language” (quoted in Kassis 1997: 141; cf. the doubts
Christys [2002: 10] voices regarding the reliability of this oft-quoted
assertion). Although there are extant complete versions in Arabic of
only the Gospels and the Psalms, Kassis (148) believes it is safe to
assume that local Christians had translated the entire Bible into
Arabic. Furthermore, an eleventh-century compilation in Arabic of
canon law has been preserved (Kassis 146). Our direct knowledge of
the Romance varieties of Al-Andalus is scanty, but it is reasonable to
9
According to Corriente (1999, 2008a: s.v. atzanet), Jinete ‘rider’ goes back to an Andalusian
Arabic ZANATI which refers to the Berber tribal confederation of Zanata, whose members were
famous for breeding horses and for their horsemanship. Corriente (1998b) suggests that the
following Arabisms in Spanish are of Berber origin: tagarote ‘type of falcon’, atahorma ‘harrier
eagle’, gorguz ‘short spear’, tragacete ‘type of spear, javelin’, azagaya ‘javelin, light spear’.
88
A history of the Spanish lexicon
assume a large Arabic impact on the lexicon. In addition to Arabic–
Romance bilingualism, there existed for speakers of Arabic a situation of diglossia between spoken Hispano-Arabic and Classical
Arabic, the written (and spoken) language of Islamic religious practice and theological and scientific scholarly discourse. Many educated
Christians and Jews also used Classical Arabic as a scholarly written
language.
Nevertheless, the Christians of Al-Andalus, the so-called Mozarabs, played a major (though not exclusive) role in the diffusion of
Arabisms at the level of the spoken language. The southward movement of the Christian Reconquest brought with it the entry into AlAndalus of Romance varieties from the north of the Iberian Peninsula, and consequently linguistic contact with Hispano-Arabic and
romanandalusí ‘Andalusi Romance’, with its Arabic-laden lexicon.
Toledo, Córdoba and Seville, cities with significant Christian populations, were reconquered in 1085, 1236, and 1248 respectively. As they
acquired the newly imported varieties of northern HispanoRomance, the relatively small number of bilingual local Christians
who remained10 retained at least some of the local vocabulary of
Arabic origin. A similar transfer of such vocabulary (though perhaps
on a smaller scale) also occurred earlier when, as a result of sporadic
persecutions, groups of Christians fled Al-Andalus and resettled in
the more northern Christian territories. This immigration of refugees
may be responsible for the early Arabisms documented in northern
Hispano-Romance texts from territories where Arabic never flourished as a spoken language (e.g. Asturian, Galician).11 Oliver Pérez
(2004) argues for the presence of vestigial Arabisms going back to
the short-lived Arabic presence in León. García González (2008a:
269–70) attributes a role in the transmission of Arabisms to the
linguistically heterogeneous group of speakers of Romance, Arabic,
and Berber who occupied the no-man’s-land between the southern
limits of Christian Spain along the River Duero and the northern
10
López Morillas (2000: 50) suggests that most Christians had fled the major cities of
Andalusia in the century before they were reconquered.
11
Relevant examples are found in Lapesa et al. (2003), which, with regard to Arabisms,
should be read in light of Corriente’s critical analysis (2004).
The Arabic component
89
limits of Al-Andalus. As the Reconquest progressed through the
second half of the thirteenth century, the balance turned in favor of
the northern varieties of Hispano-Romance, in what could be now
labeled Romance–Arabic bilingualism. In those areas of reconquered
Al-Andalus where an Arabic-speaking population remained in place,
native speakers of northern varieties of Hispano-Romance came into
contact with Hispano-Arabic.
5.5 Chronological considerations
Although our knowledge of the lexicon of romanandalusí is far from
complete (see now Corriente 2008b: 97–227, and for the inherited
Latin component of its lexicon, 137–227), it is reasonable to assume
the presence of a significant number of Arabisms (just as there is a
presence of Romance words in Hispano-Arabic texts). One can posit
three chronological layers of Arabisms in the northern varieties of
Hispano-Romance. The earliest Arabisms were brought to the north
by bilingual Christians who opted to flee to Christian Spain, especially during periods of persecution and internal political strife in
Muslim Spain. The second layer corresponds to the main period of
the Reconquest (1085–1300) and direct contact between northern
Romance varieties and Hispano-Arabic at the levels of both the
spoken and the written language. Such a situation does not require
a high degree of bilingualism or even competency in Arabic among
the recently arrived Romance-speaking Christians. This is also the
period of many translations and adaptations of texts and treatises
written in Arabic. The third layer contains later borrowings (often
technical terms) from the mudéjares, Muslims living in Christian
Spain who now lived in a situation of Romance linguistic domination
in which their mastery of Arabic became less and less, often converting their original mother tongue into a heritage language. García
González (2008b) situates Romance–Arabic language contact in
medieval Spain at point 1, “casual contact”, on the scale of degrees
of contact-induced language change established by Thomason and
Kaufman (1988: 77). This point involves only lexical borrowing,
usually of non-basic vocabulary, with some signs of the beginning
of point 2 on the scale, “slightly more intense contact”, in which
90
A history of the Spanish lexicon
borrowing of function words occurs sporadically (e.g. the preposition
hasta, of Arabic origin).
There is no reliable way to date the entry of a given word of Arabic
origin or transmitted through Arabic into medieval HispanoRomance. The first attestation of a lexical item in a text indicates
only its initial use in the documented written language and may
presuppose its earlier presence in the spoken language. The presence
of a neologism in a text seems to imply that the word was at least
understood by its intended readers, although it may not have enjoyed
currency in the spoken language. García González (2008a: 261) operates for the early period of the Muslim presence with what he calls
“accidental Arabisms” (arabismos accidentales). For the most part
these Arabisms are concrete nouns, most of which have not survived
the Middle Ages and may have been used only in very specific
technical or specialized contexts (e.g. clothing, textiles) by small
groups of speakers. Many such words turn up in notarial documents
from northern Spain prepared between the eighth and twelfth centuries; e.g. al(ch)az, adorra, alcorasci ‘Muslim’, almuctén ‘type of
coin’, habí, malfatana, uma.12 Other Arabic words, documented
rarely in the earlier period, did not become rooted (at least in the
written language) until later; e.g. algodón, almirante, albéitar, taza
(cf. the similar dual entry of certain Latinisms, attested sporadically
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but not fully integrated until
the fifteenth century or later).
Maíllo Salgado (1983) examines the entry of Arabisms in the period
1300–1514, during which time Arabic was used mainly in the Kingdom of Granada. For the years 1300–50 his corpus yielded 237 Arabisms, of which 79 are documented for the first time, and of which
11 are recorded only once. For 1350–1454, he reports 400 Arabisms,
of which 136 represent first documentations; the sources for the
years 1454–1514 offer 338 Arabisms, of which 45 represent first attestations. Of course, Arabisms that entered Spanish through oral
transmission may have been present long before their initial attestation, often in texts written well after Arabic had lost its status as
12
See Lapesa et al. (2003), the twenty-six fascicules published to date of the (now defunct)
DEM, and Corriente (2004).
The Arabic component
91
a prestige language in the Iberian Peninsula. García González
(personal communication) observes that many of these late Arabisms
adduced by Maíllo Salgado failed to take root in the language
and were restricted to the technical jargon of medicine and chemistry
(in the medieval sense). Doubtless, the use of different texts and
the incorporation of material from new databases such as CORDE
would yield different results.
5.6 Etymological controversies
Any analysis and evaluation of the Arabic contribution to the Spanish lexicon must rest on a solid base of reliable etymologies. Although
specialists do agree on the identification of most words of allegedly
Arabic origin (while important details concerning the formal and
semantic facets as well as the regional and social levels of the Arabic
etymon are often in dispute), the proposed Arabic origin of a significant number of words remains controversial. Currently the leading
specialist in this field is Federico Corriente. He is the author of a
number of major studies in which he critically examines many of the
Arabic etymologies proposed in the pioneering works of Dozy and
Engelmann, and Eguílaz, in the Spanish Royal Academy’s Diccionario de la lengua española, in the Spanish and Catalan etymological
dictionaries of Joan Coromines, and in the writings of the Arabist
Miguel Asín Palacios. The Appendix “Falsos arabismos” in Corriente
(1999: 485–95; also 2008a: 481–92) summarizes this facet of his findings on this topic. In numerous cases Corriente rectifies the proposed
etymon and, when possible, takes as his starting point the appropriate Andalusian-Arabic form rather than the Classical Arabic cognate.
At times he rejects long-accepted Arabic etyma in favor of other
sources. He also proposes (in many instances for the first time)
Arabic etyma for several etymologically controversial items. Corriente (1999) links Spanish riesgo ‘risk, danger’ directly to Arabic
RIZQ (unlike Kahane and Kahane 1968, who posit intermediate Byzantine and Venetian stages in the process of transmission; for further
discussion, see below), and defends Arabic etyma for such nouns as
ademán ‘gesture’ afán ‘eagerness, enthusiasm’, melena ‘long lock of
hair, mane’, zahón ‘leather overalls’, pato, originally ‘goose’, now
92
A history of the Spanish lexicon
‘duck’13 (long explained as an onomatopoeic formation sharing the
same root as pata ‘foot’; see REW, DCECH, and Meier 1984: 153), and
for the long-standing etymological crux, loco ‘mad, crazy’ (for which
Corominas had also advocated an Arabic base).14
Corriente (1999: s.v. aleive), DCECH and Hilty (2005: 185)15 support an Arabic origin for aleve as opposed to the Germanic base
defended by, among others, Gamillscheg (see Chapter 4). DCECH
rejects the long-held view that Sp. danzar ‘to dance’, danza ‘solemn,
formal dance’ is a Germanic word borrowed from French, proposing
in its place a Hispano-Arabic origin. Corriente (1999: 298) rejects the
specific etymon proposed in DCECH, but accepts a different Hispano-Arabic base diffused throughout Europe from southern France.
The origin of Sp. marrano ‘converted Jew’ has long been a subject of
controversy. Proposed etymologies for this culturally loaded label
include the family of Lat. VERRES ‘pig’, an Aramaic formula Hellenized
in Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians (discussed in detail in
Kahane and Kahane 1964: 28–33), and the different Arabic bases
advocated by Malkiel (1948b) and Corriente (1999, 2008a: s.v. marrano). Whereas Steiger, Corominas, and Corriente defended the
Arabic origin of Sp. rincón (originally re(n)cón, ra(n)cón; cf. Cat.
racó) ‘corner’, Malkiel (1990c) suggested a borrowing from the family
of Fr. recoin.
Since the end of the nineteenth century various scholars have
proposed different Arabic etyma for naipe(s) ‘playing card; deck of
cards’. Corriente (1999, 2008a: s.v. naip) continues to support the
hypothesis of an Arabic origin for this noun. In contrast, DCECH
and DECAT reject the various suggested Arabic etyma. Without
identifying the ultimate source of this term, these dictionaries suggest
naipe(s) entered Spanish from neighboring Catalan, due to the early
The Arabic origin of pato was suggested in 1862 by Defrénoy and later by Dozy and
Engelmann (1869: 326). Medieval texts offer few examples of pato. Nebrija’s use of anser
masculus to gloss pato in his Spanish–Latin dictionary points to the original meaning of this
noun in Hispano-Romance. Montero Curiel and Montero Curiel (2005: 289–90) discuss the
meaning of the one instance of pato found in the Cancionero de Baena.
14
DCECH notes that an Arabic etymon for loco was first proposed in 1925 by the IndoEuropeanist J. Kuryłowicz, followed by Rice (1935).
15
Hilty here suggests that the rare form aleuado found in the Alfonsine Libro conplido en los
iudizios de las estrellas means ‘defective’ and is a derivative of aleve.
13
The Arabic component
93
documentation of such games in Catalonia. In his DCELC (s.v. naip),
Coromines suggests that the Catalan noun is an adaptation of OFr.
naïf(s) ‘silly, foolish’, used with reference to tarot cards. He attributes
to the Jews of Perpignan a role in the diffusion of the term. The noun
in question is first documented in the fourteenth-century Escorial
glossary (ed. Castro 1936) where it glosses a form napigium, explained
by Castro as a Latinization of either naipe or of its alleged Arabic
etymon. The CORDE data show that naypes appears with considerable frequency in the fifteenth-century poet Fernando de la Torre.
The history of this word requires monographical study to clarify its
immediate origin in Spanish as well as its more distant source.
DCECH lists Portuguese, French, Provençal, and medieval Italian
cognates. Nebrija’s Spanish-Latin dictionary includes naipes as a
headword, glossed ‘chartarum ludus’. Among other words whose
alleged Arabic origin (posited for the most part in DRAE) Corriente
has rejected are chisme, cursi, dolama, guadaña, hola, macabre, olé,
pataca, raqueta, tecla, zapato.16
There are a handful of etymologically controversial items that
ultimately may have an Arabic origin, but which did not enter
Spanish as a result of Romance–Arabic language contact in the
Iberian Peninsula. Cognates of the Spanish words turn up in other
(Romance and non-Romance) languages of the Mediterranean basin.
Many seem to have been originally used in nautical, seafaring, and
Mediterranean commercial contexts. Various scholars have proposed
Arabic etymologies for Sp. riesgo ‘risk’, faluca ‘type of vessel’, and
avería ‘damage, breakdown’, hypotheses which are not universally
accepted. According to Kahane and Kahane (1968), the family of
which riesgo is a member goes back to an Arabic root meaning
‘maintenance; tax system in Egypt involving the individual in the
procurement of his own maintenance’, transmitted throughout
the Mediterranean by way of Byzantine Greek. In their view, the
Romance forms spread from It. rischio. The derivation of riesgo from
an Italian base poses a number of problems (such as the tonic
16
Winet (2006: 405–6) offers a shorter list (without discussion or commentary) of dubious
Arabisms (which she labels “arabismos inseguros”).
94
A history of the Spanish lexicon
diphthong and the voiced velar).17 Does the appearance of riesgo with
the meaning ‘strife, contention’ as early as the fourteenth-century
Crónica de Alfonso XI (CORDE) call into question the hypothesis of
an early Italianism? DCECH and Corriente (2008a, s.v. avaria) both
trace Sp. avería ‘damage, breakdown’ (originally ‘damage to a ship’s
cargo’) to Arabic. Corriente operates with possible transmission
through Italian or the heavily Venetian-based late medieval Mediterranean lingua franca, whereas DCECH sees Catalan as the immediate
source for the entry of this Arabism into Spanish. In contrast, Kahane
and Kahane (1959) derive it from Byzantine Greek BAREÎA < SUMBOLE
BAREÎA ‘heavy contribution’, transmitted throughout the Mediterranean from Italo-Romance. The Spanish noun is first documented in
the last quarter of the sixteenth century (CORDE). Whereas Corriente sees in the ship designation faluca (vars. falucha, falúa) an
Arabism transmitted as a Mediterranean maritime term, Kahane
et al. (1953) derive it from a Nordic base (cf. Old English hulc)
diffused through the Mediterranean from Gascony and the Iberian
Peninsula (where, according to the Kahanes, it first appears in the
Alfonsine Siete Partidas as OSp. haloque). While accepting Kahane’s
etymology for haloque, Eberenz (1975: 139–41, 205–8) demonstrates
that haloque and faluca (for which he supports Corominas’s Arabic
etymology) designate different types of sailing vessels and are historically unrelated lexical items. The modern Spanish forms are not
documented until the early seventeenth century (although the presence of the entry falúa in Covarrubias, Tesoro, may bespeak its
presence in the language at an earlier date; CORDE offers one latesixteenth-century example). Experts (e.g. Kahane et al. 1963, DCECH,
Corriente 1999: s.v. almirall) agree that the Arabic base ‘AMÎR that
underlies almirante ‘admiral’ and its numerous European cognates
reached the West through Byzantine Greek. This term is found as
amirate/admirat/admirat(o)/amirate ‘rank between count and
knight’, in eleventh- and twelfth-century Latin documents from
Spain (Lapesa et al. 2003: s.v. amirate). Although specialists recognize
17
They seek to explain the diphthong of riesgo through secondary association with OSp.
riesco ‘cliff ’, an alleged forerunner of risco ‘cliff ’. I have been unable to verify the authenticity of
riesco. Although adduced in DCECH (s.v. riesgo), no examples appear in the CORDE database.
The Arabic component
95
the Arabic origin of Sp. tarifa ‘tariff, duty tax’, its first documentation
in the seventeenth century (alongside earlier arancel, itself an Arabism) seems to confirm transmission through another language. The
presence of tarifa in fourteenth-century Catalan leads DCECH to
classify tarifa as a Catalanism rather than as an Italian loan (although
the noun is documented in fourteenth-century Italian sources; see
Cortelazzo and Zolli 1979–88: s.v. tariffa).
5.7 Lexical rivalries
The majority of Arabisms in Spanish are concrete nouns that designate material products, techniques, and cultural realities introduced
into the Iberian Peninsula, for which Hispano-Romance had no
appropriate term. Nevertheless, Spanish contains numerous instances of apparent rivalry and co-existence between Arabisms and
referentially similar Romance items.18 Usually, the two terms were
not perfect synonyms, with chronological, social, and semantic distinctions often coming into play. In some cases it may be argued that
the referent was so closely associated with Muslims or with Arabic
culture that speakers came to favor the Arabic term, despite the
presence of a Romance designation. One such case may be the
triumph of aceite19 ‘oil’ (Ptg. azeite) over OSp. olio, the local reflex
of Lat. OLEUM.20 Oil was little used in Christian Spain in the early
Middle Ages and was, for all intents and purposes, reintroduced by
the Arabs. Bisyllabic olio is abundantly documented in the medieval
language in all senses of ‘oil’, whereas óleo, a patent Latinism, does
not appear until the sixteenth century21 and refers frequently to holy
Fasla (1999–2000: 96n45) lists such items, labeled semantic doublets (dobletes semánticos).
DEM records scattered instances of OSp. azeitera ‘oil container’ and azeitero ‘oil vendor,
oil producer’. CORDE offers further examples of azeytero in the late fifteenth century Libro de
Acuerdos del Concejo Madrileño. Note the juxtaposition of the Romance and Arabic forms in
the following passage from Pero López de Ayala’s translation of Boccaccio’s Caída de los
príncipes: “Tomó el profeta una azeytera llena de olio” (DEM: s.v. aceitera). The Old Spanish
record documents scattered instances of the verb oliar and adjectival olioso.
20
Castro (1922) has suggested that OLEUM would have yielded *ojo through oral transmission
in Castilian, thereby creating an intolerable situation of homonymy with ojo ‘eye’ < OCULUM. I
find this hypothesis unconvincing, since context would have rendered semantic confusion
between two such disparate nouns highly unlikely.
21
CORDE offers one example of óleo in a document from the first quarter of the fifteenth
century, where the noun is used in an ecclesiastical context.
18
19
96
A history of the Spanish lexicon
oils. In an interesting example of a lexical split, Spanish prefers
aceituna ‘olive’ (Ptg. azeitona) rather than oliva (recorded in medieval notarial documents) to designate the fruit of the olivo ‘olive tree’;
note the derivatives olivar ‘olive grove’, olivero ‘place to store olives’,
and the infrequent use of aceituno, aceitunar,22 and the absence of
aceitunero from medieval texts, although the word is sporadically
documented in modern sources, and in modern varieties of Andalusian with the dual meaning ‘olive picker; thrush’ (Garulo 1983: 43, 63).
It seems reasonable to argue here that speakers associated the use of
oil for cooking and the cultivation of olives with the Arab population,
and its use in the sacraments and as a medication with Latin/
Romance.
Preference for Arabic goods may have aided the triumph of almohada ‘pillow’ over native OSp. façuerelo, derived from faz ‘face’.
Similar circumstances may explain the success of taza (OSp. taça)
‘drinking bowl; cup’ alongside copa.23 It is unclear to me why Spanish
chose the Arabism (of Greek background) zanahoria ‘carrot’ (Ptg.
cenoura). There is no trace of a reflex of Lat. CAROTA in Spanish or
Portuguese, while PASTINACA, which could mean ‘parsnip’ or ‘carrot’,
lives on as Cat. pastanaga.24 Was the carrot associated with Arabic
cooking, or was Andalusia noted at the time for the cultivation,
production, and sale of carrots? The Arabism bellota (Ptg. bolota)
ousted OSp. lande < GLANS (cf. Cat. gla, aglà, It. ghianda) as the
designation for ‘acorn’, although landre lived on with the meaning
‘tumor’, amply documented in late-medieval medical texts, often
with reference to a tumor the size of an acorn (DETEMA: s.v. landre).
With regard to the standard designation for ‘lettuce’, Sp. lechuga <
25
LACTUCA contrasts with the Portuguese Arabism alface.
Although
Walsh (1967: 77) alludes, on the authority of Steiger (1932: 169, 230), to
22
DEM records two instances of OSp. azeituno in texts as well as examples in the
dictionaries of Alfonso de Palencia, the Latin–Spanish and Spanish–Latin compilations of
Nebrija, and Covarrubias’s Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española. DEM identifies one
example of aceitunar in the thirteenth-century Libro del repartimiento de Murcia.
23
Juan Ruiz places copa and taza alongside each other in reference to drinking vessels (Libro
de buen amor, 342c).
24
Lat. PASTINACA was borrowed by Arabic and in this guise re-entered the Iberian Peninsula
as Sp. biznaga, Ptg. bisnaga/bisnaca, Cat. bisnaga.
25
Ptg. leituga lives on with the meaning ‘nome vulgar extensivo a algumas plantas herbáceas
de suco leitoso pertenecentes à família das Compostas’.
The Arabic component
97
a short-lived OSp. alface (var. alfaça), Corriente (1999, 2008a) lists
only the Portuguese word; the CORDE database and fasc. 23 (alcar–
alfaquí) of the DEM do not document the alleged Old Spanish
cognate of alface.
At the outset, the Arabism alcoba and the Latinism dormitorio
seemed not to be rival designations for ‘bedroom’. The Arabic base
meant ‘dome, cupola’, and alcoba is well documented in the thirteenth century with the meanings ‘cupola, building with a dome,
domed burial monument; separate space in a temple reserved for
sacred objects; cavity, cave’. Only in the fourteenth century does this
noun come to mean ‘separate space or room’, with the first example
of the meaning ‘bedroom’ appearing in the Vida de los Filósofos,
c.140026 (DEM: fasc. 22, s.v alcoba; Kiegel-Keicher 2005: 314–19). In
the medieval language dormitorio usually referred to the sleeping area
of a monastery.27 The typical medieval dwelling had no room set
apart as a sleeping area. As Christians began to occupy Arab-style
houses in their newly reconquered cities, they adopted Arabic terminology for specific architectural features, e.g. zaguán, which designated the vestibule or entryway from the street that hid from view the
dwelling’s interior patio. Of the two rivals for the concept ‘jail,
dungeon’, the Arabism mazmorra carried more negative connotations than native cárcel. Only in the early modern period did the
Arabism face some degree of competition from calabozo, for which I
have found no medieval attestations.28 The usual term for ‘spur’ in
Medieval Spanish is espuela, of Germanic origin; the Arabism acicate
‘spur’ is first attested in the fifteenth century, and, to judge by a
sixteenth-century treatise, designated a specific type of Moorish spur
(Maíllo Salgado 1983: 267–8); today acicate lives on with the metaphorical meanings of ‘spur, goad’. In the thirteenth century the
26
The relevant passage reads “Sy por ventura estava semejante pintura en el alcoba de
aquella muger”, rendering the Lat. “in cubiculo mulieris”.
27
Old Spanish also records with the meaning ‘alcoba’ the Arabism alhanía (OArag. variant
alfaneya; see Colón 1989: 271–81).
28
In Nebrija’s Spanish–Latin dictionary calaboço is given as a headword immediately
followed by its synonym carcel and the Latin glosses scalae, gemoniae. If the etymology
proposed in DCECH is correct, namely an alleged Latin *CALAFODIUM with cognates in Sardinian (kalavóyu, kolovóyu ‘ditch, ravine, gorge’), then calabozo must have existed at the level of
the spoken language from the outset. Wagner (DES: s.v. kalavóyu) raises the possibility of an
Arabic etymon; calabozo is not included in Corriente (1999, 2008a).
98
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Arabism azogue/zoco denoted the large daily Arabic market located
in the city center, while native mercado referred to the small weekly
market of the Christians, often held outside the city walls. As the
Christian markets became daily like their Arabic counterparts, the
semantic distinction between the two terms weakened, and azogue
eventually gave way to mercado (Kiegel-Keicher 2006: 1480–1).29 The
Arabisms almacabra, almocáber, almacábar designated Muslim cemeteries, and thus fell into disuse with the expulsion of the Moriscos
in the period 1609–14.
Instances of the Arabism alacrán far outnumber escorpión (var.
escurpión) as the label for ‘scorpion’ in medieval texts. In several
passages in translations of the Vulgate, alacrán translates forms of
Lat. scorpio from the source text (for examples, see DEM: fasc. 19, s.v.
alacrán). The Arabism azogue and the Latinism mercurio have long
co-existed as synonyms for ‘mercury, quicksilver’, and can be found
in synonymic pairs, e.g. “del azogue y su minera, llamado por otro
nombre argento vivo o mercurio vulgar y de la manera que se
engendra” or “argento vivo y azogue (que los alchimistas llaman
mercurio)”, in Bernardo Pérez de Vargas, De re metallica (1569,
cited in CORDE). The Arabism zaratán ‘a type of small tumor’,
recorded in scattered fifteenth-century medical treatises (DETEMA:
s.v. zaratán) and in a handful of early modern texts (CORDE) was far
overshadowed by the Latinism cáncer. The noun odre ‘winesack’ (Lat.
< UTER) overshadowed the referentially similar Arabism zaque, first
documented in Rodrigo Fernández de Santella, Vocabulario ecclesiastico (1499). CORDE shows that both aljófar and perla ‘pearl’ enjoyed
great popularity in the medieval and early-modern language. Today
the former denotes a ‘small and irregularly-shaped pearl’ (DRAE).
While becoming a frequent toponym, the Arabism alcántara ‘type of
stone bridge’ never threatened native puente. In like fashion almofalla ‘army’ was never a serious rival to OSp. hueste (which yielded to
the Latinism ejército only in the late fifteenth century; see Dworkin
2006), as is also the case for azagaya vs dardo ‘dart, lance’. The
abundantly documented Arabism albará(n)/alvará(n)/albalá(n)/
29
Given the semantic distance between the two homonyms, it is unlikely that the presence
of azogue ‘mercury, quicksilver’, of Arabic origin, played a role in the loss of azogue ‘market’.
The Arabic component
99
alvalá(n) (DEM: fasc. 21, 6b–14a) began to face competition from the
Latinism cédula in the late fifteenth century.30 In the modern language, albarán is the common term for a document issued to
acknowledge receipt of merchandise, whereas cédula is employed in
a juridical sense.
The designations for certain professions sometimes show an Arabic/Romance dichotomy, reflecting the social realities of medieval
Spain. Often the Romance term is documented considerably later
than the semantically corresponding Arabism, reflecting the linguistic consequences of the Europeanization of many professions, their
techniques, and other aspects of Spanish life in the early modern
period. Among the various designations in medieval HispanoRomance for ‘physician, doctor’ is the well-documented Arabism
alfaquim (studied by Hilty 1995), found alongside físico, the Gallicism
menge/metge (transmitted through Catalan?), and finally the Latinism médico. Over time the OSp. Arabism alfageme (flanked by
numerous orthographic variants) ‘surgeon, bloodletter, barber (in
the medieval sense)’ gave way by the early sixteenth century to
barbero, attested in the fourteenth century, but not documented
with any frequency until the fifteenth century. According to the
data in DETEMA, alfaquim is not found in late-medieval and
early-modern medical texts, and instances of barbero, cirujano, and
sangrador far outnumber those of alfageme, reflecting a Renaissance
preference for technical terms of Greek, Latin, or Romance origin.
The term alfageme experienced a major downgrading of its status.
The Leyes de Moros (1462) specifically labeled the use of alfageme as
an insult to the addressee (Giménez 2011: 163). Aldrete makes clear
that alfageme was obsolescent by the time he wrote his Del origen y
principio de la lengua castellana o romance que oi se usa en España
(1606). Both Spanish and Portuguese turned to the Arabism alfayate/
alfaiate to designate ‘tailor’. Whereas Portuguese has retained this
word, Sp. alfayate yielded to sastre, a borrowing from Catalan (or
southern Gallo-Romance via Catalan?) sastre/sartre documented first
30
The variant albarán appears as an entry in Covarrubias’s Tesoro de la lengua castellana o
española. The first volume (1726) of the Diccionario de autoridades describes albarán as a lowerclass word found in Aragon.
100
A history of the Spanish lexicon
in the fourteenth century.31 This borrowing became the dominant
designation for ‘tailor’ before the end of the fifteenth century. Evidence
from early-modern sources indicates that before alfayate definitively
fell into disuse, it had come to indicate for some speakers a less skilled
and talented, often rural tailor (Steiger 1948–9: 16–18, Giménez 2011:
123–40), showing how the narrowing of a word’s semantic scope in a
negative direction can lead to its loss. At the outset albéitar32 referred to
the practitioners of albéitaría, the care and curing of horses. Only with
the introduction of the new techniques of veterinary medicine into
Borbonic Spain in the eighteenth century were the albéitar and his
profession gradually replaced by the new veterinaria and its practitioners known as veterinarios, Latinate Gallicisms that entered the
language through the translation into Spanish of French treatises in
that field (see Giménez 2011: 211–33).33 In like fashion the Arabisms
alarife and alhajero gave way to arquitecto and joyero respectively
(Giménez 2011: 182–210). The polysemous alarife, found already in the
thirteenth century, designated the practitioner of various skilled professions involving building and municipal design, construction, and maintenance.34 Once again, with the turn toward a European perspective
with regard to skilled professions, Graeco-Latin arquitecto began to
compete with alarife (for details and abundant documentation of this
rivalry, see Giménez 2011: 169–201).
5.8 Grammatical categories of Arabisms
Spanish contains a small number of adjectives of Arabic origin:
alazán ‘reddish-brown (of horses)’, OSp. algarivo ‘evil, perverse’,35
31
Giménez Eguibar (2011: 123) records one instance of sastre in a document dated 1271 from
the Crown of Aragon. She also cites an example of sortor from the Aragonese Fuero de Teruel
(c.1300).
32
For abundant medieval documentation of this noun, see DEM (fasc. 21, s.v. albéitar).
33
According to the data in CORDE and in Giménez Eguibar (2011: 219–24) veterinaria is
first attested in the late eighteenth century while veterinario first appears in the nineteenth
century. The Arabic noun appears regularly in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dictionaries,
often with specific reference to a specialist in the treatment of horses (see NTLE: s.v. albéitar).
34
DEM (fasc. 20, s.v. alarife) offers the following definitions for alarife: ‘arquitecto, maestro
de obras’; ‘maestro de albañilería’. It also registers a handful of examples of alarif, all taken from
the thirteenth century Poridat de las poridades (translated from an Arabic original), which it
defines as ‘cierto rango militar subalterno’.
35
CORDE and DEM (fasc. 24, s.v. algarivo) cite examples of this adjective from the
thirteenth-century Libro de Alexandre, Poema de Fernán González, the fourteenth-century
Poema de Alfonso Onceno, Libro del miseria del omne, the Rimado de Palacio and from two
The Arabic component
101
azul ‘blue’, baladí, ‘banal, trivial’, OSp. gafo ‘leprous’, haragán ‘idle,
lazy’ OSp. hazino ‘sad, afflicted’, OSp. horro ‘free (no longer a
slave)’,36 loco ‘mad, crazy’ (if this etymologically controversial adjective is indeed an Arabism as suggested by DCECH and Corriente
[1999, 2008a], who do disagree on the precise etymon), mezquino
‘small, mean, miserable’,37 OSp. rafez/refez, rahez/rehez ‘cheap, vile’,
zafio ‘crude’, zaino ‘chestnut-colored (of a horse)’, zaíno ‘treacherous,
false’,38 zambo ‘knock-kneed’, identified by Corriente as an Arabism,
zarco ‘light-blue (of eyes)’, and possibly tacaño, ‘miserly, cheap’,39
first documented as a noun meaning ‘rogue; lewd, malevolent
individual’.
Latin lacked a basic term for ‘blue’, using caerulus ‘sky-colored’ as
the label for that color, a word that failed to survive into the Romance
languages, in all of which the basic term for ‘blue’ is a borrowing,
either from Arabic (as in Sp./Ptg. azul [rare OSp. variant azur], It.
azzurro) or from Germanic (Fr. bleu, It blú [itself a Gallicism?]).
There seems to be no way of knowing how speakers expressed the
concept ‘blue’ prior to the integration of azul into the lexicon.
According to Pastoureau (2001), blue was not commonly used in
Western art until the twelfth century. In Spanish azul originally
referred specifically to the color of lapis lazuli used as a dye, and
compositions found in the Cancionero de Baena. It is absent from the dictionaries of Nebrija
and all later compilations.
36
This adjective could also mean ‘sterile (cow, sheep woman)’, as observable in And. jorro,
Ptg. forro, Cat. forro.
37
Cognates of mezquino are found in Romance languages outside the Iberian Peninsula.
The word entered southern France as OProv. mesqui/mesquina (f.) ‘poor, small, mean’; it
passed into Old French as substantival meschin/meschine ‘young man, young woman’, which
fell into disuse by the sixteenth century. Modern Fr. mesquin ‘mean, stingy’ is usually considered to be an early modern borrowing of It. meschino, found in the medieval language (DELF,
DHLF: s.v. mesquin), although Hope (1971) does not include it in his study of French
Italianisms.
38
Corriente (1999, 2008a: s.v. zaino) states that originally disyllabic zaino and trisyllabic
zaíno go back to distinct Arabic roots. DCECH operates with one etymon and seeks to explain
the semantic link through the alleged reputation of the false lineage of chestnut-colored horses,
a hypothesis possibly supported by the following passage from Alonso Martínez de Espinaza,
Arte de ballestería y montería (1644): “A los caballos castaños que no tienen ninguna señal
blanca llaman zainos; suelen ser muy buenos y valientes, aunque se halla en ellos que tienen
malos resabios, y de aquí le vino al hombre que trata con otros con cautela y falsedad, llamarle
zaino” (quoted in CORDE).
39
Winet (2006: 416) includes loco and tacaño in her list of uncertain Arabisms (“arabismos
inseguros”).
102
A history of the Spanish lexicon
thus was employed as a noun. Infrequently attested OSp. bla(v)o,
borrowed from French, designated the color of a specific fabric. Some
varieties of American Spanish employ celeste with the meaning ‘blue’,
a typological parallel with the Latin use of caerulus; cf. also G.
himmelblau, E. sky-blue.
It may be significant that a fair proportion of these adjectives
express negative qualities. Does this fact mirror attitudes among
Christian Romance speakers toward their Muslim neighbors, or
might it reflect a cross-linguistic tendency for borrowed adjectives
to bear negative semantic connotations? Some of these items—gafo,
hazino, horro, ra-/refez40—have, with time, fallen into disuse or have
become obsolete.41 During the fifteenth century gafo eventually gave
way to its Latinate rival leproso (Dworkin 1998, 2011b); ra-/refez began
to lose vitality in the fifteenth century and was labeled obsolete by
Covarrubias in 1611, after succumbing to vil, ruin and the Latinate
neologism fácil (Dworkin 2011b); horro, which originally referred to
slaves and prisoners and which survives in Andalucia as the noun
horra ‘sterile cow, infertile woman’ (Garulo 1983: 69), was replaced by
libre and franco, both borrowings from Gallo-Romance. Speakers of
modern Spanish would not associate the modern verb ahorrar ‘to
save (money)’, orig. ‘to free a slave or a prisoner’, with the medieval
adjective of Arabic origin.42
Primary verbs of Arabic origin are rare in Spanish: achacar
‘to blame, criticize’, atamar ‘to finish’, halagar ‘to flatter’, recamar
‘to embroider’ atracar ‘to bring a ship alongside the dock’, zahorar ‘to
eat late, have a feast’.43 The verb nicar ‘to copulate’ turns up once in
the Cancionero de Baena (Corriente 2008: 398, s.v. nica).44 Does the
40
Before falling into disuse the Old Spanish adjective may have entered Basque as erraz
‘easy’ (Trask 1997: 261).
41
Today most scholars reject the analysis of OSp. sandío (earlier sandió?) as a jocular
derivative of the Arabism sandía ‘watermelon’; for an alternative analysis see Craddock (1982).
42
DEM (fasc. 18: 597–601) offers abundant semantically classified examples of the family of
ahorrar/ahorrado/ahorro. Garulo (1983: 69) reports a verb ahorrar, restricted to Andalusia, ‘to
miscarry in the last months of a pregnancy’.
43
OSp. çahorar is found in the Libro de buen amor and in the Breviario çunni (1462), where
it is used in its strict Islamic meaning of eating a late meal during Ramadan; for discussion, see
Maíllo Salgado (1983: 133–4). The noun zahora is derived from the verb (Corriente 1999, 2008a:
s.v. zahora/zahorar).
44
According to DHLF (s.v. niquer), Fr. niquer, originally a vulgar term meaning ‘to
copulate’, is a late nineteenth-century borrowing from the Arabic of North Africa.
The Arabic component
103
infrequency in the recipient language of primary verbs borrowed
from Arabic constitute sufficient grounds to definitively reject the
proposed Arabic etymology of Sp./Ptg. matar ‘to kill’ (see discussion
in Chapter 3)?
Although function words tend not to be borrowed, the preposition
hasta (OSp. ata, fata, hata, fasta), Ptg. até ‘until, as far as’ has long
been recognized as an Arabism. Why should Spanish and Portuguese
turn to a borrowing from Arabic rather than to material inherited
from Latin to express this notion? Lat. TENUS did not survive into the
Romance languages; its successor USQUE played a role in the complex
history of Fr. jusque, and It. fino can be traced to a grammaticalized
use of the ablative FINI FINIS. We have no clear idea how speakers of
early Hispano-Romance expressed the concepts denoted by hasta
prior to the early and rapid incorporation of the Arabism.45 Medieval
Aragonese and Catalan offer instances of enta < INTA (Cl. INTUS)46 and
troa < INTRO AD ‘as far as, until’. Malkiel (1975: 258) suggests that
speakers adopted hasta from the technical language of Arabicspeaking land surveyors, but he offers no proof to support this
hypothesis. Corriente (1983) accepts the Arabic origin of hasta,
but argues for the influence on its development from H: ATTA of
Andalusian–Romance reflexes of Lat. AD ISTA. Troubled by the rarity
of the borrowing of prepositions, Lliteras (1992: 425–7) argues that
OSp. a(d)ta is a local creation based on a reanalysis of enta, based on
the assumption that the first syllable of enta is the preposition en.
Lliteras allows for the secondary influence of the Arabic H: ATTA . This
bold hypothesis has provoked no reaction in the scholarly literature.
Other scholars have argued that enta is a reanalysis of OSp. a(d)ta.
Corriente (1999: 75–6) suggests that the OSp. adverbial abés/avés
‘with difficulty, scarcely’, traditionally derived from a Latin compound *AD VIX, is of Arabic origin.47 Originally a noun, fulano has
45
An example of usque a turns up in a brief Latin text preserved in a slate from the
Visigothic period excavated in the province of Salamanca; see Velázquez Soriano (2004: 194).
Lapesa et al. (2003: s.v. fasta) provides examples of these forms from tenth- and eleventhcentury documents.
46
Kontzi (1970) suggests that the Arabic ‘inda played a role in the semantic development of
OArag. enta, itself of Romance origin.
47
For documentation and discussion of the traditional etymology, see DEM (fasc. 2, s.v.
abés).
104
A history of the Spanish lexicon
become grammaticalized as a type of indefinite pronoun, used to
indicate an unidentified person (cf. E. so and so). Specialists agree
that this item is of Arabic origin (with its final segment -án remodeled on the Romance suffix -ano). It occurs today frequently in the
set phrase fulano, zutano (OSp. çutano, citano), mengano ‘Tom,
Dick, and Harry’, matched in Portuguese by fulano, sicrano (var.
seclano) e beltrano. Several scholars have proposed varying Arabic
etymologies for zutano (see Pharies 1977: 213–15, who, taking citano as
the original variant, opts for derivation from a proper name, Citi, not
to be confused with Cid(i), of Arabic provenience). Specialists reject
the hypothesis proposed by Krotkoff (1963), and viewed favorably by
Castro (1966: 190) and Menocal (1983), that the address pronoun
usted reflects the Arabic address form USTAD ‘teacher’.48 The Spanish
pronoun is first attested only in the early seventeenth century, at a
time in which the intense Arabic–Romance language contact necessary for such an interlanguage grammaticalization process no longer
existed. Moreover, in the history of the Romance languages, there are
no known instances of the borrowing of personal pronouns
(although this phenomenon has been noted in other non-Indo-European language families; see Thomason and Everett 2005).
5.9 Semantic issues
Some words of Arabic origin acquired negative connotations only
upon entering Spanish. Algarabía ‘din, tumult, confused noise’ goes
back to a designation for the Arabic language. Badea (flanked by
albudeca and OSp. budefa) ‘low quality melon’ > ‘tasteless’ derives
from an Arabic noun meaning ‘(water)melon’; alcahuete ‘pimp’
originally designated a person who arranged marriages; cicatero
‘miser, skinflint’ goes back to a root which designated a seller of
second-hand goods. The Arabic root underlying mezquino ‘small,
miserable’ meant ‘a subject who lived in the palace’, with “an understandable semantic evolution towards poverty and precariousness”
(Corriente 2008a: 378, s.v. mesquí). According to Corriente (2008a:
48
Neither Corriente (1999, 2008a) nor Kiesler (1994) include usted in their compilations of
Arabisms.
The Arabic component
105
s.v. salamaleque), Sp. zalama ‘exaggerated courtesy, flattery’ originated in the Arabic formula of greeting ‘peace be upon you’. OSp.
tafur/tahur ‘gambler, card-sharp’ goes back to Ar. TAKFUR (of Armenian background, originally a title given to Armenian and Greek
sovereigns (Corriente 2008a, s.v. taful/r). In contrast, some words
took on a positive meaning, e.g. alcurnia ‘lineage’, originally a form of
addressing someone.
Somewhat controversial is the hypothesis that the semantic evolution of some Romance words reflected calques of these words’ Arabic
translation equivalents. The most active proponent of this hypothesis
was the philologist and historian Américo Castro who outlined his
proposal in two major books on Spanish history (1948, 1954) in which
he elaborated his theories on the artistic, literary, social, and linguistic
effects of the convivencia in medieval Spain of Christian and Semitic
cultures and ways of life. He viewed as calques based on Arabic
models the genesis of Sp. hidalgo (older hijodalgo) ‘type of noble’
(lit. ‘son of goods’) and the acquisition of the meaning ‘secret’ by
OSp. poridad (later puridad, preserved mainly in the fixed phrase en
poridad/en puridad), allegedly the local descendant of Lat. PURITAS
‘purity’.49 Further selected examples are the use of casa with the
meaning ‘city’, of infante in the sense ‘son of a king or nobleman’,
acero used as ‘sharp blade, strength, energy’, nuevas designating
‘fame, renown, tale’, the use of plata (< Lat. *PLATTA ‘flat piece of
metal’) as ‘silver’, and the meaning ‘to plunder, pillage’ found in OSp.
correr. The personal use of amanecer ‘to dawn’, anochecer ‘to become
night’ (e.g. yo amanezco ‘I awake in a certain place’, yo anochezco ‘I
arrive at night’) has also been attributed to a Semitic model. This last
example has been the subject of a major debate involving A. Lombard
(1936), who first proposed a Semitic model, E. Coseriu (1961), who
rejected Lombard’s Arabic hypothesis, citing parallel uses in
Rumanian and Old French, and A. Castro (1966), who, not surprisingly, supported Lombard’s proposal. The Spanish texts written in
Arabic script by converts to Christianity living in sixteenth-century
49
Malkiel (1992) critically surveys the various attempts to account for the genesis of this
noun. Dworkin (2006: 35–41) discusses its replacement by the Latinism secreto.
106
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Aragon are replete with examples of Spanish words employed with
the semantic range of their Arabic translation equivalents.
5.10 Arabic–Romance hybrids
The intensity of the Romance–Arabic lexical symbiosis can be seen in
a handful of formations that contain an Arabic base to which a
Romance suffix has been attached. Sp. albricias ‘piece of good news,
reward for bringing good news’ is traditionally segmented into an
Arabic base followed by what seems to be the Romance suffix -icia,
the Latinate outgrowth of -ITIA (which yielded -eza through oral
transmission). This form in -icias is but one of a number of documented variants—albíxera, alvizra, alviçra, albisra, alvistra (see Malkiel 1946, DEM: fasc. 21, s.v. albricia)50—and is unique to Spanish; cf.
OPtg. alvíssara/alvíssera (IVPM: s.v. alvíssara), alvíxara, alvíçara,
OCat. albixera/albixeres (the placement of the stress is disputed;
Cat. albricies is a borrowing from Castilian).51 Both DCECH and
Corriente (1999, 2008a: s.v. façanha) posit a similar segmentation
into an Arabic root and a Romance suffix for Sp. hazaña ‘great deed’
(OSp. fazaña orig. ‘tale, narration’).52 OSp. enaziado ‘spy, renegade’
consists of a Hispano-Arabic base and the Romance suffix -ado. The
formal model provided by the Romance suffixes -ano and -ino may
explain why many Arabic bases in -án and -ín received a final vowel
when adapted to Spanish norms. There are also examples of compounds involving Romance and Arabic elements, e.g. (euphemistic)
OSp. baticambra/beticambra ‘latrine’, made up of an Arabic root BAIT
‘house’ and the Romance base cámara/cambra ‘room’ (< CAMERA),
studied by Gorosch (1955) and Kiegel-Keicher (2005: 350),53 aguanafa
50
OSp. derivatives include albriciar, alvizrar, and the corresponding agentives albriciador,
alvizrador, all found in a Bible translation and in the writings of Alfonso de Valladolid (DEM).
51
Corriente (1999, 2008a: s.v. albixeres) lists additional Catalan variants. For differing views
on the Arabic form underlying the Romance material, see Malkiel (1946), DCECH, and
Corriente (1999, 2008a: s.v. albixeres).
52
Malkiel (1950b) offers a different explanation of OSp. fazaña. In his view the noun
consists of the base faz- (from OSp. fazer ‘to do, make’) to which was added the suffix -aña,
usually affixed to nouns. Malkiel suggests that the presence in Old Spanish of pastraña ‘tale,
story’ provided the formal model for this anomalous derivative.
53
These hybrid forms, documented in the Fuero de Teruel, Fuero de Albarracín, and the
Fuero de Baeza existed alongside the synonymous OSp. Arabisms almoxaba and betamel
(Gorosch 1949–50).
The Arabic component
107
‘aromatic water’, made up of Sp. agua and Arabic NAFHA ‘smell,
aroma’, OSp. barbitaheño ‘beard colored red with henna’ (Steiger
1948–9: 18). Quite frequent are parasynthetic Romance verbs formed
from Arabic roots by means of Romance prepositions and verbal
suffixes, e.g. Sp. acafelar ‘to cement together’, created on the Arabic
noun QAFR ‘cement’, encaramar ‘to raise, extol’ derived from an
Arabic root KARAMAH ‘honor’ (Corriente 1999: s.v. encaramar), OSp.
arrefezarse ‘to cheapen, denigrate’ based on OSp. ra-/refez ‘cheap,
vile’. Such derivatives indicate the degree to which the Arabic base
had become fully integrated into the lexical structure of Spanish.
Spanish also offers examples of adverbial phrases involving a
Romance preposition and an Arabic base such as en balde ‘in vain’,
de balde ‘gratis’ (also Ptg. debalde, embalde, Cat. debades, older en
bades), based on Hisp.-Ar. BÁTIL.54
5.11 Arabisms in alRecently, one additional formal feature of many Spanish Arabisms
has received much attention. A high proportion of such words begin
with al- (or some variant showing assimilation to the following
consonant, e.g. arroz ‘rice’), a reflex of the agglutinated Arabic
definite article. In a number of instances, the cognate Arabism in
Catalan appears without this element.55 The contrast is even more
striking between the Spanish items and the corresponding Arabism
in Italian and, even more so, in Sicilian (e.g. Sp. algodón ‘cotton’
versus It. cotone,56 arroz versus riso, azúcar versus zucchero). Speakers came to associate initial al- with Arabisms. The anonymous midfifteenth-century commentator of Dante’s Inferno notes “quantos
vocablos que tenemos que escomiençan en al son moriscos y non
latinos. Como alhonbra, algodón, alcalde, aldayra, almud, altayde,
54
Many Romanists and Hispano-Arabists (e.g. Corriente 1999, 2008a, s.v. balde) analyze Sp.
baldar ‘to maim, cripple, mutilate’ as a Romance derivative of balde. Others see this verb as the
borrowing of an Arabic verbal base. Skelton (1971) surveys earlier analyses and suggests
derivation from Turkish balta ‘battle axe’, which entered Spanish through Arabic.
55
Bramón (1987) compares several hundred Spanish and Catalan Arabisms with regard to
the agglutination of the Arabic article. Noll (1996) offers a survey of the various hypotheses
formulated to explain this phenomenon in Spanish and Portuguese.
56
Sp. algodón entered medieval Gallo-Romance as OFr. auqueton, OProv. alcoton.
108
A history of the Spanish lexicon
alcaçar, almjheres, alcántara . . . ” (Webber 1962: 35). In a similar
passage in the second part (1615) of Cervante’s novel Don Quijote,
the knight explains to Sancho Panza that all words in Spanish
beginning with al- are Arabic (“morisco” in his own words). He
cites as specific examples albogues, almogaza, almorzar, alhombra,
alguacil, alhucema, almacén, and alcancía (see Solà-Solé 1983: 91).57
On occasion the incorrect belief that a word is of Arabic background
may explain the presence of an unetymological al-; e.g. almena
‘merlon’ < OSp. (a)mena < MINA, almendra ‘almond’ < Gr.-Lat.
AMYGDALA. A number of Arabisms that have entered Spanish show
no traces of the agglutinated article: bellota ‘acorn’, berenjena (but
sporadic and later alberengena, Cat. alberginia > Fr. aubergine)
‘eggplant’, jarro/jarra ‘pitcher’, rehén (alongside OSp. arrehén) ‘hostage’, tambor (originally atamor) ‘drum’, tarea (OSp. atarea) ‘task’,
taza ‘cup’.
In addition, the influx of Arabisms contributed to a growing
number of Spanish nouns with word-final stress. The large number
of Arabisms in -í led to the analysis of this vowel as an independent
suffix (although in the medieval language it rarely was attached to
non-Arabic bases, as in alfonsí ‘Alfonsine, pertaining to Alfonso’),
and came to alternate with native -ino (e.g. alfonsí alfonsino, tunecí
tunecino ‘Tunisian’), as well as with other suffixes, e.g. beirutí beirutense ‘Beiruti’, iraquí iraqués ‘Iraqui’, nepalí nepalés nepalense ‘Nepalese’, vietnamí vietnamés vietnamita vietnameño ‘Vietnamese’. Katz Levy (1967: 310–12) argues that OSp. Arabisms in -el (e.g. alfilel [ousted by alfiler] ‘pin’, alcacel ‘green barley’,
algacel ‘gazelle’, alcocel ‘town’) constitute one of the various sources
that fed the genesis of the suffixoid -el in Spanish.
5.12 Lost Arabisms
The loss of Arabisms documented in the medieval language is a topic
that requires much further investigation. Walsh (1967), an unpublished doctoral dissertation, is the only attempt to date at a systematic
study of this issue and is, essentially, an inventory of Arabisms that
57
Of these words, only almorzar and alcancía are not Arabisms.
The Arabic component
109
have disappeared from the standard language (though many may
have survived in rural varieties). To meaningfully evaluate the loss of
Arabisms, one must first determine the extent to which the item in
question was actually integrated into Hispano-Romance. As already
noted above, older Spanish sources contain numerous Arabisms that
are documented only once or twice and may have enjoyed at best
limited circulation in the language. Indeed, they could be classed as
unintegrated Arabisms. Their absence from the post-medieval language does not, in my view, really constitute lexical loss. A substantial
number of Arabisms pertaining to the dress, customs, political structure, military and agricultural techniques, and other realia of Muslim
Spain fell into disuse along with their material referents,58 while
others in the same circumstances survived by undergoing semantic
changes that reflected new realities, e.g. azafata orig. ‘royal female
servant’, revived in the twentieth century with the meaning ‘flight
attendant’,59 alférez ‘royal standard bearer’ > ‘lieutenant, ensign’,
alcalde ‘judge’ > ‘mayor’.
With the territorial progress of the Reconquest, Arabic lost prestige
in Christian Spain and ceased to be used by mudéjares, Muslims
living in Christian territory, and moriscos, Muslims who had converted to Christianity. By the late fifteenth century, Arabic enjoyed
currency only in Valencia and Granada, where the language was
seriously threatened after 1492. Although Hernando de Talavera,
the first archbishop of reconquered Granada, advocated the use of
Arabic as a temporary tool in preaching to the local Muslim population, the monarchy and many clergy viewed Arabic as synonymous
with heresy, and consequently, it was not regularly employed in
ecclesiastical efforts to convert Muslims, many of whom had not
yet mastered the Romance speech of their new masters.60 A series
of official decrees (not always fully enforced) proscribed the use of
58
The relevant items often live on in dictionaries, and are used by historians when
describing the realities of the past.
59
This new use of azafata resulted from a decision made in the 1940s by César Gómez Lucía,
then General Director of Iberia Airlines, who himself had encountered the word when reading
the memoirs of a Carlist general; see Alvarez
de Miranda (2008: 28).
60
Among churchmen who advocated the use of Arabic in an effort to convert Muslims was
Martín Pérez de Ayala, bishop of Guádix who, in 1554, declared the need for preachers to be
proficient in Arabic; for details see Giménez-Eguibar and Wasserman Soler (forthcoming).
110
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Arabic in speech and in writing (Cardaillac 1990). The 1526 Edict of
Granada prohibited the use of Arabic as a spoken and written
language, especially in commercial activities. The edict was temporarily suspended a few years later. As a reaction to the Morisco Revolt
of 1568–71, the Pragmática issued by Phillip II on November 17, 1576
banned the speaking, writing, and reading of Arabic both in public
and in the privacy of one’s home. Various writers condemned the use
of Arabisms, especially when a Latin or Romance term was available.61 In his Recopilación de algunos nombres arábigos (c.1593), Fray
Diego de Guádix, a native of Granada, advocated the avoidance of an
Arabic word if a synonym of Romance origin was available. Words
associated with Muslims and their religious and social practices and
customs, and those recognizable as Arabisms through their initial al-,
may have become victims of a form of linguistic anti-Semitism. These
instances of deliberate lexical replacement may reflect the first instances of a linguistic consciousness on the part of speakers of latemedieval and early-modern Spanish. They may also reflect the first
moments of the process of linguistic standardization in what after
1479 we may call the nation-state of Spain. The reduction (if not
elimination) of lexical variation is a hallmark of the standardization
process.
The (often gradual) replacement of Arabic words referring to
trades and professions may reflect late medieval and early modern
sociopolitical realities, e.g. albéitar by veterinario, alfayate by sastre,
alfejeme by barbero, alarife by arquitecto, alfaquím by médico, discussed above. The fact that many practitioners of these professions in
medieval Spain were Jews may have been a concomitant factor in the
decision to eliminate the word of Semitic origin. According to the
fourteenth century Gran Crónica de Alfonso XI, after the execution of
61
For example, Martin de Viciana declares in his Alabanzas de las lenguas hebrea, griega,
Latina, castellana y valenciana (1547): “Es lástima ver, que en la lengua castellana cuya tanta
mixtura de términos, y nombres del Arábigo y á les venido por la mucha comunicación, que por
muchos años han tenido en guerra, y en paz con los Agarenos. Y hanse descuidado los
castellanos, desando perder los propios, y naturales vocablos, tomando los extraños: y desto
recibe la noble lengua castellana no poco, sino muy grande perjuicio, en consentir, que de las
más cevil y abatida lengua arábiga tome vocablo, ni nombre alguno, pues en Castilla hay
millares de Varones sabios, que en lugar de los arábigos podrían hallar vocablos propios á
cualquier cosa, en demás teniendo la lengua latina”.
The Arabic component
111
don Juçaf de Écija, the king ordered that only Christians should
collect taxes and that the designation for the royal tax collector be
changed from the Arabism almoxarife to tesorero.62 As noted above,
the loss of much Arabic medical terminology in the early modern
period reflects the growing predominance of the newly rediscovered
Graeco-Latin medical tradition and its technical vocabulary at the
expense of the local Arabic tradition (Vázquez de Benito and Herrera
1989), as well as the Europeanization of early-modern Spanish society. A similar situation arises with regard to military terms, e.g. the
replacement of atalaya ‘sentinel’ by centinela (an Italianism first
documented in the early sixteenth century), zaga ‘rearguard’ by
retaguardia. As noted above, some Old Spanish adjectives of Arabic
origin, such as gafo, hazino, horro, ra-/refez, have, with time, fallen
into disuse or have become obsolete. Speakers might have been able
to identify some of these adjectives as borrowings from Arabic, e.g.
Covarrubias (1611) was aware of the Arabic origin of ra-/refez (an
etymology that he may have taken from the unpublished manuscript
of the Recopilación de algunos nombres arábigos of his contemporary,
the Franciscan Fray Diego de Guádix, which contains an entry for
raez); horro may have been used primarily with reference to freed
Muslim slaves or to Christians liberated from Arabic captivity.63
5.13 Arabisms in modern Spanish
An early-nineteenth-century nostalgia for Spain’s Islamic past developed by historians, archeologists, and writers associated with
Romanticism (e.g. the dramatist Duque de Rivas and the poet José
Zorrilla) reintroduced Arabisms found in older literature as well as
new items introduced to denote realities of the Muslim world (Oliver
Pérez 2004: 1087–92). Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century
62
In his Historia general de España (1601–9) the Jesuit Juan de Mariana recounts this
incident and judges almoxarife ‘a detestable word, because it is Arabic’. I wish to thank
Professor Rafael Cano for bringing this example to my attention.
63
According to Harris (2005: 106), the Spanish of the Jews spoken in Spain prior to 1492
contains the Arabism alforria ‘freedom, liberty’, often found in the phrase salir a alforria ‘to
liberate a slave’. This noun abounds in the Jewish version of the Bible conserved in Escorial MS
i-j-3 (c.1400), in a Ladino prayerbook from Ferrara (1552), and in the Ferrara Bible (1553). I am
aware of the presence of alforria in only one text from Christian Spain, namely the midfifteenth-century Romance version of St. Isidore’s Etymologiae (see CORDE).
112
A history of the Spanish lexicon
treatises and essays dealing with Spanish Morocco employed a number of Arabisms that, for the most part, have failed to take root and
circulate in spoken Spanish (Domingo Soriano 1994–5).64 Earlytwentieth-century writers such as Juan Ramón Jiménez and Azorín
creatively revived and reintroduced Arabisms from the past. The influx
of Arabic speakers much later in the century (especially from Morocco)
seems not to have brought new Arabisms into contemporary Spanish.
Most new items fall into the category of international Arabisms diffused
into many of the world’s languages to reflect current sociopolitical
realities, e.g. ayatola, fedayín, mufti, musulmán (actually a borrowing
from French; see Chapter 6), muyahadín, talibán. Such words probably
entered Spanish through English or French.
Speakers are not etymologists, and in the modern language the
historical origin of a word rarely affects its vitality in daily speech.
Quilis’s analysis (1985) of the answers provided to the lexical questions
in the Cuestionario para el estudio coordinado de la norma lingüística
culta de las principales ciudades de Iberoamérica y de la Península
Ibérica, showed that the sixteen speakers interviewed used 207 words
of Arabic origin (listed in Quilis 1985: 234–5). The following items
were given as responses to the relevant questions by all sixteen speakers: aceite, aceituna, alcalde, alfombra, algodón, alicatar, ante, arroba
(in the sense ‘liquid measure’), arroz, azafata, azucarero, azucena,
azul, bisagra, chaleco, escarlatina, gasa, guitarra, jazmín, limón, limonero, naranja, nuca, tambor, tarifa, timador, timo (alongside engaño),
zaguán. Among the Arabisms given as their first choice by more than
half the informants are acelga, adobe, ahorrar (strictly speaking a
Romance derivative based on the obsolete adjective horro; see
above), ajonjolí, alacena, albañil, albornoz, alcaldía, alcantarilla, alcoba, alcohol, alfiler, algodón, alquilar, alquiler, ataúd, atracar, azotea,
barrio, espinaca, jarra, sandía, taquilla, zanahoria. These words are
responses to specific questions concerning lexical selection for naming a given object or concept and not indicators of frequency of usage.
64
Javier García González (personal communication) offers the following examples: cabila
‘tribe of Berbers or Bedouins’, chilaba ‘type of hood or long robe’, jaima, kif ‘hashish’, tabor
‘unit of Moroccan troops in the Spanish army’. The following two expressions turn up in slang:
ir con toda la haka ‘to go in a group’, irse a keli ‘to go home’.
The Arabic component
113
5.14 Spanish Hebraisms
Although Jews played a major role in medieval Spanish society, the
influence of Hebrew on the local Romance vernaculars is almost nonexistent.65 Many Spanish Jews living in Muslim Spain were bilingual,
employing local varieties of Arabic and of the Romance vernacular
for everyday speech, and (Judeo-) Arabic for serious writing, e.g.
Maimonides’s Guide for the perplexed. Hebrew was restricted essentially to use by men for prayer and religious study and for theological
discussion or disputation; it was not considered an appropriate
vehicle for mundane secular needs. Spanish Hebrew texts would
have had little circulation outside the Jewish community. The few
Christian clergy who attempted to learn Hebrew did so for the
preparation of anti-Jewish polemics or to better understand the
meaning of Old Testament texts. The clergy would have employed
Romance rather than Hebrew in their efforts to convert the local Jews
(Vose 2009: 104–15). Doubtless Hebrew terms were employed in the
spoken Romance of the Spanish Jews to refer to realities of religion
and ritual and of community life, social and juridical organization,
and practices for which there existed no adequate Romance term;66
otherwise the Romance varieties of the Jews probably did not differ
greatly with regard to phonological and syntactic structures from
those of their Christian neighbors.67 Social, commercial, and consequently linguistic contact between the Jewish and Christian communities must have been fairly limited in many quarters, a situation that
might have favored the development of certain non-lexical features
characteristic of the Romance used within Jewish society.68
The few hypotheses proposing Hebrew etyma for Spanish words
have not met with widespread acceptance. The suggestion in DCECH
65
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries several Spanish men of letters interested in the
history of Spanish words, influenced by the belief that Hebrew was the original language of
humankind, posited Hebrew etyma for various Spanish words.
66
Bunis (1993: 17–18) offers examples of such Hebraisms found in pre-Expulsion Romance
texts from the Spanish Jewish community, as does Harris 2005: 103–5.
67
To avoid use of the Christian designation domingo ‘Sunday’, Spanish Jews turned to the
Arabism alhad. Interpreting the -s of Dios as a plural redolent of the Catholic doctrine of the
Trinity, Spanish Jews created singular Dio.
68
Miller (2000: 36–43) surveys the arguments for and against the existence in Spain prior to
1492 of a distinctive Jewish variety of Spanish.
114
A history of the Spanish lexicon
that tacaño ‘miserly, stingy’, originally used as a noun for ‘rogue,
malevolent person’ is a Christian adaptation (with anti-Jewish undertones) of Heb. TAQQANAH ‘regulation’, was rejected on semantic and
phonological grounds by Corriente (1999, 2008a: s.v. tacanho; see also
Malkiel 1991: 996–8).69 Many prestigious Romanists accepted the derivation of OSp./OPtg. desmazalado ‘unfortunate, unlucky, ill-starred’
from Hebrew MAZZAL ‘star, constellation; destiny’ (an idea that goes
back to Renaissance humanists; for bibliographic details see Malkiel
1947: 273–5). Malkiel argued that the core of the Spanish adjective goes
back to the family of MACULA ‘stain’, with at best possible secondary
influence from the Spanish Jewish community, who might indeed have
associated, through sound similarity, desmazalado with MAZZAL. The
presence of cognates of desmazalado in Jewish varieties of Italian—
smazal ‘misfortune’, smazallato ‘unfortunate, ill-starred’ (Mancini 1998:
370)—may support the Hebrew origin of the Spanish form, an etymology also advocated in Bunis (1993: 19, 2004: 136). Blondheim’s (1925:
75–9) derivation of OSp. meldar ‘to read, pray’70 from a Graeco-Latin root
MELETARE (extracted from such compounds as COMMELETARE, PRAEMELETARE, PROMELETARE) has supplanted the proposed Hebrew root L-M-D
defended by several earlier Romanists. The few words of Hebrew origin
in Christian texts usually appear in contexts referring to the Jewish
community, its faith, and its social and religious practices. DCECH (s.v.
malsín) and Corriente (1999: s.v. malsí) agree on the Hebrew origin of
malsín ‘detractor, slanderer’, first attested in the poetry of Alfonso de
Villasandino. Such derivatives as malsinar ‘to accuse’, malsindad/malsinería ‘slander’ (Bunis 1993: 19) demonstrate this word’s vitality. OSp.
albedi/albedin ‘high-ranking Jewish community official’, attested in
numerous thirteenth- and fourteenth-century municipal law codes
(fueros), derives from Heb. BET DIN ‘rabbinical tribunal’.71 The noun
69
Corominas was not the first scholar to propose a Hebrew origin for tacaño. Francisco del
Rosal (1601) and Covarrubias proposed different Hebrew etymologies in their respective
dictionaries (NTLE: s.v. tacaño). The eighteenth-century pioneer Gregorio Mayans y Siscar
included this item among his list of alleged Hebraisms in Spanish; for details see Lope Blanch
(1977: 300).
70
This verb appears in a handful of fifteenth-century Christian texts, but always with
reference to Jewish practices (CORDE).
71
For abundant documentation, see DEM (fasc. 21, 29–31). Several texts offer the variant
vedi/vedin. The initial al- of albedin may reflect assimilation to a pattern pervasive in Arabisms.
The Romance suffix of the variant albedino, found in the Fuero de Úbeda, the Fuero de Zorita,
The Arabic component
115
tacana (perhaps stressed tacaná) ‘regulations’ is documented several
times in late-thirteenth- and early-fourteenth-century Latin documents
edited by the historian Fritz Baer (1929: 155, 201, 730), and may well
underlie JudSp. tacaná ‘ruling, arrangement’ and the verb atacanar
(cited by Malkiel 1991: 997). There is one instance of treffa in the
Alfonsine General estoria (238r39; see Kasten and Nitti 2002: s.v.
trefe). A handful of late medieval Christian writers (including the
Marqués de Santillana and the converso Antón de Montoro) employ
trefe ‘impure, not kosher’ with reference to meat. The same word is
found in depositions made before the Inquisition by Spanish Christians
(Eberenz and de la Torre 2003: 247), as is its antonym caser. The noun
cohena ‘wife of a descendant of the Jewish priestly class’, found once in a
poem included in the Cancionero de Baena, simply represents a joking
use of a Hebrew base to which was added a Spanish ending. The one
medieval example of máncer ‘illegitimate child, bastard’ (< Heb. mamzer, a word that has entered Yiddish and Italian as mamzero) turns up
in the General estoria, where Alfonso’s collaborators erroneously label
it as a Latin term (“como este [el hijo bastardo] llaman en latín máncer”,
quoted in Kasten and Nitti 2002: s.v. máncer). The CORDE data
indicate that two twentieth-century authors (Antonio Zozaya, Juan
José Domenchina) use máncer. The items recorded in lists of Hebraisms in modern Spanish (e.g. Schallman 1952, Alvarado 1991) are either
unintegrated Hebrew words used only in reference to the realia of
Judaism or, more often, biblical and religious terms ultimately of
Hebrew origin that entered Spanish (and other European languages)
through Latin (which had acquired the words from Greek). The Spanish of the exiled Sephardim contains a large number of Hebrew and
Aramaic words, many brought from medieval Spain by the exiles of
1492, who used these words in the pre-Expulsion Romance of the
Spanish Jews (Bunis 1993, 2004: 116–121).72
Medieval Spanish translations of Hebrew texts as well as translations of the Hebrew Bible may contain scattered Hebraisms, but these
and the Fuero de Baeza, is further evidence of its integration into the language. There is
scattered evidence for the derivatives bedinaje and uedinazgo (DEM: fasc. 21, 22–3).
72
For an overview of problems involved in the study of Hebraisms in Italo-Romance, see
Aprile and Lelli (2004).
116
A history of the Spanish lexicon
items never circulated in the general language. Eberenz and de la
Torre (2003: 245–53) record a handful of Hebrew items taken from
the transcriptions of oral depositions and statements made by Jewish
and Christian witnesses at Inquisitorial proceedings: caser, trefe,
sabadear ‘to sway while praying’, barahá ‘blessing’, targún ‘book of
Jewish commentaries’ (both of which must have enjoyed sufficient
currency in some circles73 to merit inclusion as entries in Covarrubias’s Tesoro and later in the Academy’s first dictionary), séfer
‘(prayer) book’, çidur ‘daily prayer book’, guezará ‘edict’, çedaca
‘charity, alms’.
5.15 Summary
By the time of the arrival of the Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula, it is
accurate to use the label “Hispano-Romance” for the vernacular
language of the local Christian population. This contact is the first
instance of the extended contact of Hispano-Romance with a language that served as the vehicle of a political power, of a major
religion, and which boasted a developed written culture. In the
early centuries of the Muslim presence, many Christian and Jewish
residents in the Iberian Peninsula whose mother tongue was Hispano-Romance acquired Hispano-Arabic as a second language. As a
result of what may have been fairly widespread bilingualism (at
least in Muslim controlled territory), Arabisms constitute the richest
source of borrowings in the history of Hispano-Romance. Although
nouns constitute the most frequently borrowed word class, a significant number of adjectives (for the most part expressing negativelyvalued states and qualities) and some primary verbs entered Hispano-Romance from Arabic. Noteworthy is the borrowing of a
function word, the preposition hasta ‘until, as far as’.
Not all Arabisms were borrowed to express new products, techniques, scientific concepts, and other realia introduced into Spain by
the Arabs. Many Arabisms existed alongside referentially similar
Romance lexical items. Toward the end of the medieval period,
73
Montaner Frutos (2005: 309–12) offers additional fifteenth- and sixteenth-century examples of barahá, frequently used in an anti-Jewish context.
The Arabic component
117
with the territorial reconquest by the Christian kingdoms of Muslim
Spain, the prestige of Arabic began to wane; it became the language of
a heretical faith and was associated with the social and cultural Other.
Its use as a spoken language was severely limited and even repressed
or forbidden by legal statute. Due to the frequent use of the initial
segment al- in numerous Arabisms, speakers often recognized these
foreign elements. As a result, some segments of the speech community made an effort to eliminate Arabisms (especially with regard to
trades, professions, and social realities of Islamic culture). This may
have been the first attempt in the history of Spanish at deliberate
manipulation of the lexicon as a reaction to a specific category of
loanwords.
6
The impact of Gallo-Romance
on the Spanish lexicon
6.1 Background
The preceding chapters have examined the lexical consequences of
contact between the Latin/Hispano-Romance linguistic continuum
and three unrelated language groups, namely the various pre-Roman
languages of the Iberian Peninsula, Germanic (especially Gothic),
and Hispano-Arabic. Although contact with these languages lasted
several centuries, they have all (except for Basque) fallen into disuse
in the Iberian Peninsula. The contact between Hispano-Romance
and Gallo-Romance1 (the Romance varieties spoken in the former
Roman province of Gallia [Gaul]) is different in certain crucial
respects. Gallo-Romance is the first genetically related language
group with which Hispano-Romance came into contact. It is not
unreasonable to suppose that at the outset, there may have existed a
high degree of mutual intelligibility between these sister languages,
especially between varieties of southern Gallo-Romance and neighboring northern Hispano-Romance, a situation which would facilitate lexical borrowing. During the first moments of Gallo-Romance
lexical influence on Hispano-Romance, the new lexical items at issue
may not have seemed as foreign as, say, borrowings from Arabic.
1
With regard to the medieval period, I will subsume under the label “Gallo-Romance”
borrowings from both Old and Middle French and Medieval Occitan (often labeled
Old Provençal). Niederehe (1998: 111) notes that medieval borrowings from southern GalloRomance varieties (“occitanismos”; cf. Colón 1967) outnumbered loans from northern
Gallo-Romance (“galicismos”; see Pottier 1967). Given their linguistic similarities and shared
vocabulary, it is often impossible to distinguish between borrowings from Occitan and from
Medieval Catalan. In some cases an item of northern French origin may have entered Spanish
through Occitan or Catalan. I shall return to this question in Chapter 8.
The impact of Gallo-Romance
119
There may have been no consciousness of a process of borrowing, a
circumstance that may explain the introduction of a relatively high
number of Gallo-Romance verbs, adjectives, and, possibly, even some
function words. Gallo-Romance (or, in the post-medieval period,
French) is the first language with which Hispano-Romance has enjoyed uninterrupted contact through to the present day. French is the
linguistic vehicle of a literature and of a culture that has exercised a
considerable and continuous influence on Spanish writers, thinkers,
and artists.
Speakers of medieval northern and southern varieties of GalloRomance began to enter the Iberian Peninsula in significant numbers
c.AD 1000. While French soldiers allied themselves with their Christian brothers in the military aspect of the Reconquest of Muslim
Spain, French clergy crossed the Pyrenees to reorganize the Spanish
church and to bring it into line with the liturgical practices of Rome.
Many of the first bishops in the newly reconquered territories were
French. Starting c.1100, an increasing number of French speakers
entered the Iberian Peninsula to make the lengthy overland pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in the northwest corner of the Iberian
Peninsula. All three groups of Gallo-Romance speakers would have
had prolonged and intimate contact with speakers of HispanoRomance. Indeed many French visitors ended up settling in Christian
Spain, creating in northern cities such as Jaca, Pamplona, and Estella
French quarters (barrios francos), whose governing municipal codes
(fueros) were written in varieties of southern Gallo-Romance.
Throughout the medieval period literary models from France played
a role in the evolution of Spanish literature. Works originally written
in French were translated (in the medieval sense) or adapted into
Hispano-Romance or served as the models for the preparation of
Hispano-Romance texts on the subject matter in question. Consequently, words of Gallo-Romance origin entered medieval HispanoRomance through both oral and written channels.
As Spain and France became powerful and influential nation states
in early modern Europe, uninterrupted (friendly and hostile) political, military, social, religious, and cultural contacts continued. While
Spain was the dominant political force in sixteenth-century Europe,
120
A history of the Spanish lexicon
France assumed that role on the continent over the next two centuries. With the arrival of the French royal House of Bourbon on the
Spanish throne in 1713, French influence on all aspects of cultural and
intellectual life was especially strong throughout the eighteenth century and in the Napoleonic era of the early nineteenth century. In the
modern period French has become a conduit for words of English
origin entering Spanish and other European languages; in such cases
the Spanish words in questions are to be analyzed as borrowings from
French rather than as Anglicisms (see below and Spence 2004).
Despite their importance in the history of the Spanish lexicon,
Gallicisms have not received adequate scholarly attention. De Forest
(1916), based on the author’s Columbia University dissertation, is
limited to borrowings from Old French in twelfth- and thirteenthcentury literary texts. The Enciclopedia Lingüística Hispánica contains separate chapters on borrowings from French, ‘Galicismos’
(Pottier 1967) and from medieval Provençal, ‘Occitanismos’ (Colón
1967). Approximately 500 Gallicisms first documented in the period
1501–1700 are recorded and studied in considerable detail by Varela
Merino (2009). Krohmer (1967) records Gallicisms found in Spanish
newspapers, and Curell Aguilà (2005b, 2009) lists and comments on
1118 modern Gallicisms found in twentieth-century dictionaries. Both
authors include integrated and unintegrated lexical borrowings as
well as semantic loans and calques in their compilations. For additional bibliography, see Thibault and Glessgen (2003: 24) and Varela
Merino (2009).
6.2 Medieval Gallicisms: Nouns, adjectives, and verbs
A fair number of medieval Gallicisms ended up competing with and,
over time, displacing native Hispano-Romance words of similar
meaning. In some instances the substitution may reflect a perception
that the item or quality at issue reflected close association with the
culture of which Gallo-Romance varieties were the linguistic vehicle.
One such area is horticulture. Oral transmission into HispanoRomance of Latin FLOREM (Cl. FLOS/FLORIS) may have originally yielded
*llor (cf. the toponym Lloredo < FLORETUM and OPtg. chor ‘flower’),
showing the native Luso-Romance (and originally also Hispano-
The impact of Gallo-Romance
121
Romance?) development of the word-initial Latin cluster FL-. Spanish
flor can reasonably be viewed as a Gallicism (as can other related
terms such as laurel ‘laurel’ and vergel ‘orchard’) rather than as a
Latinism (the analysis advocated in DCECH). In the same way
jardín, perhaps originally referring to a formal garden, ousted
huerta/huerto ‘vegetable or fruit garden’ as the designation for ‘garden’.2 In the culinary sphere the initial consonant identifies jamón
‘ham’ (vis-à-vis Lat. GAMBA) as a French loanword (< jambon). This
label for the food is not documented until the sixteenth century
(CORDE); however, there are scattered examples of jamón as an
animal anatomical term in the Libro de buen amor (st. 1084c) and
in the fifteenth-century MS P of the thirteenth-century Libro de
Alexandre. Other early borrowings in the same semantic field include
perexil ‘parsley’ (< OProv. peiresilh, OFr. persil). In the military
sphere flecha ‘arrow’ (< Fr. flèche) begins to rival native saeta (<
SAGITTA) in Castilian only in the fifteenth century, whereas the Gallicism is abundantly documented in the later fourteenth-century Aragonese writings of Juan Fernández de Heredia.3 The CORDE
database offers over one thousand examples of batalla ‘battle’
(OProv. batalha) in the thirteenth century alone, far outnumbering
instances of referentially similar lid, fazienda, and pelea. Although
most specialists class OSp. gente ‘tribe, race, people’ as a Latinism, its
voiced palatal affricate initial consonant might bespeak a Gallicism
(OFr./OProv. gent); the native reflex of Lat. GENS (acc. GENTEM) was
OSp. yente, a form abundantly documented in the thirteenth century,
but rarely found after c.1300 (CORDE). The Gallicisms fonta/honta
‘shame, dishonor’, associated with the literature and culture of
courtly chivalry, enjoyed a degree of vitality in the thirteenth century,
2
Jardín is first attested in late-fourteenth-century Aragonese sources, some based on French
models (Viaje de Juan de Mandevilla, as preserved in Escorial MS M. III.7, Heredia’s Traducción de Vidas paralelas de Plutarco, and the Gestas del rey don Jayme de Aragón. In Castilian,
jardín first appears in the poetry of Francisco Imperial and Alfonso de Villasandino preserved
in the Cancionero de Baena, compiled in the first quarter of the fifteenth century. The Latin–
Spanish Dictionary of Nebrija employs jardín as a gloss for hortiorum and specifies ‘el jardín
para plazer’. The presence in Nebrija’s Spanish–Latin dictionary of jardinero and jardinería
alongside jardín illustrates the integration of this Gallicism by the end of the fifteenth century.
3
The CORDE database documents flecha in the Castilian Tratado de la Comunidad (which
it dates c.1370), preserved in a unique fifteenth-century manuscript. Just as in HispanoRomance, Fr. flèche (of Germanic origin), ousted OFr. sa(i)ete < SAGITTA.
122
A history of the Spanish lexicon
but failed to dislodge native vergüença/vergüeña (mod. vergüenza). In
like fashion, other nouns borrowed from Gallo-Romance did not
survive: OSp. añel ‘lamb’ (documented only once both in Berceo
and in the Libro de Alexandre), was never a serious rival to cordero;
consiller ‘advisor’ did not oust native consejero; OSp. loguer ‘rent,
rental’ and the corresponding verb alogar gave way to another
borrowing, the Arabism alquiler (OSp. alquilé); mester ‘office, position’ is today only used by literary scholars and historians in the
labels mester de clerecía, mester de juglaría, while menester usually
forms part of a syntagm es menester (also OSp. aver menester) ‘to
need, to be necessary’.4 Both the Gallicism argent ‘silver’ and its
vernacular counterpart arienzo never seriously rivaled plata, abundantly attested since the twelfth century.
Adjectives of French origin denoting physical appearance may have
penetrated Spanish through courtly lyric poetry. The adjective bello
‘handsome, beautiful, fine’ entered from southern Gallo-Romance;
local oral transmission of Lat. BELLUS would have yielded OSp. *billo
(via *biello).5 I have suggested (Dworkin 1980) that garrido ‘handsome,
beautiful’ is an adaptation of OFr. garni rather than a derivative of the
verb garrir ‘to chatter’, the etymology advocated in DCECH. One may
also include here gentil ‘elegant, gentle’ and short-lived genta ‘gracious’.6 The Gallicism laido ‘ugly, foul’ (< OFr. lait/laid, of Germanic
origin) appears in scattered medieval texts and may have been restricted
to the literary language, never threatening in the spoken language
native feo (OSp. var. hedo), although this adjective lives on in neighboring Catalan as lleig. In Dworkin (1990), I suggest that the near-homonymy of laido with OSp. ledo (var. liedo) ‘happy, joyful’ may have sealed
the fate of both adjectives. OSp. laido enjoyed sufficient vitality to cast
4
The Royal Academy’s Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (2005) labels as obsolete the use
of menester as an independent noun. OSp. mester is an adaptation of OFr. mestier (involving a
blend of MINISTERIUM and MYSTERIUM), whereas menester continues OFr./OProv. menestier. For
details, see Dworkin (1972) and FEW (fasc. 117/118, s.v. MINISTERIUM).
5
The adjective bello was flanked by the Gallicisms beldat beldad; belleza is a later
Italianism, first attested in the writings of Juan Fernández de Heredia and other Aragonese
sources (see Chapter 7).
6
This adjective appears only in the feminine form and, with the exception of the set phrase
Virgen genta found in the Libro de buen amor (st. 1648g), only in thirteenth-century texts. The
apocopated adverbial form gent (which would also be the masculine form of the adjective) turns
up in the poetry of Gonzalo de Berceo.
The impact of Gallo-Romance
123
off laideza. The rare nouns laidura ‘stain’, laidamiento ‘harm, damage’
seem to presuppose *laydar (< OProv. laydar ‘to wound’). OSp. sage (<
OFr. sage) ‘wise person’ was never a serious rival to native sabio either
as a noun or adjective.7 The same holds for OSp. fol ‘mad, crazy’ with
regard to loco. The Gallicism feble ‘weak’ lasted into the early modern
period before giving way to the Latinism débil first documented in the
late medieval language (Dworkin 2002a). In contrast, ligero, an adaptation of OFr. legier (< *LEVIARIUS) consolidated itself with the meanings
‘rapid, quick’ (alongside native aína, replaced in the early modern
language by the Latinism rápido [Dworkin 2002b]) and ‘easy, light’
(also expressed by OSp. lieve [mod. leve] and liviano). Both libre and
franco took root, displacing in the long run etymologically controversial
OSp. yengo (cf. Malkiel et al. 1978) and the Arabism forro/horro,
originally used in reference to freed slaves. Although most manuals
classify blanco ‘white’ as an early Germanic loan into spoken Imperial
Latin, I would not wish to rule out its possible origin in Spanish as an
early borrowing of Fr. blanc), as would be the case also for Ptg. branco,
It. bianco), displacing OSp./OPtg. alvo (cf. DEM: fasc. 21, s.v. albo, and
IVPM: fasc. 1, s.v. alvo), both of which seemed to enjoy a fair degree of
vitality. Additional color terms of French origin are bla(v)o ‘blue’, bruno
‘brown’, which may have first been used with reference to textiles, and
gris ‘gray’, which originally described furs. Other adjectives of French
origin reflecting the values of chivalric and courtly culture include
OSp. ardido (vars. fardido/faldrido) ‘bold, daring’ < OFr. hardi, OSp.
(d)esmarrido ‘sad’ < OFr. marri, and fornido ‘strong, robust’ < OFr.
forni (for detailed discussion, see Dworkin 1985: 30–9).8
7
Scattered examples of sage continue to appear through the sixteenth century. In his
Diálogo de la lengua (c.1535), Juan de Valdés alludes to and advises against the use of sage
with the meaning of cruel (ed. Montesinos 1928: 122). Nebrija’s Spanish–Latin dictionary
equates the headword sage with divino and glosses it with ‘sagax, praesagus’. Various sixteenthand seventeenth-century dictionaries have an entry for sage. The vocabulary included in Carlos
Chaves, Romances de germanía de varios autores . . . (1609) glosses sage as ‘astuto, avisado’. John
Stevens’s Spanish–English compilation (1706) labels sage as obsolete; for details see NTLE (6,
s.v. sage).
8
It is unclear whether earlier favorido is an adaptation of It. favorito or of Fr. favori, itself an
Italianism (Hope 1971: 195). Its use in the Marqués de Santillana’s Coplas al muy exçellente e muy
virtuoso señor don Alfonso, Rey de Portugal and its presence in the plays of Bartolomé de Torres
Naharro, a long-time resident of Italy, may bespeak its Italian origin.
124
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Three other adjectives merit comment in the context of medieval
borrowings from Gallo-Romance. Specialists today accept Aebischer’s
suggestion (1948b) that español is of southern Gallo-Romance origin,
a local reflex of *HISPANIOLUS; the native gentilic was OSp. españon
< *HISPANIONEM, a form not found after the first half of the fourteenth
century. In the medieval language español referred to inhabitants of the
Iberian Peninsula and was almost never used as a language name.9 The
absence of a final vowel points to the Gallo-Romance origin of latín and
alemán (OSp. variant alamán and rare alemano; cf. DEM: fasc. 23: 213–
14), both used to denote a people and a language. Vernacular transmission of LATINUM yielded OSp. ladino, originally ‘someone versed in the
local Romance vernacular’, whereas latino is a Latinism.
The genetic affiliation between Gallo- and Hispano-Romance may
have facilitated the borrowing of verbal bases. The two verbs danzar
and bailar ‘to dance’ entered the language from northern and southern varieties of Gallo-Romance, respectively (< OFr. danser and
OProv. balar).10 The latter is first documented in the poetry of
Villasandino preserved in the Cancionero de Baena and indicated
popular dances, whereas danzar (OSp. dançar) dominated in the
preceding centuries, and indicated a more formal type of dancing.
The native Hispanic verb was OSp. sotar (< SALTARE ‘to jump’),
preserved today in the dance name jota (OSp. xota); note also OSp.
sotador(a) ‘dancer’. OSp. asmar ‘to think, calculate’ (< OFr. asmer)
flourished up to c.1450 and then suddenly fell into disuse, giving way
to its Latinate doublet estimar. Other verbs of French origin attested
in the medieval period include afeitar ‘to put on makeup, to adorn; to
shave’ (< OFr. afaitier),11 amarrar, ‘to tie up a ship’, amparar (var.
emparar)12 ‘to shelter, protect’ (< OProv. emparar), atropellar ‘to
9
One example from the Alfonsine Estoria de Espanna (fol. 83v38): “los engennos que se
llaman en latín arietes . . . e en espannol llaman los bozones” (cited in Kasten and Nitti 2002: s.v.
español). Aebischer (1978: 261) offers an example of OFr. espaignol so used in the thirteenthcentury Roman de Gaufrey. Aebischer’s study also surveys earlier hypotheses on the origin of
español, which include viewing this form as a dissimilation of OSp. españon or even as an
Italianism (< It. spagn(u)olo).
10
The DCECH and Corriente (1999, 2008) have proposed an Arabic origin for danzar (see
Chapter 5).
11
Some scholars have suggested that afeitar is a borrowing from Portuguese; see below,
Chapter 10.
12
For discussion of this verb’s possible Gallo-Romance origin see Dworkin 1993.
The impact of Gallo-Romance
125
knock down, overrun’ (< OProv. atropellar), blandir ‘to brandish’
(< Fr. brandir), desmayar ‘to faint, swoon’ (< OProv. esmaiar),
despachar ‘dissolve, annul; dispatch’ (< OProv. despachar), empachar
‘to prevent, obstruct’ (< OProv. empachar), emplear ‘to use’ (< OFr.
empleier), enojar ‘to bore, irritate; to anger’ (< OProv. enojar), esgrimir ‘to wield (a weapon)’ (< OProv. esgremir), izar ‘to raise (the sails)’
(< Fr. hisser),13 (obs.) parlar ‘to speak’ (< OProv. parlar), punir ‘to
punish’ (Dworkin 1996), trabucar ‘to founder, capsize’ (< OProv.
trabucar), and possibly trobar ‘to find’; ‘to compose verse or song’.
It is unclear whether the two senses of OSp. trobar represent two
etymologically distinct homonyms or one polysemous verb.14 The
overwhelming majority of examples of trobar ‘to find’ come from
Aragonese texts. This verb did not pose a threat to native hallar or
encontrar in Castilian. The formal difficulties involved in deriving Sp.
quitar ‘to take away’, orig. ‘to remove a debt or sin’, from Lat.
QUIETARE disappear if the Spanish verb is viewed as a borrowing of
semantically similar OFr. quitt(i)er (an analysis proposed by Wartburg in FEW).15 Some of these verbs (e.g. amparar, desmayar, emplear) are documented very early in the recorded history of Spanish,
so it may be impossible to know the native terms replaced by the
Gallicisms.
6.3 Medieval Gallicisms: Function words and suffixes
A handful of function words entered Spanish from Gallo-Romance.
The one such element that took root is the negator jamás (< IAM
MAGIS), whose initial affricate consonant may bespeak its trans-Pyrenean origin.16 The CORDE data indicate that instances of native
The few documented cases of this verb, originally a nautical term, in fifteenth-century
Spanish sources pose several problems, discussed in Varela Merino (2009: 1446–7). Its use
became very frequent in the early modern language.
14
Menocal (1982) seeks to revive the hypothesis, launched by the Spanish Arabist Julián
Ribera, of an Arabic origin for trobar.
15
FEW and DHLF (s.v. quitter) trace the complicated formal and semantic history of the
French verb. DCECH derives the Spanish verb directly from QUIETARE. The same questions arise
with regard to the genesis of the adjective quito ‘quits; even’ and its relation to QUIETUS.
16
Perhaps because it is a negator, most specialists treat jamás as a native development of
underlying IAM MAGIS (e.g. Penny 2002: 132); cf Sp. ya ‘already’ < JAM. Lloyd (1987: 249–52)
examines in more detail the evolution of Lat. word-initial /j/ + non-front vowel. Lloyd argues
that forms such as ya, OSp. yurar < JURARE, yazer ‘to lie’ < JACERE, represent the expected
13
126
A history of the Spanish lexicon
nunca (< NUNQUAM) far outnumber the numerous instances of jamás.
As Rueda Rueda (1997: 113–31) points out, only in the fifteenth
century did jamás and nunca become functionally equivalent as
negative markers. OSp. toste ‘soon, rapidly’ (< OFr. tost, mod. tôt) is
well documented through the end of the medieval period, but becomes distinctly rare in the early modern period.17 The possessive lur
‘their’, aprés (used prepositionally and adverbially) ‘after’, asaz
‘enough’ and the rare aisa/aise ‘easily’ (cf. OFr. aise, OProv. ais) are
documented through the fifteenth century, almost exclusively in
Aragonese sources18 (for documentation, see Mackenzie 1984, Lleal
1997: s.vv. après, lur, and DEM: fasc. 18, s.v. aisa/aise). It seems feasible
to view the variant ansí (alongside OSp. assí) ‘so, thus’, as an adaptation of Fr. ainsi (older e[i]nsi) in order to explain the nasal consonant
(which, to judge by IVPM, is never found in OPtg. assi[m]).
Suffixes themselves are never directly borrowed as derivational
morphemes; rather they enter the recipient language as parts of loanwords. In some instances, speakers perceive the sequence in question
as a derivational element, and they successfully begin to attach it to
other bases regardless of origin. Lexical borrowings played a major
role in the diffusion in Spanish of the suffix -aje, the local adaptation
of OFr. -age, Occ. -atge < -ATICUS (whose native Spanish reflex is OSp.
-adgo, mod. -azgo). Throughout the medieval period HispanoRomance took from its northern neighbor numerous technical
terms pertaining to the economic and social realities of feudalism
(with the suffix written variably as -age, -aje), e.g. OSp. coraje, ‘anger,
outcome, whereas items with the word-initial voiced affricate such as junio ‘June’ < JUNIUS, juez
‘judge’ < JUDEX, junto ‘together’ < JUNCTUS represent some form of learnèd development of the
consonant at issue. The model provided by such doublets as yurar jurar, yunta junta may
have paved the way for the genesis of jamás alongside ya. Although Lloyd does not classify
jamás as a Gallicism, he is willing to so categorize OSp. jogar ‘to play’ < JOCARE and juego ‘game’
< JOCUS.
17
The earliest examples appear in prose romances based on French originals, such as the
Cuento del Emperador Otas, Cuento de Tristán de Leonís, Cuento del Lanzarote del Lago. The
Glosario de el Escorial (ed. Castro 1936: #185) turns to toste to explain the Latin adverb
inmediate. Toste is absent from Nebrija’s dictionaries and all other early modern dictionaries
surveyed for NTLE. While allowing for the Gallo-Romance origin of toste, DCECH also
suggests Catalan as the immediate donor language.
18
Pato (2010: 17) doubts the need to class lur as a borrowing. Sixteenth century Aragonese
texts reflecting the language of Muslim converts to Christianity offer numerous examples of
après (Galmés de Fuentes 1994: 111).
The impact of Gallo-Romance
127
daring’, OSp. corretage ‘brokerage’, OSp. domage ‘damage’, homenage
‘homage’, lenguage ‘language, speech’, linage ‘lineage’, maridaje ‘marriage’, mensaje ‘message’, peaje ‘toll’, ultraje ‘outrage, offense’, usage
‘custom, practice’, vassallaje ‘vassellage’, viaje ‘trip, voyage’.19 Such
borrowings continued in the early modern language: aprendizaje
‘apprenticeship’, bagaje ‘baggage’, menaje ‘set of household furniture’,
pasaje ‘landscape’, and even on into the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries (aliaje ‘mixture’, alumaje ‘act of ignition’, camuflaje ‘camouflage’, chantaje ‘blackmail’, doblaje ‘dubbing’, garaje ‘garage’, reportaje ‘journalistic report’, sabotaje ‘sabotage’). Until the seventeenth
century almost all words in -aje were borrowings. Gradually speakers
of Spanish came to recognize this repeated sequence as a suffix
functionally equivalent to native -azgo and began to use it to create
a relatively small number of derived denominal and deverbal formations from bases already present in the lexicon, e.g. almacenaje ‘storage or warehouse fees’, boscaje ‘thicket, grove’, caudillaje ‘leadership,
rule by a caudillo’, etiquetaje ‘labeling’, kilometraje, mareaje ‘seamanship; route’, molinaje ‘fee for grinding at a mill’, pandillaje ‘action or
influence of a gang; racketeering’, pilotaje ‘piloting; pilotage fee’,
ropaje ‘clothing’.20 Borrowings from Gallo-Romance (as well as
from Catalan and Arabic) contributed to the crystallization of a
nominal ending -el (Pharies 2002: 197–200) or suffixoid (Katz Levy
1965, 1967), which, like Arabic -í, increased the stock of nouns with
word-final stress in Spanish. Gallicisms in -ardo, e.g. bastardo ‘bastard’, goliardo ‘Goliard’, gallardo ‘valiant, gallant’, paved the way for
the creation of a suffix -ardo of fairly limited productivity in Spanish
(Pharies 2002: 95–6). On the side of phonology Gallicisms such as
gente, gemir, jardín, jamón, joya, jamás, etc., as well as the numerous
formations in -aje, were an important source (alongside Arabisms and
19
As -aje also represents the Catalan outcome of -ATICUS, the authors of DCECH suggest a
Catalan origin for Sp. carruaje ‘coach, carriage’, companaje ‘snack’, formaje ‘cheese mold’ (cf.
Cat. formatge vs Fr. fromage), obraje ‘manufacturing’, oraje ‘severe winter weather’. They
vacillate between Catalan and southern Gallo-Romance as the immediate source for lenguaje
‘language’, romeraje ‘pilgrimage’, salvaje ‘wild’, viaje ‘voyage’, between Catalan and French with
regard to peaje ‘toll’, ramaje, ultraje ‘outrage’, OSp. usaje ‘use, custom’; for brief discussion, see
Prat Sabater (2003: 235–40).
20
Fleischman (1977: 285–315) offers a thorough listing and semantic analysis of relevant
borrowed and native formations in -aje; see also Pharies (2002: 52–3) and Lang (1990: 133).
128
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Latinisms articulated with ecclesiastical pronunciation) for increasing
the frequency in Old Spanish of the voiced palatal affricate /dʒ/,
especially in word-initial position (Malkiel 1976b).
6.4 Early modern Gallicisms
Gallicisms continued to enter Spanish in the early modern (1500–
1700) and modern (1700–) periods, and constitute the largest single
group of borrowings into the postmedieval language until the mid
twentieth century, when Anglicisms became the most frequent borrowings. Such loans are overwhelmingly nouns and reflect
the influence of French material and social culture, as well as the
prestige enjoyed among many writers by the models of French
literary prose. Varela Merino (2009), a veritable tour de force, records
and studies in considerable detail with abundant documentation
approximately 500 Gallicisms first documented in the period 1501–
1700, many of which deal with military equipment and techniques,
heraldry, food, elegant living, courtly manners, and dress. Selected
examples include abigarrado ‘many colored’, acoquinar ‘to intimidate, cause fear’, alabarda ‘halbard’, amotinar ‘to rise up in rebellion,
to protest’, arcabuz ‘type of firearm’, argáneo ‘part of the anchor
ring’, asamblea ‘legislative assembly, meeting for decision making’,
atacar/ataque ‘to attack/attack’ (viewed by some scholars as an
Italianism in Spanish; see Chapter 7), avanzar ‘to advance’,21 bagaje
‘baggage’ (orig. ‘military equipment)’, banquete ‘banquet’, barricada
‘barricade’, bayoneta ‘bayonet’, billete orig. ‘paper with a short message’> ‘ticket’, bloquear ‘to blockade’, bote ‘small boat, launch’22,
burgués ‘inhabitant of a city, citizen’, cadete ‘cadet, recruit’, café
‘coffee’, claraboya ‘skylight’, crema, ‘cream’, dintel ‘lintel’, ensamblar
‘to assemble’, equipaje ‘baggage (originally for a sea voyage)’, esclusa
‘canal lock’, farsa ‘farce’, fila ‘line, queue’, fumar ‘to smoke’, gabinete
‘study, work area’, garantía ‘guarantee’, guapo ‘handsome, beautiful’
21
DCECH claims that Catalan is the immediate source of avanzar and that only its military
sense reflects the influence of Fr. avancer; its use in banking ‘to advance money’ reflects the
semantic influence of its Italian cognate.
22
Varela Merino (2009: 658–60) allows for the possibility that bote is an early borrowing
from English; see also DCECH (s.v. bote) and Chapter 11.
The impact of Gallo-Romance
129
(originally a noun meaning ‘quarrelsome troublemaker’),23 hucha
‘hutch’, izar ‘to raise (a flag, sails)’, jefe ‘leader’, lotería ‘lottery’,
maniquí, ‘mannequin’, manteo ‘cape’, marchar ‘to walk, march’,
paquete ‘packet (originally, of letters bound together)’,24 parque
‘park (originally a wooded or gardened area near a palace or castle)’,25 placa ‘plate, plaque’.
6.5 Gallicisms: Eighteenth to twentieth centuries
The eighteenth century marks a key moment in the spread of French
vocabulary to other European languages, including Spanish.26 At this
time the French Bourbon royal house took over the throne of Spain on
which it sits to this day. Speaking French or lacing one’s speech with
French words became fashionable in upper class social circles. The
spread into Spain of the intellectual innovations of the French-based
Enlightenment necessitated the creation of numerous neologisms.
French predominance in politics, economics,27 philosophy, social
and political thought, courtly ways, and the physical sciences (physics
and chemistry) is reflected in the spread from French of many key
23
Such specialists in French etymology as Gamillscheg and Wartburg viewed the French
cognates of guapo as Hispanisms, a view supported by Vázquez Ruiz (1962), who proposed an
Arabic origin for the Spanish word. Varela Merino (2009: 1355–9) offers a critical review of the
etymological debate, as well as documentation of guapo in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
sources. If guapo is indeed a borrowing of OFr. wape/gape, it must have existed for several
centuries in the spoken language before finding its way into literary texts in the mid seventeenth
century.
24
The earliest examples of paquete appear in the writings of Spaniards living in the Low
Countries and in bilingual dictionaries produced in that area (see Verdonk 1979, Varela Merino
2009: 1678–9).
25
This noun first appears as parco, used in synonymic iteration with luco arbolado in the
Comedieta de Ponça written by Iñigo López de Mendoza, Marqués de Santillana (1436) and,
slightly later, in the Andanças e viajes of Pedro Tafur, with reference to the grounds of a palace
in Brussels, as do many of the sixteenth-century examples of parco and parque. Terlingen
argued for the Italian origin of parco. Varela Merino (2009: 1688) wonders whether the two
forms represent different attempts to adapt Fr. parc to the norms of Spanish morphology. That
same author offers abundant documentation and a critical review of the etymological debate at
pp. 1679–90; see also Colón (2002: 196–8).
26
Despite the importance of the eighteenth century in the history of French loanwords in
Spanish there does not exist a monographic study for this period comparable in scope and
depth to Varela Merino’s aforementioned monograph (2009) on sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Gallicisms.
27
For examples of borrowings from French in the field of economics, see Haensch (1981:
142), a study that deals with the various processes involved in the creation of the Spanish
economic vocabulary.
130
A history of the Spanish lexicon
terms in these areas for which early modern Spanish had not developed adequate internal lexical resources.28 The reorganization of the
Spanish army along French lines in the early years of the Bourbon
monarchy led to an influx of French military terminology through the
translation of relevant French technical texts, e.g. the Diccionario
militar . . . (1749) of Raimundo Sanz (ed. Gago Jover and Tejedo Herrero 2007), based on the Dictionnaire militaire ou recueil alphabétique . . . of Aubert de la Chesnaye-Dubois (1742). In his Bibliografía
militar de España (1876) José Almirante criticized the number of
Gallicisms in Sanz’s Diccionario; for discussion see Tejedo Herrero
and Gago Jover (2006), who list among the relevant borrowings from
French brigadier, cadete, detalle, elíptico, espontón, galería, gendarme/
gendarmería, lotería, patrulla, recluta, and sicsaques (mod. zigzag).
Verdonk (1980, 2002) has examined a series of possible military Gallicisms that first entered Spanish via the Spanish soldiers stationed in
multilingual Flanders from 1555–1713 and were later incorporated into
the general language: avenida ‘avenue’ (an adaptation to Spanish
morphology of Fr. avenue), blinda/blinde, convoy, recruta (> recluta)
orig. ‘replacement, substitute troops’, later ‘recruit’, víveres ‘supplies,
provisions’.
Álvarez de Miranda (1992: 54–5) stresses that many of the Gallicisms that entered the eighteenth-century Spanish intellectual vocabulary are in reality semantic Gallicisms, i.e. the word itself was not
originally borrowed directly from French, but rather its new senses
and increased vitality reflect the influence of the cognate item in
French. The words themselves are often pan-European Latinisms and
Hellenisms. He cites as specific examples of such French-inspired
developments the semantic and notional history in the Spanish of the
Enlightenment of such items as burgués, burguesía, espectador, nostalgia, proletario, social. Although documented at earlier moments in
the history of the language, these words were apparently little used
and had effectively become obsolete. It seems safe to agree with
Álvarez de Miranda (2008) that they were reintroduced definitively
28
Spanish also created appropriate neologisms in all these areas through internal derivational processes (especially involving Graeco-Latin prefixes and suffixes) and adjustments to
the semantic range of current lexical items (regardless of their historical origin).
The impact of Gallo-Romance
131
into Spanish via French. In all likelihood French models played a
similar role at this time in the semantic evolution of such key terms of
intellectual life as bienestar, buen gusto, civilización, criterio, crítica,
escéptico, escepticismo, humanidad, ilustrar, ilustración, liberal, misántropo, nación, prejuicio, among others whose histories Álvarez de
Miranda (1992) has studied in detail. Most such neologisms entered
Spanish through the written language.
French came to replace Latin as the language of the natural sciences
in Europe. Much of the relevant terminology first entered written
Spanish through translations of French texts, and, at the outset,
would have been known only to a handful of speakers in a country
where illiteracy was prevalent.29 Many of these items were coined in
French from Greek and Latin bases: fusión, oxígeno, hidrógeno, microscopio (Garriga 2004). Although the word gas was coined by the
Flemish scientist van Helmont in the seventeenth century, the word
itself entered Spanish via French. Also of French origin from this
period are the key terms of the metric system, e.g. metro, kilómetro,
litro (as well as later coinages using these elements, e.g. taxímetro ‘taxi
meter’). The same situation prevails with regard to (neo-) Latinisms
in the technical vocabulary of other disciplines. In the eighteenth
century many such neologisms were created in French and then
diffused as Gallicisms to numerous languages, often in the translations
of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des
arts et des métiers, pour une société de gens de lettre (1751–80).
It is likely that the many modern Spanish nouns in -ismo and -ista
that entered Spanish in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are
Gallicisms (though the suffixes themselves are of Graceo-Latin background). Baralt’s Diccionario de galicismos (1855) lists antagonismo,
chauvinismo, dogmatismo, pauperismo, positivismo, racionalismo, and
sentimentalismo, and, with regard to -ista, arrivista, bolsista, equilibrista, formulista, hablista, herborista, lingüista, monopolista, pesimista, realista. Schmitt (2008) discusses the specific cases of Sp.
determinismo, formalismo, luteranismo, naturalismo, vis-à vis Fr.
29
Gutiérrez Cuadrado (2004) and Messner (2004) offer a general overview of the role of
translations from French in the development of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish
and Portuguese scientific terminology.
132
A history of the Spanish lexicon
déterminisme, formalisme, lutéranisme, naturalisme, and asks whether
the Spanish nouns originated as independent creations or were borrowed from French (which may have taken some of them from
German). Neologisms in -ismo and -ista continued to turn up in the
twentieth century. Krohmer 1967 specifically lists as Gallicisms activismo, activista, amateurismo. Curell (2009) classifies as Gallicisms
altruismo, arribista, cubismo, culturismo ‘bodybuilding’, culturista
‘body builder’, dadaísmo/dadaísta, dirigismo, ‘government interventionism’, fauvismo/fovismo, fumista ‘joker’, impresionismo/impresionista, tachismo, lampista (cf. native lamparero) ‘lamp maker, lamp
seller’, parachutista; femenismo, first attested in Spanish in 1902, is a
borrowing of Fr. féminisme, coined in 1837 (Thibault 2009: 115). Some
recent Spanish coinages in -idad are in all likelihood adapted Gallicisms based on French models in -ité; e.g. acuidad, banalidad,30
debilidad.
Additional modern Gallicisms include: ambigú ‘buffet supper’, apartamento ‘apartment’, avión ‘airplane’, bebé ‘baby’, berlina ‘type of carriage’, bigudí ‘hair curler, curling pin’, bisturí ‘scalpel’, bisututería
‘costume jewelry’, boga ‘vogue’, bombón ‘candy’, botella ‘bottle’, brigada
‘brigade’, buró ‘bureau’, cafetera ‘coffee maker’, camión ‘truck’, canapé
‘canape’, carné/carnet ‘identity card’, chalé ‘chalet’, champaña ‘champagne’, champiñón ‘mushroom’, charcutería ‘delicatessen’, chófer
‘driver’, cognac ‘cognac’, complot ‘plot, scheme’, compota ‘compote’,
consomé ‘consommé’, corbata ‘necktie’, coqueta ‘coquette’, cotón
‘printed cotton fabric’ (which failed to oust the Arabism algodón),
croqueta ‘croquet’, cruasán/croissant ‘croissant’, debacle ‘debacle’, departamento ‘department’, detalle ‘detail’, doblar ‘to dub’, doblaje ‘dubbing’, élite ‘elite’, finanzas ‘finance(s)’, franela ‘flannel’, fusil ‘rifle’,
galimatías ‘gibberish’, gobernanta ‘nanny, governess’, interesante, intriga ‘intrigue’, lupa ‘magnifying glass’, mamá ‘mommy’, menú ‘menu’,
obús ‘mortar’, pantalón ‘pants’, papá ‘daddy’, paquebot ‘steamboat’,
peluca ‘wig’, retreta ‘retreat; taps’, ruta ‘route’, sable ‘saber’, satén
‘satin’, sofá ‘sofa’, tisú ‘tissue’, torbillón ‘whirlwind’ (vs torbellino) (Álvarez de Miranda 2004: 1053).
30
Krohmer (1967) and Curell Aguilà (2009) also class the underlying adjective banal as a
Gallicism.
The impact of Gallo-Romance
133
French loanwords have been entering Spanish for over a thousand
years. Those Gallicisms that have existed in Spanish for a long time
have clearly been fully integrated into the phonological and morphological structures of Spanish. Many recent loanwords (for the most part
borrowed through written sources) retain their French spelling and are
often put in italics or placed in quotation marks when used today in
written Spanish, e.g. amateur ‘fan’, boiserie ‘wood covering placed on
walls’, boite ‘discotheque’, charme ‘charm, grace’, milieu (Curell Aguilà
2005a: 66, 2009). It is difficult to know whether such items as boiserie
and charme are pronounced in French style with /z/ and /ʃ/.
French was the linguistic medium through which such words as
babucha ‘mule, babouche’, harén ‘harem’, musulmán ‘Muslim’,31
minarete ‘minaret’,32 derviche ‘dervish’, razia ‘raid’ were transmitted
from such languages as Arabic, Turkish, and Persian into modern
Spanish. Many of the Flemish/Dutch and Scandinavian loans in
Spanish entered the Iberian Peninsula from French (see Chapter 4).
That language was also the immediate source for many Spanish
words of English origin, words which Spence (2004: 97) labels
“franco-anglicismes”. Often there are phonological or semantic
clues to such borrowings, e.g. word-final stress typical of French or
a meaning not found in English, as in autostop ‘hitch-hiking’, camping ‘campground’, footing ‘jogging’, parking ‘parking area’. Many of
the borrowings in such fields as sports, clothing, and politics, among
others, that entered Spanish in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may fall into this category, e.g. bebé ‘baby’, esmoquin ‘tuxedo
jacket’, (e)snob ‘snob’, frac ‘type of coat’, golf ‘golf course’, líder
‘leader of political party’, mitin ‘political rally’,33 pijama ‘pyjama(s)’,
31
According to CORDE, musulmán first appears c.1600 in a series of texts known as Relatos
moriscos and does not turn up again until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. OSp.
mozlemo is very rare (although it produced the noun mozlemía/muzlemía, found in Berceo).
Medieval Spaniards seem not to have distinguished clearly between Arabs as an ethnic group
and as followers of Islam. Consequently, such labels as moro, arávigo, sarraceno were employed
in Old Spanish to indicate a follower of Islam. The terms muçlim(a), muçlimes appear quite
frequently in the Aljamiado Spanish of Moriscos living in Aragon prior to their expulsion in
1609 (for sources see Galmés de Fuentes et al. 1994: s.v. muçlim).
32
Corriente (1999, 2008) views French as the immediate source of almimbar ‘pulpit in a
mosque’ and alminar ‘minaret’, whereas DCECH and Thibault (2009: 126–8) reject the analysis of
these items as Gallicisms.
33
As I shall point out in Chapter 11, many specialists treat golf, líder, mitin as direct
borrowings from English.
134
A history of the Spanish lexicon
redingote ‘greatcoat’, speaker ‘announcer’ (see Spence 2004: 99–102
for many additional examples). Of the European languages, Spanish
seems to have the largest number of “franco-anglicismes”. The fact
that a given word of English origin is attested in French earlier than
in Spanish does not automatically rule out independent borrowing by
French and Spanish directly from the donor language. There are also
possible cases of double borrowing over time. The phrase hacer el
amor originally meant ‘to woo, court’, and is a calque of Fr. faire
l’amour, so used. Today the Spanish phrase means ‘to have sex’ and is
in all likelihood a calque of E. to make love (which has also influenced
the contemporary meaning of the French phrase).
Quilis’s analysis (1983) of the lexical portion of the study of the
educated linguistic norm in the speech of Madrid discloses that the
sixteen informants employed 515 Gallicisms in response to the items
in the lexical questionnaire. Of these, 64 were employed by all
informants; among these are abotonarse, amateur (alongside native
aficionado), arcipreste, aterrizar, avioneta, batería, baúl, bicicleta,
billete, botón, brocha, camión, corbata, cremallera, chimenea, edredón, equipaje, fresa, glorieta, jamón, joyería, maleta, pantalón, paquete, parche, pelota, plancha, peluca/peluquero, servilleta, taller, taxi
(Quilis 1983: 538). These words are responses to specific questions
concerning lexical selection for naming a given object or concept and
not indicators of frequency of usage.
In analyzing modern Gallicisms in Spanish, the linguist must seek
to distinguish lexical borrowings from semantic Gallicisms, the
acquisition through contact by a Spanish word of the semantic
range of its French cognate or translation equivalent. This question
can be raised with regard to the history of a number of words already
documented in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, e.g. pieza
‘literary or musical work’, peluca ‘wig’ (Varela Merino 2009: 1723–7),
café ‘establishment where coffee is served’34 (is café as the name of a
drink a Gallicism or an Italianism?), derrota ‘military defeat’ (a
borrowing of Fr. déroute or a later semantic development, perhaps
based on the French model, of earlier OSp. derrota ‘route, road’; see
34
Álvarez de Miranda (2009: 16–17) raises the possibility that this use of café is an Italianism.
The impact of Gallo-Romance
135
Varela Merino 2009: 1033–7). Is martinete ‘piano hammer; type of
hammer’ a borrowing of Fr. martinet or a semantic evolution, based
on a French model, of OSp. martinete ‘type of heron’? In the twentieth century the same question can be asked with regard to Sp.
ordenador ‘computer’. Is the Spanish noun a direct borrowing of
Fr. ordinateur or a semantic evolution of a native deverbal noun
ordenador ( ordenar) under the influence of the French form?35
Spanish derivatives of Gallicisms pose similar problems. To give but
two examples, are Sp. duchar ‘to shower’, and fichero ‘file folder,
catalogue; computer file’ direct borrowings of Fr. doucher and fichier
or native Spanish derivatives of ducha ‘shower’ and ficha ‘file card’,
themselves both Gallicisms (< Fr. douche and fiche)? Spanish contains numerous contemporary loan translations from French, in
which native Spanish words combine in phrases which mimic French
models: alta costura ‘high fashion’, alto rango ‘high rank’, alta sociedad ‘high society’, alzacuellos ‘high stiff collar on a dress’, falso amigo
‘false friend’, apenas si ‘scarcely, hardly’, palabra clave ‘key word’,
cien por cien ‘one hundred percent’, coche cama ‘sleeping car’, golpe
de estado, jugar un papel ‘to play a role’, librar una batalla ‘to fight a
battle’, mujer fatal ‘femme fatale’, puesto en escena ‘staging’, siglo de
las luces ‘Enlightenment’, tomar posición ‘to take a position’, ultimo
grito ‘latest novelty (in fashion)’. Numerous additional examples of
modern Gallicisms (loan words and calques) in Spanish are available
in Vallejo Arróniz (1986a, 1986b) and in the overview offered by
Curell Aguilà (2009).
6.6 Reactions against Gallicisms
This influx of Gallicisms provoked a heated debate in the eighteenth
century among writers, pitting such figures as Benito Jerónimo Feijoo
(1676–1764), who advocated elaborating and expanding the Spanish
vocabulary through the incorporation of foreign neologisms when
needed to express new concepts and discoveries, against the defenders of the purity of the Spanish language such as Gaspar Melchor de
35
Fr. ordinateur was coined in 1956 at the request of IBM-France in an effort to oust the
Anglicism computer (Curell Aguilà 2009: 372). The CORDE database indicates that Sp. ordenador ‘computer’ becomes frequent c.1970.
136
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Jovellanos (1744–1811), José Cadalso (1741–82), and Leandro Fernández de Moratín (1760–1828), among others. This group sought to
support the efforts of the Royal Spanish Academy of the Language
(founded 1713) to banish new words that were unnecessary and to
revive with new meanings in their stead the traditional vocabulary:
“Desterrar las voces nuevas, inventadas sin prudente elección, y
restituir las antiguas, con su propiedad, hermosura, y mayor sonido
que las subrogadas” (quoted in Corbella 1994: 62). Nevertheless, the
first two dictionaries issued by the Royal Academy, the so-called
Diccionario de autoridades (1726–39) and the first edition of the
Diccionario de la lengua castellana (today’s DRAE) gave many such
Gallicisms (as well as earlier borrowings from French) official
approval (Corbella 1994, Jiménez Ríos 1998).36 New technical terms
from French found their way into the multi-volume Diccionario
castellano con las voces de las ciencias y artes compiled by the Jesuit
Esteban de Terreros y Pando (1786–93, but actually finished in 1765).
Both the introduction of new Gallicisms and the debate concerning
their acceptability continued into the following century, culminating
in the polemical and virulently anti-neologistic Diccionario de galicismos of the Venezuelan Rafael Baralt (1855), a work that was
prologued and lauded by the dramatist and member of the Royal
Spanish Academy of the Language, Eugenio Hartzenbusch.37 In
contrast, Baralt’s contemporary and friend, Adolfo de Castro took a
more reasonable view of French loanwords in his Libro de los galicismos (Madrid, 1898). A similar debate is now taking place in the
Spanish-speaking world concerning the influx of Anglicisms.
6.7 Gallicisms in New World Spanish
Many Gallicisms that entered European Spanish found their way into
New World Spanish. After independence, many of Spain’s former
36
Fries (1989) argues convincingly against the claim, put forward by such eminent literary
historians as Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo and Emilio Cotarelo y Mori, that a desire to halt the
Gallicizing tendencies of the Spanish language was a major factor behind the formation of the
Royal Spanish Academy of the Language.
37
For a discussion of this debate, with appropriate quotations and illustrations, see Rubio
(1937), Lázaro Carreter (1985: 255–92), and Martinell Gifre (1984). Lépinette (2003) describes and
critically analyzes Baralt’s Diccionario.
The impact of Gallo-Romance
137
colonies looked to France as a model for the establishment of their
own political and educational systems. French literary movements
influenced the developing literatures of Latin America. In a unique
case of language contact in the New World the French presence in
Haiti provided Gallicisms to the Spanish of the neighboring Dominican Republic (cf. Granda Gutiérrez 1991: 177–87). New World Spanish contains a number of Gallicisms absent from Peninsular Spanish.
Sala et al. (1982: 432–60) offer a list of 435 Gallicisms documented in
dictionaries of regional varieties of New World Spanish.38 Only some
fifty items are widespread in Latin American (especially those that
are international Gallicisms), whereas the majority turn up only in
some regions of the New World. Most such words are not recorded in
the latest edition of DRAE used by Sala and his team, which does not
necessarily mean that they are unknown in European Spanish. Dictionaries of Argentine Spanish record the largest number of Gallicisms. The information was garnered mainly from lexicographic
sources, many of which are not known for their scientific rigor. As
is the case with compilations of indigenous words in varieties of New
World Spanish, no effort is made to distinguish between Gallicisms
used occasionally in the dictionary’s oral or written sources and those
which are firmly rooted and employed frequently. Very few of the
many Gallicisms collected have produced local derivatives, usually a
sign of the base’s integration into the recipient language. Sala and his
collaborators conclude that Gallicisms do not occupy a significant
place in the overall picture of the lexicon of New World Spanish
(1982: 482).
6.8 Summary
Gallo-Romance loanwords have been entering Spanish for over a
thousand years, the longest continuous period of contact between
Spanish and a donor language. Although the overwhelming majority
of the relevant borrowings are nouns, a relatively larger number of
Gallicisms are verbs and adjectives. Loans from medieval GalloRomance reflect, for the most part, spheres of activity in which
38
Cahuzac (1988) offers a critique and analysis of Sala’s treatment of New World Gallicisms.
138
A history of the Spanish lexicon
France predominated over its neighbors in the Iberian Peninsula. In a
significant number of instances the Gallo-Romance lexical items over
time displaced referentially similar words already present in medieval
Hispano-Romance. In addition, a handful of function words (prepositions, adverbials) entered medieval varieties of HispanoRomance (especially Aragonese, quite exposed to French influence)
from its northern neighbor; only one such item, the negator jamás
(for which not all specialists accept a Gallo-Romance origin) succeeded in taking root. Gallo-Romance loans played the leading role in
introducing the suffix -aje/-age into the derivational repertoire of
Hispano-Romance. The contact between Hispano- and GalloRomance reaches the third level on the Thomason–Kaufmann scale
described in Chapter 1.
French influence on the pre-modern and modern Spanish lexicon
reflects French predominance in European cultural, political, social,
and intellectual life from the fifteenth century into the twentieth
century. Almost all borrowings from this period are nouns, and it
seems reasonable to state that much technical terminology of the
nascent natural and social sciences entered Spanish from GalloRomance through written sources (especially translations of relevant
French writings). The influx of Gallicisms in the eighteenth century
provoked the first overt reaction against neologisms in restricted
circles of the educated speech community. Semantic loans and calques based on French models began to play a significant role in the
history of the Spanish lexicon.
7
The influence of Italian on the
Spanish Lexicon
7.1 Preliminaries
The contact situation that led to the introduction of Italian lexical
material into the Iberian Peninsula differs from the cases studied so
far in this book.1 The presence of Italian soldiers in the Iberian
Peninsula during the Reconquest, of merchants from Pisa and
Genoa who settled in Seville starting in the thirteenth century, of
members of Italian religious orders, and of Italian pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela, seem to have had no lexical consequences.
Contact sufficiently strong to produce lexical borrowings (in both
directions) between these two Romance languages began only in the
later medieval and early modern periods. It represents the first
instance in the history of Spanish in which contact took place
with a language that was not brought directly into the Iberian
Peninsula as part of an invasion or settlement and which was not
spoken in an immediately neighboring geographical territory.
Indeed, contact with varieties of Italo-Romance represents the
first such instance resulting largely from the spread of HispanoRomance outside the bounds of its native territory. The
1
Italian loanwords in Spanish still await scholarly attention within the framework of
contemporary studies of lexical contact and borrowing. Terlingen (1943; condensed and revised
1967) remains the only systematic synthesis, and covers only the period up to 1600. This work
shows the weaknesses resulting from its preparation and publication as a doctoral dissertation
written under the difficult circumstances of wartime Holland. In all fairness to Terlingen, he did
not have at his disposal the wealth of raw material that became available only later in
Corominas’s two etymological dictionaries of Spanish, nor would he have had access to the
files of the Royal Spanish Academy’s Diccionario histórico de la lengua española, a project that
itself was a victim of the tragic circumstances of the Spanish Civil War. Valuable critiques and
rectifications appear in Corominas (1948), Gillet (1948).
140
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Catalan-speaking Crown of Aragon expanded its political sphere of
influence into Sicily (1282), Sardinia (1326), and the Kingdom of
Naples (1442). In the latter site, there arose a flourishing literary
activity at the court of Alfonso V, especially in the form of Castilian
and Catalan cancionero poetry. Some early terms of Italian origin,
especially words relating to navigation and maritime commerce,
entered Spanish through Catalan2 or through the sparsely documented Mediterranean lingua franca, with its notable Genoese and
Venetian lexical component. Much of the Spanish–Italian linguistic
contact arose through the written language as a result of the spread
through Europe of Italian Humanism and the Renaissance and the
accompanying masterpieces of Italian literature. Italian sources and
Italian scholars played an important role in the translation activities
in the late fourteenth century at the Aragonese court of Juan
Fernández de Heredia (d. 1396). At this time, Spaniards began to
travel to Italy to study with the Italian humanists, especially at the
University of Bologna. By the end of the fifteenth century the major
prose and verse writings of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio had
been translated into Hispano-Romance.
7.2 Medieval Italianisms and etymological controversies
These first intellectual and literary contacts introduced a small number of Italian loans into Medieval Spanish.3 Álvarez Rodríguez (1989)
identifies a handful of Italianisms found in three translations of
Greek originals made at the court of Heredia, none of which took
root. Pascual (1974: 103–4) cites terremoto ‘earthquake’, (obsolete)
mercadante ‘merchant’, and capucho ‘hood’ (reflecting the influence
of the Franciscan order) as possible medieval Italianisms found in
Enrique de Villena’s translation of Dante’s Divina commedia. The
presence of several examples of terremoto in the pre-Alfonsine Bible
preserved in Escorial MS E6, in the Alfonsine General estoria IV, and
2
Corominas (1948) offers a substantial number of relevant examples of such words that
Terlingen (1943) had treated as Italianisms in Spanish. In DCECH (s.v. lustre), Corominas states
that almost all pre-sixteenth-century Italianisms documented in Spanish entered via Catalan.
3
In contrast, a much larger number of Italian loans entered medieval Gallo-Romance; see
Hope (1971: 27–66).
The influence of Italian
141
in the Cavallero Cifar may call into question the role of Italian in the
earliest introduction of this word in Spanish texts. All the instances of
terremoto in the E6 Bible correspond to terraemotus in the Vulgate.
One of the most frequently documented Italianisms of this period is
belleza ‘beauty’,4 found in such authors as the aforementioned Juan
Fernández de Heredia, the fifteenth-century poets Juan de Mena,
Iñigo López de Mendoza, Marqués de Santillana, all familiar with
Italian, and used frequently in the mid-fifteenth-century translation
of Boccaccio’s Tesiada. The Marqués de Santillana is normally credited with introducing the noun soneto ‘sonnet’ in his Sonetos fechos
al itálico modo, although Enrique de Villena had employed it earlier
in his Exposición del soneto de Petrarca (1434). This designation
turns up frequently in the fifteenth century Cancionero castellano
de París, Cancionero castellano y catalán de París, and the Cancionero de Juan Fernández de Ixar.
The status as Italianisms of some other items documented in
Medieval Spanish remains problematic. The plural novelas ‘fictional
tales’ appears in Santillana’s Comedieta de Ponça and in Nebrija’s
Gramática castellana. CORDE offers one example of singular novela
‘piece of news’ in the Exemplario contra los engaños y peligros del
mundo (1493); all the remaining few instances of novela are feminine
forms of the Old Spanish adjective novel (of French or Catalan
origin?). Is the noun novela an Italianism, a plausible analysis proposed already in the sixteenth century by Juan de Valdés and supported by Terlingen (1943: 96), or might it possibly be an adaptation
of OFr. nouvelles, with concomitant semantic influence of It. novella?
Santillana also employs the noun gruta ‘grotto’, of Neapolitan or
Sicilian origin. DCECH is unsure whether amante ‘lover’, abundantly
documented in the fifteenth century, is a borrowing from Italian or
from Gallo-Romance. The analyses offered in Kahane and Kahane
(1958/1979) render it unlikely that OSp. galea/galera ‘galley, type of
ship’ entered Spanish directly from southern Italy, the source of
4
Prior to the introduction of belleza, the abstract noun based on bello, a borrowing from
southern French, was beldat/beldad (in all likelihood a Gallicism). The neologism belleza also
faced rivalry from such terms as hermosura, OSp. locanía, and, later, lindeza (after lindo,
originally ‘of legitimate birth’, had acquired the meaning ‘beautiful’), and fresqueza.
142
A history of the Spanish lexicon
diffusion throughout the western Mediterranean of this nautical
Hellenism as suggested by Terlingen (1943: 246–7). The older variant
galea is found in a twelfth-century Catalan source and is abundantly
attested in the thirteenth century, while the earliest examples of galera
(thirteenth century) come from Aragonese and Catalan sources (for
documentation and discussion, see Eberenz 1975: 155–78); Vidos (1965:
350) and the Kahanes identify Aragonese and Catalan as the immediate source of the Spanish forms. Fifteenth-century translations of
Italian texts and works produced by writers familiar with Italian
contain scattered examples of unintegrated and partially adapted
Italian words that failed to survive in the Spanish lexicon.5
Despite the Italian origin for OSp. bonança ‘good weather, calm’
advocated by REW and Terlingen (1943: 229), its early use in Heredia
and in Enrique de Villena’s translation of the Aeneid may well point
to transmission from Italian via Catalan or Aragonese. On the basis
of OFr. bonace (mod. bonasse), OPtg. bonaça, It. bonaccia, the
DCECH operates with *BONACIA, modeled on MALACIA ‘calm at sea’,
a nautical Hellenism misinterpreted as a derivative of MALUS ‘bad,
evil’, and implies that the Spanish form (with its unetymological -n-)
is a native reflex of the posited Latin base. The secondary meaning
‘prosperity’ is attested in Covarrubias (1611). The history of fortuna is
complex. In the meaning ‘fate, destiny’, it is a Latinism attested since
the thirteenth century. Terlingen (1943: 232) claims that the meaning
‘storm at sea or on land’ reflects Italian usage already documented in
thirteenth-century Venetian and Genoese sources, whereas DCECH
once again suggests transmission through Catalan.6
Meyer-Lübke (REW: #8531) asserted that Sp. tacaño ‘miserly,
miser’, orig. ‘rogue, evildoer’ as well as Ptg. tacanho, Cat. tacany,
and Fr. taquin, are adaptations of It. taccagno, itself of disputed
(possibly Germanic) origin. Scattered examples of the Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan forms, used as nouns, first appear in fourteenthand fifteenth-century texts, whereas It. taccagno is first documented
5
Abundant examples appear in Pascual (1974: 85–117); see also Lida de Malkiel (1950:
249–50) for samples drawn from Juan de Mena, and López Bascuñana (1978) for Italianisms
found in the writings of the Marqués de Santillana.
6
Gillet (1951: 94) offers sixteenth-century examples of the uses of bonanza and fortuna,
especially from the writings of Bartolomé de Torres Naharro.
The influence of Italian
143
in the early years of the sixteenth century, a situation which bespeaks
possibly seeing the Italian form as a Hispanism, as already suggested
in DCECH. Although documented in the late medieval language with
the meaning ‘rogue, lewd individual’, tacaño does not become frequent until the sixteenth century. Terlingen does not include tacaño
in his inventory of Italian loanwords in Spanish. Hope (1971) does not
follow the lead of DELF in labeling Fr. taquin orig. ‘miserly’, mod.
‘teasing’, as an Italianism. The authors of DCECH class Fr. taquin as
a Hispanism. DHLF (s.v. taquin) traces a quite different history for
this word, linking it to OFr. taquehan, taquehein, and deriving
it ultimately from a hypothetical Dutch *TAKEHAN For an overview
of attempts to identify the etymology of It. taccagno, see Cortelazzo
and Zolli (1979–88: s.v. taccagno). I have discussed in Chapter 4 the
Hebrew and Arabic etyma proposed for tacaño by Corominas and
Corriente respectively.
Although Terlingen (1943: 347) does not attribute Sp. cortesano
‘courtly, pertaining to the court’ directly to It. corteggiano, he sees
Italian influence in its semantic development (as observable in the
first half of the sixteenth century in Juan de Boscán’s translation of
Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano and in the poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega).
Cortesano shows considerable vitality in fifteenth-century texts (with
some 30 examples recorded in CORDE) and is in all likelihood a
borrowing from Gallo-Romance (although DCECH toys with the
possibility of transmission through Catalan).7 Genetically related
cortejo ‘court, wooing; cortege’ and cortejar ‘to court, curry favor;
woo’, both first attested in the early modern language, are borrowed
directly from Italian.
7.3 Italianisms in early modern Spanish
Italian had its greatest lexical influence on Spanish between 1500 and
1700, a time when many Latinisms and Gallicisms also entered the
language.8 This is also the period in which many Spanish words
7
Fr. courtisan is recognized as an Italianism first attested in the mid fourteenth century at
the papal court in Avignon (DELF, DHLF, Hope 1971: 149, 184).
8
Álvarez de Miranda (2009) bemoans the lack of a study of eighteenth-century Italianisms
in Spanish.
144
A history of the Spanish lexicon
entered Italian. Until the late seventeenth century, Spain held political
control over considerable territory in Italy. Spanish and Italian men of
letters and artists spent long periods in each other’s countries. Corominas (1948: 107) raises the possibility that some items classified as
Italianisms in Spanish in such works as Terlingen (1943) may, in
reality, be Hispanisms in Italian.9 The simultaneous influx of borrowings from different historically related languages can lead to difficulties
in determining the immediate origin and the route(s) of transmission
followed by certain loanwords. Sometimes it can be next to impossible
to decide whether a given word is a Latinism or an adaptation of its
literary Florentine reflex,10 whether a given item entered Spanish
directly from Italian, or whether it first passed through French or
Catalan (as may be the case with many terms pertaining to navigation
and commerce in the Mediterranean basin).
Chronology may often help to determine whether a given item is
an Italianism, especially when the word in question is first attested
only in early modern Spanish, while the possible Italian source is
already found in the medieval period. In contrast, the presence of a
suspected Italianism in Spanish texts prior to c.1400, despite medieval
Italian attestations of the word, may suffice to cast doubt on or
invalidate Italian as the immediate source of the word in question.
Here I shall offer some examples. The presence of (d)esmarrido
‘weak, downcast’ in such thirteenth-century works as the Libro de
Alexandre and the Libro de Apolonio rules out the Italian origin
posited in Terlingen (1943: 360–1).11 Nevertheless, the late instances
of esmarrido in the poetry of Juan de Enzina and Bartolomé de
Torres Naharro may reflect secondary Italian influence (although
Gillet 1951: 592 rejects this possibility). Most etymologists had followed Diez’s dictum (EWRS) that Sp. bizarro ‘brave, courageous;
noble; pompous, outlandish’ was of Basque origin and that the Italian
9
On Spanish loanwords in Italian see Zaccaria (1927), a work somewhat dated in its
findings, and Beccaria (1968).
10
Morreale (1959) treats at length the transmission of Latinisms into Spanish through
Italian, with specific reference to the examples found in Juan Boscan’s translation (first edition
1534) into Spanish of Castiglione’s Il libro del Cortegiano.
11
Specialists are divided as to whether this adjective entered Old Spanish directly from
Gallo-Romance or from Catalan (for references, see Dworkin 1985: 33–5).
The influence of Italian
145
bizzarro is a Hispanism. The fact that the Spanish adjective first
appears only in the late sixteenth century (CORDE), whereas the
Italian form is found as early as Dante, leads DCECH to view Sp.
bizarro as an Italian loanword (see also Cortelazzo and Zolli 1979–88:
s.v.).12 DCECH questions the Italian provenience (burrasca/borrasca) of Sp. borrasca ‘storm (at sea)’ proposed in REW (#1219),
and Terlingen (1943: 231), declaring it to be ultimately of Greek origin
with an unclear path of transmission into the Romance languages.
Does Ast. borrina ‘dense moist fog’ possibly indicate an autochthonous origin for borrasca, with Fr. bourrasque and It. borrasca being
Hispanisms?13 All the relevant Romance forms are first documented
in the sixteenth century.
Experts are divided on the immediate French or Italian origin of
some Spanish words referring to military activities, as both France
and Italy were leaders in early modern Europe in the invention of
new military technologies and techniques. Specialists in French lexicology view the verb attaquer ‘to attack’ as an Italianism cognate to
native attacher ‘to attach, attack’. Whereas Terlingen (1943: 204)
classifies Sp. atacar as an Italianism, Corominas raises the possibility
that the French verb is the immediate source of the Spanish verb first
documented (though not occurring frequently)14 with two military
senses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ‘to load a gun or
cannon with powder’ and ‘to attack’.15 CORDE offers a handful of
late-fifteenth-century examples of a verb atacar ‘to attach a piece of
clothing to the body’, cognate with Fr. attacher (OFr. estachier), It.
12
The co-existence in the sixteenth century of Sp. bizarro and It. bizzarro may have played a
role in the complex semantic history of both items; for detailed discussion see Beccaria (1968:
235–56). Terlingen does not include bizarro in his register of Spanish Italianisms.
13
Although there are no medieval attestations of borrasca, this noun occurs frequently in
sixteenth-and seventeenth- century texts (CORDE). DELF, DHLF, and Hope (1971: 166) classify
bourrasque and its orthographical variants as Italianisms.
14
The rarity of atacar before the seventeenth century led Verdonk (1980: 47–59) to suggest
that this verb first entered Spanish in Flanders, where Spanish troops were in contact with
soldiers from both France and Italy. At the time, Verdonk was unaware of the sixteenth-century
examples of atacar as a military verb found in CORDE. Varela Merino (2009: 526–36)
abundantly documents and critically discusses the origin of atacar, which she views as a
Gallicism.
15
Old Spanish turned to arrebatar, arremeter, asaltar, embestir to express the notion ‘to
attack’. The first dictionaries to record the modern meaning of atacar are Francisco Sobrino,
Diccionario nuevo de las lenguas española y francesa (1705) and John A. Stevens, A Spanish and
English Dictionary (1706); see NTLE (2, s.v. atacar).
146
A history of the Spanish lexicon
staccare (the underlying base of attacare through prefix change),
OProv./OCat. estacar, all ultimately of Germanic origin. Terlingen
(1943: 333) considers this use of atacar an Italianism, whereas
DCECH sees here a denominal verb based on taco ‘plug, peg’,
whose etymology remains unknown. The same root ultimately underlies It. distaccare, which, as a technical term in painting, entered
Spanish in the early modern language as destacar ‘to highlight’;
DCECH views the military term destacar ‘to assign, detach’ as a
borrowing of Fr. détacher, remodeled on the equation attacher =
atacar (see also Varela Merino 2009: 1059–61).
Does Sp. marchar, originally a military term, absent from Old
Spanish but abundantly recorded in the early modern language,
come directly from Fr. marcher (of Germanic origin), or It. marciare
(itself a Gallicism)?16 Valera Merino (2009) and López Vallejo (2010)
raise similar questions with regard to the French or the direct Italian
provenience of such military terms as desmantelar ‘to dismantle,
demolish’, plataforma ‘platform for artillery’, salva ‘salvo (of artillery
or firearms)’. Opinion is divided as to whether Sp. cartucho (variants
cachucho, escartacho, escartocho, escartazo) ‘cartridge, shell’ is an
adaptation of Fr. cartouche or of It. scartoccio. López Vallejo (2008)
suggests that the masculine gender of the Spanish noun supports the
view that cartucho is an Italianism.
The origin of Sp. apoyar ‘to support’, first documented in the early
modern language, poses a similar problem. The absence of this verb
from Terlingen (1943) was noted by Corominas (1948: 116), who, in
his etymological dictionaries, viewed apoyar as a borrowing of It.
appoggiare adjusted on the model of native Sp. poyo ‘hillock’ (<
17
PODIUM), the Spanish cognate of It. poggio.
Allowing for a degree
of vacillation in the vowels of borrowings, I wonder whether apoyar
might be a borrowing of Fr. appuyer, already documented in Old
French. Speakers today perceive no genetic connection between
alojar ‘to lodge’ and lonja ‘portico, porch’, first attested in the late
16
Varela Merino (2009: 1546–55) offers abundant early documentation, and critically reviews previous discussion of the origin of marchar.
17
Terlingen (1967: 273) includes apoyar and apoyo in his list of architectural terms of Italian
origin.
The influence of Italian
147
fifteenth century with the meaning ‘public exchange market’ in a
document referring to a space in Seville occupied by merchants from
Milan (CORDE). Terlingen (1943: 273–5) derives the Spanish noun
from It. loggia (itself a Gallicism; see Hope 1971: 109), although he
makes no attempt to account for the intrusive nasal. DCECH sees
here a borrowing of Fr. loge via Catalan, specifically Valencian llontja
(vis-à-vis Cat. llotja). The initial documentation of alojar (as opposed
to OSp. alogar) in the sixteenth century supports analysis as a
loanword. Whereas Terlingen (1943: 174), Gillet (1951: 393–4)18 and
Colón (1967a: 231) see here an Italianism, DCECH posits Cat. allotjar
(< Fr. loger) as the source of the Spanish verb.
Before acquiring in the seventeenth century its modern meaning
‘to endure, tolerate’, Sp. aguantar was used as a technical nautical
term ‘to hold with one’s hand an object on board a ship so that it does
not strike anything’. It is so glossed in Diego de García Palacio,
Vocabulario de los nombres que usa la gente de mar (Mexico, 1587),
cited in NTLE (s.v. aguantar). This same meaning is repeated in
several seventeenth-century dictionaries. There is no entry for aguantar in Covarrubias’s Tesoro. Its late appearance in Spanish probably
rules out a local parasynthetic denominal verb based on guante
‘glove’. The first lexical source to document aguantar with its modern
meaning is the unpublished Artículos para el Diccionario de la lengua
castellana by the Leónese priest Juan Ferreres, a series of draft entries
commissioned for the future first Dictionary of the Royal Spanish
Academy of the Language; see NTLE (I, s.v. aguantar). The rarity of
the Spanish verb prior to 1600 led the authors of DCECH to label
aguantar an Italianism (< agguantare ‘to catch forcibly, seize, grasp’),
although Cortelazzo and Zolli (1979–88) first document the Italian
verb only in the seventeenth century. It. agguantare does not figure as
a headword in the Italian–Spanish section or as a gloss in the
Spanish–Italian part of Cristóbal de las Casas’s bidirectional Vocabulario de las dos lenguas toscana y castellana (1570).
18
The CORDE database does not confirm the attestations of alojar from Diez de Games,
Crónica de don Pero Niño and from J. de Lucena, De vida beata.
148
A history of the Spanish lexicon
OSp. embaxada ‘message’, in all likelihood a borrowing from
southern Gallo-Romance,19 may have acquired its current diplomatic
meaning from It. ambasciata/imbasciata (Terlingen 1943: 163–5). The
technical poetic term Sp. estrambote ‘additional couplet or triplet’
may represent an alteration of OSp. estri(m)bote (< OProv. estribote)
under the influence of It. strambotto. The artistic meaning of Sp.
relieve ‘relief’ may indeed be a semantic loan from It. rilievo, although
OSp. relieve ‘table scraps, leftovers’ is a Gallicism (< Fr. relief) or a
relever). The
deverbal noun based on OSp. (l)levar (cf. OFr. relief
formal similarity between the Spanish noun and It. rilievo may have
led to the semantic change undergone by relieve; had the term been
borrowed directly from Italian, one would expect to find *relievo/
*rilievo in Spanish. The presence of espía ‘spy’ in fourteenth-century
sources may well rule out its classification by Terlingen (1943: 180) as
an Italianism.20
The absence of a final vowel in Sp. coronel ‘colonel’ vis-à-vis It.
colonello may indicate a French origin for the Spanish noun
(although transmission through a northern Italian dialect with characteristic loss of the final vowel cannot be discounted). Hope (1971:
181–2) classes the French noun as an Italianism. CORDE provides
examples of coronel used as a last name in fourteenth-century documents (“don Pedro Coronel, doña María Coronel, Alfonso Fernandes
Coronel”. In some medieval texts (e.g. Diego de Valera, Cirimonial de
Príncipes [1449]), coronel is clearly a diminutive of corona ‘crown’;
the absence of a final vowel and the sequence -el point to transmission through French or Catalan. The earliest use of coronel as
a military rank appears in Alonso de Santa Cruz, Crónica de los
Reyes Católicos (1491–1516), which seems to antedate the first appearance of Fr. coulonnel (1534) and colonel (1556). Detailed
19
Except for two instances in the Cavallero Zifar, all pre-1500 examples of embaxada are
found in Aragonese sources, especially in the writings of Juan Fernández de Heredia, which
may signal this word’s trans-Pyrenean origin. Fr. ambassade is a medieval Italianism (Hope
1971: 27). Terlingen (1967: 277–8) suggests the semantic influence of the Italian forms on OProv.
ambaissada.
20
Terlingen was unaware of Spanish attestations of espía prior to the late fifteenth century.
CORDE first documents this noun in Pero López de Ayala, Libro rimado de Palacio. By the end
of the fifteenth century espía had effectively ousted OSp. barrunte/varrunte and (rare) esculcador ( esculcar); Covarrubias (1611) specifically labeled barrunte as being of “lengua antigua
castellana”.
The influence of Italian
149
documentation of the Spanish record and discussion of the rival
etymological hypotheses can be found in Varela Merino (2009:
975–80).
Colón (1997) demonstrates clearly that the comparatively rare It.
tonto is not the source of the homonymous Spanish adjective meaning ‘silly, foolish’, of which examples abound starting in the second
half of the sixteenth century. On the other hand this same scholar
defends the Italian origin (already recognized in the eighteenth
century in the Diccionario de autoridades) of Sp. testaferro ‘strawman, front in a business deal’ as an Italianism (first attested in
Gracián as testa de ferro).21 The initial documentation of fracasar
‘to fail, ruin’ in Jerónimo de Urrea’s translation of Orlando furioso,
and its absence from Crístobal de las Casas’s bi-directional Italian–
Spanish dictionary (1570), vis-à-vis the presence of It. fracassare and
derivatives as headwords in the Italian–Spanish section, seem to
confirm the Italian origin of the Spanish verb. Modern flanco
‘flank, side’ and terraplén ‘embankment, terreplein’, both Gallicisms,
first appear as fianco and terrapleno/terripleno (second quarter of the
sixteenth century), variants which indicate an Italian origin.22 The
early examples of the Italianism asalto ‘assault’ are flanked by scattered instances of the Gallicism asaute (Varela Merino 2009: 42). The
absence of the final vowel in Sp. festín ‘party’, pasquín ‘poster, scandal
sheet, satirical lampoon’ may bespeak borrowing of Fr. festin
and pasquin, both Italianisms (Hope 1971: 195, 214) rather than
of It. festino, pasquino. The initial attestations in the late-sixteenth
and early-seventeenth-century of petardo ‘small mortar used in
siege warfare for breaking down doors’, adduced by Varela
Merino (2009: 1733–41), confirm the French origin of this noun, an
analysis previously challenged by Delgado Cobos (2000: 338), who
supports deriving this military technical term from Italian petardo,
itself a Gallicism (Hope 1971: 261–2). Terlingen (1943: 361–2) and
DCECH view the verb pillar ‘to seize, grab, rob’ as an adaptation of
Lapesa (1980: 457) includes testaferro in his short list of early modern Spanish Lusisms.
Both Varela Merino (2009: 1977–84) and López Vallejo (2010: 317–19) claim that terrapleno is the original borrowing from Italian and that terraplén is a remodeling of the Italianism
based on the model of French (without it being an actual loanword). Varela Merino offers
abundant documentation of the relevant forms.
21
22
150
A history of the Spanish lexicon
It. pigliare. Since the Spanish verb is first attested in the midfifteenth-century translation (attributed to Diego de Valera) of Honoré Bouvet, Árbol de batallas, one might wish to see Fr. piller as the
source of the Spanish verb; note pillaje, also first attested in the
translation of Bouvet’s treatise, based on Fr. pillage. The fact that
amén de ‘except for; besides’, employed frequently by Cervantes, first
appears in Jerónimo de Urrea’s translation (1549) of Arisosto’s
Orlando furioso and, slightly later, in the writings of Luis Gálvez de
Montalvo, a Spaniard residing in Italy, led Espinosa Elorza (2010) to
view this neologism as an adaptation and reanalysis of It. a men di.
Comments made by Spaniards living in the sixteenth century can
be helpful in analyzing the history of possible Spanish Italianisms. In
his Diálogo de la lengua (c.1535), Juan de Valdés, a long-time resident
of Naples, advocates the adaptation in Spanish of the following
Italian words (ed. Montesinos 1928: 138–9): facilitar, fantasía, aspirar,
entretener, discurrir, discurso, manejar, manejo, servitud, novela,
novelar, cómodo, incómodo, comodidad, solacio, pedante, and asesinar (an Arabism transmitted to the West through Italian). The
Diálogo de las lenguas (1579) of the Valladolid native and resident
Damasio Frías specifically condemns the use by “Italianized Spaniards” of such items as acampar ‘asentar el real’ (in this case a
semantic loan from It. accampare added to native acampar), asedio
‘siege’ (alongside native cerco and sitio), parangón ‘comparison’,
(now obsolete) estringa ‘type of belt’, vitela ‘vellum’, (now obsolete)
xiloco ‘southeast wind’ (cf. Sp. jaloque), and abandonado ‘abandoned’.23 Frías’s list also includes giorno, paes, and scarpi, three
unintegrated Italianisms that did not take root in Spanish (Mondéjar
1983). A brief list of alleged Italianisms is supplied by Francisco
Cascales in his Tablas poéticas (Murcia, 1617); the words so labeled
are catalufa, escarpe, espaviento, fodro, foso, plataforma, velludo
(ed. Brancaforte 1975: 102). Bartolomé Jiménez Patón’s list in his
Mercurius Trimegesistus (1621) of censured borrowings includes
some Italianisms, although their origin is not specifically identified.
23
Sp. abandonar, documented in the medieval language, is in all likelihood a Gallicism. Its
use by the poet Garcilaso de la Vega in the sixteenth century may reflect the influence of Italian
abbandonare in its revitalization.
The influence of Italian
151
González Ollé (1976: 196–7) points out scattered critical allusions to
the use of Italianisms in the Carta del Bachiller de Arcadia, attributed
to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, and in Eugenio de Salazar, the latter
with reference to military terminology. A similar critique turns up in
Alonso de Pimentel’s epic Guerras civiles de Flandes (1587–98). In his
Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, Sebastián de Covarrubias
accurately identified several words that he believed to be Italianisms,
e.g. corso, estropeado, menestra, escarpín, esdrúxulo, avançar (in the
commercial sense ‘to advance money’), bisoño, espilocho, façoleto,
cingaro, estafar, but included others for which specialists in Spanish
etymology do not accept an Italian origin: agacharse, baile, embaxador, empachar, ruiseñor (of which the last four are recognized today
as borrowings from Gallo-Romance). Although espilocho and façoleto are of Italian origin, these words apparently never took root in
Spanish (as specifically mentioned in the corresponding entries in the
Royal Academy’s first dictionary, the Diccionario de autoridades
(Gemmingen 1996).
The overwhelming majority of Spanish Italianisms are nouns
occurring in fields in which Italians held sway in early modern
Europe. The predominance of such cultural borrowings indicates
that Spanish–Italian contacts involved only small numbers
of speakers and that the written language may often have been the
main route of transmission. Some Italianisms are in reality semantic
loans, insofar as the word at issue already existed in HispanoRomance, but contact with its Italian cognate resulted in a specialized
addition to its semantic range. Selected examples follow. In the field
of painting and the visual arts Spanish adopted from Italian actitud
‘position, posture’, acuarela ‘watercolor’, caricatura ‘caricature’, cartón ‘design or study used as a model’, colorido ‘colorful’, contorno
‘outline’, diseñar ‘to design’, diseño ‘design’, encarnación ‘flesh-colored’, esbelto ‘svelte’, and its derivative esbelteza ‘svelteness’, fresco
‘fresco’, grotesco ‘grotesque’, modelo ‘model’, mórbido ‘subtle (colors,
shape)’, vago ‘beautiful’, and its derivative vagueza ‘beauty’; in the
realm of architecture, balcón ‘balcony’, baldaquín ‘baldaquin, canopy’, capitel ‘capital of a column’, cornisa ‘cornice’, estuco/estuque
‘stucco’, fachada ‘façade’, galería ‘gallery’, medalla ‘medallion’,
152
A history of the Spanish lexicon
mosaico ‘mosaic’, nicho ‘niche’, pedestal ‘pedestal’, pilastra ‘pillar’,
planta ‘floor’, podio ‘podium’, pórtico ‘porch, arcade, portico’; in the
area of music, aire ‘air, aria’, alto ‘alto’, aria, bajo ‘bass’, batuta
‘baton’, compositor ‘composer’, fantasía ‘fantasy’, madrigal ‘madrigal’, ópera ‘opera’, soprano ‘soprano’, tenor ‘tenor’. In addition to
soneto and novela, discussed above, Hispano-Italian literary relations
provided such items as arlequín ‘harlequin’, bufón ‘buffoon’, capricho
‘caprice (as theatrical genre)’, coliseo ‘coliseum, large theater’, comedia ‘comedy (play with a happy ending)’, esdrújulo ‘proparoxytone’,
estanza ‘stanza’, madrigal ‘madrigal’, palco ‘box in theater’, para(n)
gón ‘comparison’, payaso ‘clown’,24 saltimbanco ‘mountebank, juggler, tumbler’, terceto ‘tercet’. Military arms, life, and techniques
provided a number of terms: alerta ‘alert, warning’, arcabuz ‘harquebus’, artillería (possibly a semantic loan in the narrower sense ‘cannon’, as artillería ‘war machine’ already existed in Medieval
Spanish;25 see Gillet [1948: 251]), batallón ‘batallion’, bisoño ‘recruit’,
boletín ‘cédula militar de alojamiento’, (obs.) bombarda ‘old type of
cannon’, bombardear ‘to bombard’, cartucho ‘cartridge’, casamata
‘casemate’, centinela ‘guard, sentinel’,26 ciudadela ‘citadel’, compañía
‘company (of troops)’, emboscada ‘ambush’, emboscar ‘to ambush’,
escaramuza ‘skirmish’, escaramuzar ‘to skirmish’, escolta ‘escort’,
escopeta ‘type of rifle’, escuadra/escuadrón ‘squadron’, foso (vs native
OSp. fuessa) ‘trench’, mosquete ‘musket’, parapeto ‘parapet’, pistola
‘pistol’, plataforma ‘ground-plan’, soldado ‘soldier’, tropa ‘troop(s)’.
Commercial contacts with Italy led to the importation of avería
‘damage’, banco/banquero ‘bank, banker’, bancarrota ‘bankruptcy’,
cambio ‘(ex)change’ (in its commercial senses), crédito ‘credit’, débito
‘debit’, mercante ‘merchant’, millón ‘million’, monte de piedad (a
semantic calque) ‘pawn shop’, póliza ‘policy’. In the realm of foods,
Spanish took from Italian in the early sixteenth century fideos
24
Álvarez de Miranda (2009) stresses the role of the popularity of Italian theater in
eighteenth-century Spain in the introduction of Italianisms. He offers brief lexical vignettes
of coliseo, comparsa, palco/palquete, payaso (specifically rejecting the classification in DCECH
of payaso as an adaptation of Fr. paillasse, itself a borrowing from Italian), and platea.
25
CORDE offers dozens of examples of artillería from Hernado del Pulgar, Crónica de los
Reyes Católicos (1480–4); see also Gago Jover (2002: 53–4).
26
López Vallejo (2006) traces in some detail the introduction and incorporation of centinela
into sixteenth-century Spanish.
The influence of Italian
153
‘noodles’, first documented in the Lozana andaluza (1528) of Francisco Delicado, menestra ‘minestrone’, found in Torres Naharro
(1517) and Delicado, and salchicha ‘sausage’, first recorded in the
late sixteenth century (CORDE).27 Many of the Italianisms recorded
here also appear in other European languages such as French,
English, and German (see Stammerjohann et al. 2008).
Negative perceptions of Italian behavior, mores, social customs,
and way of life may account for the introduction and incorporation
of some Italianisms. As early as 1611 in his Tesoro de la lengua
castellana o española, Covarrubias recognized the Italian origin of
the Spanish verb charlar ‘to chatter’. Today specialists view charlar
and the noun charla ‘chat, chatter’, both sporadically attested in
sixteenth-century sources (CORDE),28 as adaptations of It. ciarlare,
whose origin itself is a long-standing etymological crux. A monographic study of the words at issue would be needed to determine
whether the presence in Spanish of formally and referentially similar
chirlar/chillar played any role in the introduction and incorporation
of charlar. The perceived loquacious nature of Italians may also
underlie the borrowing of cháchara ‘idle talk, prattle’ and chanza
(var. chancha) ‘joke, mockery, lie’.29 Most experts agree that Sp.
charlatán ‘charlatan, rogue, scoundrel’, first documented in the sixteenth century (CORDE), is a borrowing of Italian ciarlatano (vars.
cerretano, ciaratanto, ciarratane),30 as are its French and Portuguese
counterparts. The absence of the final vowel in the Spanish form can
be explained through transmission from a northern variety of Italian,
but might it not point to Fr. charlatan (an unquestionable Italianism)
as the immediate source of Sp./Ptg. charlatán/charlatão? The final
27
Other international terms relating to cuisine, such as espagueti(s), mortadela, and pizza
entered Spanish only in the twentieth century.
28
The verb charlar appears as an entry in the Spanish section in Cristóbal de las Casas’s
bidirectional Vocabulario de las dos lenguas toscana y castellana (Seville 1570). The
corresponding Italian gloss is frapare. Does its appearance as an entry in Jaques de Liaño,
Vocabulario de los vocablos que más comunmente se suelen usar (1565) indicate that charlar
already enjoyed a certain vitality in everyday speech?
29
Cornish (2011) refers to the widespread fame in the Middle Ages of Italian loquacity.
30
Most specialists in Italian etymology agree that ciarlatano derives from the Umbrian place
name Cerretano (de Spoleto) altered by association with the verb ciarlare. Other hypotheses
include an Altaic base that entered Italian via Turkish (Karl H. Menges) and a Byzantine Greek
origin (Henry and Renée Kahane). For a critical overview with bibliographic references see
Malkiel (1949a, 1957a) and Cortelazzo and Zolli (1979–88).
154
A history of the Spanish lexicon
segment of Sp. canalla ‘rabble’ indicates a borrowing, either directly
from It. canaglia or from Fr. canaille (itself an Italianism; see Hope
1971: 31). Examples of canalla abound in sixteenth-century texts.
I have come across only one medieval example, found in the latefifteenth-century Cancionero de Gómez Manrique: “No del pan de
la canalla, mas del bien obrar carguemos” (cited in CORDE).
A prejudiced view of Italian business practices may explain the
borrowing of estafar ‘to deceive, defraud’, an adaptation of It. staffare
‘to remove one’s foot from the stirrup’, based on a metaphor comparing the victim of fraud to a rider left hanging with one foot out of
the stirrup. The Spanish verb does not become frequent until the
seventeenth century (CORDE), although it is listed in Richard Percyval’s bidirectional Spanish–English dictionary (1591; see NTLE: s.v.
estafar). It seems reasonable to claim that estafador ‘swindler’ is a
Spanish derivative.31 The noun superchería ‘fraud, hoax, deceit’ also
falls into this category. Similar perceptions of Italians may also
underlie the genesis of poltrón ‘lazy person’ first employed by Francisco Delicado and by Bartolomé de Torres Naharro, long-time
residents of Italy.
Borrowings from Italian played a major role in the history in
Spanish of the adjectival suffix -esco. Local medieval reflexes of the
Gr.-Lat. diminutive suffix -ISKOS are rare, in comparison with the
vitality of the suffix in Rumanian, Catalan, Sardinian, and varieties of
Italian; note nominal OSp. parentesco ‘relationship’, used almost
exclusively in legal texts.32 Medieval Hispano-Romance preferred
the more Latinate -isco: berberisco ‘Berber’, levantisco ‘Levantine;
mutinous, rebellious’ (reflecting the influence of levantar ‘to raise,
arise’), morisco ‘Moorish’, serranisco ‘used among mountaineers’.
Only with the spread of Italianisms during the Renaissance did the
Italian suffix -esco gain a foothold over time as a productive adjectival
suffix in Spanish. Malkiel (1972: 373) identifies It. grottesco, an artistic
31
In contrast, estafeta ‘mail delivered by horse; post rider, courier’ (attested in the early
sixteenth century in Torres Naharro (Gillet 1951: 147) is also an Italianism, but did not undergo
the semantic shift experienced in Spanish by estafar.
32
This noun is first attested abundantly in the thirteenth-century Aragonese legal compilation
known as Vidal Mayor, which may point to a Catalan or Aragonese origin of parentesco, which
appears with great frequency in the 1491 printed edition of the Alfonsine Siete Partidas.
The influence of Italian
155
and literary term, as the key leader-word in the European diffusion
of It. -esco as a suffix having literary and artistic overtones. Other
relevant early-modern Italianisms in Spanish are arabesco
‘Arabesque’, barbaresco ‘pertaining to the Barbary Coast’, bufonesco
‘buffoonish, clownish’, burlesco ‘burlesque’, canallesco ‘base, rotten
despicable’, charlatanesco ‘charlatan-like’, gigantesco ‘gigantic’, novelesco ‘novelesque’, pintoresco ‘picturesque’, rufianesco ‘characteristic
of a ruffian’, soldadesco ‘pertaining to soldiers’ (see Pharies 2002:
237).33 Selected examples of neologisms in -esco coined in Spanish
include churrigueresco ‘pertaining to the style of Churriego’, cervantesco ‘Cervantine’, quitojesco ‘reminiscent of don Quijote’, carnavalesco ‘carnival-like’, cancilleresco ‘reminiscent of the chancellery’,
chulesco ‘chulo-like’, picaresco ‘picaresque’, animalesco ‘animal-like’,
ladronesco ‘thief-like’ (cf. the list provided in Malkiel 1972: 382–4). It
seems reasonable to suggest that contact with written and spoken
Italian models may have played a role alongside Latin in the adaptation in Spanish, beginning in the fifteenth and increasing significantly
in the sixteenth century, of the suffix -ísimo, used to form the
absolute superlative of adjectives. Among the earliest writers who
had recourse to -ísimo were the Marqués de Santillana, Juan Boscán,
and Juan and Alfonso Valdés, all familiar with Italian (Morreale
1955).
7.4 Italianisms in New World Spanish
Large-scale Italian immigration to the River Plate region (Buenos
Aires, Montevideo, and environs) beginning in the middle of the
nineteenth century led to the introduction into local varieties of
Spanish of numerous Italianisms which are not found in peninsular
Spanish (nor, for the most part, elsewhere in the New World). Many
such items reflect the original regional Italian dialects of the newcomers. Sala et al. (1982: 488–528) offer an inventory of Italianisms in
New World Spanish, followed by an analysis according to geographical distribution, derivational productivity, and semantic range. Meo
33
Björkman (1984: 37–40) offers a chronological list of Spanish -esco adjectives which
contains only three adjectives in fifteenth-century sources: mercadantesco, mercantesco, refranesco. The following two hundred years witnessed a flood of neologisms in -esco.
156
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Zilio (1989: 15–48) lists Italianisms found in the Spanish of the
Argentinian and Uruguayan sides of the River Plate, among them34
batifondo ‘prolonged noisy disturbance’, bela ‘beautiful’, bochar ‘to
fail an exam’, brodo ‘mess, difficulty’, bruchar ‘to burn’, capelo ‘hat’,
capo ‘boss, leader’, chivo ‘meal’, colifato ‘crazy, mad’, discreto ‘mediocre’, esbornia ‘drunken party’, escansafatiga ‘lazy’, estrilar/estrilo ‘to
rage’/‘rage’, farniente ‘idleness’, furbo ‘liar, rogue’, lungo ‘tall person’,
matina ‘morning’, naso ‘nose’, paco ‘package; pile of paper money’,
pasayeta ‘stroll, walk’, pasticho ‘confusion, disorder’, putsa ‘bad odor’.
7.5 Summary
Contact between varieties of Hispano- and Italo-Romance took place
for the most part outside the confines of the Iberian Peninsula.
Although some Spanish Italianisms appear in fifteenth-century
texts, most such loanwords go back to the early modern period
(1500–1700) and, as nouns referring to areas of knowledge and
expertise associated with Italy, entered the recipient language principally through written sources. The simultaneous diffusion of Italian
words into French and Spanish during this period complicates the
etymological analysis and identification of Spanish Italianisms, as
many relevant items may have entered Spain as borrowings from
its northern neighbor. The genetic relationship between Spanish and
Italian and the many similarities between the phonological structures
of both languages facilitated the integration of Italianisms. As I shall
show in the following chapter, some Latinisms may have passed
through Italian on their way to the written varieties of Romance in
the Iberian Peninsula.
34
I have not included here the many international Italianisms found in Meo Zilio’s
repertory referring to Italian foods and sauces.
8
Latinisms in Spanish1
8.1 Preliminaries
Elements acquired from Latin form the heart of the core vocabulary
of all the Romance languages. The Latin component of these languages consists of two distinct layers: those elements inherited
directly through oral transmission from those regional and social
varieties of spoken Latin which, with time, evolved into the individual
Romance languages, and items deliberately borrowed at a later stage
in each language’s history, usually from written Latin sources, most
often as part of the complex process of elaborating each Romance
language as a vehicle suitable for the transmission and diffusion of
secular and religious knowledge. Previously this function had been
the exclusive property of written Latin. The analyst is here witness to
a rare situation, in which literate speakers borrow lexical items taken
from a specific register of their own language’s historical predecessor,
a register accessible only in written form.2 The massive influx of such
borrowings resulted in a thorough re-Latinization of the Spanish
lexicon and played a major role in shaping the composition of the
vocabulary of modern Spanish and, for that matter, of all the
Romance languages.
The words in the inherited layer show the effects of the normal
processes of the sound changes that characterize the history of
Spanish, whereas the items borrowed from written Latin sources
appear not to have undergone these shifts. Indeed, numerous Latin
words entered Spanish at different moments in its history through
1
An earlier and shorter version of this chapter appeared as Dworkin (2010).
Typologically similar are the entry of Sanskrit lexical items into Hindi and the use in
modern Greek of vocabulary taken from Classical Greek.
2
158
A history of the Spanish lexicon
both channels, e.g. Sp. bicha ‘bug, small animal’ versus bestia ‘beast’ <
BESTIA, caudal ‘wealth, prosperity, fortune’ versus capital ‘capital’
< CAPITALIS, cabildo ‘cathedral chapter’ versus capítulo ‘(book) chapter’ < CAPITULUM, fraguar ‘to forge, make’ versus fabricar ‘to manufacture, fabricate’ < FABRICARE, artejo ‘joint’ versus artículo ‘article’ <
ARTICULUS, raudo ‘swift, fast-flowing’ versus rápido ‘swift(ly), quick(ly)’
< RAPIDUS, to cite but a handful of examples from among hundreds
of other such pairs. Such semantically differentiated sets are known
as “doublets” (Sp. dobletes, It. doppioni, G. Scheidewörter).3 Specialists in the history of the Spanish language have tended to label these
neologisms “latinismos” ‘Latinisms’ or “cultismos” ‘learnèd words’.
Whereas some experts use the terms interchangeably, others argue
cogently for a distinction between the two, essentially with latinismos
referring to borrowings from the literary language of ancient Rome,
and cultismos designating words whose evolution seems either not to
follow the patterns of regular sound change or to display Latinate
syntactic or semantic usage. I shall not enter here into this polemic
(summarized in Clavería Nadal 1991: Ch. 1, García Valle 1998: 37–85),
and shall simply use the term “Latinism” for those words which
entered Spanish as borrowings from written varieties of Latin,
regardless of the time or circumstances of the borrowing. Nor shall
I discuss the validity and analytic value of the controversial concept
“semicultismo”, for words which show features of both oral and
Latinate transmission.4 There are many cases where it is difficult to
determine whether the Spanish word at issue was borrowed from
written Latin sources or entered through oral transmission, but was
subject to factors that may have caused it not to conform to
the patterns of so-called “regular” sound change. For example, does
the vowel of Sp. cruz ‘cross’ instead of *croz (cf. Fr. croix, It. croce,
reflecting the /o/ of the spoken Latin form) unequivocally indicate a
borrowing from written sources, or could it reflect an ecclesiastical
pronunciation of an orally transmitted form under the influence of
3
Gutiérrez (1989) discusses and analyzes numerous doublets found in modern Spanish.
Malkiel (1977) reviews early Romance studies of such lexical doublets.
4
Bustos Tovar (2007) offers his readers an overview, with relevant bibliography, of this
ongoing controversy.
Latinisms
159
the written form CRUX? In the evolution from Latin to HispanoRomance it can happen that oral transmission results in no change.
In such cases formal criteria alone cannot determine whether the
word is part of the inherited vocabulary of Spanish or a later borrowing from Latin, e.g. DURUS > duro ‘hard’, PURUS > puro ‘pure’, SINCERUS
> sincero ‘sincere’. Whereas the abundant documentation of duro and
puro from the thirteenth century onward may point to popular
transmission, the late initial appearance and sparse documentation,
as well as the initial vowel, of sincero may indicate that this adjective
is a Latinism. The failure to undergo an expected sound change is not
an infallible formal test for the identification of Latinisms.
Most previous synthetic studies of Latinisms in Spanish are lists,
often arranged by semantic categories, of relevant words found in the
writings of a specific author or of a particular literary work, with
emphasis on the relevant cultural background and/or the stylistic
value of the use of Latinisms in the text under study. These borrowings were studied as exemplars of cultural phenomena rather than as
linguistic signs that formed part of a lexico-semantic system. Only
recently have specialists begun to deal systematically with the linguistic questions of motivation raised by the introduction and incorporation of Latinisms into the lexical and semantic structures of Spanish.
Were all such borrowings designed to fill gaps in the lexicon for
which the nascent literary language lacked a signifier, or did a
significant quantity of Latinisms oust items already present in the
spoken registers of early Hispano-Romance? What kind of semantic
transformations did the Latinate neologisms undergo in the process
of incorporation into Spanish? Did the entry of Latinisms result in
semantic restructuring? I shall return to some of these issues below.
8.2 Periodization
The entry of Latinisms into Spanish has been an ongoing process
observable since the time of the earliest Hispano-Romance texts. All
attempts at the periodization of linguistic phenomena are artificial
and at best serve a didactic purpose. To offer but one example, Castro
(1936: LXXI) proposes five chronological divisions in the history of
Spanish Latinisms: (1) from the earliest texts through the reign of
160
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Alfonso X the Wise (d. 1284); (2) from the end of the Alfonsine period
through 1400; (3) the fifteenth century; (4) 1500–1713, the year of the
founding of the Royal Spanish Academy of the Language; (5) 1713 to
the present.5 There are two moments in the earlier history of the
language when borrowings from written Latin took place on a larger
scale: (1) the thirteenth century, especially in the works of the poet
Gonzalo de Berceo6 and in the years corresponding to the scholarly
activities of the court of the king Alfonso X the Wise (1252–84), and
(2) the period c.1400–1650, when the relatively small flow of Latinisms turned into a veritable flood. A significant number of Latinisms
attested prior to 1300 seem not to have taken immediate root and
were reintroduced and definitively incorporated only in the late
medieval and early modern periods. Such borrowings result from
language contact at the level of the written language involving at the
outset only the small literate minority of the Hispano-Romance
speech community. All participants in the early stages of the process
of setting the Romance vernaculars down in writing could read and
write Latin, the language in which they first attained literacy. Only
much later, with the growing increase of literacy in the early modern
period did these lexical items gradually enter and become diffused in
the spoken language. This process may not have occurred on a large
scale in Spain until the second half of the nineteenth century, when
mass education finally led to a significant rise in literacy.
8.3 Early Latinisms
The evaluation of Latinisms in the earliest literary and non-literary
vernacular texts poses several analytical problems. I wish to suggest
that, typologically, Latinisms recorded in the earliest Romance texts
do not all fall into the same category as the loan words deliberately
taken from works of Classical antiquity in the Alfonsine period and
later in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in a deliberate effort to
5
Bustos Tovar (1974: 43–53) proposes a division into eight periods for the introduction of
Latinisms in Spanish.
6
Berceo is reputed to be the medieval author whose writings contain the highest number of
Latinisms; for lists of examples with discussion and analysis, see Bustos Tovar (1974) and Pellen
(1997).
Latinisms
161
elaborate Hispano-Romance as a literary language on a par with
Latin. Formal variation or polymorphism and orthographic inconsistency characterize early attempts at representing vernacular
speech. Words whose exterior form seems at first glance to indicate
a borrowing from Latin unsullied by the effects of regular sound
change in many instances may represent merely the use of Latin or
Latinate spelling practices to represent vernacular pronunciation.
Thirteenth-century sources document sets of synonymous pairs of
which one member seems to be a Latinism while the other reflects
oral transmission of the same Latin base: adorar aorar ‘to adore’,
bautizar batear ‘to baptize’, directo derecho ‘straight; right’,
edificar eivigar ‘to build’, (h)istoria estoria ‘history’, fruto frucho ‘fruit’, multiplicar amochiguar ‘to multiply, increase’,
predicar preigar ‘to preach’, verso viesso ‘verse’, interrogar (en)terrogar ‘question’, manifestar malfestar manfestar ‘to demonstrate, display’, testimonio testemuña ‘testimony, witness’, tributo treudo (for additional examples see Bustos Tovar 1974: 103).
In all these cases, it is the Latinate form that has survived into the
modern language. Did such forms as adorar, bautizar, directo, edificar, predicar originate as merely Latinate orthographical variants of
documented (in some cases short-lived) aorar, batear, derecho, eivigar, preigar, or did they represent from the outset distinct (perhaps
socially conditioned) phonetic variants?
The earliest Latinisms appear in such secular sources as notarial
texts, wills, deeds, bills of sale, etc. and in ecclesiastical texts such as
the Bible, the liturgy, and the lives of saints. Such texts were often
read out loud with vernacular phonetics to the illiterate masses, and
consequently in some cases the Latinisms themselves may have
entered through oral as well as written channels. During this early
period scholars had little access to accurate versions of the texts of
classical Antiquity. The written and spoken Latin employed in the
Studium Generale of Palencia (Spain’s first university founded by
Alfonso VIII in 1208–1212) may also be one source of the numerous
Latinisms found in the mester de clerecía poets of the first half of the
thirteenth century, such as Gonzalo de Berceo, whose poems offer the
first documentation of many Latinisms in Hispano-Romance, and
162
A history of the Spanish lexicon
the anonymous authors of the Libro de Apolonio and the Libro de
Alexandre. The norms formulated by Alcuin within the framework of
the Carolingian reforms carried out at the court of Charlemagne in
the first decade of the ninth century and introduced into Spain c.1100
for reading Latin out loud, with each letter being pronounced in a
consistent fashion, may explain the “learnèd” presence in the orthographic representation of orally transmitted Latinisms of pre- and
post-tonic vowels that normally disappeared through “regular” processes of sound change, alongside such clear indicators of oral transmission as voiced intervocalic stops corresponding to Latin voiceless
stops, the rising diphthongs ie and ue, vacillation between pretonic /e/ /i/ and /o/ /u/, and metaphonic vowel-raising provoked
by the palatal /j/. At this time the speech community did not operate
with a rigorous conceptual distinction between Latin and HispanoRomance; what today are considered two distinct languages may
have been viewed then as a multi-layered stylistic continuum reflecting a complex monolingualism (Wright 1993) rather than a clear-cut
Latin–Romance bilingualism or diglossia.
Tejedo Herrero (2008, 2009) suggests that the use of the label latín
in the thirteenth century sources (including the works produced in
the Royal Scriptorium of Alfonso X) to describe words clearly
Romance in form and used in a Romance context indicates a high
lexical register rather than a language distinct from the spoken
Romance vernacular. Might the Latinate forms in the pairs presented
above represent this higher (written) register? In other words, some
of the earliest Latinisms that took root in Hispano-Romance may
result from the application of the new pronunciation norms to forms
that had originated as mere Latinate orthographic variants. According to this analysis, the two items in such a pair as preigar predicar
were at first orthographic variants of orally transmitted [prejgar],
until the new norms for the oral reading of (ecclesiastical) texts led to
the pronunciation of every letter in the form predicar, leading to the
coexistence of two distinct pronunciations.
The following list is a small sample of the Latinisms documented
by Bustos Tovar (1974) in texts first written prior to 1252, the year that
Alfonso X acceded to the throne of the Kingdom of Castile and León:
Latinisms
163
abitar, absolución, accidental, adulterio, adversario, afirmar, ánima (vs alma), apóstol/apostólico/apostóligo, apreciar, artículo, audiencia, auténtico, beneficiar, breve,
canónigo, capítulo, cátedra, causa (vs cosa), certificar, clamar (vs llamar), claro,
contrario, controversia, crucificar, décimo (vs diezmo), decorar, decreto, disputar,
discípulo (vs de-/diciplo), eclipse, elección, elemento, encarnación, escándalo, espacio,
femenina, figurar, filosofía/filósofo, gloria, gracia, idiota, ídolo, imagen, lección,
legión, legítimo (vs lindo), luxuria, misa, monumento, mundo, natura, notar, ocasión,
occidente, odio, oficio, opinión, órgano, pugna/punnar, resucitar, séptimo (vs seteno),
signo, talento, testimonio.
There is no way to determine with any certainty which of these items
enjoyed any degree of currency in the spoken language outside the
circle of the lettered (mainly clerics) who were responsible for their
introduction in the texts at issue.
The decision made at the court of Alfonso X to use Romance as a
written medium for the diffusion of scientific, cultural, legal, theological, and technical knowledge marks a major turning point in the
history of Latinisms in Spanish. This goal required expanding the
lexical resources of mid-thirteenth-century Hispano-Romance to
make it an adequate instrument for this new and lofty task. Much
of the production of the Alfonsine court took the form of translations
and adaptations of Latin texts, with the result that translators came to
play a major role in the elaboration of Spanish as a literary language
and in the introduction of Latinisms. The tools available to Alfonso
and his multilingual team of Christian, Jewish and Muslim collaborators consisted of the lexical models provided by the two languages of written culture of medieval Spain, namely Latin (as
mediated, at least in part, through the Church) and Classical Arabic,
as well as the derivational mechanisms of Hispano-Romance. By this
time, the literate members of the speech community had come to
perceive Latin and Romance as distinct languages. The scholars at the
Alfonsine court availed themselves of all these instruments as part of
the process of the lexical elaboration of the Romance vernacular. One
notes in the Latinisms first documented at this time a higher degree
of fidelity to the original Latin form (although there still remains a
notable degree of formal variation). Many of the Latinisms found
in the Alfonsine corpus are recorded there for the first time,
while others had appeared in previous texts. Some are used
164
A history of the Spanish lexicon
quite frequently and were probably integrated into at least the written
language of the time, while others are rarely documented and remained clearly marginal, representing (temporarily) failed lexical
experiments. However, many such Latinisms were independently
reintroduced and viewed as innovations by creative writers in the
late medieval and early modern periods (see below), and constitute
examples of what Alvarez
de Miranda (2008) labels “discontinui7
dades léxicas”.
8.4 Late Medieval and Renaissance Latinisms
The next crucial moment in the history of Spanish Latinisms is in the
years c.1400–c.1650, the period of early Humanism and the Renaissance, characterized by a “rediscovery” of Classical Latin and the
desire to improve the quality of the Latin used as the universal
language of scholarship. This century and a half witnessed an
increase in the literacy of the lay nobility and the fomenting of a
“linguistic culture”, a growing awareness of issues relating to the
vernacular (Eberenz 2006). The movement originated in Italy, and
Italian scholars played a major role in diffusing the linguistic models
of Classical Latinity among the literate of the Iberian Peninsula.
Many Spanish writers, such as Enrique de Villena (1384–1434),
Iñigo López de Mendoza, Marqués de Santillana (1398–1458), and
Juan de Mena (1411–56), now familiar with the linguistic and literary
models of classical Latinity, sought to elevate the vernacular to the
level of the literary language of ancient Rome. The expansion, enrichment, and refinement of the Spanish lexicon through borrowings
from Classical Latin constitute one key element in this complex
procedure of linguistic elaboration.
In addition, the introduction of Latinisms into late medieval and
early modern texts may be a first step in the process of creating a
standard literary language for the newly reunited Kingdom of Spain.
A key facet of standardization is the reduction, if not elimination, of
linguistic variation (at least in the upper registers of the written
7
For examples of Latinisms documented in the thirteenth century, see Clavería Nadal (2004:
475–9). Fernández Ordóñez (2004) and Clavería Nadal (2006) discuss Latinisms in texts
prepared at the Royal Scriptorium of Alfonso X.
Latinisms
165
language). Three recent monographic studies (Harris-Northall 1996,
1999, Tejedo Herrero 2008) have examined how the teams responsible for preparing the 1491 printed edition of the Alfonsine Siete
Partidas and the 1503 edition of the late-thirteenth-century Gran
Conquista de Ultramar regularly employed Latinisms where the
corresponding passages in the manuscript tradition offered varying
vernacular lexical items or even lexical periphrases. Both HarrisNorthall and Tejedo Herrero refer to this process as the re-Latinization of the Castilian lexicon. It seems to have two sides: the frequent
triumph over time of a Latinate form over its orally transmitted
doublet (cf. the pairs cited above) and the deliberate and conscious
introduction and incorporation of numerous Latinate neologisms
(Dworkin 2010). It is at this moment in Spanish linguistic history
that what was a steady stream of Latinisms entering Spanish became
a veritable flood. As will be seen in the examples below, many
Latinisms in common use in Spanish today entered the language
only in the late medieval and early modern periods. Their introduction and subsequent incorporation in these centuries of linguistic
transition radically changed the composition of the Spanish lexicon.
The roles of the Crown of Aragon and, in particular, of Juan
Fernández de Heredia (1308–96), Grand Master of the Order of
Saint John of Rhodes, and his scholarly activity at the Avignon
Papal Court deserve brief mention at this juncture. Some scholars
consider Heredia to be an early precursor of Spanish humanism. His
stays in Greece had made him familiar with Greek texts, and he
commissioned the translation of several Greek and Latin texts into
a written variety of Aragonese. Some of these renderings seem to
have passed through intermediate French or Catalan versions.
Numerous Latinisms first appear in the Heredian translations (and
in other texts produced in Aragon) well before the date of their later
initial documentation in Castilian sources. Some examples: abuso,
administración, anual, aserción, balance, cómplice, débil, difícil, dirigir, eficacia, ejército, emergencia, extracción, facilidad, fértil, imposible, promover, rectitud, refugio, seducir, substituir, subvención, último,
urgente, válido (Lleal 1997: 11, García Gallarín 2007: 378). However, in
at least some instances the Latinism in question may have entered the
166
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Heredian texts as adaptations of forms found in the immediate
Romance source (French, Catalan, or Italian) of the translation in
question. The Crown of Aragon, with its close political ties to the
Italian Peninsula as a result of Aragonese control of the Kingdom of
Naples, served as an intermediary between Italy and Castile. During
the reign (1336–87) of Pedro IV el Ceremonioso, the vernacular prose
of the Aragonese chancellery sought to follow classical norms. Political and cultural contacts between the courts of Castile and Aragon
grew with the arrival on the throne of the Crown of Aragon in 1412 of
the Castilian Trastámara dynasty (Lleal 1995). Several of the Heredian
manuscripts became the property of the aforementioned Iñigo López
de Mendoza, one of the early writers who introduced a significant
number of Latinisms into his own writings.
Translations into the Romance vernacular constituted an important way of spreading the knowledge of Classical antiquity, an activity
in which Italian and Italian translators played a significant role.8 At
this time many Italian texts, replete with Latinisms, were being
rendered into Hispano-Romance; witness the fifteenth-century Spanish versions of the Divina Commedia, of the sonnets of Petrarch, and
of Boccaccio’s Decamerone, as well as other works by that author. In
some instances it may be difficult to determine whether the immediate source of a given loanword is written Latin or Italian.9 Many
translators took as their goal the preparation of a Romance text that
matched the Latin original with regard to elegance and style, features
that included lexical richness, subtlety, and flexibility. Their view
that, in comparison with Latin, the vernacular was distinctly inferior
as an expressive instrument became a cliché often repeated in the
translator’s prologue; cf. the characterization of the vernacular as
“rudo e desierto romance” by Juan de Mena in the Prologue to his
8
In Latin, TRADUCERE, the source of Sp. traducir, Ptg. traduzir, Cat. traduir, Fr. traduire, It.
tradurre, never had the linguistic meaning ‘to translate’. Old Spanish used the verb trasladar to
render this notion and its practices. This new use of the Latin verb goes back to Italian
humanistic practices (Colón 2001). Vernacular transmission into Hispano-Romance of TRADUCERE yielded OSp. trocir ‘to cross over, pass’ (Malkiel 1956, 1983).
9
Do such variants as débile, difícile, facile, (in)felice, interese, útile, documented in fifteenthcentury translations, represent ephemeral attempts to capture in Spanish the proparoxytonic
stress pattern of the Latin model, or are they in reality short-lived Italianisms? Penny (2002: 281)
independently raises this question.
Latinisms
167
translation (c.1438) of Homer’s Iliad. The introduction of Latin(ate)
vocabulary was a lexical solution to this problem. However, such
texts circulated only among a small literate section of the population
and were not read out loud to the general public. Thus, at the outset,
the neologisms would not have easily reached a wide segment of the
speech community. Although dramatists and novelists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries placed Latinate vocabulary in the
mouths of some of their characters, often for humorous effect, it is
likely that such literary usage did not reflect the realities of the spoken
language of the time. There flourished in late-sixteenth-century Spain
a group of so-called culterano poets, among them Fernando de
Herrera (1534–97) and Luis de Góngora y Argote (1561–1627), who
sought to embellish their poetic language through the massive use of
Latinisms and whose lexical practices, when carried to excess,
aroused the ire of such writers as Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas
(1580–1645), the author of a mocking poem La culta latiniparla.10
Despite his critiques of his Latinizing contemporaries, Quevedo
himself did not hesitate to use numerous Latinisms in his prose
and poetry.
8.5 Form class and lexical rivalries
Latinisms fall into two broad categories: Latinisms that were introduced into the written language to express (usually abstract) concepts
and notions for which the spoken vernacular still lacked adequate
linguistic expression, and Latinisms which were employed alongside
existing referentially similar Romance forms. This second category
can be further subdivided into cases of doublets involving two different (often semantically differentiated) reflexes of the same Latin base,
and rivalry between a Latinism and a semantically similar lexical
item. Within the broad and gradual process of the (re-)Latinization
of the Spanish vocabulary, the analyst must attempt to distinguish
10
Alonso (1961: 95–108) lists 438 Latinisms which were objects of contemporary censure.
Some examples: abstracto, activo, adolescente, alucinante, armonía, atención, brillante, bucólico,
cadáver, ceder, circunloquio, correlativo, crédito, defraudar, émulo, escrúpulo, fatal, favor,
fugitivo, gigante, horóscopo, indicar, invectivo, ministerio, misivo, neutro, obstáculo, opaco,
porción, positivo, pulcro, recíproco, reducción, sacrilegio, superior, tímido, trémulo, válido,
víctima. Alonso points out that many of these words appear in Góngora’s poetry.
168
A history of the Spanish lexicon
between outright borrowings from written Latin and the Latinization
of orally transmitted vernacular forms (cf. the discussion in HarrisNorthall 1992–3, 1999, Tejedo Herrero 2008, 2009).
The overwhelming majority of Spanish Latinisms are nouns. Most
such items were added to the language as technical items of specific
fields of learning and consequently did not compete with referentially
similar lexical items already present in Spanish. One may include
among these domains philology, mathematics, architecture, medicine, botany, zoology, geology, theology, law, alchemy/chemistry,
liturgy and religious practices, moral qualities and defects, and social
structure (cf. García Gallarín 2007: 246–65). The processes by which
many such items slowly spread from the narrow written (and doubtless to some extent spoken) language of specialization to the general
vocabulary remain to be studied. In the case of religious, legal,
and medical vocabulary, contact between the common person and
priests, preachers,11 lawyers, notaries, and doctors probably played
an important role in the diffusion of many Latinisms. Bustos Tovar
(2008: 1204–5) points out the role of student slang replete with
Latinisms culled from school texts and from the humanistic comedies of the early sixteenth century that enjoyed great popularity
among the students of Salamanca and Alcalá de Henares.
Instances of the replacement of an entrenched vernacular Spanish
noun by a genetically unrelated Latinism are rare. OSp. hueste
‘army’12 gave way to ejército in the early modern language after a
period of rivalry beginning in the mid fourteenth century and lasting
until the last quarter of the sixteenth century. In 1575 the Sevillan
humanist Argote de Molina included hueste among the list of archaic
words that he encountered in his edition of the fourteenth-century
Conde Lucanor. In his Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611),
Covarrubias labeled hueste as a word of the “lengua antigua castellana”. In the same period the Latinism secreto ‘secret’ ousted OSp.
11
Cf. the hundreds of Latinisms employed by preachers in the Golden Age recorded and
discussed in the five volumes of Delgado Cobos (1987).
12
Other Old Spanish designations for ‘army’ also fell into disuse: the Arabism almofalla, as
well as fonsada and virtos (Gago Jover 2002: s.vv). In like fashion, OFr. ost, a cognate of hueste,
gave way in the early modern language to the lexicalized participle armée, the reduction of
troupe armée.
Latinisms
169
poridad (var. puridad).13 Beginning in the fifteenth century, veneno
‘poison’ became a serious rival to po(n)çoña (mod. ponzoña) and
OSp. tossigo.14 More frequent are cases where the Latinism has
triumphed over its vernacular Old Spanish doublet, e.g. curso/cos(s)o,
homicidio/homezillo, verso/viesso, instrumento/estrumento, medicina/melezina15, historia/estoria, tóxico/tóssigo, gente/yente.16 In
numerous instances the popular form and the Latinism coexist in
the modern language as semantically differentiated doublets. Most
speakers would not recognize the genetic connection between the
members of such pairs.
Early medieval texts offer pairs of verbs showing oral and learnèd
transmission of the same Latin base: OSp. aorar/adorar < ADORARE,
OSp. emer/gemir < GEMERE,17 OSp. preigar/predicar < PRAEDICARE,
OSp. rez(d)ar/recitar < RECITARE, OSp. loar/laudar < LAUDARE. While
aorar, emer, and preigar fell into disuse early,18 loar enjoyed
continued vitality throughout the medieval language, before being
replaced by alabar orig. ‘to boast’; rezar and recitar live on as
semantically differentiated doublets.19 The influx of Latinisms in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries led to some additional cases of
the displacement of vernacular verbs by their recently introduced
Latinate doublets; OSp. nodrir (rare nodrescer) < NUTRIRE gave way to
Dworkin (2005, 2006a) studies these examples in detail.
As occurs frequently with Latinisms, the first instances of veneno appear in the writings of
the Aragonese Juan Fernández de Heredia. The variant venino is abundantly documented in the
thirteenth century.
15
Malkiel (1961) suggests that the -l- of melezina may reflect the influence on the descendant
of MEDICINA (*meezina; cf. OPtg. meezinha) of miel ‘honey’, an ingredient used in the preparation of medicines.
16
As suggested in Chapter 6, gente may well be a borrowing of OFr. gent rather than a
Latinism.
17
One should not discount the possibility that gemir is a borrowing from Old French rather
than from written Latin. Except for one example each in the Calila e Digna and the version of
Castigos y Documentos found in BNM MS 6559, gemir is not documented until the fifteenth
century, when examples abound.
18
Although examples of aorar abound in such Alfonsine texts as the General estoria,
Setenario, and the Estoria de España, the verb is rarely found after the late thirteenth century.
OSp. preigar is limited to the mid-thirteenth-century rendering of the Vulgate preserved in
Escorial MS i-j-6 and to the Alfonsine Libro de las Leyes (= Primera Partida); four examples of
emer turn up in the General estoria and one in the Bible translation in Escorial MS i-j-8.
19
Except for one instance in Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora, recitar appears again only
in the fifteenth century. In the Milagros, recitar and rezar appear in rhyme position in
consecutive verses.
13
14
170
A history of the Spanish lexicon
nutrir by the end of the fifteenth century, as did OSp. esleer < ELIGERE
under pressure from elegir.20 The two scattered examples of elegir in a
thirteenth-century document from the court of Alfonso X may represent attempts to graphically Latinize esleer/esleír. It is possible that
the use of elección and electo in the thirteenth century paved the way
for the later introduction of elegir. As is so often the case, the first
texts that frequently employ elegir come from the scriptorium of Juan
Fernández de Heredia (see Dworkin 2006a). In like fashion, OSp.
enfeñir ‘to pretend’ < INFINGERE yielded to the Latinism fingir
(a replacement studied in detail in Harris-Northall 1992–3), while
heñir ‘to knead’ has survived. At this time the Latinism repudiar ‘to
reject, repudiate’ ousted synonymous OSp. repoyar.21 By the end of
the fifteenth century, OSp. asmar ‘to think, calculate’ (itself a Gallicism) had given way to the Latinism estimar, documented frequently
since the thirteenth century. Eberenz (2006: 94) notes that some
highly polysemous Old Spanish verbs yielded some or all of their
functions to semantically narrower Latinisms. He adduces as examples obsolete departir, replaced by such Latinisms as distinguir,
diferenciar, dividir, separar, and conversar, and of enderezar vis-àvis corregir, reparar, and dirigir.
The overwhelming majority of such verbs that entered Spanish at this
time seem not to have participated in any form of lexical rivalry; rather
they were additions to the language as part of the process of lexical
elaboration and refinement. A substantial number of these neologisms
are based on Latin-prefixed compounds of simple verbs that had come
into Spanish through oral transmission as members of the -er conjugational class. Although most go back to Latin prototypes in -ÉRE or ´-ERE,
compounds which entered Spanish via oral transmission did so as -er
verbs, whereas those compounds borrowed from Latin tended to join
the -ir class in Spanish; querer ‘to wish, want’ adquirir ‘to acquire’,
inquirir ‘to inquire’, OSp. conquerir ‘to conquer’ (replaced by conquistar,
20
Argote de Molina included esleír in the list of obsolete words that he attached to his 1575
edition of the fourteenth-century El Conde Lucanor.
21
The loss of repoyar led to the demise of the noun repoyo ‘rejection, repudiation’
< REPUDIUM. Oral transmission of these Latin bases also yielded a series of Spanish forms in
reboj-, rebuj-, showing normal voicing of -P- preserved in rural speech; for details, see Malkiel
(1954: 69–71).
Latinisms
171
first documented in the fourteenth century), requerir ‘to require, summon, investigate’; correr ‘to run’ acorrer ‘to come to the aid of ’,
recorrer ‘to travel, go over; peruse’, socorrer ‘to aid, rescue’ discurrir
‘to roam, ramble, talk about’, incurrir ‘to incur’, ocurrir ‘to occur’,
recurrir ‘to resort to, turn to’; romper ‘to break’ corromper ‘to corrupt’
interrumpir ‘to interrupt’, prorrumpir ‘to break forth, erupt’; meter ‘to
place, put’ cometer ‘to commit, carry out’, prometer ‘to promise’,
someter ‘to submit’ admitir ‘to admit’, emitir ‘to emit’, remitir ‘to
remit’, transmitir ‘to transmit’; verter ‘to turn’ convertir ‘to convert’,
subvertir ‘to subvert’. Although the simple verb DUCERE seems not to have
come into Hispano-Romance via oral transmission as *dozer/*dozir (in
contrast to its survival as OFr./OProv. duire, OProv. duzir, OIt. durre;
REW: #2785), many of its compounds entered as Latinisms: conducir ‘to
drive lead, conduct’, deducir ‘deduce’, introducir ‘to introduce’, producir
‘to produce’, reducir ‘to reduce’, seducir ‘to seduce’, traducir ‘to translate’;
OSp. adozir bespeaks popular transmission. Learnèd compounds are
recognizable through the relatively late date of first attestation, the
Latinate form of the prefix, and the semantic proximity to the Latin
source. Other Latinisms in -ir include afligir ‘to afflict’, constituir ‘to
constitute, consist of’, construir ‘to construct’, corregir ‘to correct’, distinguir ‘to distinguish’, OSp. efundir, cingir ‘to gird’ (which succumbed
to vernacular ceñir), short-lived fruir ‘to enjoy’, influir ‘to influence’.
Spanish offers examples of semantically differentiated doublets involving oral and learnèd transmission of the same verbal base: abogar
‘to plead for, advocate’/avocar ‘to remove a case to a higher court’
< ADVOCARE, enhestar ‘to hoist, raise’/infestar ‘to infest’ < INFESTARE,
enjambrar ‘to swarm together’/examinar ‘to examine’ < EXAMINARE,
fraguar ‘to forge’/fabricar ‘to manufacture, fabricate’ < FABRICARE, enjertar (var. injertar) ‘to graft’/ insertar ‘to insert’ < INSERTARE, repoyar/
repudiar ‘to repudiate’ < REPUDIARE. Speakers of modern Spanish do
not perceive the genetic connection between the members of these
sets. Borrowings from Latin in the late medieval period led to a significant increase in the number of present participles in -ante, -iente, which
acquired nominal and adjectival uses in Spanish. Many such items are
first documented in texts prepared in the Crown of Aragon.
172
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Latinisms played a major role in constituting the inventory of
modern Spanish adjectives. A markedly increased use of descriptive
adjectives was a feature of the imitation of Latin poetic and prose
style in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. García Gallarín (2007:
237–42) lists several hundred such adjectives, the majority of which
appear before 1700. Herrero Ingelmo (1994–5: 36) notes that 52% of
the learnèd vocabulary found in sixteenth-century poetry consists of
adjectives, borrowed in response to a need to nuance nouns and to
express feelings and emotions with greater precision and force. Many
such adjectives are wholesale importations of Latin adjectives derived
from underlying nouns and verbs by means of such suffixes as -ACEUS,
-ANEUS, -ARIUS, -ATICUS, ´-ICUS,´-IDUS, -TORIUS, resulting in the incorporation into Spanish of learned adjectival suffixes as -áceo, -áneo,
-ario, -ático, ´-ico, ´-ido, -torio (versus orally transmitted -azo, -año,
-ero, -azgo, -io, -d(u)ero), all of which today display varying degrees
of productivity.22 Specialists agree that borrowing from Latin was
responsible for the introduction in the fifteenth century of the suffix ísimo (< ISSIMUS), whose use grew rapidly in the following century, in
the formation of the absolute superlative of adjectives (although
I would not rule out a role for Italian in this process; see Chapter 7).
In many instances Latinate adjectives, often first documented in
Aragon in the fourteenth century and in Castile in the fifteenth,
supplanted adjectives or adjectival periphrases employed in the
medieval language. The Latinisms fácil ‘easy’ and difícil ‘difficult’
took over part of the earlier semantic range of highly polysemous
OSp. ligero and grave respectively (Eberenz 1998); débil eventually
ousted OSp. feble (itself a borrowing from Old French) and occupied
the semantic space of flaco and flojo. In like fashion único replaced
several clumsy periphrases used in Old Spanish Bible translations to
render Lat. UNICUS. Learnèd último won out over earlier cabero,
22
The creation of sets of suffixal doublets was not limited to adjectival formations. Note the
following sets: -azo/-áceo < ACEUS, -aza/-acia < ACIA, -ada/-ata < ATA, -ado/ato < ATUS, -aico (no
vernacular form) < AICUS, -aina/-ágine < AGINE, -ajo/-áculo < ACULUS, -anza/-ancia < ANTIA, -año/áneo < ANEUS, -azgo/-ático < ATICUS, -zón/-ción < TIONE, -d(u)ero/-torio < TORIUS, -dumbre/-tud <
TUDINE, -dura/-tura < TURA, -edo/-eto < ETUM, -ejo/-ículo < ICULUS, OSp. -ença/-encia < ENTIA, -eño/íneo < INEUS, -ero/-ario < ARIUS, -esa/-isa < ISSA, -ez/-icie < ITIE, -eza/-icia < ITIA, -izo/-icio < ICIUS,
-ío/-ivo < IVUS, -miento/-mento < MENTUM, -udo/-uto < UTUS.
Latinisms
173
çaguero, derradero, trasero, and especially postrimero and postrero;
útil ‘useful’ ousted various periphrases involving the OSp. noun pro
(see Dworkin 2002a: 426–31). The adjective rápido ‘quick, swift’
became common only in the early modern period when it ousted
the adverb aína and took over part of the semantic scope of OSp.
ligero (itself a borrowing from French), festino, presto, privado, and
toste (Dworkin 2002b). OSp. mañero ‘sterile’ yielded to the Latinism
estéril in the fifteenth century (for details, see Dworkin 1998). Learnèd
pálido ‘pale’ took over part of the semantic range of OSp. descolorido
and amarillo (Dworkin 2005). Although documented sporadically in
fifteenth-century medical texts (DETEMA), the CORDE data indicate that pálido becomes frequent only in the second half of the
sixteenth century. Latinate necesario ‘necessary’ displaced the periphrases aver/ser me(ne)ster. In many of these cases the writers
responsible for the introduction of the neologism doubtless felt that
the vernacular signifiers at issue were excessively vague and polysemous, and that the Latinisms expressed with greater precision the
quality or state to be described. In some instances the Latinate form
of an adjective replaced its vernacular doublet: antiguo/antigo
‘ancient’, continuo/contino ‘continuous’, cotidiano/cutiano ‘daily’,
dulce/(rare) OSp. doz/doç; cf. Ptg. doce, It. dolce, Fr. doux/douce
‘sweet’. Other borrowings from Latin primary adjectives seemed to
fill gaps for which medieval Hispano-Romance lacked a signifier:
hábil ‘skillful’, próximo ‘next’, puro ‘pure’, sincero ‘sincere’, orig.
‘pure, without mixture’.
Two specific series of adjectives merit comment in this context.
The early modern language witnessed the entry of proparoxytonic
adjectives in unstressed ´-ido borrowed from Latin adjectives in
´-IDUS: e.g. árido ‘arid, dry’, ávido ‘avid’, cándido ‘candid, frank’,
escuálido ‘squalid, dirty’, lánguido ‘limp, languid’, mórbido ‘morbid’,
nítido ‘clear, sharp’, pálido ‘pale’, pútrido ‘rotten, corrupt’, rábido
‘furious, angry’, sólido ‘solid, strong’.23 In some cases the Latinism
23
Pharies (2002: 315) estimates there are approximately eighty such adjectives in Spanish.
This figure includes some modern scientific neologisms in ´-ido based on neo-Latin and Greek
stems, e.g. cánido ‘pertaining to dogs’, félido ‘pertaining to cats’, arácnido, ‘pertaining to
spiders’, emédido ‘pertaining to turtles’.
174
A history of the Spanish lexicon
came to exist alongside the handful of orally transmitted Spanish
reflexes in unstressed monosyllabic -io /jo/: lacio ‘weak, limp’ flácido ‘flaccid’, limpio ‘clean’ límpido ‘transparent’, lucio ‘bright,
shiny’ lúcido ‘clear, lucid’, OSp. rabio/rabdo/raudo ‘swift’ rápido
‘quick(ly), swift(ly)’, rancio ‘rotten’ ráncido ‘rancid’, recio ‘strong,
stiff’ rígido ‘rigid’, turbio ‘unclear’ túrbido ‘unclear’. OSp. nidio
‘shining’ and rabdo/raudo ‘swift’ seem to have died out or become
obsolescent before the borrowing of nítido and rápido respectively.24
The sole learnèd ´-ido adjective documented prior to 1400 appears
to be húmido ‘moist, damp’, found in several Alfonsine texts and in
MS A of the Semeiança del mundo (first half of the thirteenth century).
The following are first recorded in the period c.1400–1450: ávido,
cándido, estúpido, frígido, lánguido,25 líquido, lúcido, nítido, pérfido,
pórfido, sórdido (Pharies 2002: 315, García Gallarín 2007: 237–40).
Examples are found in the writings of Juan de Mena, Enrique de
Villena and the Marqués de Santillana, all three known for their
Latinizing tendencies. Such poets as Fernando de Herrera and Luis
de Góngora, known for their fondness for Latinisms, employed many
such adjectives. The Italian cognates of several ´-ido adjectives antedate their Spanish counterparts. Without stating outright that such
Spanish adjectives are in reality borrowings from Italian, one may ask
to what extent Italian models may have played a role in their entry and
incorporation into Spanish (Dworkin 1978: 610).
Spanish ordinal numerals (used adjectivally) show rivalry between
inherited forms and Latinisms. The first five in the series directly
continue their Latin ancestors: primo/primero ‘first’ < PRIMUS/PRIMARIUS, segundo ‘second’ < SECUNDUS, tercio (rather than *terço)/tercero ‘third’ < TERTIUS/TERTIARIUS, cuarto ‘fourth’ < QUARTUS, and quinto
‘fifth’ < QUINTUS. In Old Spanish the next elements offer a mixture
of inherited bases and forms based on the suffix -eno < ENUS: sesto
(< SEXTUS) seseno ‘sixth’, sietmo (< SEPTIMUS) seteno ‘seventh’,
24
One might add to this list a possible OSp. candio (as preserved in the toponym Rucandio
< RIVU CANDIDU cándido.
25
The data in CORDE indicate that lánguido was first employed in the late sixteenth
century by the poet Fernando de Herrera. The few fifteenth-century examples of lúcido, pérfido,
sórdido are found as epithets in Latinate prenominal position; pórfido is used as a noun in Pedro
Tafur, Viajes e andanças.
Latinisms
175
ochavo (< OCTAVUS) ocheno ‘eighth’, noveno ‘ninth’, diezmo (<
DECIMUS) dezeno ‘tenth’. For ordinals beyond this point the attachment of -eno to the cardinal number was the norm: onzeno ‘eleventh’,
dozeno ‘twelfth’, trezeno ‘thirteenth’, sezeno/dizeseseno ‘sixteenth’,
diziseteno ‘seventeenth’, veynteno ‘twentieth’, trenteno ‘thirtieth’,
etc. As the Middle Ages drew to a close, the ordinals in -eno gradually
gave way to rivals imported directly from written Latin: sexto, séptimo, octavo, nono (alongside noveno), décimo, undécimo, duodécimo,
décimo tercero, décimo cuarto, décimo quinto, vigésimo, trigésimo,
quadrigésimo, etc. Some older ordinals live on as lexicalized substantives: primo ‘cousin’, siesta ‘rest, nap’, older ‘noon (sixth hour of the
day), midday heat’, ochavo ‘type of coin’, diezmo ‘tithe’, docena
‘dozen’, cuarentena ‘period of forty days’.26
As can be seen from many of the examples offered above, numerous Latinisms that entered Spanish had their word stress on the
antepenultimate syllable. Oral transmission of such bases into Hispano-Romance often eliminated the articulatorily weak immediately
post-tonic syllable, thus shifting the stress in the resulting Romance
form onto the second-last syllable. Consequently, words showing
stress on the third-last syllable were comparatively uncommon in
the medieval language. In the early modern period the influx of
Latinisms that retained their original antepenultimate word stress
reinvigorated the stress pattern in Spanish. Latinisms such as ágil,
débil, dúctil, estéril, fácil, fértil, frágil, hábil, móvil, portátil, útil, led to
a series of words ending in -l with stress on the second-last rather
than the last syllable. The incorporation of Latinisms into early
modern Spanish led to the reintroduction of ambisyllabic consonant
clusters that had undergone various forms of reduction and simplification in the processes of oral transmission. The pronunciation of
each letter of these written forms led to an increase in the inventory
of consonants that could occur in syllable-final position: acción, acto,
doctor(r), efecto, octavo perfecto, recto; digno, insigne, maligno, pugnar; concepto, corrupto, séptimo.
26
García Gallarín (2007: 135–50) describes in considerable detail the rivalry between inherited and Latinate ordinals; Pharies (2002: 213–14) summarizes the history of the suffix -eno.
176
A history of the Spanish lexicon
8.6 Failed Latinisms
Unlike borrowings that result from oral contact between two languages, the introduction of a Latinism was often the result of a
conscious decision by an individual speaker/writer who could not
find an adequate signifier in the unelaborated vernacular. It is plausible that different members of the speech community independently
introduced the same Latinism over time until it finally took root in
the language. The first documentation of such a form does not at all
indicate any degree of acceptance or full integration. A significant
number of Latinisms first documented in the fifteenth century are
not found as headwords or as glosses in Nebrija’s Latin–Spanish
(1492) and Spanish–Latin (c.1495) dictionaries (García Macho and
Dworkin 1994). Many of the numerous Latinisms found in Berceo
and the other writers of the mester de clerecía do not appear again
until the flood of Latinisms of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Some took even longer to take root. The adjective social, although
documented in the fourteenth century, did not pass into general
usage until the second half of the eighteenth century (probably
under French influence); obsoleto, attested in Quevedo, became
widely used only in the twentieth century. Similar patterns of scattered early attestation followed by considerably later integration can
be seen in the histories of proletario, clientela, estrangular, and
mundial, among others (Alvarez
de Miranda 2008: 5–9).27
Although a large percentage of medieval and early modern Latinisms remained in the language, some lexical experiments were failures. Lida de Malkiel (1950: 251–7) cites the following examples from
the poetry of Juan de Mena, one of the most Latinizing poets of the
fifteenth century: pigro, ficto, vaníloco, fruir, corusco, superno, belígero, bello, nubífero, clarífico, longevo, murices, vulto, circuncingir.28
Lapesa (1957: 162) records in the poetry of the Marqués de Santillana
bel, colle, geno, furiente, luco, viperoso. Bustos Tovar (2008: 1207)
adduces from early-sixteenth-century poets such examples as ancilla,
27
The analyst cannot ignore the possibility that French and English models may have
played a role in the integration of these items.
28
That same author (1950: 251) notes that all the Latinisms found in Jorge Manrique’s latefifteenth-century Coplas por la muerte de su padre have come into the modern language.
Latinisms
177
armento, belígero, belipotente, dutriz, flámine, gemibundo, impéritoignaro, longevo, murices, nubífero, obsistir, penatígero, solercia,
ultriz. That same scholar’s earlier study of Latinisms in the sixteenth-century Comedia Thebaida (c.1520) notes the following handful of Latinisms documented in that text that failed to take root in the
modern language: circuncigido, impervio, influción, inquísitos, longincuidad, mulcir, supósito (Bustos Tovar 1982: 24).
Many of the Latinisms that entered Spanish also appear as learnèd
borrowings in French, Portuguese, Italian, and (although later)
Rumanian.29 In some instances a Spanish (and often Portuguese)
Latinism is matched by an orally transmitted cognate in one or more
of the sister languages, e.g. the aforementioned case of Sp. cruz vs
Fr. croix, It. croce, Sp. precio ‘price, value’ (flanked by prez ‘honor,
glory, renown’, a borrowing from southern Gallo-Romance) vs Ptg.
preço, Fr. prix, It. prezzo, Sp. dulce ‘sweet’ vs Ptg. doce, It. dolce, Fr.
doux,30 Sp. predicar vs Fr. prêcher.
Some writers well versed in Latin and admirers of its artistic potentialities and subtleties of vocabulary sought to creatively exploit its lexical
richness in their vernacular literary production. One procedure was the
use of semantic Latinisms, i.e. the use in Spanish of words of Latin origin
(be they originally the result of oral transmission or learnèd neologisms)
with meanings they once possessed in literary Latin but had lost either at
the level of spoken Latin or in the course of their semantic evolution in
Spanish. Lapesa (1972) records in the sonnets of Garcilaso de la Vega
(1501–36) such examples as animoso ‘strong (with reference to wind)’,
avena ‘pastoral flute’, conducir ‘contract, rent’, convertirse ‘apply oneself
to, dedicate oneself to’, declinar ‘to deviate, move away from’, diverso
‘hesitant, irresolute’, estudio ‘desire, interest’, feliz ‘fertile, fruitful’, modo
‘rhythm, melody’ (a meaning found in OSp. muedo as used by Berceo),
oficio ‘duty, obligation’, reducir ‘to lead back’.31
29
Abundant documentation of Latinisms viewed in this perspective appears in Reinheimer
Rîpeanu (2004a, 2004b).
30
The history of the reflexes of PRETIUM in Hispano-Romance is an example of a base that
has entered the language as a Latinism (precio) and as a Gallicism (OSp. prez). There seems to
be no evidence for the existence of orally transmitted OSp. *preço. Malkiel (1957b) traces in
detail the history of the descendants of Lat. PRETIUM in Spanish and Portuguese. That same
scholar (1975b) seeks to account for the triumph of dulce over rare OSp. doç(e).
31
Lapesa (1992) presents additional examples taken from the poetry of Fray Luis de León
(1527–91).
178
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Another device was the creation of “artificial Latinisms”, neologisms formed by adding to authentic Latin bases genuine Latin
suffixes to coin new derivatives unknown in Latin. Azofra Sierra
(2002) offers the following examples found in the poetry and prose
of Juan de Mena: altivo, angelical, celestial, centilumíneo, chimerino,
cladio, coitino, comedio, defensivo, ducial, egídeo, elegíano, expresivo,
imaginativo, lirial, mucronio, musal, paternal, pecudro, pestilencial,
pireo, pungitivo, quadrivista, quadrupedal, soberbio. Of these items,
angelical, defensivo, expresivo, imaginativo, paternal, and pestilencial
have survived into modern Spanish. Except for expresivo, these six
adjectives are abundantly documented in fifteenth-century and early
modern texts. This technique of creating Latinate neologisms was not
limited to learnèd writers; men of science turned to such creations in
their growing efforts in the early modern period to use the Romance
vernacular rather than Latin as an instrument for the transmission of
knowledge in such areas as mathematics, astronomy, architecture,
and navigation.
The reader can turn to various sources for lists of Latinisms in
Spanish. Broad overviews of Latinisms in Spanish spanning the entire
history of the language appear in Mariner Bigorra (1967) and
throughout García Gallarín (2007). Spanish Latinisms figure prominently in Reinheimer Rîpeanu (2004). Several studies record Latinisms found in specific periods. Bustos Tovar (1974) offers a lengthy
register of Latinisms (which he labels cultismos) documented in the
pre-Alfonsine period. Fernández-Ordóñez (2004) and Clavería Nadal
(2006) survey the many Latinisms found in the works produced in
the Royal Scriptorium of Alfonso X (1252–84). Herrero Ingelmo
(1994–5) catalogues and discusses lexical and semantic Latinisms
found in sixteenth-century poetry.
8.7 Learnèd Hellenisms
A few observations concerning words of Greek origin are in order
here. Although Greek roots abound in Spanish from the earliest
times, very few (if any) of these elements entered Spanish through
direct oral contact between the Latin/Hispano-Romance continuum
and the various historical stages of spoken Greek. As already noted in
Latinisms
179
Chapter 3, the small Greek-speaking trading colonies that existed
along the east coast of the Iberian Peninsula in pre-Roman times and
the brief Byzantine presence in the south-east in the sixth century
had no impact on the Spanish lexicon, leaving only a handful of
toponyms (e.g. Ampurias, Rosas [earlier Rhodas]). As is well known,
hundreds of Greek words entered Latin and played a significant role
in its elaboration as a literary and scientific language. Greek also
contributed significantly to the creation and enrichment of the technical vocabulary of Christian Latin. In this way Hellenisms entered
the spoken and written varieties of Latin employed in Hispania, and
came to form part of the inherited Latin lexical base of HispanoRomance. The same is true for most of the Hellenic roots that later
entered Spanish as Latinisms (as defined above in this chapter). The
direct knowledge of Classical Greek texts in the Renaissance led to
the creation of borrowings taken directly from that source. Carriscondo Esquivel (2010: 62–9) claims that the following technical terms
found in sixteenth-century astronomical treatises entered Spanish
directly from written Greek sources: perigeo, asterismo, dicótomo,
monoide, panselionos, halón, paralaje/paralaxis, and the adjective
meteoro. On the basis of DCECH, Geckler (2004: 189) offered the
following examples of direct Hellenisms in Spanish: análisis, anarquía, catástrofe, dialecto, episodio, fase, panorama, periferia, semáfora, sinfonía (alongside orally transmitted zampoña < Gr.-Lat.
SYMPHONIA). All these items turn up in French, Italian, English, and
German. It would be necessary to study the history of each word and
the date of its first documentation in Spanish and in the other major
European languages of culture to determine whether Spanish humanists
themselves directly borrowed the word from the newly rediscovered
ancient sources or whether it entered Spanish from another European
vernacular. Such appears to be the case of neologisms in -oide, which
began to make their appearance in Spanish texts of the sixteenth century,
usually translations of classical or French sources (e.g. conoide, diploide,
anciroide, deltoide, lithoide). The models provided by French and
English scholarly prose may account for a second influx of such neologisms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and for the creation
within Spanish of such elements as matoides (Eduardo López Vago),
180
A history of the Spanish lexicon
romanticoide (Miguel de Unamuno), and presbiteroide (Ricardo Palma);
see Rifón (2009: 100).32
In the modern period neologisms were coined using pre-existing
Greek elements (e.g. fotografía, fonología, morfema, telegrama) or
combinations of Latin and Greek elements (e.g. inmunología, automóvil, televisión) to create new technical vocabulary for the burgeoning social and natural sciences. The majority of these pseudo-Greek
neologisms were initially coined by speakers of French, English, and
German (especially the first two), and it is from these languages that
such formations entered Spanish (and many other European languages). The transmission to the languages of the Mediterranean
basin of lexical items from spoken and written Byzantine Greek is a
complex question, to which the team of Henry and Renée Kahane
devoted a considerable portion of their long and productive scholarly
careers.33 Words of Byzantine Greek origin entered medieval Hispano-Romance as Arabisms, Italianisms, and Catalanisms. Examples
are offered in the relevant chapters of this book.34
8.8 Summary
In many respects, the nature of the language contact that led to the
introduction and incorporation of so many Latinisms in Spanish is
distinct from the other cases treated in this book. Latinisms result
from contact between a language (in this case, Spanish) and the
written registers of its historical predecessor (subsumed under the
label Classical Latin), an infrequent phenomenon in the annals of
linguistic history. The entry of Latinisms has been an ongoing
32
A complete list of Spanish formations in -oide, alongside the corresponding forms in
French and English, with dates of first documentation and the relevant Graeco-Latin models,
appears in Rifón (2009: 106–14). Among other neologisms in -oide that were created within
Spanish are acuareloide, adolescentoide, agnosticoide, americanoide, canguroide, cementoide,
diabetoide, digitaloide, esperpentoide, fenomenoide, gusanoide, locoide, pajaroide, polipoide,
religiosoide, sexualoide. According to the charts in Rifón (2009: 106–14), none of these forms
has equivalents in French or English, the two modern sources of loanwords in -oide.
33
Kahane and Kahane (1970–76: 346–639), as well as the studies reprinted in Kahane and
Kahane (1979) offer an overview of their meticulous philological research in this rich and
complex field.
34
Fernández Galiano (1967) is the only extensive and systematic listing of Greek words in
Spanish. Much information can be gleaned from the examples in Bergua Cavero (2004), in
essence a study of the phonological adaptations of Hellenisms into Spanish.
Latinisms
181
process in the recorded history of Spanish. This contact took place
predominantly at the level of the written language with regard to both
the source language and the recipient language, in which these
neologisms slowly spread to the spoken language. The borrowing of
a lexical item from Classical Latin is a deliberate purposeful act on the
part of an individual writer. Many Latinisms may have been introduced independently over time by a host of different individuals.
Some such words may have actually entered Spanish as borrowings
from other Romance languages (French, Catalan, Italian) in which
they were Latinisms. Although it is safe to state that most Latinisms
entered the language to fill lexical gaps as part of the process of
lexical elaboration, there are many instances in which the neologism
ousted a signifier for the given concept already present in the lexicon.
The selection of the Latinate variant in such cases may form part of
the process of the standardization of written Spanish in the late
medieval and early modern periods. Latinisms played an important
role in greatly increasing the number of adjectives in Spanish, most of
which are first documented in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The effect of Latinisms has not been limited to the lexicon proper.
With regard to phonological and phonotactic structures, the entry
into Spanish of these neologisms led to a marked increase in the use
of the antepenultimate stress pattern and to the (re)introduction of
select Latin consonantal clusters, with a consequent small increase in
the number of consonants that could occur in syllable-final position.
On the side of morphology, the influx of Latinisms resulted in a
notable expansion of the language’s repertory of derivational suffixes.
Latinisms have transformed the composition of the lexicon of modern Spanish, in much the same way that borrowings from Norman
French have altered the shape of the vocabulary of modern English,
or, more recently, how borrowings from French in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries have changed the course of the lexical history
of Rumanian.
9
Portuguese and Catalan loans
in Spanish
9.1 Lusisms
Throughout its history, Spanish has been in contact with its immediate linguistic neighbors in the Iberian Peninsula, namely those varieties of Romance subsumed under the label Catalan to its east and the
bundle of varieties known as (Galician-) Portuguese/Luso-Romance
to its west. I shall first turn my attention here to the minor role played
in the history of the Spanish lexicon by borrowings from Portuguese,
i.e. Lusisms. Neither the influence of Portuguese on the Spanish
lexicon nor, conversely, the greater impact of Spanish on the composition of the Portuguese vocabulary has received adequate scholarly
attention.
Salvador (1967) and Báez Montero (2006) represent the only up-todate attempts at syntheses of Portuguese loans in Spanish.1 Both note
rightly that the close genetic affiliation of the Romance varieties of
the Iberian Peninsula often makes it difficult to determine with
certainty if a word whose phonetic shape in Spanish vis-à-vis its
Latin source hints at a borrowing from a western variety of IberoRomance is of Portuguese, Galician, or Leónese origin. There may
indeed be some justification for operating in such cases with the label
“westernisms” (Sp. occidentalismos), as the medieval Romance varieties spoken in the north of the Iberian Peninsula form a dialect
1
One must consult with considerable caution the lists of Spanish Lusisms offered in Sá
Nogueira (1947). Examples of selected borrowings from Portuguese appear in such standard
manuals as Menéndez Pidal (1941), Lapesa (1980: par. 661 984 1131), and Penny (2002: 280–1).
Verdonk’s survey of lexical change in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain offers a handful
of Lusisms that entered Spanish at that time (2004: 900–1).
Portuguese and Catalan loans
183
continuum without rigid linguistic boundaries. Labels such as “Galician”, “Asturian”, and “Leónese” reflect political realities (Penny
1999). Prior to declaring its independence in 1140, Portugal had
been a county in the Kingdom of León (as had the County of Castile,
which had broken away to form the Kingdom of Castile in the middle
of the tenth century). The strong family resemblance would have
removed for many speakers the air of foreignness of such borrowings.
In the medieval and early modern periods, unsophisticated speakers
may have considered what we call Spanish and Portuguese simply to
be regional varieties of the same overarching linguistic reality or of
the same language. From 1580 to 1640 the thrones of Spain and
Portugal were united under the Spanish Hapsburg monarchy. In
the resulting situation of language contact Spanish was clearly the
dominant language. Many Portuguese writers opted for Spanish as
their literary language and often introduced ephemeral Portuguese
elements in the lexicon of their works. The Spanish noun and
adjective portugués itself is not attested until the fifteenth century
(CORDE) and is a borrowing from Spain’s western neighbor, replacing older native portogalés.
9.2 Etymological controversies
The origin of a number of items considered by some scholars to be
Lusisms continues to be controversial. The descending diphthong /ej/
of afeitar ‘to put on makeup, to adorn oneself; to shave’ and its
accompanying deverbal noun afeite < AFFACTARE/AFFECTARE points to
a non-Castilian origin. EWRS, Sá Nogueira (1947: 187–8) and Salvador (1967) classify afeitar and afeite as Lusisms. Other experts (e.g.
REW: #253, Malkiel 1957: 56–61) analyze these items as Gallicisms
(OFr. afaitier), while the authors of DCECH choose to see here an
instance of semi-learnèd transmission of the Latin base. The presence
of this family in early-thirteenth-century works from the mester de
clerecía school, such as the Libro de Alexandre, Libro de Apolonio,
and Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora, favors the proposed GalloRomance origin (cf. Bustos Tovar 1974: 318–19). The diphthong
observable in coitar ‘to afflict’, coitado ‘afflicted’, and coita ‘affliction’
(modern cuitar, cuita) vis-à-vis the consonant cluster of its etymon
184
A history of the Spanish lexicon
*COCTARE, as well as the word family’s emotive meaning, has led
Malkiel (1945: 166), Salvador (1967: 243), and Penny (2002: 280) to
class these items as Lusisms associated with the language of lyric
poetry. Again, as in the case of afeitar and afeite, the vitality of coitar,
coitado, coita in mester de clerecía poetry may indicate a borrowing
from southern Gallo-Romance (cf. OFr. coitier, OProv. coitar).
If cariño ‘tenderness, affection’, orig. ‘nostalgia, desire’ is truly a
diminutive based on the adjective caro ‘dear’, a case might be made
for seeing a Lusism here, an analysis proposed in light of the suffix
-iño [= Ptg. -inho] by Malkiel (1948a: 365), and supported by Salvador
(1967). Abundant attestations of cariño first appear in the writings of
Juan del Encina (1468–1529), whose language reflects western Hispano-Romance usage, and in the early-sixteenth-century written
sayagués (a rustic variety of Leónese) of the playwright Lucas Fernández (1474–1542). The lack of an entry for carinho in IVPM speaks
to the absence of this noun from Old Portuguese, which might well
invalidate its classification as a Lusism. DCECH supports this line of
reasoning, and accepts Spitzer’s (1921: 40) view that cariño derives
from a verb cariñar ‘to miss a person or place’, found in Aragonese
(Borao 1859: 137) and as a Hispanism in Sardinian. This analysis still
fails to account for the genesis of the forms at issue. The earlier and
more frequent use of alguém in Old Portuguese led Malkiel (1948a) to
claim that OSp. alguién (modern alguien) was a borrowing from
OPtg. alguém, displacing alguno with reference to humans. The
CORDE database confirms that the earliest attestations of the Spanish form appear in texts from León in western Spain (royal documents sent by Alfonso X to León, and the Fuero de Salamanca).
Given the rarity of the borrowing of pronouns (and, for that matter,
of other grammatical elements) in the history of Spanish, one must
ask why speakers would have taken such an element from a neighboring dialect that was not necessarily considered to be prestigious.
This very point led Corominas to reject in DCECH Malkiel’s analysis
of OSp. alguién as a Lusism. Eberenz (2000: 418–21), FernándezOrdóñez (2011: 85), and Pato (2009) support a western (though not
necessarily Portuguese) origin for alguien.
Portuguese and Catalan loans
185
The late initial documentation of Sp. pendencia ‘quarrel, dispute’
led Malkiel (1944) to suggest that this noun reflects OPtg. peendença
(with the remaking of the suffix on the model of the Latinate -encia).
In like fashion, Malkiel (1945: 166) viewed OSp. quexumbre ‘complaint, lament’ as an adaptation of OPtg. queyxume. For most analysts, the fixed phrase echar (de) menos ‘to miss (a person)’ makes
more sense if viewed as a Spanish adaptation of Ptg. achar menos,
in which achar, misanalyzed by speakers as a variant of native echar
(< IACTARE), is in reality an opaque cognate of Sp. hallar ‘to find’ (cf.
OSp. fallar menos, OArag. trobar menos, Cat. trobar menys ‘to miss’).
In contrast, Colón (1988: 205–33), noting that the Spanish periphrasis
is not documented until the sixteenth century (a dating confirmed by
the CORDE database), a moment when the Portuguese expression is
falling into disuse, sees here a simple case of the substitution within
Spanish of fallar/hallar by echar. However, Colón fails to motivate
the proposed verbal replacement.
If they are indeed early Lusisms, pendencia, cariño, quexumbre,
and echar de menos (and perhaps the family of coitar) mirror the
linguistic influence on Old Spanish of Galician-Portuguese, the dominant language of early lyric poetry in the Iberian Peninsula. According to Malkiel (1981), this same cultural context in all likelihood
accounts for the entry into the language of the OSp. adjective ledo
‘happy, cheerful’, whose stressed monophthong vowel vis-à-vis
native OSp. liedo (< LAETUS), points to its Portuguese origin. Malkiel’s
analysis of OSp. ledo as a Lusism rests in large part on the alleged
absence of that form from thirteenth-century Castilian prose texts.
The CORDE database offers a significant number of examples of ledo
from such mid-thirteenth-century prose texts as the Libro de los
buenos proverbios, Calila e Dimna, Bocados de oro, and the Poridad
de las poridades as well as from slightly later Alfonsine texts.2 In light
of the dual development of Lat. AE / aj/ as OSp. ie /je/ and e (although
the latter represents a minority outcome), might ledo reflect different
transmissions of the underlying Lat. LAETUS, a solution that would
2
Castilian liedo was already on the wane in the thirteenth century, where it turns up in the
Bible translations preserved in Escorial MSS i-j-6 and i-j-8 and in some works prepared at the
court of Alfonso X (CORDE).
186
A history of the Spanish lexicon
eliminate the need of positing a Portuguese origin for this adjective?
Within the semantic sphere of emotions associated with lyric poetry,
the absence of the family of enfadar ‘to bore, irritate, annoy’ > ‘to
anger’ from the medieval language contrasts sharply with its vitality
in Old Portuguese texts, a situation which supports the suggested
Portuguese origin of the relevant Spanish forms (Salvador 1967,
DCECH).3
Most scholars derive Sp. bravo ‘wild, uncultivated; untamed’ and
its Provençal, Catalan, and Italian congeners (brau, bravo) from Lat.
BARBARUS. Aebischer’s (1953) hypothesis that the Spanish adjective is a
borrowing of Ptg. bravo seems to have gained no followers. His
reasoning is based on the frequent and earlier use in Portuguese
charters of barbaras/bravas and on the assumption that bravo was
analogically remade on the model of femimine brava, which he
derives from Lat. BARBARA via the following steps: barvara > barvala
(attested in old Portuguese charters) > *bravala > *bravaa > brava.
DCECH does not explicitly reject the possibility that Sp. arisco ‘rude,
surly’ is an adaptation of etymologically obscure Ptg. areísco, but
declares that the origin of both the Spanish and Portuguese words
require further study.4 Colón (2002: 436–53) convincingly demonstrates that Sp. volcán ‘volcano’ and its cognates in other European
Romance and non-Romance languages do not originate in Ptg.
volcão (as claimed in DCECH and DECAT), a form documented
later in Portuguese than in Spanish.5 Most experts have viewed Sp.
nao ‘type of seaship’ as an adaptation of Cat. nau (DCECH). Eberenz
(1994) studies in detail the use of nao in medieval sources; he shows
that this type of boat was used principally in Atlantic regions and
3
Volume 3 of IVPM offers examples of OPtg. desenfadar, desenfadado, and desenfadamento
(s.vv.).
4
The Spanish adjective is first documented in the mid-fourteenth-century Libro de buen
amor, st. 1228b, describing the rough sound produced by a Moorish guitar (“Allí sale gritando la
guitarra morisca/de las bozes aguda e de los puntos arisca”, ed. Blecua). The word at issue is
used in rhyme with morisca, trisca, aprisca. The CORDE database offers an example of
adjectival arisco in the mid-fifteenth-century Cancionero de Gómez Manrique. IVPM lists no
medieval instances of Ptg. areisco. DELP (s.v. areísco) offers an overview of earlier hypotheses
concerning the origin of the Portuguese form and cites a Ptg. arisco in a poem by Alvaro
de
Brito in the mid-fifteenth-century Cancioneiro geral.
5
Colón goes on to suggest that volcán goes back to Ar. BURKAN. Corriente implicitly rejects
this hypothesis by not including volcán and its Portuguese and Catalan cognates in his
compilations of Spanish Arabisms (1999, 2008a).
Portuguese and Catalan loans
187
suggests that nao may be a borrowing of OPtg. nau (or even of Gasc.
nau). The origin of the key historical and cultural label criollo ‘child
born of European parents in Spain’s American colonies; black born
in these colonies’ has been traced by several experts (most recently
Noll 2004) to Portuguese crioulo (whose genesis itself poses a number
of still unanswered questions), although this hypothesis is far from
universally accepted.6
9.3 Phonological clues to Lusisms
In contrast with the lateral palatal ll- produced by Lat. PL-, CL-, FL- in
Hispano-Romance, the palatal affricate ch- represents the frequent
outcome of these clusters in medieval Portuguese. Consequently,
Spanish words displaying initial ch- rather than the “expected” llhave often been classed as Lusisms, e.g. chamada ‘brushwood’, chamarasca ‘brushwood; brushwood fire’, chamiza ‘brushwood used as
kindling’, chamuscar ‘to singe, sear scorch’, all members of the family
traceable back to Lat. FLAMMA ‘flame’ (cf. Ptg. chama ‘flame’ vs Sp.
llama), chamariz ‘greenfinch’, from the family of Lat. CLAMARE (cf.
Ptg. chamar ‘to call’ vs Sp. llamar), chato ‘flat, blunt’ < PLATTUS, chopo
‘type of poplar tree’ < *PLOPPUS, safely reconstructed on the basis of
the Spanish and Portuguese forms as well as It. pioppo (Classical
7
POPULUS), and choza ‘rustic hut, cabin’ < PLUTTEA. Other than the
apparent diachronic phonological anomaly, no convincing reason
has been offered to justify these items as borrowings from Spanish’s
western neighbor. Some specialists have argued that the voiceless
palatal affricate also represents the original outcome in HispanoRomance of the Latin clusters at issue, preserved in the lexicon
associated with rural and conservative speech, with ll- reflecting a
later evolutionary overlay. An interesting split can be seen in the
descendants of Lat. PLOVERE ‘to rain’ and PLUVIA ‘rain’. Whereas Sp.
6
Woll (1997), who sees in criollo a native Spanish derivation of criar ‘to raise’, reviews the
debate on the origin of the Spanish noun.
7
DCECH allows for the possibility that chato, chopo, and choza are Lusisms, but also
suggests that the initial ch- reflects the working of sandhi phenomena, by which the initial
PL- formed a group with the final consonant of a preceding determiner and developed as if in
word-internal position. If that is the case, why were its effects limited to only a handful of lexical
items with initial PL-, FL-, CL-?
188
A history of the Spanish lexicon
llover ‘to rain’ and lluvia ‘rain’, show the expected reflex of the initial
consonant cluster of the Latin bases, semantically related chubasco
‘rain shower, downpour’ displays the western outcome. Given the
west-to-east movement of weather patterns in the Iberian Peninsula,
were phenomena of the type denoted by chubasco associated with the
western regions of the Peninsula, hence explaining the choice of
the western-looking form; cf. Ptg. chover, chuva, chuvisco, chuveiro?
The development of an affricate from initial PL- is also a feature of
some varieties of Asturian (García Arias 1988: 121–2), and consequently the aforementioned items may represent adaptations into
standard Spanish of rustic terms found in western varieties of
Hispano-Romance. Within the semantic field of meteorological phenomena that may have originated in Portuguese is the family of
despejar ‘to clear a place, to clear the sky’ and despejado ‘clear,
cloudless’,8 not attested in Spanish until the sixteenth century, but
found in fifteenth-century Portuguese sources (IVPM 3: 35, s.vv.
despejadamente, despejado, despejar, despejo). If indeed the root pej- reflects an ancestral *PEDIA (as suggested in Malkiel 1954: 23–34),
the formal development of the medial /dj/ reflects Portuguese rather
than Castilian evolutionary tendencies.9 Phonological considerations
led the authors of DCECH to classify Sp. almeja ‘clam’ as a borrowing
of Ptg. amêijoa (although the immediate etymon of the Portuguese
noun remains unknown).10 Sp. almeja is first documented in Enrique
de Villena’s Arte cisoria of 1423 (CORDE), whereas IVPM offers an
initial attestation of the Portuguese noun c.1500.
In like fashion, phonological considerations led such specialists as
Baist (1906: 903), Meyer-Lübke (REW: s.v. MASCULUS), and, more
recently, Hartman (1984) to classify Sp. macho ‘male’ as a Lusism,
claiming that OSp. maslo represented the native Castilian outcome of
Lat. MASCULUS. Other experts presented various arguments to
8
Malkiel (1954: 139–41) offers a detailed examination, with numerous textual references, of
the complex semantic history of this word family in early modern Spanish.
9
While agreeing that the -j- of despejar/despejado indicates a Portuguese origin, Walsh
SPISSUS ‘thick, dense’ to
(1981) operates with a blend of the family of *PEDIA with *SPISSIARE
account for the complex semantic development of despejar. The reconstruction of *SPISSIARE is
based solely on Gallo-Romance material.
10
A Portuguese origin for almeja had been suggested c.1555 by Andrés Laguna (as reported
in Covarrubias, Tesoro . . . (ed. Maldonado 1994: s.v. almeja)
Portuguese and Catalan loans
189
demonstrate that the derivation of macho from MASCULUS was indeed
possible within the framework of Castilian diachronic phonology (for
relevant bibliography and discussion see Dworkin 1991: 16–21). Supporters of the Portuguese origin of macho have failed to explain in a
convincing way why a borrowing from a neighboring language was
needed to replace maslo, which may have acquired taboo or obscene
associations as a designation for the penis. Equally problematic is the
hypothesis, launched by Michaëlis de Vasconcelos (1886: 135) that the
homonym macho ‘mule’ is a borrowing and reduction of OPtg.
muacho ‘mule’. Despite second thoughts expressed by Michaëlis de
Vasconcelos on later occasions, scholars of the stature of MeyerLübke (REW: #5742) and the authors of DCECH accepted the proposed Portuguese origin for this animal name. Alternatively, could
macho ‘male’ be seen as a reduction within Spanish of the phrase
mulo macho ‘male mule’?11 The -ñ- of Sp. ordeñar ‘to milk’ led Walsh
(1987) to reject derivation of this verb from *ORDINIARE and to posit a
borrowing from OPtg. ordinhar. This verb would have to be an early
Lusism, as ordeñar is documented in the mid-thirteenth-century
hunting treatise Libro de Moamin and in the Alfonsine General
estoria. Walsh does not attempt to explain why speakers of Hispano-Romance felt a need to borrow such a basic verb of rural life
from neighboring linguistic varieties and why Lat. MULGERE fell into
disuse (though it left reflexes in rural dialects; see DCECH: s.v.
esmucir). Regular development through oral transmission of the
diminutive suffix -INUS, -INA yielded -inho, -inha in Portugese and ino, -ina in Spanish. The presence of -iño, -iña in Spanish in lieu of
the expected -ino, -ina may well indicate a Lusism: basquiña ‘type of
petticoat’, brinquiño ‘trinket, small piece of jewelry’, corpiño ‘bodice’,
lampiño ‘beardless, hairless’.
Portugal’s pre-eminence as a seafaring nation in the fifteenth
century underlies the presence of Lusisms in Spanish pertaining to
the realm of navigation. Báez Montero (2006: 1279) lists the following
11
To complete the picture, I wish to draw attention to OSp. macho ‘blacksmith’s hammer’,
attested several times in the Alfonsine General estoria. Two rival hypotheses have been
proposed to account for its genesis: derivation from Lat. MARCULUS ‘hammer’ or an alteration
of OSp. maço ‘mace, club’ (for details, see Dworkin 1991: 23–4).
190
A history of the Spanish lexicon
items under this category: angra ‘cove, inlet’, balde ‘pail, bucket’, buzo
‘diver’, callao ‘pebble; stretch of land with pebbles’ (cf. the toponym
Callao, the port of Lima, Peru), cantil ‘undersea shelf’, acantilado
‘cliff’, carabela ‘type of ship’, estela ‘ship’s wake’, garúa ‘fine drizzle’,
laja ‘shallow bank or shoal’, marejada ‘ocean swell’, pleamar ‘high
tide’, tanque ‘tank, vat’, vigía ‘reef, shoal; lookout’, virar ‘to turn’. The
vitality in Old Portuguese of amainar ‘to shorten the sails’ (see IVPM:
s.v. amainar) and the fact that the Spanish nautical term amainar
with the same meaning is first documented in the fifteenth-century
Confisión del amante, translated into Spanish from a Portuguese
version of the Middle English Confessio Amantis (c.1390), supports
Colón (2007c), who analyzes the Spanish verb as a Lusism.12 The
initial documentation of virar ‘to turn’ in the written Spanish
of Christopher Columbus as preserved in his Diary may also point
to Portuguese as the immediate source of this verb in Spanish (cf. the
brief discussion of virar in Chapter 2).
9.4 Lusisms in regional Spanish
Owing to the contiguity of the western regions of León, Extremadura,
and Andalucía to Portugal, it is not surprising to find in the local
varieties of Spanish in these areas scattered Lusisms that have not
made their way into the standard language. Alvar (1963) identifies
some sixty Portuguese loans that have taken root in Andalusian, e.g.
fogaje ‘skin rash’, bolindre ‘type of bowling game’, apañar ‘to harvest
olives’, esterquera/esterquero ‘dung heap’, marguyón ‘layer of vine,
shoot, runner’, rabiza ‘plow beam’, g(u)rumelo ‘mushroom’, gallo
‘section of fruit’, pendorada ‘manger for cows’, pardal ‘type of sparrow’, popa ‘hoopoe’.13 Speakers from western León, Andalucía, Extremadura, and the Canary Islands, where Portuguese lexical
12
DCECH prefers to classify amainar as a Catalanism, a hypothesis demolished in Colón
(2007c).
13
The overwhelming majority of the relevant forms identified by Alvar are found sporadically only in Andalusian villages close to the Portuguese border. The regional Spanish of Galicia
in northwest Spain contains lexical items taken from Galician, a Romance variety closely
affiliated with Portuguese. Rojo (2004: 1098–9) lists cheirar ‘to smell bad’, colo ‘lap’, escachar
‘to break’, esmagar ‘to crush’, parvada ‘foolishness’, pocho ‘rotten’, podre ‘rotten’, rosmar ‘to
grumble, growl’, tolear ‘to drive mad’, trapallada ‘trifle, matter of no importance’.
Portuguese and Catalan loans
191
elements were present, and Portuguese-speaking crypto-Jews,
brought with them during the colonial period many of the Lusisms
found in New World Spanish. Sala (1982: 590–600) offers a list of
New World Spanish Lusisms, for the most part transmitted from
Brazil. Selected examples: anjico ‘type of tree’, batelón ‘canoe’, bichoco ‘old broken down horse, old person’, buceta ‘woman’s genital’,
cachimbo ‘pipe for smoking’, calote ‘deception, trick’, capiango
‘mythical animal; astute thief; bodyguard’, degredo ‘hospital; place
where useless items are stored’.
9.5 Catalan loanwords in Spanish: Background
The analysis of possible Catalan loanwords in Spanish14 poses a
number of difficult problems. Prior to the fifteenth century the
sociopolitical prestige of Catalan equaled that of Castilian. It was
the main administrative language of the Crown of Aragon (created in
1137 through the union of the Kingdom of Aragon with the County of
Catalonia) and the vehicle of a thriving literary culture. The Crown of
Aragon was very active in the commercial life of the Mediterranean
basin and had established itself in Sicily (1282) and Sardinia (1323), as
well as later in the Kingdom of Naples and in parts of Greece. Catalan
was a major language of culture and trade in the Mediterranean. In
1479 the Crown of Aragon merged with the Kingdom of Castile and
León, creating the modern nation-state of Spain. This union accelerated the decline of the sociopolitical prestige of the Catalan language,
a process that had begun in 1412 with the arrival on the throne of the
Crown of Aragon of the Trastámara dynasty from the neighboring
kingdom of Castile and León. The result was the spread of Castilian
linguistic features into Aragonese and Catalan as well as lexical
borrowing in both directions resulting from linguistic contact
between two genetically related languages of differing prestige spoken
within the borders of the same political entity.
14
This section will deal only with Catalan loans in general Spanish, and will not discuss
Catalan words found with some degree of frequency in the local Spanish of Catalonia, Valencia,
and the Balearic Islands, or Catalan loanwords in varieties of Aragonese or Murcian bordering
on Catalan-speaking regions (cf. Sinner 2004).
192
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Medieval Catalan and Occitan seem to have formed a continuum
with a high degree of lexical overlap. In addition, at the outset of the
vernacular literary tradition, Catalan lyric poets employed Occitan as
their poetic medium. Consequently, it is frequently difficult (if not
impossible) to tell whether a given Spanish word was borrowed
directly from southern Gallo-Romance or whether it entered through
Catalan. The presence of a suffix or final segment such as -aje, -ete, -el,
for example, can point in numerous instances to either a GalloRomance or a Catalan loan. Specialists are unsure in many cases
whether a given Spanish word came directly from northern or southern Gallo-Romance or from Catalan. If the word in question entered
Spanish after the decline by the end of the thirteenth century of
Occitan as an important political and cultural language, it appears
more likely that the word came directly from Catalan. Colón (1967a:
195) states that Catalan had no significant impact on the Spanish
lexicon until well into the fourteenth century. Among the numerous
Spanish words that fall into this gray category are alojar (viewed by
other specialists as an Italianism; see Chapter 7), ardido ‘bold, daring’,
bagasa ‘prostitute’, bajel ‘type of boat’, bosque ‘wood, forest’, burdel
‘bordello, house of prostitution’, cartel ‘poster’, coliflor ‘cauliflower’,
cortesano ‘pertaining to the court, courtly’, escudete ‘small shield’,
esmalte ‘enamel’, falda ‘skirt’ (ultimately of Germanic background),
forastero ‘stranger, foreigner’, lenguaje ‘speech, language’, manjar
‘meal; snack’, OSp. menge ‘physician’, nivel ‘level’, palenque ‘fence,
palisade, enclosure’, parlar ‘to talk, speak, chatter’, peaje ‘toll’, pincel
‘paintbrush’, roquete ‘turret, rook (chess piece)’, salvaje ‘wild, savage’,
surtir ‘to stock, supply’, OSp. toste ‘quickly, soon’, trozo ‘piece, slice’,15
OSp. volunter/volonter ‘willing’. There is no doubt concerning the
non-native status in Spanish of these words; the question is delineating the precise route of transmission. Given the presence of Catalan
15
The etymology of trozo (OSp. troço, also Ptg. troço) has been the subject of much debate.
The Catalan origin of these words goes back to Diez’s EWRS and was supported in REW and by
Colón (1976: 44). In contrast Hubschmid (1952) advocates a pre-Roman base for these items as
well as for OProv. trotz/tros, Cat. tros and N. It. trus, and rejects the analysis of the Spanish and
Portuguese nouns as Catalan borrowings. Malkiel (1950a) viewed trozo as a backformation from
the verb destrozar (OSp. destroçar ‘to break into pieces’) < *DESTRUCTIARE. Hubschmid’s essay
(1–2) critically surveys other conjectures on the etymology of troço/trozo.
Portuguese and Catalan loans
193
speakers throughout the Mediterranean, Catalan may also have
served in some instances as the immediate source of entry into
Hispano-Romance of borrowings from other languages (Arabic,
Greek, varieties of Italian, and perhaps that entity known as the
Mediterranean lingua franca), especially of terminology related to
commerce and to navigation. In these two categories, DCECH argues
that such Arabisms as avería, máscara, tafurea, tarifa, and such
Italianisms as bronce, escayola, esquife, moscatel entered Spanish as
Catalan loanwords.
9.6 Catalanisms: Analytical problems
The Catalan lexical contribution to Spanish has not been systematically studied. Colón (1967a) critically examines many separate instances of possible Catalan loanwords in Spanish in the framework of
a thoughtful reflection on the methodological and analytic problems
posed by the study of such items. He declares (214) that, for lack of
adequate monographic studies, it is far too early to attempt to offer
from a linguistic perspective a comprehensive analytic synthesis of
Spanish Catalanisms. Numerous entries in the two versions of Corominas’s etymological dictionaries, DCELC and DCECH, individually discuss the possible Catalan origin of relevant lexical items. Prat
Sabater (2003, 2005) offers a valuable discussion and summary of the
treatment of Catalanisms in DCECH. According to Prat Sabater’s
statistics, this reference work identifies 982 Spanish words as being
clearly or probably of Catalan origin. Her focus is a critical analysis,
discussion, and evaluation of the phonological, morphological, derivational, semantic, chronological, and extralinguistic criteria employed in DCECH to determine whether a given Spanish word
entered the language from Catalan. She concludes that only 221 of
the relevant words identified in DCECH are definitely Catalanisms.
Prat Sabater’s dissertation is directly dependent on the findings of
DCECH and is not intended to be an independent synthesis or a
complete repertory of Catalanisms in Spanish.
DCECH remains the sole source for an overall view of what
Spanish words, in the opinion of the authors of that compilation,
may have entered the language from Catalan. Indeed Corominas has
194
A history of the Spanish lexicon
been severely criticized for exaggerating the influence of Catalan on
its neighbor to the west, and on analyzing as Catalanisms words for
which other explanations seem more reasonable (e.g. Colón 2002: 38,
2007a: 29). One cannot discount the strong possibility that ideology
and nationalistic sentiments have led Corominas to exaggerate the
size of the Catalan contribution to the Spanish lexicon. Unfortunately, unlike its predecessor, DCELC, DCECH does not contain
indices arranged by donor language. This gap in the apparatus of
DCECH is now compensated to a large extent by the list in Prat
Sabater (2003: 340–2), arranged by century of first documentation in
Spanish, of 893 Spanish words that DCECH judges to be Catalanisms.
According to her statistics, the breakdown for first attestations by
century is as follows, according to DCECH: twelfth century, 17;
thirteenth century, 89; fourteenth century, 74; fifteenth century, 189;
sixteenth century, 154; seventeenth century, 123; eighteenth century,
85; nineteenth century, 127; twentieth century, 35. Almost half of these
items are first documented prior to 1600. All first attestations in
historical lexicology are, of course, tentative and relative and can
easily change as new texts and data become available.
Chronological, formal, and extralinguistic considerations may help
to determine whether the proposed Catalan origin of some Spanish
words rests on a firm foundation. The first printing presses in Spain
were founded in the 1470s in Catalan-speaking territories. This fact,
combined with the initial appearance of OSp. emprenta ‘impression;
printing’ only in the late fifteenth century vis-à-vis the considerably
earlier presence of Cat. emprempta seems to support viewing the
Spanish noun as a Catalan loan (DCECH, DECAT).16 At the outset
Sp. prensa designated an olive press, and is so used in the Spanish
translation (c.1385), based on a Catalan version, of the Roman writer
Palladius’s treatise Opus Agriculturae. DCECH sees in prensa an adaptation of Cat. premsa, the feminine form of the past participle of Cat.
premer ‘to press, squeeze’. The Moors introduced paper into the Iberian
Peninsula c.1150 in Játiva (mod. Xátiva), located in the Crown of
16
One instance of a verb emprentar ‘to make or leave an impression’ appears in the
fifteenth-century Aragonese Libro del tresor, based on the French text by Brunetto Latini.
This verb may be borrowed from the identical Catalan verb.
Portuguese and Catalan loans
195
Aragon. Sp. papel appears frequently in notarial documents throughout
the medieval period, especially in the prepositional phrase de papel, en
papel. The variant paper is typical of Aragonese and Catalan, but also
turns up frequently in Castilian sources. The routes of transmission in
Gallo- and Ibero-Romance taken by the descendants of PAPYRUS ‘paperreed, papyrus’ are difficult to trace.17 The immediate source of Sp. papel
is a subject of debate; whereas FEW (fasc. 50, s.v. PAPYRUS) sees the
Spanish noun as an adaptation of Fr. papier (itself a borrowing of
PAPYRUS), DECAT (s.v. paper) considers the Catalan noun to be the
source of papel, as well as of Fr. papier (> E. paper, G. Papier). The
historical fact that in the Iberian Peninsula, clocks with mechanical
wheels and gears were first introduced in Catalonia, as well as considerations of sound change, support Corominas’s hypothesis that Sp.
reloj ‘clock’ reflects an adaptation of Cat. relotge < HOROLOGIUM. The
Spanish noun is first attested (with the spelling relox) in the earlyfifteenth-century Visión deleytable of Alfonso de la Torre (CORDE).
Cat. bosc is documented several centuries earlier than Sp. bosque. The
CORDE data indicate that the Spanish noun did not enjoy any degree
of vitality until the fifteenth century;18 it is documented abundantly in
the Castilian translation of Boccaccio’s Tesseida (c.1430–40). This text
also offers the first instance of Sp. forastero, which is attested several
centuries later than Cat. foraster.19 This chronological gap seems to
confirm the Catalan origin of the Spanish form, used extensively in the
Corónica de Adramón (c.1492) and in the Libro de acuerdos del concejo
madrileño (CORDE). In like fashion, sastre ‘tailor’ is documented in
Catalan and Aragonese sources well before its initial appearance in
Castilian territory (where it ousted the OSp. Arabism alfayate).20 The
17
Oral transmission of PAPYRUS into Gallo-Romance yielded OFr. paveil ‘type of reed’ and
OProv. pabil ‘wick’; for other popular reflexes of PAPYRUS in Gallo- and Italo-Romance, see FEW
(fasc. 50, s.v. PAPYRUS). In parallel fashion Lat. CHARTA ‘leaf of the Egyptian papyrus’ underlies It.
carta ‘paper’ and its Romance cognates (e.g. Fr. carte, Sp./Ptg. carta).
18
One instance of bosque appears in the early-thirteenth-century Leónese Cuento muy
fermoso de Otas de Roma and in the Aragonese translation of Palladius (c.1385), a text based
on a Catalan intermediary.
19
Colón (1976: 197) claims that Catalan served as the intermediary language in the transmission from southern Gallo-Romance to Hispano-Romance of bosque and forastero.
20
In retrospect I now consider my attempt to explain sastre as a native Spanish reflex of the
nominative case SARTOR (Dworkin 1973: 34–5) to be misguided.
196
A history of the Spanish lexicon
CORDE database offers 228 examples of sastre found in fifteenthcentury sources. Formal and chronological considerations support the
Catalan origin of Sp. faena ‘task’. The Spanish noun does not represent
the outcome of FACIENDA, which produced OSp. fazienda. Whereas Sp.
faena (originally borrowed as a nautical term) appears at the beginning
of the sixteenth century, Cat. faena/feyna (mod. feina) are documented
in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries (DECAT: s.v. feina).
A similar chronological gap between the medieval documentation of
Cat. festejar ‘to feast, celebrate’ and the initial appearance of Sp. festejar
in the second half of the fifteenth century, as well as the reputation
of the Catalan court for its sumptuous feasts, lends credence to
the suggestion (DCECH, DECAT) that the Spanish verb is a borrowing from its eastern neighbor. The final segment -el of Sp. clavel
‘carnation’, not attested until the middle of the sixteenth century,
points to a Catalan origin.21 The abundant presence of enyorar
‘to long for, to feel nostalgia for’ in Medieval Catalan vis-à-vis the initial
documentation of Sp. añorar, with the same meaning, only in the
late nineteenth century supports the classification of the Spanish verb
as a Catalanism.
I believe that Corominas’s derivation of Sp. pantalla ‘lamp screen,
lamp shade’, first attested as pantalia in the second part of the Quijote
in the phrase dar pantalia ‘to apply shoe polish’(?)22 may require
rethinking. Arguing that the final segment -alla clearly indicates the
non-Castilian origin of pantalla, he claims that the Catalan noun is
the result of the alteration in that language of local ventalla ‘light
screen, lamp screen, shade’ under the influence of synonymous
pámpol. According to the DECAT (6, s.v. pantalla), the Catalan
noun is not attested before the beginning of the nineteenth century;
in contrast, CORDE records scattered instances of Sp. pantalla in the
I have come across one instance of plural claveles in the sense ‘cloves, spices’ in the
veterinary treatise Libro de los açores (c.1300). The form clavels turns up in the late thirteenthcentury MS O of the Libro de Alexandre (st. 1463b; the corresponding passage in MS P offers
clavos). These early examples may go back to OProv. clavel ‘clove’, whereas the later flower
name clavel is a borrowing of Cat. clavell.
22
This interpretation of the phrase (a hapax?) as used in Cervantes’s masterpiece was first
suggested by F. Rodríguez Marín in his 1916 edition of the Quijote; see Fernández Gómez (1962:
s.v. pantalia). He argued that the soot scraped off lamp screens was used to heighten the black
color of men’s shoes.
21
Portuguese and Catalan loans
197
seventeenth century. Many Catalan specialists have argued that
Cat. pantalla is a borrowing from Spanish, a view that Coromines
vigorously and scornfully (though not convincingly) rejects.
9.7 Catalanisms: Form class
The majority of Catalan loanwords in Spanish are nouns that reflect
the importance of Catalan as the language of maritime life, seafaring
activities and Mediterranean commerce, or designate products,
foods, and life styles associated with the Catalan-speaking regions
of the Iberian Peninsula. The following words are a small sampling of
the 280 words that Prat Sabater (2005: 386–7) listed as “catalanismes
segurs” and “catalanismes probables”:
acollar, alioli, anís, añorar, avellanate, avenate, avilantez, balance, barraca, bergante,
bojar, bol, buido, butifarra, caja, calamar, camisola, carruaje, cohete, confitar,
congoja, convite, cotejo, cuartel, dátil, entremés, esparavel, esquife, faena, festejar,
follaje, follía, forastero, frazada, imprenta, lisa, lonja, manjar, muelle, nivel, noque,
orate, orgullo, paella, papel, pincel, prensa, quijote, rape, reloj, retablo, (de) reojo, riel,
rozagante, tarifa, trajín/trajinar, truque, veza, viaje, vinagre, zozobra/zozobrar.
Spanish borrowed some adjectives from its immediate eastern
neighbor. As in the case of medieval adjectival borrowings from
Arabic, some of the adjectives expressed negative states or qualities.
OSp. ávol ‘bad, evil’ comes from Cat. àvol, the local reflex of HABILIS. A
handful of examples of the Spanish adjective appear in scattered texts
(e.g. Libro de Alexandre, General estoria, Miraglos de Santiago, prior
to the beginning of the fifteenth century; the presence of the longerlived derivative avoleza may indicate that the adjective enjoyed some
degree of vitality prior to its early demise. Also of Catalan background is the (now obsolete) adjective orate ‘mad, crazy’, of which
scattered examples turn up in a single poem preserved in several latefifteenth-century cancioneros. This word displays a certain degree of
vitality in the theater of Bartolomé de Torres Naharro and his earlysixteenth-century contemporaries (Gillet 1951: 369–70). Specialists
agree that the Spanish form goes back to Cat. orat, ‘mad, foolish’,
documented in medieval sources, a descendant of Lat. *AURATUS
198
A history of the Spanish lexicon
‘unhealthy wind’ (cf. Oprov. aurat), based on AURA ‘wind, breeze’ (the
source of OFr. aure, ore, OSp. oriella ‘breeze’).23 The classification in
DCECH of OSp. feble ‘weak’ as a Catalanism is questionable. The
authors claim that the relevant Old French form would have been
foible, forgetting that feible would have been an intermediate stage
between Lat. FLEBILIS and foible (mod. faible); the source may also be
OProv. feble.
9.8 Summary
The impact on Spanish of its neighbors, Portuguese and Catalan, is
fairly reduced. The dominance of the Galician-Portuguese tradition
of lyric poetry in the thirteenth century may account for the transmission into Spanish of certain words that describe or designate
emotions and feelings. Portugal’s importance as a maritime power
in the late Middle Ages and in the sixteenth century explains the
presence of Spanish nautical terminology of Portuguese origin. More
problematic from the perspective of etymological analysis are a series
of lexical items referring to realities of rural life and the weather,
whose phonological evolution from Latin seems, on the surface, to
reflect tendencies associated with Luso-Romance. It will require a
monographic study of each word to determine whether it entered
Spanish from Portuguese or from a western variety of HispanoRomance (e.g. western Leónese). Also worthy of closer examination
is the alleged Portuguese origin of the indefinite pronoun alguien
(originally alguién).
Starting in the beginning of the fifteenth century, Catalan, the
language of the Crown of Aragon and an important language of
commerce in the Mediterranean basin, underwent a major decline
in terms of its sociolinguistic prestige. Castilian was the dominant
language in the Spain created by the union in 1479 of the Kingdom of
Castile and León with the Crown of Aragon. The close morphological
and lexical affinities between medieval varieties of Catalan and of
23
This etymology was first proposed by Spitzer and Tallgren; for details see DECAT, (6, s.v.
orat). Gillet (1951: 369–70) surveys earlier attempts to etymologize the Spanish adjective.
Portuguese and Catalan loans
199
southern Gallo-Romance often make it difficult to determine which
of these two languages is the immediate source of a given Old
Spanish lexical item. Catalan is also the language through which
some medieval Arabisms and Italianisms found their way into
Hispano-Romance.
10
Lexical borrowings from the
New World
10.1 Background
It is only in the case of borrowings from the indigenous languages of
the New World that the historian of the Spanish lexicon can precisely
identify the year and place in which the process of language contact
began, the year in which the first relevant loanwords were documented in the language, as well as the words themselves. In October 1492,
Christopher Columbus and his crew experienced their first encounter
with the peoples and the languages of the Caribbean islands. From
the outset, the Spaniards were faced with the problem of finding
signifiers for the new exotic material realities of the New World—
flora, fauna, foods, customs, clothing, peoples, etc. Two possible
solutions immediately presented themselves: the use of a Spanish
word that designated an object similar to or reminiscent of the new
item,1 or the adaptation to Spanish of the local designation for the
object in question. During the first moments of language contact
between Spanish and the indigenous languages of the islands, there
were clearly no speakers even minimally competent in both Spanish
and the local languages. Luis de Torres, the Hebrew- and Arabicspeaking translator that Columbus had brought with him, was of no
use under the circumstances. The first efforts at communication
would have required the use of gestures and the gradual acquisition
1
At the beginning of the colonial period some Spaniards used pavo ‘peacock’ to designate
the turkey, lagarto ‘lizard’ and culebra ‘serpent, snake’ for the reptiles named today by indigenous caimán and iguana, tigre and león for the large cats named today by indigenous puma and
jaguar, and buitre ‘vulture’ for the bird today known as zopilote.
Borrowings from the New World
201
word by word (with the usual deformations inherent in this process)
by both parties of the vocabulary of the other.
The first written account of the initial encounters between speakers
of Spanish and of the local indigenous languages, Columbus’s Diario
a bordo, already contains in Hispanicized garb several lexical items
taken from these languages (almost exclusively from Taíno, a language formerly spoken on the Caribbean islands) that designated
specific social and material realities unknown to the Spaniards: ají
‘type of hot pepper’, bohío ‘type of rural dwelling’, cacique ‘type of
local chieftain’, caona ‘gold’, canoa ‘canoe’, caribe ‘native’, cazabe
‘type of local bread or cake made with manioc flour’, guanin ‘type of
low-quality gold’, hamaca ‘hammock’, nuçay ‘gold of low quality’,
tiburón ‘shark’, tuob ‘type of low-quality gold’. Care must be taken in
assessing which of these words were actually used by Columbus. His
original Diario (written while at sea) and a 1493 copy made at the
behest of Queen Isabel have been long lost. The version that has come
down was an edition made in the mid sixteenth century by the
Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who also incorporated
material added by Columbus’s son Hernando. For further discussion
and exemplification of this point, see Frago Gracia (2005: 1720–2).
One of these items, canoa, is the first borrowing from a New World
language which merited an entry in a Spanish dictionary, namely Elio
Antonio de Nebrija’s Spanish–Latin Dictionary (c.1495),2 where it is
first explained as ‘nave de un madero’ and then glossed with Lat.
monoxylum.3 The route taken by this word from Columbus’s Diary
to the first systematic dictionary in which Spanish words functioned
as lemmata merits a brief description here. Nebrija had no access to
Columbus’s Diary, first published posthumously only in the mid
2
According to Alvar Ezquerra (1997: ix), the 1506 edition of Nebrija’s Spanish–Latin
dictionary contains an entry for indigenous guanín ‘low quality gold’, a word documented in
several sixteenth-century texts describing the realities of the New World (Alvar Ezquerra 1997:
s.v. guanín). I have not found this item in the 1516 edition of Nebrija’s dictionary.
3
In Nebrija’s 1492 Latin–Spanish dictionary this word is glossed with the Spanish Arabism
almadía. On at least two other occasions in the Diary Columbus used canoa alongside the more
familiar almadía so that the meaning was clear. The CORDE database cites 14 instances of
almadía in Columbus’s journal, which seem to constitute the only medieval examples of this
word. Its presence in at least two fifteenth-century Portuguese sources (IVPM: s.v. almadia)
may indicate that almadía is a Lusism of Arabic background in the written language of
Columbus.
202
A history of the Spanish lexicon
sixteenth century on the basis of copies made by the Dominican Friar
Bartolomé de las Casas. On February 15, 1493, while still at sea on the
return voyage to Spain from his first voyage to the New World,
Columbus wrote a letter to Luis de Santángel, Minister to King
Fernando, who had played a major role in convincing the Catholic
Monarchs to finance Columbus’s expedition. This letter describes
much of what Columbus saw in the New World, including a local
form of transportation on water known as canoa. Santángel received
the letter in March 1493 and had it printed straightaway; it appeared
in Barcelona on April 1, 1493. It circulated widely and doubtless came
into Nebrija’s hands, where he came across the neologism canoa.
This word appeared in no other sixteenth-century dictionary until
Cristóbal de las Casas’s bidirectional Spanish–Italian dictionary (Seville 1570), where it is glossed by It. lontro. Martín Fernández de
Enciso and Alonso de Chaves employed canoa in their respective
treatises on boats and navigational matters of 1519 and 1520 respectively (CORDE).
New World borrowings into Spanish fall into two general categories (which, of course, lend themselves to further subdivision);
indigenous vocabulary that became part of general Spanish in Europe
and the New World, and borrowings (the overwhelming majority)
restricted to national, regional, or local varieties of American Spanish. This chapter will limit its purview to the former category. In both
cases, the analyst must distinguish between the thousands of words
recorded in the relevant Peninsular or New World dictionaries and
compilations devoted to indigenismos or americanismos, and the
considerably smaller subset of such loanwords that actually enjoy a
degree of vitality at the level of the spoken language in the variety of
Spanish at issue. There is no shortage of monographs that list and
discuss (with varying degrees of analytical acumen) the indigenous
component of specific modern regional varieties of New World
Spanish or of dictionaries and word lists that catalogue such items
(usually in alphabetical order). In addition to not highlighting the
handful of words in everyday use in the local varieties of New World
Spanish, they fail to differentiate items that are used only by bilingual
speakers, whose mother tongue is usually the native language (as in
Borrowings from the New World
203
modern Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia, for example). A synthesis of the history and a rigorous linguistic analysis of borrowings in
the framework of contact-induced language change from the local
native languages into the many regional varieties of New World
Spanish would indeed be the subject of a separate book.
10.2 Reception and integration of New World borrowings
For the first two decades of the Spanish presence in the New World,
contact was limited to the native languages of the islands of the
Caribbean. Two of these languages, Taíno and Arawak, supplied
most of the first loanwords that appear in European and New World
Spanish texts of the sixteenth century and which subsequently
migrated with later colonists to continental South America. In addition to the items cited above from Columbus’s Diary, such borrowings
include areito ‘type of indigenous song and dance’, barbacoa ‘type of
cooking grill’, batata ‘sweet potato’, caníbal ‘cannibal’, (e)nagua
‘Indian woman’s skirts; petticoat’, huracán ‘hurricane’, maíz ‘maize,
corn’, pito ‘thread made with the leaves of the maguey plant’, sabana
‘flat plain, savannah’, tuna ‘prickly pear, Indian fig’, yuca ‘yucca’. After
the arrival of the Spaniards in Mexico in 1519, words from Nahuatl, the
principal language of the Aztecs, began to enter Spanish to express
local realia, e.g. aguacate ‘avocado’, cacahuete ‘peanut’, chicle ‘type of
gum to be chewed’, chocolate ‘chocolate’, coyote ‘coyote’, guajolote
‘turkey’, tomate ‘tomato’. Further Spanish expansion in continental
South America brought the language into contact with other indigenous languages such as Quechua, the principal language of the Inca
Empire in the Andes, Mapuche, the language of the Araucanos of
Chile, and the Tupi-Guaraní of what is today Brazil and Paraguay.
Among the items taken from Quechua are alpaca ‘alpaca’, cancha
‘open unencumbered space’, chinchilla ‘chinchilla’, coca ‘coca leaf or
plant’, cóndor ‘condor’, patata ‘potato’, puma ‘puma’. Almost all the
New World words that have come to form part of the vocabulary of
general Spanish (and which have spread subsequently into many
European languages) come from the Arawak/Taíno group, Nahuatl
204
A history of the Spanish lexicon
or Quechua.4 Borrowings from other indigenous languages turn up
almost exclusively in those varieties of New World Spanish that are in
contact with the donor language.
Although borrowings from the native languages entered New
World Spanish through direct oral contact, they made their way
back to Spain in the written reports of Spaniards living in the New
World (and subsequently, through translations of such works, into
neo-Latin and other European vernaculars; see Marcos Marín 2009).
There is no way to know to what extent individual words may have
been brought back in the speech of returning sailors, missionaries,
and colonists. In light of the specific exotic referents of New World
borrowings, such items did not immediately enjoy widespread diffusion in the spoken or written language in Spain. They appear abundantly in the earliest chronicles reporting and describing the Spanish
conquest and settlement of the New World, but many are clearly
regarded as foreignisms and are accompanied by explanations and
glosses.5 For European Spaniards, the use of indigenous New World
vocabulary characterized (and often stigmatized) the speech of (current and former) residents of the Spanish colonies, and led to the
coining of the phrase hablar indiano (Sánchez Méndez 2010). A
number of such words appear (sometimes in Latinized dress) in
documents from the first quarter of the sixteenth century prepared
in the royal chancery, and in the Latin text of the Decadas de Orbe
Novo (published in parts between 1493 and 1525) of Pedro Mártir de
Anglería, an Italian humanist who spent many years at the court of
the Catholic Monarchs and who published, on the basis of travelers’
reports, descriptions of the New World, where he never set foot over
his long life; e.g. ajes ‘type of sweet potato’, batata, caníbales, canoa,
cazabe ‘type of native bread’, conuco ‘small parcel of land to be
farmed’, bohío, iguana, magüey, maíz, naboria ‘Indian assigned to
4
Many more words of Nahuatl and Quechua origin live on and enjoy a high degree of
vitality in the standard Spanish of Mexico and Peru.
5
Alvar Ezquerra (1997) offers a lengthy list of all indigenous lexical items found in twentytwo chronicles from the sixteenth century. The scholarly literature abounds in articles and
monographs examining the indigenous elements found in individual sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers active in Spain and in her colonies; for references see the bibliographic
information in Alvar Ezquerra (1997) and Buesa and Enguita Utrilla (1992).
Borrowings from the New World
205
work on an encomienda’, yuca (Morínigo 1959: 10, Moreno de Alba
1996).6 Morínigo reports the presence of seventy such items in the
brief Sumario de la natural historia de las Indias c. 1525) of Gonzalo
Fernández de Oviedo; many more New World words appear, often
without metalinguistic marking of their non-Spanish origin, in his
five-volume Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535–57; see
Enguita Utrilla 2004 for an examination of the Nahuatl loans in
this text). Early dictionaries prepared by missionaries as tools for
evangelization of the native peoples already contain a significant
number of indigenisms both as head words in the Spanish section
and in the Spanish glosses given to native vocabulary. Fray Domingo
de Vico’s (unpublished) Vocabulario de la lengua cakchiquel,
prepared in Guatemala c.1555, employs items from the native languages of the Caribbean such as axí, batey, bejuco, cacique, enagua,
huracán, maiz, sabana, and Nahuatl words such as cacao, calpul,
camotes, chian, chile, chiquibuite, copal, coyote, guipil, macegual,
mecal, milpa, ocote, petatetamal, tomate, xícara (Hernández 2008:
71).7 By 1555 Fray Alonso de Molina’s Vocabulario de la lengua
castellana y mexicana contained such indigenisms as aguachil, ají,
batata, batea, batey, buhío, cacao, canoa, capulín, coa, embixar ‘to
paint with annatto’, magüey, maíz, maizal, mecapal, petaca, tameme
as headwords in its Spanish–Nahuatl section (Rivarola 2004: 814,
Lope Blanch 1999). The presence of such derivatives as cacicazgo,
caciquero, caciquillo, canoero, canohuela, canoílla, hamaquero, hamaquilla, macanero, maizal, milpería, papita, petaquilla in the writings of sixteenth-century chroniclers (see Alvar Ezquerra 1997: s.vv.)
bespeaks the rapid integration of the relevant indigenous bases into
Spanish. Only a handful of New World loans found in the chronicles
from the New World survived long term in European Spanish. Nonliterary documents—lawsuits, contracts, private letters—from the
New World contain very few words of indigenous origin. New
World borrowings slowly appear in theater (e.g. in the comedias of
6
This author added as an appendix to his edition of the first three Décadas (Alcalá de
Henares 1516) a Vocabulario bárbara of 374 items, most of them New World words.
7
This is a list of selected examples. According to Hernández (2008: 68), most of the
indigenous words found in this compilation are still used in the Spanish of Guatemala and in
other Central American varieties.
206
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Lope de Rueda) in the second half of the sixteenth century, with the
appearance of American themes in creative literature. However it is
only several years later, in the works of Lope de Vega and Cervantes,
among others, that items such as bejuco ‘type of reed’, cacao, caimán,
caribe, huracán seem to be used as integrated elements of the Peninsular Spanish lexicon, not restricted to use by native characters in
plays dealing with New World themes. Moreno de Alba (2009) finds
the following words in the writings of Cervantes: bejuco, cacao,
cacique, caimán, caribe, huracán, loro. According to Morínigo, the
most frequently documented borrowings c.1600 include caimán,
chocolate, naguas, tiburón, batatas, mico ‘long-tailed monkey’, arcabuco ‘thicket’, ají, ara ‘macaw’, chapetón, guayaco ‘type of plant’,
jícara ‘cup, small bowl’, jalapa ‘jalap’, tomate, vicuña, patata.
Covarrubias’s Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611), the
first monolingual dictionary of Spanish, contains twenty-three8 New
World items, among them cacique, hamaca,9 huracán, maíz, perulero, pita, tiburón.10 The presence of a New World word in the Tesoro
may be reasonably interpreted as a sign that the word had become
integrated (perhaps in selected registers) in Spanish. However the
absence of such an item from this dictionary does not mean that the
word was unknown in early-seventeenth-century Spanish. Morínigo
claims that the Royal Spanish Academy of the Language’s Diccionario de autoridades (1726–39), a normative compilation of words
acceptable in literary written registers, contains c.150 New World
borrowings.11 The presence of a New World word in this compilation
8
This figure includes such toponyms as México, Mechoacán (mod. Michoacán), Perú,
Teotihuacán.
9
Although the presence of an entry for hamaca in the Tesoro may well bespeak its
integration into early-seventeenth-century Peninsular Spanish, Covarrubias proposed a
Hebrew etymology for the noun.
10
In addition to native borrowings that function as headwords in the Tesoro, Covarrubias
employs acal ‘type of canoe’ in his definition of canoa and, in like fashion, nopal and tuna, both
types of cactus, in his entry for México. As for almost all the New World borrowings in the
Tesoro, these items, which live on in the Spanish of Mexico, were taken from the second part of
Francisco López de Gómara, Historia general de las Indias (Lope Blanch 1977a). There is no way
of knowing the criteria employed by Covarrubias in selecting this handful of such words
documented and discussed in his sources.
11
Gútemberg Bohórquez (1984) identified 168 New World words in the Diccionario de
autoridades, whereas Salvador Rosa (1985) counted 127 such items. Romero Gualda (1992) also
lists and discusses such neologisms found in this dictionary as well as those present in
Diccionario castellano con las voces de ciencias y artes of Padre Esteban Terreros.
Borrowings from the New World
207
may merely reflect its usage in an earlier literary work or chronicle
rather than any degree of vitality or integration into the contemporary written or spoken language. This evaluation also applies to the
New World borrowings found in Padre Esteban de Terreros y Pando’s four-volume Diccionario castellano con las voces de Ciencias y
Artes (1786–93, but completed prior to 1767, the year of the Jesuit
expulsion from Spain). The regional vocabularies of those regions of
Spain that had regular contact with the New World during the
colonial period, especially Western Andalusia and the Canary Islands, contain many New World words that are not found in the
standard language. Frago Gracia (1994: 142–4) records in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century non-literary documents from Seville
the New World borrowings achiote, aguacate, batea,12 cacao, calamaco, caoba, carey, ceiba, chocolate, chocolatero, coca, (e)nagua,
jícara, llama, pita, tabaco (see below), tabaquero, and vicuña, items
that seem not to have become widely diffused elsewhere in Spain by
that time. The coining of derivatives such as chocolatero, tabaquero
underscores the degree of integration and vitality of the underlying
bases. Speakers may well have created such derivatives independently
in Spain and in the New World.
10.3 Etymological controversies
The proposed New World origin of a handful of nouns that indeed
designate realities associated with America continues to be controversial. The context of the use of the noun poncho in testimony given
in 1526 by Alonso de Santa Cruz upon his return from an expedition
to the River Plate led by the Italian mariner Sebastian Cabot led
Morínigo (1954) to question the indigenous origin of this term for a
type of clothing worn by the local natives. Although he identifies no
specific etymon, he believes the word to have originated in the speech
of Spanish sailors active in the Mediterranean basin. DCECH suggests a genetic connection with poncho ‘idle, soft, chubby’, allegedly a
variant (with an intrusive nasal) of pocho ‘faded, discolored’,
12
Frago Gracia (1994: 147) records batea, hamaca, and macana in a document dated March
19, 1510 from Seville.
208
A history of the Spanish lexicon
ultimately of expressive origin. Although tobacco was introduced
into Europe from America and tabaco was already identified as the
local indigenous name13 by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo in his
Historia general y natural de las Indias, the noun may be a Peninsular
Spanish word of Arabic origin (connected by DCECH and Corriente
1999, 2008 with altabaca, documented as otaboca in the latefifteenth-century medical treatise Tesoro de los remedios [DETEMA:
s.v. altabaca]), which was applied to the New World product in much
the same way that the first colonists applied such Spanish words as
pavo, lagarto, león, tigre to such American animals as guajolote,
caiman, puma, jaguar. Although DCECH suggested an Arabic origin
for baquiano ‘expert guide’ > ‘expert, skilled person’,14 Rivarola (1985,
1988) argued for the Caribbean origin of the word, documented for
the first time in sixteenth-century New World chronicles. DCECH
operates tentatively with an Arabic origin for batea, for which Corriente (1999: s.v. batea) also offers an Arabic etymology. Opinion is
divided as to whether cigarro is a metaphorical outgrowth of cigarra
‘type of grasshopper, cicada’ (based on a comparison with the shape
of that insect’s body), ultimately traceable to the family of Lat. CICADA,
or a borrowing from a New World language. Although boniato ‘sweet
potato’ clearly designates a New World product and is in the beginning found only in colonial texts, the origin of the term is open to
question. It is almost invariably employed as an adjective modifying
other foodstuffs in sixteenth-century sources (e.g. ají boniato, yuca
boniata). DCECH wonders whether boniato was coined as a mock
derivative of Lat. BONUS by the Italian humanist Pedro Mártir de
Anglería, whose text contains in Latinate garb boniatum.
The path followed into Peninsular Spanish by the native New
World term barbacoa is unique. This word is used extensively in
New World Spanish with the meaning ‘wooden or lattice frame used
13
“Hay en la tierra una hierba que llaman tabaco . . . ”, quoted in Alvar Ezquerra (1997: 331b).
Until the label tabaco became dominant, many Spanish colonists in the sixteenth century
employed the Nahuatalism piciete to designate this product (Norton 2008: 171). The sixteenthcentury Sevillian physician Nicolás Monardes stated a propos of tabaco: “El nombre proprio
suyo entre los Indios es Picielt, que el de tabaco es postizo, de nuestros Españoles, de una ysla do
hay mucha cantidad de él, llamada este nombre Tabaco” (cited in Marcos Marín 2009: 147).
14
Corriente does not include baquiano in his compilations of Spanish Arabisms (1999,
2008).
Borrowings from the New World
209
to dry fruit, grains, etc.’ and ‘grill for cooking meat’. According to
Buesa (1992: 177) barbacoa with the latter meaning found its way into
English, from which it entered modern European Spanish as an
Anglicism.15 The CORDE database offers very few examples of
barbacoa so used. None of the repertories of Anglicisms (Pratt
1980, Lorenzo 1996, Rodríguez González and Lillo Buades 1997)
include the noun at issue, which seems not to be very much used in
Spain, where speakers seem to prefer by far parrilla.
10.4 Vitality in contemporary European Spanish
A number of words of indigenous origin continue to enjoy vitality in
the spoken Spanish of Spain. The lexical data gathered as part of the
Estudio coordinado de la norma lingüística culta de las principales
ciudades de Iberoamérica y de la Península Ibérica includes fifty items
of New World origin, which were offered as responses to specific
items on that project’s lexical questionnaire, e.g. butaca, cacahuete,
cacao, cacique, cancha, canoa, chicle, chocolate, colibrí, cóndor, coyote,
enaguas, guateque ‘cocktail, bachelor party’, guayaba, hamaca, huracán, jaguar, iguana, loro, maíz, petaca, tiza, tomate, yuca (Buesa and
Enguita 1992: 146–8; Enguita 1996). Whereas those items that refer to
New World animals, foodstuffs, plants, etc. still retain their original
meaning, others have acquired new or extended meanings reflecting
modern realities. Butaca today refers to a modern seat with armrests (as in a theater); cacique as a political term corresponds to
Spanish political realities. The type of female undergarment denoted by enaguas today does not correspond to the original referent. Guateque no longer refers to a specific native drink.
I wish to draw attention here to a relevant question that has
received little attention from students of the Spanish lexicon,
namely the impact over the last few decades of spoken and written
varieties of New World Spanish on the Spanish of Spain. Latin
American literature is today widely read in Spain, and some major
Latin American literary figures now reside there (the most notable
15
The OED gives scattered instances of barbecue from the late seventeenth century (1697)
and the first years of the eighteenth century.
210
A history of the Spanish lexicon
example being the recent Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa). In
addition, colloquial New World Spanish circulates in Spain through
the popular Latin American soap operas (telenovelas) widely
watched on Spanish television, and in the speech of the many
Latin American emigrants who have settled in Spain. To what
extent have words of indigenous origin used only in regional or
social varieties of New World Spanish entered the spoken and
written language of Spain? From a historical perspective, should
the analyst view such lexical items as additional examples of the
linguistic influence of the native languages of the New World, or
should such words more realistically fall into the category of the
adaptation of regionalisms whose immediate origin is a contemporary variety of Spanish, but whose distant origin is a New World
indigenous language?
10.5 Summary
In many respects the entry of New World vocabulary into early
modern Spanish parallels the processes by which words of preRoman origin entered Latin. In both instances the speakers of the
languages transported to a new territory encountered languages with
which they had not even a minimum degree of familiarity. At the
outset communication was at best rudimentary. There may well have
arisen in the New World pidginized contact varieties of Spanish,
which perhaps became the native language for future generations.
As in the Iberian Peninsula, this creolized system left no direct
written traces. Although both the Romans and the Spaniards took
social and political control in the new territories, they constituted a
minority vis-à-vis the speakers of the local languages. Both in early
Roman Spain and in the course of the Spanish colonial presence in
the New World, many of the indigenous languages ceased to be
spoken. As their speakers gave up their mother tongues, they adopted
the new prestige language of power and society, often bringing with
them vocabulary from their native speech as part of the process of
language shift. The overwhelming majority of pre-Roman lexical
items that entered the Latin/Hispano-Romance continuum and of
indigenous lexical items that entered regional varieties of New World
Borrowings from the New World
211
Spanish are nouns designating realities of the local physical terrain,
flora, fauna, foods, dress, customs, indigenous social organization,
etc. Many such words live on only in regional, often rural, varieties of
Peninsular and New World Spanish. Although dictionaries of indigenismos offer thousands of entries, only a relatively small number of
words from the New World took root in Spain; even in New World
varieties of Spanish, most such words are known only to a handful of
specialists versed in specific local realities. In like fashion, only a
handful of pre-Roman items made their way to Rome and entered
the general spoken Latin of the Empire.
11
Anglicisms in Spanish
11.1 Historical background
For approximately the last sixty years, English (especially its American variety) has been the main source of new loanwords in Peninsular and New World varieties of Spanish. Prior to the eighteenth
century, few, if any, English words entered Spanish, despite AngloSpanish contacts, often of a belligerent or bellicose nature involving
political and military conflict on the continent, on the high seas, and
in the New World colonies. In the Middle Ages, Alfonso VIII of
Castile married Leonora, daughter of Henry II of England. Alfonso X
married off his sister Leonora to the future Edward I. In the fourteenth century the Black Prince and his soldiers came to Spain to aid
Pedro the Cruel in his struggle with Enrique de Trastámara. English
merchants and traders visited Spain, as perhaps did some scholars.
However, there was no significant presence of speakers of English in
the Iberian Peninsula. Only one English work of literature was
translated into Spanish in the Middle Ages, namely John Gower’s
Confessio amantis (1390), but the sole extant Spanish version was
based on a Portuguese intermediary, only recently discovered.1
In the sixteenth century, Catherine of Aragon, wife of Henry VIII,
learned English very well. The marriage of Phillip II of Spain to Mary
Tudor led to the presence of a sizeable Spanish population in London, some of whom must have mastered the language of their
new country. Commercial relations between England and Spain
1
Two sentences in what seems to be Middle English were intercalated in the fifteenthcentury chronicle El victorial, in a passage where Pero Niño arrives on the English coast.
A poem by Francisco Imperial preserved in the Cancionero de Baena includes a brief English
phrase (Martín-Gamero 1963: 22–4).
Anglicisms
213
continued to flourish. Nevertheless, there was little direct contact on
a regular basis between sufficient numbers of speakers of English
and Spanish for English words to enter and take root in written or
spoken Spanish. A handful of works were translated from English
into Spanish in the period 1500–1700. Such books would not have
been accessible to the largely illiterate population and would have
had no influence on written Spanish. Whereas manuals for learning
Spanish and bidirectional Spanish–English dictionaries were produced in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
similar tools did not appear for the teaching of English in Spain until
the late eighteenth century, prior to which Spaniards had to rely on
the polyglot manuals and lexica produced in the Low Countries
(Martín-Gamero 1963: 25–128; also Fernández Urdaneta 2010).
The influence of Britain began to be felt in Spain (and elsewhere in
Europe) in the eighteenth century. The British constitutional monarchy became a model for many political thinkers. English advances in
agriculture, the medical sciences, and economics spread throughout
Europe, and rivaled French progress and influence in those fields.
There was a marked increase in the number of English works translated into Spanish. Men of letters such as Gaspar Melchor Jovellanos
(1744–1811), Juan Meléndez Valdés (1754–1817), and José Cadalso
(1741–82) mastered English and promoted its teaching and use. The
language began to be taught in classes offered by the local Sociedades
Económicas de los Amigos del País; Jovellanos instituted the teaching
of English in the newly founded Real Instituto Asturiano (1795). The
burgeoning number of translations from English sources began to
introduce English scientific and technical terminology into written
Spanish.
11.2 Earliest Anglicisms
There are no sure instances of English loanwords in Spanish prior to
the eighteenth century. Rodríguez González (2002: 128) suggests that
the names for the cardinal points norte ‘north’, sur sud ‘south’, este
‘east’, and oeste ‘west’ represent the first Spanish Anglicisms
(although he concedes possible transmission through French, as
had already been suggested in DCECH: s.v. norte, and in DHLF:
214
A history of the Spanish lexicon
s.v. nord).2 All four terms appear in medieval sources, with norte
(usually employed with reference to the north star) going back to the
thirteenth century (CORDE), a time of no direct contact with Middle
English. Two Old Spanish ship designations, ballener (also Ptg.
barinel, Cat. balener) and haloque, may go back to English bases
that entered Spanish through French and Gascon respectively
(Eberenz 1975: 27–34, 205–8).
Páramo García (2003) surveys and comments on Anglicisms found
in 69 translations from English to Spanish made between 1767 and 1800.
Almost all these words appear in their English garb and express concepts that are specifically British and for which Spanish lacked a
signifier. These items are clearly unintegrated foreign words, and
would not have diffused to the speech of the general population of
the time; in fact, many of them have failed to take root in Spanish.
Among the few exceptions identified by Páramo García that have
survived and taken on a Spanish form are such items as bote ‘small
boat, skiff’,3 cuáquero ‘Quaker’, pingüino ‘penguin’, ponche (alongside
punch) ‘punch (drink)’ and ron (alongside rum) ‘rum’. One instance of
dogo ‘bulldog’ (a British breed) appears in Padre Isla, Fray Gerundio
(1758).4 In some cases it is difficult to determine whether the item in
question entered Spanish directly from English or whether it crossed
the Pyrenees as a Gallicism. Further complicating the analysis is the fact
that in some cases the word itself first entered English from French
before making its way back to the Continent. The fact that an Anglicism
is first documented in French earlier than in Spanish does not automatically mean that French is the immediate source of the Spanish
form. The English word could have entered both languages as separate
Anglicisms, or Spanish as independent borrowings from both English
and French. Páramo García (2003: 291) presents one example of tren
‘retinue’ taken from Josef Alonso Ortiz’s translation (1794) of Adam
2
The French designations nord, sud, est, ouest are all documented well before their Spanish
counterparts (DHLF).
3
DCECH suggests that, although of English origin, bote entered Spanish from OFr. or Gasc.
bot. The handful of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century examples of bote found in Spanish texts
written in the Low Countries are probably ephemeral adaptations of Dutch boot; for further
discussion, see Varela Merino (2009: 688–90).
4
This noun also appears a few decades earlier in a list of words in Gregorio Mayans y Siscar,
Abecé español (c.1723).
Anglicisms
215
Smith, Investigación de la naturaleza y causas de la riqueza de las
naciones.5 Does tren ‘train’ as a means of transportation, abundantly
documented in the nineteenth century, come directly from English
(where transportation by rail in mines and collieries was first practiced),
or from French, where train so used is an Anglicism from the first half
of the nineteenth century? The Anglicism rail was used in 1858 by Pedro
Antonio de Alarcón in his De Madrid a Santander (CORDE), but was
displaced by riel (a possible borrowing from French or Catalan, first
documented in 1498 with the meaning ‘narrow long bar of smelted
metal’). Is Sp. té ‘tea’, recorded once in the seventeenth century with
direct reference to the Chinese plant, and then abundantly documented
in the eighteenth century (CORDE), a borrowing directly from English
or from French, where it is documented in the seventeenth century
(DHLF: s.v. thé)? Páramo García (2003: 289–90) records as an Anglicism the nautical term tope ‘top of the mast’. This noun is abundantly
documented in the seventeenth century as a nautical term and is a
borrowing of OFr. top (Varela Merino 2009: 2003–10).6 The compilers
of the Royal Academy’s first dictionary specifically derived Sp. parque,
defined as ‘an enclosed wooded area near a palace or royal home’, from
English park.7 In his four-volume Diccionario castellano con las voces de
ciencias y artes . . . (concluded c.1765, but not published until 1786–1793),
Esteban Terreros y Pando commented on the Anglicism club as the
English name for what is called in Madrid “tertulia o junta de personas
de gusto” (quoted in Salvador 1985: 156).
11.3 Anglicisms 1800–1950
A handful of Anglicisms reflecting British realities and fashions
entered Spain in the first half of the nineteenth century. The exile
5
Tren is documented with some frequency in the seventeenth century with the meaning
‘retinue’ and as a military term tren de artillería and, so used, is a Gallicism (Varela Merino
2009: 2013–19).
6
The variant topo is found once in Columbus’s Diario. Is this form authentic or an error on
the part of Columbus, who was not a native speaker of Spanish? Tope ‘top, limit’ is genetically
distinct from the family of the verb topar ‘to bump, knock against’. The expression a tope ‘filled
to the top’ originally referred to a fully loaded ship.
7
In reality this noun (first attested as parco in the fifteenth-century Comedieta de Ponça,
Andanças e viajes de un hidalgo español) is a Gallicism; for abundant documentation and
analysis, see Varela Merino (2009: 1679–90).
216
A history of the Spanish lexicon
in Britain of liberal writers and thinkers during the repressive reign
(1813–33) of Fernando VII led to the incorporation of certain borrowings from English in their writings, e.g. dandy,8 bistec.9 The second
half of the century saw the definitive incorporation of such Anglicisms as cheque, club, rifle, revólver, túnel (all abundantly documented in CORDE for that period), and turista.10 It is at this time that the
Diccionario nacional o gran diccionario clásico de la lengua española
of Ramón Joaquín Domínguez (1849) and DRAE in its 1869 edition
first record anglicismo as a term referring to the use of English words
and phrasing and characterizing such practice as a “defect”.11 García
Gallarín (1998: 171–7) records Anglicisms in writings from the first
third of the twentieth century of three members of the Generation of
’98, Pío Baroja (1872–1956), Ramón del Valle-Inclán (1866–1936), and
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936). Here I offer selected examples
identified by García Gallarín from the works of Baroja: bluff, boby,
boyscout, browning, buflista/blufista, clubman, comradeship, coolie,
curman (a combination of cur and man), dancing, dock, fashionable,
fútbol, gentleman, groom (as an equestrian term), jai laif, jazz-band,
máster, mail-coach, music-hall, partner, pemmican, pick-pocket,
puzzling, runner, sandwich, skipper, slogan, smart (set), speech, sportsman, square, thug, toast, tory, trust, tubo ‘subway’, turf, whist. Almost
all the examples are unintegrated English words, most of which have
not remained in Spanish. García Gallarín treats as borrowings from
English, words that entered Spanish as Gallicisms. Fernández García
(1972) records numerous Anglicisms found in the weekly magazine
Blanco y Negro in those issues that appeared between 1891 and 1936.
Once again, the overwhelming majority of these items are unintegrated Anglicisms.
8
In one of the first documented uses of this noun in her novel Clemencia, Fernán Caballero
(the pseudonym employed by Cecilia Böhl de Faber [1796–1877]) specifically labeled dandy as
the English word that corresponded to Sp. perimetre.
9
This word is first documented in 1828 (Bretón de los Herreros); it appears several times in
Larra and other writers as beefsteak.
10
Geckler (2004: 191) lists turista as an example of a European Gallicism, whereas Pratt,
(1980), Lorenzo (1996), and Rodríguez González and Lillo Buade (1997) deem it an Anglicism in
both Spanish and French.
11
According to CORDE, Leandro Fernández de Moratín first used anglicismo with reference to the imitation of British ways and manners in his memoir Viaje a Italia, written in the
last decade of the eighteenth century.
Anglicisms
217
English began to have a greater lexical impact on New World
varieties of Spanish in the nineteenth century as a result of US activity
in Latin America and the political model it provided for the newly
independent republics.12 The great Liberator, Simón Bolívar, knew
English and scattered lexical and semantic Anglicisms appear in his
writings (Hildebrandt 1961: 148–73): bote, paquebote, papel (used with
the meaning ‘newspaper’), esplín, boxear, rifle, editor (used with the
English meaning ‘newspaper editor’), comodoro, congreso, receso,
corporación, federación, protectorado, retaliación, suramericano, norteamericano, americano (referring to the United States). Direct reference to British institutions led to his use of libra esterlina, chelín,
penique, guinea, and yarda. Anglicisms entered the Spanish of Cuba
at an early stage, while it was still a Spanish colony, to judge by the
following entries in the various editions of Pichardo (1836), the oldest
dictionary of a local variety of New World Spanish: ténder ‘coal car’;
bifteq (so spelled), bloque (used as a billiard term), brandi ‘aguardiente’, bul-dog, check/cheque, chequear, chequeo, jalfnajalf ‘somewhat drunk’. In his observations on the late-nineteenth-century
Spanish of Bogotá, Rufino José Cuervo viewed negatively the use by
journalists of reporter and interview, noted with some disapproval
budín and bistec, declared completely unnecessary tiquete in place of
billete de ferrocarril, and condemned guafe and saibor as deformations of English wharf and sideboard (Cuervo 1914: 676).
11.4 The influence of American English 1950–
As noted above, until c.1950 most English loanwords came from
British English and were culturally specific borrowings, reflecting
realities of British life, sports, politics, and society. There was a
drop-off in the entry of new Anglicisms during the Spanish Civil
War (1936–39) and in the decade immediately following this fratricidal conflict, a period during which Spain had little contact with the
English-speaking world and in which the government of the dictator
Francisco Franco adopted a policy against non-Castilian elements in
12
Haensch (1995: 244) claims that the use in early post-colonial American Spanish of
congreso ‘parliament’, senado, secretario ‘cabinet minister’, corte ‘high court’ and distrito federal
reflects US influence.
218
A history of the Spanish lexicon
the national language. The Franco government legislated against the
use of foreign words, especially in the realm of sports. Such efforts
met with mixed success. Rodríguez González (2002: 132) reports that
at that time match, back, and speaker gave way to encuentro, defensa,
and locutor. Only in the second half of the twentieth century, with the
post-war political and cultural hegemony of the United States and the
end of the isolation of the Franco regime, did American English begin
to have a significant impact on European Spanish. Anglicisms
entered Spanish through oral and written channels. Already in 1955
(as reprinted in Lorenzo 1996: 81–107) Emilio Lorenzo spoke of the
flood of Anglicisms in European Spanish, as did Stone (1957).
The sociocultural background for the introduction of Anglicisms
in Spanish is very different from that of the earlier lexical strata of the
Spanish lexicon. The presence of American military bases, increased
tourism from Britain and the United States to Spain starting in the
1960s, the lyrics of British and American popular songs and rock and
roll, greater access to English-language press and television, now
easily available through cable and satellite services, and the recent
wider diffusion in urban Spain of undubbed English-language films13
contributed to the influx of Anglicisms into both spoken and written
Spanish. These routes of transmission involve the spoken language,
but without direct contact between speakers of Spanish and English.
This language has now displaced French as the favored foreign
language taught in high schools and universities. Spanish journalistic
prose also contributed to lexical (and syntactic) Anglicisms, especially through translations, often hastily and carelessly done, of news
stories distributed in English by the major wire services such as The
Associated Press, United Press International, and Reuters. Many of
the recent Anglicisms that came through written sources were absorbed visually rather than orally, which may account for their
slowness to adapt to the norms of Spanish phonotactics and morphology. As a result of the much higher levels of literacy in twentiethcentury Spain, such Anglicisms had a better chance of spreading
through the general population to the spoken language. Spanish,
13
A ministerial decree issued in April 1941 mandated the dubbing of all foreign films into
Spanish as a protection against the entry of foreign words (Bravo 2006: 233).
Anglicisms
219
like many other languages, has suffered the lexical effects of English
as the international tongue of science, technology, medicine, business, management, and the Internet. Anglicisms seem to have had
greatest impact on the speech of the young urban and educated
Spaniards.
11.5 Reactions to Anglicisms
Just as in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with respect to
Gallicisms (cf. Chapter 6), some intellectuals and writers in the
Spanish-speaking world have protested, in a puristic vein, the growing swell of Anglicisms, especially in those cases where an adequate
signifier already existed in Spanish or in which speakers could have
adapted raw material present in the language to new uses. In his
posthumous 1922 book Limpia y fija (echoing the motto of the Royal
Spanish Academy), the journalist Mariano de Cavia (1855–1920)
advocated replacing the Anglicism fútbol with balompié (Lebsanft
1997: 28), a form that has failed to find favor, to judge by the materials
available in the CORDE database.14 Over the years other proposed
substitutes for fútbol have included bolopié, bolapié, and piebalón.
Not all Spanish substitutes for Anglicisms have met with approval.
Although azafata is still the word used in Spain for what is today
called in English ‘flight attendant’ (a gender-neutral designation), its
revival in 193515 as a replacement for the specifically feminine Anglicism stewardess was roundly criticized by the philosopher Salvador
de Madariaga and the novelist Francisco Ayala. Various writers have
used such strongly negative labels as invasión or plaga to describe the
influx of Anglicisms.16 Many have been openly critical of the admission of many such items in the latest editions of the Royal Spanish
Academy’s Diccionario de la lengua española, an action that appears
The spelling fútbol became current in 1917. The English form is found in Spanish texts
from the last decade of the nineteenth century (Fernández García 1972: 117–19).
15
The revival of azafata is due to César Gómez Lucío, Director General of the airline of the
Spanish Republic and future director of its successor, Iberia. The adoption of azafata by Iberia
in the 1940s assured its success in peninsular Spanish. One other suggestion made at the time
was provisora. For details, see Álvarez de Miranda (2008: 28).
16
As early as 1954, Mallo (1954: 135) described Anglicisms as a “plague which seriously
threatens the authenticity of our language” (my translation; original: “Una plaga que amenaza
gravemente a la autenticidad de nuestro idioma”).
14
220
A history of the Spanish lexicon
to confer what is perceived as official sanction for their use (especially
in the written language). González Monllor and Troya Déniz (1997:
151–4) list the following lexical and semantic Anglicisms accepted for
the first time in the 1992 edition of the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española:17 aerobic, anfetamina, auditar, autostop, aviónica,
bádminton, baffle, basquetbol, behaviorismo, beicon, best-seller, birome, blister, blues, boxer, brandy, bungaló, buster, cadi, campus,
cazatalentos (a calque), cello, charter, chequear, chinchín, chip, clip,
closet, clown, comic, concreto, contracultura, contrainteligencia, córner, cross, debutante, delfinario, derbi, descharchar, discapacitado,
dopar, dravidiano, drogadicción, ecualizar, escultismo, eslogan, esnifar, esnob, extraditar, flas, fólder, gangster, glycol, grogui, hamburguesa, interviú, krill, legui, licopeno, linier18, magacín,
magnetostricción, marine, marketing, ocupacional, parsec (a unit of
measurement employed in astronomy), penalti, piolet,19 pipermín,
polyester, pop, póster, pulsar, puzzle, quark, quásar, récord, relax,
sandwich, sida, silicona, suspense, tamil, teletexto, test, trailer, transfocador, trial, váter. This list includes a large number of items that
appear in English garb and have retained their English word stress (as
indicated by the use in Spanish of written accent marks). The former
Director of the Royal Spanish Academy, Victor García de la Concha,
has described Anglicisms as an “injuria al español” (‘an offense to the
Spanish language’, quoted in Álvarez 2001: 49).
11.6 Semantic Anglicisms and loan-translations.
Equally pernicious for many Spaniards concerned with the quality of
their language are semantic Anglicisms, the acquisition by Spanish
words, regardless of their historical native or non-native origin, of
meanings that come directly from the word’s English cognates or
translation equivalents. Examples include ignorar for hacer caso
17
Their list also includes words recorded in the 1984 edition of the Diccionario de la Real
Academia Española, but not specifically labeled as Anglicisms until the 1992 edition.
18
The website of the Royal Spanish Academy (www.rae.es) indicates in the online edition of
DRAE that the forthcoming 23rd edition will list Catalan as the immediate source of linier,
where it is an adaptation of British English linesman.
19
Likewise, the website of the Royal Spanish Academy indicates that the forthcoming 23rd
edition of its Dictionary classes this word as a borrowing of Fr. piolet ‘ice-axe’.
Anglicisms
221
omiso de, remover for quitar, anticipar for prever, audiencia for
auditorio or público, editar for redactar, opcional for optativo, regulación for reglamento, versatile for adaptable. According to Álvarez
(2001: 51) the Academy has admitted numerous semantic Anglicisms
in DRAE without indicating the origin of these meanings, e.g. década
‘any period of ten years’ (cf. decenio), emergencia ‘emergency’ (cf.
urgencia), nominar ‘to nominate’ (cf. nombrar). The linguist is in no
position to predict whether these new meanings will over time
become an integral part of the word’s semantic load, with the foreign
source no longer being recognizable to future generations of speakers.
Many Anglicisms have entered the (written) language, despite the
presence in Spanish of an adequate signifier for the product or
concept at issue. Several essayists concerned with language matters
have drawn attention to pertinent examples. Grijelmo (1998: 133)
offers the following examples: baby sitter/canguro/niñera; (e)spray/
pulverizador; trailer/avance; match/partido; show/espectáculo; cassette/cinta/grabadora; stocks/reserva; disc jockey/pinchadiscos; interview (interviu)/entrevista; best seller/éxito; overbooking/sobreventa;
script/guión; marketing/mercadotecnia and mercadeo (the latter
being preferred in Latin America); estresado/agobiado. Some additional examples: airbag/bolsa de aire bolsa de seguridad colchón
de aire; alien/extraterrestre alienígena; antitrust/antimonopolio;
background/experiencia historial trasfondo; basquetbol/baloncesto (with the latter dominating in Spain, where it is supported by
the Royal Spanish Academy of the Language; the Anglicism is
favored in New World varieties of Spanish); bear market/mercado
bajista. Over the years, readers of El País, one of Spain’s leading
national dailies of the post-Franco period, have written letters to the
editor, criticizing the excessive use of Anglicisms in its articles and
reports (for examples, see Lebsanft 1990). The paper’s style guide
counsels against the use of foreign words when a Spanish equivalent
is available (although historically that word may be a borrowing in
the distant or even recent past). An exception is made for Anglicisms
related to the realms of technology, information sciences, sports, and
economics, the last a field dominated by the English-speaking world.
The Manual de español urgente issued by the Spanish press agency
222
A history of the Spanish lexicon
EFE, records scores of Anglicisms which should be avoided in favor
of existing Spanish equivalents (187–307), e.g. account manager/director de cuentas, accrued interest/interés acumulado, adherencia/adhesión, alta prioridad/prioridad máxima, aterrizaje de emergencia/
aterrizaje forzoso, bank rate/tipo de descuento, behaviorismo/conductismo. In its recent Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (2005), the
Academy has specifically condemned the use of Anglicisms under
such circumstances. Fernando Lázaro Carreter, a former Director of
the Royal Spanish Academy of the Language, is quoted in the October 26, 2003 issue of El País as stating that the battle against Anglicisms is essentially a lost cause.
In addition to loan translations based on individual words, the
overlapping of cultural models in Western Europe led to the formation in modern Spanish of numerous phrasal calques based on direct
translation of English models. Most such neologisms are compounds
involving two nouns in varying syntactico-semantic relations, a
combination historically more typical of Germanic rather than
Romance languages. Many seem to be creations of journalistic language. Selected examples include acuerdo sorpresa ‘surprise agreement’, año luz ‘light year’, buque factoría ‘factory ship’, canción
protesta ‘protest song’, ciudad dormitorio ‘bedroom city’, coche
bomba ‘car bomb’, fecha límite ‘expiry date’, hombre rana ‘frogman’,
hora punta, ‘peak hour’, madre patria ‘mother country’, misión
rescate ‘rescue mission’, momento clave ‘key moment’, perro guardián
‘watchdog’, prueba sorpresa ‘surprise test, pop quiz’, reunión cumbre
‘summit meeting’, sector agricultura ‘agricultural sector’. Verb +
noun nominal compounds have a long history in Romance; however,
many such formations coined in the modern language are calques of
English models, e.g. calientaplatos ‘plate warmer’, cortacésped ‘lawn
mower’, exprimelimones ‘lemon squeezer’, guardacostas ‘coast guard’,
lanzacohetes ‘rocket launcher’, lanzallamas ‘flamethrower’, limpiaparabrisas ‘windshield (Brit. windscreen) wiper’, portaaviones ‘aircraft carrier’, rascacielos ‘skyscraper’ (unless it is a calque based on Fr.
gratte-ciel), tocadiscos ‘record player’ (Pratt 1980: 207). Spanish has
also created on English models such hybrid compounds as top diez
‘top ten’, manager de carretera ‘road manager’, rock duro ‘hard rock’,
tenis de mesa ‘table tennis’.
Anglicisms
223
English may have played a role in the revival of a handful of lexical
items documented only sporadically in earlier stages of Spanish.
Although documented as early as the seventeenth century in works
by López Pinciano and Quevedo, the Latinism obsoleto only began to
show signs of vitality in the first half of the twentieth century,
possibly under the influence of English obsolete. The model provided
by the English sport(s) led to the revival in the early twentieth century
of the Old Spanish noun deporte20 (var. depuerto) with its modern
meaning; as an unintegrated Anglicism sport today refers to a casual
style of clothing; sport is first documented in the mid nineteenth
century with the meaning ‘distinguished’ in the phrase “algunos
caballeros sport (see Álvarez de Miranda 2008: 6–8, 28–31, and the
references therein).
11.7 Integration and derivational productivity
Anglicisms have had comparatively little time to become integrated
to Spanish phonological, morphological, and orthographic norms.
Consequently, most of the hundreds of Anglicisms recorded in such
compilations as Pratt (1980), Lorenzo (1996), Rodríguez González
and Lillo Buades (1997) appear in English garb, with word final
consonants (especially stops, e.g. club, clip) and plurals in consonant
+ s (clubs, clips) completely alien to modern Spanish phonotactics.
Other Anglicisms exist in varying forms, some showing a greater
degree of adaptation to the recipient language: club/clube, film/filme,
repórter/reporter/reportero, snob/esnob, stress/estrés, truck/troc/troque. Some Anglicisms have become formally integrated into the
language and have produced native derivatives: líder ‘political leader’
(first attested in 1900 in the writings of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez) cast off
liderar, liderazgo; mitin ‘political rally’ has taken the plural mítines
and has produced mitinero. The noun turista ‘tourist’ (used by Juan
Valera in the middle of the nineteenth century) adapted easily to
Spanish norms, given the presence in the language of numerous
20
Oudin’s Spanish–French dictionary (1607) defines deporte as ‘esbat, recreation’; Percivale’s
English–Spanish compilation treats deporte as an adjective, glossed ‘contentfull [sic], enjoying,
joyful’. Siesso’s monolingual dictionary (1723) declares deporte ‘recreación’ an Italianism (see
NTLE: s.v. deporte).
224
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Latinisms, Hellenisms, and Gallicisms in -ista. Rodríguez González
and Lillo Buades (1997) list the following contemporary derivatives in
-ista formed on bases borrowed from English: (auto)stopista, bestsellerista (alongside bestselleriano), blu(e)sista ‘blues singer or performer’, cartoonista, clubista, junglista ‘performer or fan of “jungle
music”’, rockista (alongside more frequent roquero), sportinguista,
stopista, tradeunionista, warrantista, windsurfista; see also Muñoz
Armijo (2010). The model provided by English of the use of the
pseudo-suffix -gate to indicate some sort of scandal has spread into
Spanish, leading to the coining of such jocular formations as bocadillogate, braguetagate, campañagate, codornizgate, espíagate, Zapaterogate (Méndez Santos 2011).
Various sports terms21 have become well integrated: boxear is the
source of boxeo, boxeador (early twentieth century); fútbol ‘(British or
US) football’ (first documented in the 1920s) has produced futbolero,
futbolista, futbolín, futbolístico, futbol(o)mania. English bat (as used
in baseball and cricket) was adapted as bate, the source of batazo,
batear, bateo, bateador. The sport names béisbol/beisbol and básquetbol/basquetbol show varying stress patterns; the former pair spun off
beisbolero, beisbolista, beisbolístico. The soccer term gol ‘goal’ (cf.
native tanto) has acquired a native plural goles and gave rise to golazo,
goleada, golear, goleador. British soccer has also provided chut, chutar22 (cf. reflexive chutarse a drug term meaning ‘to shoot up’;
deverbal chute is used in the realms of both sports and drugs), córner,
linier, penalty, hat trick, and the calque saque de esquina; for additional Anglicisms in Spanish football vocabulary, see Nomdedeu
(2009). Spanish also contains examples of pseudo-Anglicisms,
words actually borrowed from French, but consisting of English
words that are not used in the donor language the way that they
are in French and Spanish: e.g. autostop ‘hitchhiking’, footing ‘jogging’, smoking/esmoquin ‘tuxedo’ (based on the now archaic smoking
jacket).
21
Pfändler (1954: 114) shows that Anglicisms far outnumber Gallicisms in Spanish sports
terminology of the 1940s.
22
Pfändler (1954: 32) records chutazo, not found in Rodríguez González and Lillo Buades
(1997), who also note that chut is giving way to tiro, disparo. Is the same true for chutar vis-à-vis
tirar and disparar?
Anglicisms
225
11.8 Gay sex, drugs, and the Internet
Owing to the model provided by lifestyles and technological innovations associated with the United States, Anglicisms have come to play
a major role in the Spanish lexicon dealing with the gay culture, the
drug culture, and the Internet. The key term gay entered Spanish in
the 1970s as a positive (or at least neutral) counterpart to negatively
tinged maricón and marica. In contemporary Spanish gay refers to
both men and women (as in English), although it may have originally
designated only gay males. This neologism has become so rooted that
it has spun off a host of derivatives (Rodríguez González 2008: 252–3):
gaidad gayedad, gayismo, gayicidad, gayesa, gayez, gay(h)etero,
heterogay, criptogay, gayby ‘child adopted by a gay couple’, and
taligay ‘radical gay’ (based on taliban + gay).23 Most of the terms
used to refer to homosexual practices and sexual acts are unintegrated Anglicisms. Only a handful of terms have been adapted to
some degree to Spanish orthographical, phonological, and morphological norms, e.g. quin, dragcuin, tinajera ‘homosexual who likes
young boys’ < E. teenager, léder ‘leather (fetish)’, lederón/lederona,
lederina, and the pejorative ledronga. Others appear as loan translations: salir del armario ‘to come out of the closet’, nominal salida del
armario (used alongside revelación and the unintegrated el coming
out); note also armario ‘closet gay’, its feminine counterpart armaria,
and the newly coined derivatives armariazo, armarismo, armariado,
armariazarse, armarizante, and armarización (Rodríguez González
2008: 261).24 To judge by the answers given in response to my
questions by various native speakers of Spanish, many of these
terms are not widely known, much less used, outside the gay
community.
23
Gay was admitted into the 2001 edition of the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española.
The Diccionario panhispánico de dudas recommends the plural gais (as opposed to gays) and
discourages its use as an invariable adjective as in discotecas gay. Sp. homosexual, in all
likelihood an Anglicism, is first documented in the 1930s in the writings of Dr. Gregorio
Marañón.
24
Rodríguez González (2008a: 271–2) offers a complete list of relevant terms classified by
categories of Anglicisms based on his Diccionario gay-lésbico (Rodríguez González 2008b). The
two largest categories are unintegrated Anglicisms and calques.
226
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Anglicisms have also invaded the language of the Spanish underground drug culture, in the form of outright borrowings, semantic
loans, and calques: join, joint/yoin (alongside porro, canuto), chutarse, esnifar, esnifada, esnifador, esnife, esnifota, esnó, espit, espitar,
espitoso, flash ‘intense sensation of well-being and euphoria produced
by drugs’, flipar ‘to flip out’, flanked by flipante, flipero, flipeta, and
flipe,25 rifer, trip/tripi, tripante, tripar, triposo, caballo ‘heroin’ (based
on the similar use of E. horse; cf. also Fr. cheval, so used), blanca,
blanca dama, nieve, polvo, talco (all designating ‘cocaine’, modeled on
E. white, white lady, snow, powder, and talcum), subir, ponerse alto ‘to
get high’, tener el mono ‘to have a monkey on one’s back’. Does the
family of alucinar, alucinante, alucine, as used in the drug culture, go
back to E. hallucinate or Fr. halluciner?
In like fashion, Anglicisms abound in current Spanish terminology
referring to the Internet. The neologisms again take the form of
outright borrowings that, for the most part, have retained their
English garb or appear as calques/loan translations. In the former
category one finds such items as access point, bloguero/bloguera,
browser, chat/chatear, cookie, e-mail/emilio, firewall, hacker, homepage, internet, mail, server, site, webmaster, website (Jansen 2005: 301).
Examples of loan translations in this semantic field include archivo
adjunto ‘attached file, attachment’, administrador ‘administrator’,
arrastrar ‘to drag’, autopista de la información ‘information highway’, charla ‘chat’, correo ‘email’, correo basura ‘junk email’, cortafuegos ‘firewall’, dominio ‘domain’, explorador, foro, galleta ‘internet
cookie’ (alongside cuqui, an integrated Anglicism, and espía (Jansen
2005: 405),26 grupo ‘email group’, hojeador ‘browser’, lista ‘list
(serve)’, navegador ‘navigator, browser’, página web ‘webpage’, pasarela ‘gateway’, proveedor ‘provider’, ratón ‘mouse’, servidor ‘server’,
sitio ‘site’, ventana ‘window’ (Jansen 2005: 305–6).
25
The family of flipar has acquired positive non-drug-related overtones in colloquial
speech, e.g. este trabajo me flipa ‘I groove on this job’ (Rodríguez González 1994: 151). Similar
semantic developments can be seen in the families of alucinar and flashear, which have
acquired positive meanings not found in their English models.
26
Winter-Froemel (2008: 21, 23) offers the example of cuqui, a form not found in Rodríguez
González and Lillo Buades (1997) and Jansen (2005).
Anglicisms
227
Quilis’s study (1984) of Anglicisms in the educated speech of
Madrid found 291 such items used in the responses to the lexical
questionnaire employed in the Estudio coordinado de la norma
lingüística culta de las principales ciudades de Iberoamérica y de la
Península Ibérica. In many cases speakers also used another term for
the same concept, which gives the reader a chance to observe the
rivalry between Anglicisms (be they lexical, semantic, or loan calques) and their rivals. The following items were used by all informants: bar (in reference to the counter), béisbol, boxeador, boxear,
boxeo, canal de televisión, champú, cheque (vs talón), dólar, esmoquin, esquijama, fútbol (vs balompié), gasoline, gol (vs tanto and
punto), linotipista, penalty, pijama, set (vs juegos), tenis, tocadiscos
(vs gramófono, gramola, and pick-up, today rarely used), trolebús,
túnel, vagón (vs coche), wisky.
The following were used by more than half of the informants:
anorak27 (vs chubasquero, cagul), aparcar (vs parar), bar (vs taberna,
bodega), barman (vs camarero, coctelero, chaval, tabernero, vinatero),
bate (vs palo), batear, bikini, bistec, block ‘writing pad’, cafetería,
chocar, choque, chutar, ciclón, claxon (vs bocina), clip (both for hair
and for papers), club, cóctel, convención, crawl /krol/, devaluación,
editor (of a newspaper), enrolar, estación de servicio, inflación (economic term), jeep, jockey, knockout, líder, limpiaparabrisas, pantis,
ping-pong, reportero, rimel, ring, ron, slip, suéter, supermercado, televisión, televisor, transistor. For almost all these examples, the informants indicated knowledge of and active use of alternative terms.
The percentage of Anglicisms used by the Madrid informants is
lower than the comparative figures based on the same questionnaire
in such Latin American capitals as Mexico City, Caracas, Santiago de
Chile, Havana, and San Juan (Puerto Rico). Not all Anglicisms found
in Peninsular Spanish turn up in New World Spanish, and vice-versa,
although with global communication and the Internet, that reality
may be changing.
The dictionary compiled by Rodríguez González and Lillo Buades
(1997) constitutes the most complete and up-to-date repertory of
27
Curell Aguilà (2009: s.v. anorak) and the DRAE consider French to be the immediate
source of this noun in Spanish.
228
A history of the Spanish lexicon
Anglicisms.28 The various editions of the Panamanian Ricardo Alfaro’s Diccionario de anglicismos (1950, 1964, 1970) are outdated and
fail to distinguish between Anglicisms found in European and New
World Spanish. The work takes a puristic stand toward the use of
Anglicisms. Although not designed as dictionaries, the word indices
in Pratt (1980: 247–69), Lorenzo (1996: 667–708), and Rodríguez
Segura (1999: 231–52) will provide the reader with numerous examples of Anglicisms.
11.9 Summary
Chronologically, Anglicisms represent the most recent lexical stratum in the history of Spanish. Although scattered instances turn up
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such items enter the
language in large numbers only in the second half of the twentieth
century. In the contemporary language, English constitutes the most
frequent source of neologisms in European and American Spanish.
Most Anglicisms entered the language so recently that many have not
had sufficient time to adapt to the phonological and orthographic
norms of the recipient language, and thus remain as unintegrated
borrowings. Perhaps more so than borrowings from other languages,
Anglicisms take the form of semantic loans or calques of the relevant
English lexical models.
The extralinguistic realities surrounding the entry and incorporation of English loanwords are distinct from the other lexical strata
studied in this book. Most Anglicisms first entered via written
sources. On the level of the spoken language, they have entered
Spanish not only through direct contact between speakers of the
two languages, but also through such sources as movies and the lyrics
of popular American music. The Internet has also played a major role
in the introduction and diffusion of Anglicisms. The huge influx of
Anglicisms into modern varieties of Spanish has raised much anxiety
among speakers and writers concerned with what they perceive as a
serious threat to the integrity of the language. Especially pernicious in
28
Rodríguez González (2003) discusses several important theoretical and methodological
issues underlying the preparation of a dictionary of Anglicisms in Spanish.
Anglicisms
229
the view of many are those Anglicisms, be they actual borrowings of
English words or semantic loans, which coexist alongside and
threaten to displace signifiers already present in the language for
the concepts at issue.
Several questions posed by the introduction and incorporation of
Anglicisms in Spanish must await the results of future research. Our
current knowledge of the social distribution of Anglicisms does not
enable the analyst to determine the extent to which certain such
elements are employed only in certain sectors of society or in the
specialized jargon of specific professions. Equally problematic is the
identification of English loanwords that may today be restricted
either to Spain or the New World. Given the realities of modern
global communications, the diffusion and popularity in Spain of
Latin American literature and television soap operas, and increased
levels of immigration to Spain from that region, Anglicisms that
originally entered only New World varieties of Spanish may have
made their way into the language of Spain. Conceivably the intimate
and daily contact between the socially and economically dominant
English and Spanish may have led to the presence in United States
Spanish (as well as in Puerto Rican and border varieties of Spanish
spoken in northern Mexico) of English loans and calques not found
elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world (e.g. lonche ‘lunch’, troque
‘truck’).
12
Some final thoughts
This book has sought to discuss and describe in some detail one
important facet of the history of the Spanish lexicon, namely the
introduction and incorporation of loanwords from the various languages that the Latin/Spanish continuum has come into contact with
as it has evolved over the course of more than two millennia. While
not attempting in the least to minimize the importance of such
loanwords as valuable evidence for the historical and social study of
cultures in contact, I have chosen to study the various relevant
phenomena as examples of contact-induced language change. The
lexical data are viewed throughout this work as linguistic signs that
form part of a system rather than as cultural artifacts or symbols.
Nevertheless, in numerous instances, extralinguistic circumstances
and realities may have initiated and propelled a chain of linguistic
events, namely the borrowing process itself, as well as the incorporation, diffusion, and integration of the loanword into the vocabulary of
Spanish.
Throughout its history, the Latin/Spanish continuum has clearly
shown itself to be receptive to the introduction and incorporation of
loanwords. The first 1500 years of language contact and subsequent
lexical borrowing took place in the Iberian Peninsula and resulted
from the movements of various peoples and their diverse languages
into that region. Such contact does not imply widespread bilingualism on the part of the recipient speech community. The bulk of
loanwords from the pre-Roman languages present in the Iberian
Peninsula when the Romans arrived in 218 BC, and those from
Gothic, as well as the earliest Arabisms and Gallicisms, resulted
exclusively from contact at the level of the spoken language. It is
Some final thoughts
231
conceivable that a significant number of the pre-Roman and Gothic
words found in the recorded history of Spanish/Hispano-Romance
are lexical retentions that speakers of these languages incorporated
into the Latin that they acquired and accepted upon renouncing the
use of their mother tongues. As the local natives constituted a
majority of Latin speakers in early Roman Hispania, these items
may have survived despite the presence of a signifier in the Latin
imported into the Iberian Peninsula from Rome. The same sequence
of events may have happened several centuries later as speakers of
Gothic abandoned their Germanic speech in favor of Latin, a language that they recognized as the vehicle of a superior culture and of
their newly acquired Catholic faith. These items entered the recipient
language as a result of initiatives taken by speakers of the moribund
source languages and subsequently diffused throughout the speech
community. However valid this distinction may be in theory, the
chronological gap between the beginning of the borrowing process
and the first documentation of the loanword in Spanish renders it
impossible to determine with any degree of certainty the route
followed by a given pre-Roman or Gothic loanword in Spanish. If a
large portion of Spanish words of pre-Roman or Germanic origin are
in reality lexical retentions rather than borrowings initiated by the
Latin/early Hispano-Romance speech communities, one might argue
that the history of extensive recipient language-initiated borrowings
begins only in the eighth century with the first contacts with Arabic.
Only with the growth and expansion in the thirteenth century of
Hispano-Romance as a written language for administrative, legal,
scholarly, and literary use did writers begin to incorporate words
taken from texts set down in Latin, Gallo-Romance, and Arabic. Over
time these loanwords worked their way (often slowly) down into the
spoken language. Leaving aside contact with neighboring GalicianPortuguese to the west and Catalan to the east, the late medieval and
early modern spoken contact situations with speakers of Italian,
Flemish, and the indigenous languages of the New World took
place outside the Iberian Peninsula. In these cases it was speakers
of Spanish, the recipient language, who initiated the borrowing
process at the levels of both the spoken and the written language.
232
A history of the Spanish lexicon
The introduction of Latinisms and Anglicisms represent special
situations. Only a small literate fraction of the speech community
had access to the texts that are the source of most Latinisms. In
addition, this tiny segment of speakers was borrowing words from an
earlier historical stage of the vernacular that they now spoke and
wrote (although most did not clearly perceive the nature of the
relationship between these two linguistic codes). Given the paucity
of intense and prolonged contact between speakers of English and
Spanish, it is safe to state that most Anglicisms entered Spanish
through written sources. The unintegrated orthographical shape of
many Anglicisms observable in contemporary written Spanish indicates that these elements were absorbed visually rather than aurally.
Today, orally transmitted Anglicisms do not require face-to-face
contact between speakers of English and Spanish. Speakers of Spanish around the world are exposed to English through such media as
television, radio, films, and the Internet.
Lexical borrowing appears to be inevitable in cases of any degree of
prolonged contact between two languages. Almost all the world’s
languages contain words that do not form part of their inherited
lexical patrimony. Although some languages may have evolved in
isolation for extended periods in the past, or their speakers made a
deliberate effort not to admit loanwords, such a situation seems next
to impossible in the context of contemporary globalized sociopolitical realities. All the Romance languages developed in their original
homelands, provinces of the Roman Empire, in contact at the levels
of the spoken and written languages with various languages, including the written literary variety of their common ancestor, Latin. As a
result of contact at the level of the written language with major
linguistic vehicles of culture, there are today very few semantic fields
in which loanwords have not penetrated.
Yet one might make the case that, at least in theory, it is not
necessary for languages to borrow vocabulary. The overwhelming
majority of loanwords seem to result from the need to have a signifier
to express a new material reality or product unknown to speakers of
the recipient language, or novel abstract concepts and qualities for
which speakers up to that point had no need of having some form of
Some final thoughts
233
verbal expression. The speech community in search of designations
to fill perceived gaps in the lexicon could carry out this task by adding
to or altering the semantic load of words already present in the
lexicon or by creating neologisms internally using the language’s
derivational resources, or by coining periphrases. As discussed in
Chapter 10, Spaniards first named animals, plants, foods, etc.,
encountered in the New World with Spanish words whose referent
in some way resembled the new objects, e.g. the use of pavo ‘peacock’
to designate the turkey. This process runs the risk of creating situations of burdensome polysemy that may lead to ambiguities and
outright misunderstandings, and can lead to changes in the structure
of the lexicon. In Spain, pavo caught on as the name of the turkey,
thus forcing speakers to choose another label, in this case pavo real,
for the peacock.
Any qualitative or quantitative evaluation of the impact of borrowings on the evolution of the Spanish lexicon must rest on a firm base
of etymologies. The immediate origin in Spanish of many of the
words discussed in this book continues to be a subject of debate
and disagreement among specialists. The divergent opinions fall into
two broad categories. First, is the item in question a borrowing or
does it form part of the inherited Latin lexical patrimony of Spanish/
Hispano-Romance? Second, even if specialists agree that the word
under study is a borrowing, they may offer divergent views as to its
source language or the precise underlying base in that language.
General trends concerning the history of loanwords in Spanish may
help in evaluating the probability of competing etymological hypotheses. The paucity of clear cases in Spanish of primary verbs of preRoman, Germanic, and Arabic origin may be a factor in weighing the
likelihood of such a proposed origin for etymologically controversial
verbs (e.g. buscar, matar). The same assessment may hold for hypotheses that propose a pre-Roman or Germanic background for
some Spanish adjectives. On the other hand, the presence in Medieval Spanish of several adjectives borrowed from Arabic that express
negative states and qualities may support the proposed Arabic origin
of Sp. loco, Ptg. louco.
234
A history of the Spanish lexicon
As seems to be universal in lexical borrowings, the overwhelming
majority of loanwords in Spanish are nouns, followed at a considerable distance by verbs (or, perhaps better, verbal bases) and adjectives. The borrowing of primary verbs (i.e. verbs that are not derived
from an underlying nominal or adjectival base) is very infrequent in
the early history of the Spanish lexicon, and increases only at the time
of contact with varieties of Gallo- and Italo-Romance. The genetic
(and typological) affinity of Hispano-Romance with its sister languages may have facilitated the introduction and incorporation of
such loans. Verbs and adjectives that entered Spanish did not bring
with them the relevant inflectional affixes from the donor language.
Rather, they took on the inflectional suffixes denoting tense, aspect,
mood, person, number, and grammatical gender of Spanish. In
essence, Spanish has borrowed the stems of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, bereft of the associated inflectional morphology. Intrinsically,
form class may have nothing to do with borrowing. As actions and
states expressed through verbs and adjectives are, to a large extent,
universal, languages already have signifiers, and there is no perceived
need by speakers to borrow these elements to fill lexical gaps created
by the introduction of novel actions, states, and qualities. The entry
into Spanish of borrowed function words, such as prepositions,
pronouns, and adverbials, is very rare, the notable exception being
the preposition hasta ‘until, as far as, up to’, of Arabic origin; cf. also
Ptg. até. One might include here the negator jamás ‘never’, a possible
Gallicism, and the indefinite pronoun alguien, for which some scholars advocate a Portuguese origin.
Another theme that runs throughout this book is the rivalry
between a loanword and referentially similar lexical items already
present in Hispano-Romance. The various chapters of this book have
drawn attention to instances of borrowings of nouns, verbs, and
adjectives despite the presence in Spanish of signifiers for
the realities, concepts, actions, states, and qualities at issue. In
many instances, non-linguistic factors such as the perceived prestige
(be it social, cultural, political, economic, military, etc.) of the relevant source language may have paved the way for the triumph of the
loanword over its pre-existing rival(s). This scenario is certainly true
Some final thoughts
235
in later periods of the history of the Spanish lexicon, as speakers and
writers gradually develop a linguistic consciousness with regard both
to their own language and to those languages with which they are in
contact. The prestige associated with the source language and its
culture has played a major role in the introduction and incorporation
of numerous Latinisms, early modern and modern Gallicisms, and
Anglicisms.
Most of the loanwords examined for this study have survived in
modern Spanish (although many are not high frequency items, or are
found only in regional varieties of the language, such as modern
Basque loanwords in northern Spain or indigenous lexical items in
New World Spanish, or in the specialized language of certain professions or fields of knowledge). The survival rate seems to be very high
for words borrowed in the modern language. A number of Gallicisms
and Arabisms attested in the medieval language have fallen into
disuse. In several instances one may ask whether the item at issue
ever enjoyed currency in the spoken language or whether it appeared
only in the written language in contexts in which the relevant readers
would have been able to understand it (although the item may not
have formed part of their active vocabulary). If the external reality for
which a loanword served as signifier became obsolete, that lexical
item could have disappeared from active use in the spoken and
written language. The chapter on Arabisms in this book has drawn
attention to cases where changes in the sociopolitical reality of life in
the newly unified Spain led to the replacement of an Arabic term with
a Romance term (often a Latinism or a Gallicism), especially in the
realm of professions and trades. In such instances the loss of the
Arabism may result from deliberate acts of lexical selection by members of the speech community.
At the outset, a loanword was known to and used by only a small
group of speakers or writers. The fragmentary nature of the historical
record makes it extremely difficult to trace with accuracy or precision
the path(s) followed by a loanword that entered Spanish through
contact at the level of oral speech as it spread from the original
geographic and social locus (or loci) of borrowing and integrated
itself (gradually or rapidly) in the Hispano-Romance speech
236
A history of the Spanish lexicon
community, possibly many centuries before its initial appearance in
the extant written record. In some instances it may be easier to
identify the circumstances and the moment of a borrowing taken
from written sources and to follow its spread through written Spanish. Often writers seeking to elaborate the lexical resources of the
recipient language independently borrow the same lexical item from
written texts in the donor language. Less amenable to observation are
the stages in its passage from the written into the spoken language. It
may be reasonable to assume that the presence of a word in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century monolingual and bilingual dictionaries involving Spanish indicates its integration into the spoken and
written early modern language. However, until scholars gain a greater
understanding of the criteria employed in the selection of dictionary
entries at that time, the analyst will have to exercise caution in
drawing negative conclusions about a borrowing’s lack of integration
or vitality in Spanish based on its absence from such dictionaries.
The long-term survival of a borrowing requires its complete integration into the phonological and morphological structures of the
recipient language. The non-native status of the word is no longer
recognizable to speakers. In the cases of borrowings that entered
Hispano-Romance through contact at the level of the spoken language, the process of integration must have been fairly rapid. Today
only recent borrowings, such as some Anglicisms and Gallicisms,
recognizable in the spoken language through their phonological
shape and in written sources through their non-Spanish orthographic representation or the use of such markers as italics, underlining, or surrounding quotation marks, can be classed as
unintegrated loanwords. Only time will tell if the presence in Spanish
of such items will be ephemeral, or if they will fully adapt to the
formal realities of the recipient language. Not all loanwords recorded
at earlier stages of Spanish have survived. Once a borrowing is fully
integrated into the recipient language, it is subject to all the formal
and semantic changes and other linguistic vicissitudes, including
lexical loss, that affect the native inherited vocabulary. The ability
of a loanword to produce derivatives in Spanish is another strong
indication of its integration.
Some final thoughts
237
The Swiss Romanist Jules Gilliéron (d. 1926) formulated his oftquoted dictum “each word has its own history” with regard to the
Neogrammarian’s rigid conception of the regularity of sound change.
It is equally applicable to the study of the history of the individual
lexical items that comprise the vocabulary of Spanish. Contemporary
students of historical lexicology seek to identify broad patterns and
tendencies observable in all facets of lexical change. However, this
can only be done through the careful examination of individual word
histories. The introduction and incorporation of loanwords is a
dynamic process of linguistic change that involves the interplay of
the linguistic and cultural phenomena that come together in the
history of a lexical item. Lexical change cannot be studied in isolation
from the real-world context in which language and words are employed. For many specialists in Romance diachronic lexicology, the
opportunity to study the interaction between language and culture is
truly one of the joys of their calling.
Abbreviated references
CORDE
DCECH
DCELC
DECAT
DELF
DELL
DELP
DEM
DES
DETEMA
DHLF
EWRS
FEW
IVPM
NTLE
REW
Corpus diacrónico del español <http://www.rae.es/>
Corominas and Pascual 1980–1991
Corominas 1954–57
Coromines [Corominas] et al. 1981–91
Bloch and von Wartburg 1975
Ernout and Meillet 1967
Machado 1967
Müller 1987–
Wagner 1960–64
Herrera et al 1996.
Rey 1998
Diez 1853
Wartburg 1922–
Cunha 1986–94
Nieto Jiménez and Álvar Ezquerra 2007
Meyer-Lübke 1935
References
Adams, James N. 2003. Bilingualism and the Latin Language. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
—
—— 2007. The Regional Diversification of Latin 200 BC–AD 600. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Aebischer, Paul. 1936. ‘Protohistoire de deux mots romans d’origine grecque: thius
“oncle” et thia “tante”. Étude de stratigraphie linguistique’. Annali della Reale
Scuola Normale Superiore de Pisa, 2 series, 5: 54–69, 125–42, 211–24. Reprinted in
Aebischer 1978: 25–71.
—
—— 1937. ‘L’italien prélittéraire a-t-il dit germano et germana pour “frère” et
“soeur”?’. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 57: 211–239. Reprinted in
Aebischer 1978: 95–122.
—
—— 1948a. ‘Las denominaciones de la “manzana”, del “manzano” y del “manzanar”
en las lenguas romances, según los documentos latinos de la Edad Media’. In Paul
Aebischer, Estudios de toponimia y lexicografía romance. Barcelona: Escuela de
Filología, pp. 97–129.
References
239
Aebischer, Paul. 1948b. ‘El étnico español: un provenzalismo en castellano’. In Paul
Aebischer, Estudios de toponimia y lexicografía romance. Barcelona: Escuela de
Filología, pp. 15–48. Reprinted under the title ‘HISPANUS, HISPANISCUS,
Español’ in Aebischer 1978: 254–78.
—
—— 1953. ‘Sur l’origine portugaise de port., esp. bravo’. Revista Portuguesa de
Filologia 6: 37–50.
—
—— 1978. Études de stratigraphie linguistique. Romanica Helvetica 87. Bern:
Francke.
Alejo González, Rafael. 1993. ‘Influencia del vocabulario económico inglés sobre los
textos de economía españoles posteriores a la II Guerra Mundial’. Dissertation,
Universidad Complutense, Madrid.
Alonso, Dámaso. 1961. La lengua poética de Góngora. 3rd ed. Revista de Filología
Española, suppl. 29. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.
Alvar Ezquerra, Manuel. 1997. Vocabulario de indigenismos en las Crónicas de Indias.
Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.
Alvar López, Manuel. 1963. ‘Portuguesismos en andaluz’. In Guntram Plangg and
Eberhard Tiefenthaler (eds.), Weltoffene Romanistik: Festschrift Alwin Kuhm zum
60. Geburtstag. Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft 9/10. Innsbruck:
Sprachwissenschaftliche Institut der Leopold-Franzens-Universität, pp. 309–24.
Alvar López, Manuel and Sebastián Mariner Bigorra. 1967. ‘Latinismos’. In
Enciclopedia Lingüística Hispánica, vol. 2. Madrid: Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Científicas, pp. 3–49.
Alvarado, Salustio. 1991. ‘Hebraísmos en español y búlgaro’. Boletín de la Real
Academia Española 71: 133–56.
Álvarez, Isabel. 2001. ‘Anglicismos semánticos en el español peninsular actual’.
Español Actual 76: 49–60.
Álvarez de Miranda, Pedro. 1992. ‘Palabras e ideas: El léxico de la ilustración
temprana en España (1680–1760)’. Boletín de la Real Academia Española, suppl.
51. Madrid: Real Academia Española.
—
—— 2004. ‘El léxico español, desde le siglo XVIII hasta hoy’. In Cano 2004: 1037–64.
—
—— 2008. ‘Las discontinuidades en la historia del léxico’. In Concepción Company
et al. (eds.), Actas del VII Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Lengua
Española. Madrid: Arco/Libros, pp. 1–44.
—
—— 2009. ‘Sobre los italianismos en el español del siglo XVIII’. Dieciocho, suppl.
4: 1–29.
Álvarez Rodríguez, Adelino. 1989. ‘Los italianismos en las traducciones medievales –
del griego al aragonés – de J. Fernández de Heredia’. In Dieter Kremer (ed.), Actes
du XVIIIème Congrès International de Linguistique et de Philologie Romanes
Université de Trèves (Trier) 1986, vol. 4. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, pp. 371–8.
Aprile, Marcello and Fabrizio Lelli. 2004. ‘La sezione degli ebraismi nel Lessico
Etimologico Italiano (LEI)’. Revue de Linguistique Romane 69: 453–73.
Baer, Fritz. 1929. Die Juden im christlichen Spanien. Erste Teil, Urkunden und
Regesten, vol. 1: Aragonien und Navarra. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
240
References
Baez Montero, Inmaculada C. 2006. ‘Los lusismos en los diccionarios informatizados
de la Academia’. In José Jesús de Bustos Tovar and José Luis Girón Alconchel
(eds.), Actas del VI Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Lengua Española
Madrid, 29 de setiembre–3 de octubre de 2003, vol. 2. Madrid: Arco/Libros,
pp. 1269–83.
Baist, Gottfried. 1893. ‘Bigot und bigote’. Romanische Forschungen 7: 407–13.
—
—— 1906. ‘Gibt es ein Suffix scl?’ Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 30: 464–7.
Baldi, Phil and Richard Page. 2006. Review of Vennemann 2003. Lingua 116:
2183–220.
Baldinger, Kurt. 1972. La formación de los dominios lingüísticos en la Península
Ibérica. Transl. Emilio Lledó and Monserrat Macau. Madrid: Gredos.
Bartoli, Matteo. 1925. Introduzione alla Neolinguistica (Principi – Scopi – Metodi).
Geneva: L. S. Olschki.
Basanta, Almudena and Lieve Vangehucten. 2009. ‘Pongámonos flamencos!
Apuntes sobre el legado lingüístico de los flamencos en la España de los siglos
XVI–XVIII’. In Rita de Maeseneer et al. (eds.), El hispanismo omnipresente.
Homenaje a Robert Verdonk. Antwerp: Antwerp University Press, pp. 79–88.
Beccaria, Gian Luigi. 1968. Spagnolo e spagnoli in Italia. Riflessi ispanici sulla lingua
italiana del cinque e del seicento. Turin: G. Giappichelli.
Benarroch, Myriam. 2003. ‘Des premiers dictionnaires (Jerónimo Cardosa) aux texts:
l’apport lexical des arabismes dans la langue portugaise du XVIe siècle’.
Dissertation, University of Paris III.
Bergua Cavero, Jose. 2004. Los helenismos del español. Historia y sistema. Madrid:
Gredos.
Bertoni, Giulio and Matteo G. Bartoli. 1925. Breviario di neolinguistica. Modena:
Società Tipografica Modenese.
Björkman, Sven. 1984. “L’incroyable, romanesque, picaresque, episode barbaresque”.
Étude sur le suffixe français -esque et sur ses équivalents en espagnol, italien et
roumain. Studia Romanica Upsaliensia 35. Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet.
Bleua, Alberto (ed.). 1992. [Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita] Libro de buen amor.
Madrid: Cátedra.
Bloch, Oscar and Walther von Wartburg. 1975. Dictionnaire étymologique de la
langue française. 6th edn. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. (1st ed. 1932)
Blondheim, David S. 1925. Les parlers judéo-romans et la “Vetus Latina”. Paris:
Champion.
Bonfante, Giuliano. 1999. The origin of the Romance languages: Stages in the
development of Latin. Ed. Larissa Bonfante. Heidelberg: Carl Winter
Universitätsverlag.
Borao, Jerónimo. 1859. Diccionario de voces aragonesas. Zaragoza: Calisto Ariño.
Bossong, Georg. 2002. ‘Der Name Al-Andalus: Neue Überlegungen zu einem alten
Problem’. In David Restle and Dietmar Zaefferer (eds.), Sounds and systems:
Studies in structure and change: A festschrift for Theo Vennemamm. Berlin: de
Gruyter Mouton, 149–64.
References
241
Bramón, Dolors. 1987. ‘Aglutinación y deglutinación del artículo en los arabismos del
castellano y del catalán’. Vox Romanica 46: 138–79.
Brancaforte, Benito (ed.). 1975. Francisco Cascales, “Tablas poéticas”. Madrid:
Espasa-Calpe.
Bravo, José María. 2006. ‘Film translation research in Spain: The dubbing of
Hollywood movies into Spanish’. In Lynne Bowker (ed.), Lexicography,
terminology, and translation: Text-based studies in honour of Ingrid Meyer.
Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, pp. 227–37.
Bruguera, Jordi. 1985. Història del lèxic català. Barcelona: Enciclopedia Catalana.
Buck, Carl Darling. 1949. A dictionary of selected synonyms in the principal IndoEuropean languages: A contribution to the history of ideas. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Buesa Oliver, Tomás and José María Enguita Utrilla. 1992. Léxico del español de
América: Su elemento patrimonial e indígena. Madrid: Mapfre.
Bunis, David M. 1993. A lexicon of the Hebrew and Aramaic elements in Modern
Judezmo. Jerusalem: Magnes Press.
—
—— 2004. ‘Distinctive characteristics of Jewish Ibero-Romance, circa 1492’.
Hispania Judaica Bulletin 4: 105–37.
Bursch, Horst. 1980. ‘Der Hund und das Schwein: Etymologische Überlegungen zu
span.-port. perro, galiz. perrencha, perrencho und verwandten Formen’. Verba 7:
13–20.
Bustos Tovar, José Jesús de. 1974. Contribución al estudio del cultismo léxico
medieval. Suppl. 28 to Boletín de la Real Academia Española. Madrid: Real
Academia Española.
—
—— 1982. ‘Cultismo en el primer Renacimiento’. In Wido Hempel and Dieter
Briesemeister (eds.), Actas del Coloquio hispano-alemán Ramón Menéndez Pidal
(Madrid 31 marzo – 2 abril 1978). Tübingen: Niemeyer, pp. 15–39.
—
—— ‘Semicultismos’. 2007 In Inmaculada Delgado Cobos and Alicia Puigvert Ocal
(eds.), Ex Admiratione et Amicitia: Homenaje a Ramón Santiago. Madrid:
Ediciones Orto, pp. 179–91.
—
—— 2008. ‘Para la historia del léxico español: La valoración del neologismo
prerrenacentista en el siglo XVI’. In Concepción Company et al. (eds.), Actas del
VII Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Lengua Española. Madrid: Arco/
Libros, pp. 1201–18.
Cahuzac, Philippe. 1988. ‘Approche méthodologique de l’étude des gallicismes en
espagnol d’Amérique’. In Hommage à Bernard Pottier, vol. 1. Paris: Klinsckieck,
pp. 127–141.
Cano Aguilar, Rafael (ed.). 2004. Historia de la lengua española. Barcelona: Ariel.
Cardaillac, Louis. 1990. ‘Les morisques et leur langue’. Cahiers d’Études Romanes
16: 1–25.
Carriscondo Esquivel, Francisco M. 2010. ‘Algunos neologismos y primeras
ocurrencias de préstamos léxicos en la astronomía y la cosmografía del
Quinientos’. In Robert Verdonk and María Jesús Mancho Duque (eds.),
242
References
Aspectos de la neología en el Siglo de Oro: Lengua general y lenguajes
especializados. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, pp. 57–80.
Castro, Américo. 1922. ‘Ojo < OLEUM, nidio < NITIDUM, lezne < LICINUM’. Revista de
Filología Española 9: 65–7.
—
—— 1936. Glosarios latino-españoles de la Edad Media. Suppl. 22 to Revista de
Filología Española. Madrid: Hernando. Reprinted Madrid: Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Científicas, 1991.
—
—— 1948. España en su historia: cristianos, moros y judíos. Buenos Aires: Losada.
—
—— 1954. The structure of Spanish history. Transl. Edmund King. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
—
—— 1966. ‘Sobre “yo amanezco” y “yo anochezco”’. Boletín de la Real Academia
Española 46: 187–90.
Cavestany, Juan Antonio. 1976. ‘Sobre los vasquismos del viejo romance medieval en
Gonzalo de Berceo’. In Homenaje a Fray Justo Pérez de Urbel, OSB, vol. 1. Silos:
Abadía de Silos, pp. 381–5.
Cazalbou, Renaud. 2000. ‘Sur l’étymologie du mot bruja: Interlude botanicophonétique’. In Panorama de la linguistique hispanique Lille 2000, Actes du
IXème Colloque de Linguistique Hispanique, mars 2000. Lille: Université
Charles-de-Gaulle-Lille 3, pp. 89–98.
Christys, Ann. 2002. Christians in Al-Andalus (711–1000). Richmond (UK): Curzon.
Clavería Nadal, Gloria. 1991. El latinismo en español. Barcelona: Universitat
Autònoma de Barcelona.
—
—— 2006. ‘Acerca del cultismo en las obras alfonsíes’. In José Jesús de Bustos Tovar
and José Luis Girón Alconchel (eds.), Actas del VI Congreso Internacional de
Historia de la Lengua Española Madrid, 29 de setiembre–3 de octubre de 2003, vol 2.
Madrid: Arco/Libros, pp. 1355–69.
Collins, Roger. 2004. Visigothic Spain 409–711. Oxford: Blackwell.
Colón (i Doménech), Germà. 1967a. ‘Catalanismos’. In Enciclopedia Lingüística
Hispánica, vol. 2. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas,
pp. 193–238.
—
—— 1967b. ‘Occitanismos’. In Enciclopedia Lingüística Hispánica, vol. 2. Madrid:
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, pp. 153–92.
—
—— 1976. El léxico catalán en la Romania. Madrid: Gredos.
—
—— 1989. El español y el catalán, juntos y en contraste. Barcelona: Ariel.
—
—— 1999. ‘De arabismos interhispanos’. Travaux de Linguistique et de Philologie 37:
131–9. Reprinted in Colón 2002: 45–54.
—
—— 2002. Para la historia del léxico español. 2 vols. Prepared by Albert Soler and
Núria Mañé. Madrid: Arco/Libros.
—
—— 2004. ‘Flamenc, flamenco, fiamingo “Phoenicopterus Ruber”’. Revue de
Linguistique Romane 69: 321–34.
—
—— 2007a. ‘Coromines i l’estudi del català’. Zeitschrift für Katalanistik 20: 21–34.
—
—— 2007b. ‘Léxico’. In José Enrique Gargallo Gil and María Reina Bastardas (eds.),
Manual de lingüística románica. Barcelona: Ariel, pp. 275–95.
References
243
Colón (i Doménech), Germ 2007c. ‘El verbo amainar en las lenguas hispánicas del
siglo XV’. In Inmaculada Delgado Cobos and Alicia Puigvert Ocal (eds.), Ex
Admiratione et Amicitia: Homenaje a Ramón Santiago. Madrid: Ediciones Orto,
pp. 267–80.
Cooley, Alison E. (ed.). 2002. Becoming Roman, writing Latin? Literacy and
epigraphy in the Roman West. Journal of Roman Archaeology, Supplementary
Series, 48. Portsmouth, Rhode Island.
Corbella, Dolores. 1994. ‘La incorporación de galicismos en los diccionarios
académicos’. Revista de Filología de la Universidad de La Laguna 13: 61–8.
Cornish, Alison. 2011. Vernacular translation in Dante’s Italy: Illiterate literature.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Corominas [Coromines], Joan. 1936. ‘Mots catalans d’origen aràbic’, Butlletí de
Dialectologia Catalana 24: 1–81.
—
—— 1947. ‘Problemas del diccionario etimológico, II’. Romance Philology 1: 79–104.
—
—— 1948. Review of Terlingen 1943. Symposium 2: 102–19.
—
—— 1951. ‘Sacar’. Romance Philology 5: 158–62.
—
—— 1954–57. Diccionario crítico etimológico de la lengua castellana. 4 vols. Madrid:
Gredos and Berne: Francke.
—
—— 1972a. ‘Enseñanzas del diccionario etimológico castellano sobre el hispanocelta’. In Corominas 1972b: 195–235. Orig. in Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie
25 (1955), 30–58.
—
—— 1972b. Tópica Hespérica: Estudios sobre los antiguos dialectos, el substrato y la
toponimia romances. 2 vols. Madrid: Gredos.
—
—— 1976. ‘Elementos prelatinos de las lenguas romances hispánicas’. In Francisco
Jordá, Javier de Hoz, and Luis Michelena (eds.), Actas del I coloquio sobre lenguas
prerromanas de la Península Ibérica (Salamanca, 27–31 mayo 1974). Salamanca:
Universidad de Salamanca, pp. 87–164.
Corominas [Coromines], Joan and José Antonio Pascual. 1980–91. Diccionario crítico
etimológico castellano e hispánico. 6 vols. Madrid: Gredos.
Coromines [Corominas], Joan with the collaboration of Joseph Gulsoy and Max
Cahner. 1981–91. Diccionari etimològic i complementari de la llengua catalana.
9 vols. Barcelona: Curial Editions Catalanes.
Corriente, Federico. 1977. A grammatical sketch of the Spanish Arabic dialect bundle.
Madrid: Instituto Hispano-Árabe de Cultura.
—
—— 1983. ‘La serie mozárabe-hispano-árabe “adalal, adaqal, adass” . . . y la
preposición castellana “hasta”’. Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie 99: 29–32.
—
—— 1994. ‘Current state of research in the field of Andalusi Arabic: Achievements
and prospects’. In Mushira Eid, Vicente Cantarino, and Keith Walters (eds.),
Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics VI. Amsterdam and Phildelphia: Benjamins,
pp. 7–16.
—
—— 1996. ‘Novedades en el estudio de los arabismos en iberorromance’. Revista
Española de Lingüística 26: 1–13.
—
—— 1997. ‘Arabismos del catalán y otras voces de origen semítico o medio-oriental’.
Estudios de Dialectología Norteafricana y Andalusí 2: 5–81.
244
References
Corriente, Federico. 1998a. ‘Arabismos y otras voces de origen semítico o mediooriental en las hablas aragonesas y en gallego’, Romance Philology 51: 421–74.
—
—— 1998b. ‘Le berbère en Al-Andalus’, Études et Documents Berbères 15–16: 269–75.
—
—— 1999. Diccionario de arabismos y voces afines en iberorromance. Madrid:
Gredos. 2nd edn. 2003.
—
—— 2004. ‘Los arabismos del léxico hispánico primitivo’. Revista de Filología
Española 84: 67–93.
—
—— 2008a. Dictionary of Arabic and allied loanwords: Spanish, Portuguese,
Catalan, Galician and kindred dialects. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
—
—— 2008b. Romania Arabica: Tres cuestiones básicas: arabismos, “mozárabe” y
“jarchas”. Madrid: Trotta.
—
—— 2010. ‘Apostillas etimológicas a las voces orientales del Diccionario de la prosa
castellana de Alfonso X de Kasten & Nitti’. Revista de Filología Española 90:
47–106.
Cortelazzo, Manlio and Paolo Zolli. 1979–88. Dizionario etimologico della lingua
italiana. 5 vols. Bologna: Zanichelli.
Coseriu, Eugenio. 1961. ‘¿Arabismos o romanismos?’. Nueva Revista de Filología
Hispánica 15: 4–22. Reprinted in Coseriu 1977: 40–69.
—
—— 1977. Estudios de lingüística románica. Madrid: Gredos.
Craddock, Jerry R. 1969. Latin legacy versus substratum residue: The unstressed
“derivational” suffixes in the Romance vernaculars of the Western
Mediterranean. University of California Publications in Linguistics, 53. Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
—
—— 1982. ‘Portugués antiguo sandeu, castellano antiguo sandío “loco”: Una
sugerencia etimológica nueva’. In Otto Winkelmann and Maria Braisch (eds.),
Festschrift für Johannes Hubschmid zum 65. Geburtstag: Beiträge zur allgemeinen,
indogermanischen und romanischen Sprachwissenschaft. Bern: Francke, pp. 955–9.
Reprinted in Romance Philology 60 (2006): 157–60.
Craddock, Jerry R, Steven N. Dworkin and Cicerone Poghirc. 1980. ‘Romance
etymology: A state of the art’. In Rebecca Posner and John N. Green (eds.),
Trends in Romance linguistics and philology, vol. 1: Comparative and historical
Romance linguistics. The Hague, Paris, and New York: Mouton, pp. 191–240.
Cuervo, Rufino José. 1914. Apuntaciones críticas sobre el lenguaje bogotano con
frecuente referencia al de los países de Hispano-América. 6th edn. Paris: R. Roger
et Chernoviz.
Cunha, Antônio Geraldo da. 1986–94. Índice do vocabulário do português medieval.
Vol 1: A; vol. 2: B–C; vol. 3: D. Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa.
Curell Aguilà, Clara. 2005a. ‘Algunas observaciones acerca de la integración de los
galicismos en el castellano’. Revista de Filología de la Universidad de La Laguna
23: 65–78.
—
—— 2005b. Contribución al estudio de la interferencia lingüística: Los galicismos del
español contemporáneo. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
—
—— 2009. Diccionario de galicismos del español peninsular contemporáneo.
Strasbourg: Éditions de Linguistique et de Philologie.
References
245
Delgado Cobos, Inmaculada. 1987. ‘El cultismo en la oratoria sagrada del Siglo de
Oro (1580–1633)’. Dissertation, Departamento de Lengua Española, Universidad
Complutense, Madrid.
—
—— 2000. ‘Contribución italiana a la terminología técnica científica de los siglos
XVI y XVII’. Cuadernos de Filología Italiana special number, 331–41.
Diez, Friedrich. 1853. Etymologisches Wörterbuch der romanischen Sprachen. Bonn:
Marcus.
Domingo Soriano, María Carmen. 1994–95. ‘Apuntes de lexicografía decimonónica:
Léxico árabe’. Revista de Lexicografía 1: 69–112.
Dozy, Reinhart and W.H. Engelmann. 1869. Glossaire des mots espagnols et portugais
dérivés de l’arabe. Leiden: Brill.
Durkin, Philip. 2009. The Oxford guide to etymology. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Dutton, Brian and Joaquín González Cuenca (eds.). 1993. El Cancionero de Baena.
Madrid: Visor.
Dworkin, Steven N. 1972. ‘Mester and menester: An early Gallicism and a cognate
Provençalism as rivals in older Hispano-Romance’. Romance Philology 25:
373–389.
—
—— 1973. ‘Latin SARCIRE, SERERE, SUERE, SURGERE in Hispano-Romance: A study in
partial homonymy, weak sound change, lexical contamination’. Romance
Philology 27: 26–36.
—
—— 1978. ‘Derivational transparency and sound change: The two-pronged growth
of -IDU in Hispano-Romance’. Romance Philology 31: 605–17.
—
—— 1980. ‘Older Luso-Hispanic garrido (a) “silly, foolish”, (b) “handsome,
beautiful”: One source or two sources?’. Romance Philology 34: 195–205.
—
—— 1985. Etymology and derivational morphology: The genesis of Old Spanish
denominal adjectives in -ido. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie,
206. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
—
—— 1989. Review of Meier 1985. Romance Philology 42: 447–51.
—
—— 1990. ‘The role of near-homonymy in lexical loss: The demise of Old Spanish
laido “ugly, repugnant”’. La corónica 19: 32–48.
—
—— 1991. ‘Homonymy and polysemy in diachronic perspective: The genesis in
Spanish of macho “male”, macho “mule” and macho “blacksmith’s hammer”’. In
Ray Harris-Northall and Thomas D. Cravens (eds.), Linguistic studies in Medieval
Spanish. Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, pp. 15–28.
—
—— 1992. Review of Meier 1988. Romance Philology 45: 433–5.
—
—— 1993. ‘Old Spanish amparar, emparar, and mamparar: A study in multiple
borrowing, and lexical rivalry’. In Pilar Carrasco et al. (eds.), Antiqua et Nova
Romania, Estudios lingüísticos y filológicos en honor del prof. José Mondéjar en su
sexagésimoquinto aniversario, vol. I. Granada: Universidad de Granada, pp. 253–66.
—
—— 1994. ‘Progress in Medieval Spanish lexicography’. Romance Philology 47:
406–25.
—
—— 1998. ‘Lexical loss and neologisms in late Medieval Spanish: two case studies’.
Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 75: 1–11.
246
References
Dworkin, Steven N. 2002a. ‘La introducción e incorporación de latinismos en el
español medieval tardío: Algunas cuestiones lingüísticas y metodológicas’. In
Carmen Saralegui Platero and Manuel Casado Velarde (eds.), Pulchre, Bene
Recte: Estudios en homenaje a Prof. Fernando González Ollé. Pamplona: EUNS,
pp. 421–33.
—
—— 2002b. ‘Pérdida e integración léxicas: Aína vs. rápido en el español
premoderno’. In Bernard Pöll and Franz Rainer (eds.), Vocabula et vocabulaire:
Études de lexicologie et de (méta)-lexicographie romanes en l’honneur du 60ème
anniversaire de Dieter Messner. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, pp. 109–18.
—
—— 2003. ‘The etymology of Sp. Ptg. matar revisited: An unpublished proposal by
Yakov Malkiel’. In María Teresa Echenique Elizondo and Juan Sánchez Méndez
(eds.), Lexicografía y lexicología en Europa y América: Homenaje a Günther
Haensch. Madrid: Gredos, pp. 249–57.
—
—— 2004. ‘Progress in Medieval Spanish lexicography, II’, Romance Philology
57: 359–69.
—
—— 2005. ‘La historia de la lengua y el cambio léxico’. Iberoromania 62: 59–70.
—
—— 2006a. ‘Cambio léxico en el Medioevo tardío: La pérdida del esp. ant. esleer y
poridad’. Revista de Historia de la Lengua Española 1: 31–43.
—
—— 2006b. ‘La naturaleza del cambio léxico’. In José Jesús de Bustos Tovar and José
Luis Girón Alconchel (eds.), Actas del VI Congreso Internacional de Historia de la
Lengua Española Madrid, 29 de setiembre–3 de octubre de 2003, vol 1. Madrid:
Arco/Libros, pp. 67–84.
—
—— 2008a. ‘Para una tipología del cambio léxico: Los préstamos en el español’ in
Concepción Company et al., Actas del VII Congreso Internacional de Historia de la
Lengua Española. Madrid: Arco/Libros, pp. 1233–41.
—
—— 2008b. ‘Toward a typology of lexical borrowing: Primary adjectives as
loanwords in Spanish’. In Hans-Jörg Doehla and Raquel Montero (eds.),
Lenguas en diálogo: El iberorromance y su diversidad lingüística y literaria:
Ensayos en Homenaje a Georg Bossong. Frankfurt: Vervuert, pp. 111–23.
—
—— 2009a. ‘Further thoughts on the Latin lexical base of Hispano-Romance’. In
Fernando Sánchez Miret (ed.), Romanística sin complejos: Homenaje a Carmen
Pensado. Berlin and New York: Peter Lang, pp. 105–21.
—
—— 2009b. ‘El papel de la semántica cognitiva y de la tipología léxica en los estudios
etimológicos’. In Rita de Maesener et al. (eds.), El hispanismo omnipresente:
Homenaje a Robert Verdonk. Antwerp: University of Antwerp, pp. 161–9.
—
—— 2010. ‘Thoughts on the relatinization of the Castilian lexicon’. Romance
Philology 64: 273–83.
—
—— 2011a. ‘Lexical change’. In Martin Maiden et al. (eds.), Cambridge history of the
Romance languages, vol. 1: Structures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 585–605.
—
—— 2011b. ‘La variación y el cambio léxico: Algunas consideraciones’. In Mónica
Castillo Lluch and Lola Rodríguez Pons (eds.), Así van las lenguas variando:
Nuevas tendencias en la investigación del cambio lingüístico en español.
Frankfurt: Peter Lang, pp. 155–69.
References
247
Eberenz, Rolf. 1975. Schiffe an den Küsten der Pyrenäenhalbinsel: Eine
kulturgeschichtliche Untersuchung zur Schiffstypologie und -terminologie in den
iberoromanischen Sprachen bis 1600. Bern: Herbert Lang and Frankfurt: Peter
Lang.
—
—— 1994. ‘Nave y nao en castellano medieval: Historia de una sustitución léxica’.
Anuario de Estudios Medievales 24: 609–23.
—
—— 1998. ‘Dos campos semánticos del español preclásico: “fácil” y “difícil”’. In Inés
Andrés-Suárez and Luis López Molina (eds.), Estudios de lingüística y filología
españolas: Homenaje a Germán Colón. Madrid: Gredos, pp. 167–83.
—
—— 2000. El español en el otoño de la Edad Media: Sobre el artículo y los
pronombres. Madrid: Gredos.
—
—— 2006. ‘Cultura lingüística y cultivo del castellano en el otoño de la Edad Media’.
In José Jesús de Bustos Tovar and José Luis Girón Alconchel (eds.), Actas del VI
Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Lengua Española Madrid, 29 de
setiembre–3 de octubre de 2003, vol 1. Madrid: Arco/Libros, 85–102.
Eberenz, Rolf and Mariela de la Torre. 2003. Conversaciones estrechamente vigiladas:
Interacción coloquial y español oral en las actas inquisitoriales de los siglos XV a
XVII. Zaragoza: Libros Pórtico.
Echenique Elizondo, María Teresa. 1987. Historia lingüística vasco-románica. 2nd
edn. Madrid: Paraninfo.
—
—— 2005. ‘Consideraciones actuales en torno a la lengua vasca y a su acción como
substrato-adstrato del castellano’. Iberoromania 62: 71–86.
—
—— 2008. ‘Léxico vasco y latino-románico en contacto’. Oihenart 23: 61–75.
Echenique Elizondo, María Teresa and Juan Sánchez Méndez. 2005. Las lenguas de
un reino: Historia lingüística hispánica. Madrid: Gredos.
Edmondson, Jonathan. 2002. ‘Writing Latin in the Roman Province of Lusitania’. In
Cooley 2002: 41–60.
Eguílaz y Yanguas, Leopoldo de. 1886. Glosario etimológico de las palabras españolas
(castellanas, catalanas, gallegas, mallorquinas, portuguesas, valencianas y
bascongadas). De origen oriental (árabe, hebreo, malayo, persa y turco).
Granada: Imprenta de la Lealtad. Reprinted Madrid: Linotipias Monservat, 1974.
Enguita Utrilla, José María. 2004. Para la historia de los americanismos léxicos.
Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Ernout, Albert and Antoine Meillet. 1967. Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue
latine: Histoire des mots. 4th edn. Paris: Klincksieck.
Espinosa Elorza, Rosa María. 2010. ‘Amén de, ¿neologismo de Cervantes?’. In Robert
Verdonk and María Jesús Mancho Duque (eds.), Aspectos de la neología en el Siglo
de Oro: Lengua general y lenguajes especializados. Amsterdam and New York:
Rodopi, pp. 239–54.
Espinosa Elorza, Rosa María and Carlos Sánchez Lancis. 2006. ‘Adrede/acaso:
Historia de una antinomía’. In Milka Villayandre (ed.), Actas del XXXV
Simposio Internacional de la Sociedad Española de Lingüística. León:
Universidad de León, pp. 464–85.
248
References
Everett, Nicholas. 2003. Literacy in Lombard Italy c. 568–774. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Fasla, D. 1999–2000. ‘La adopción de arabismos como fuente de creación sinonímica
en español (datos para un estudio socio-semántico)’. Anuario de Lingüística
Hispánica 15/16: 83–100.
Fernández Galiano, M. 1967. ‘Helenismos’. In Enciclopedia Lingüística Hispánica,
vol. 2. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, pp. 51–77.
Fernández García, Antonio. 1972. Anglicismos en el español (1891–1936). Oviedo:
Gráficas Lux.
Fernández Gómez, Carlos. 1962. Vocabulario de Cervantes. Madrid: Real Academia
Española.
Fernández-Ordóñez, Inés. 2004. ‘Alfonso X el Sabio en la historia del español’. In
Cano 2004, pp. 381–422.
—
—— 2011. La lengua de Castilla y la formación del español: Discurso leído el día 13 de
febrero de 2011 en su recepción pública. Madrid: Real Academia Española.
Fernández Urdaneta, Heberto H. 2010. Dictionaries in Spanish and English from 1554
to 1740: Their structure and development. Soria: Diputación Provincial de Soria.
Fleischman, Suzanne. 1977. Cultural and linguistic factors in word formation: An
integrated approach to the development of the suffix -age. University of California
Publications in Linguistics, 86. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press.
Forest, John B. de. 1916. ‘Old French borrowed words in the Old Spanish of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries’. Romanic Review 7: 369–413.
Frago Gracia, Juan A. 1994. Andaluz y español de América: Historia de un parentesco
lingüístico. Seville: Junta de Andalucía.
—
—— 2005. ‘El indoamericanismo léxico en España: De Colón a Monardes’. In César
Hernández Alonso et al. (eds.), Filología y lingüística: Estudios ofrecidos a Antonio
Quilis, vol. 2. Madrid and Valladolid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Científicas, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Universidad de
Valladolid, pp. 1719–28.
Fries, Dagmar. 1989. La Real Academia Española ante el uso de la lengua. Madrid:
Sociedad General Española de Librería.
Fundación del Español Urgente. 2008. Manual de español urgente. 18th edn. Madrid:
Cátedra.
Gago Jover, Francisco. 2002. Vocabulario militar castellano (siglos XIII–XV).
Granada: Universidad de Granada.
Gago Jover, Francisco and Fernando Tejedo Herrero (eds.). 2007. Diccionario militar
de Raimundo Sanz: Edición y estudio. Zaragoza: Institución “Fernado el Católico”.
Galmés de Fuentes, Álvaro et al. 1994. Glosario de voces aljamiado-moriscas. Oviedo:
Universidad de Oviedo.
Gamillscheg, Ernst. 1934–36. Romania Germanica: Sprache- und Siedlungsgeschichte
der Germanen auf dem Boden des altern Römerreiches. 3 vols. Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter.
References
249
Gamillscheg, Ernst. 1967. ‘Germanismos’. In Enciclopedia Lingüística Hispánica, vol.
2. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, pp. 79–91.
García Arias, Xosé Lluis. 1988. Contribución a la gramática histórica de la lengua
asturiana y a la caracterización etimológica de su léxico. Oviedo: Biblioteca de
Filoloxía Asturiana.
—
—— 2006. Arabismos nel dominiu llingüísticu ástur. Oviedo: Academia de la
Llingua Asturiana.
García de Diego, Vicente. 1922. ‘Cruces de sinónimos’. Revista de Filología Española
9: 113–53.
García Gallarín, Consuelo. 1998. Léxico del 98. Madrid: Editorial Complutense.
—
—— 2007. El cultismo en la historia de la lengua española. Madrid: Ediciones
Parthenon.
García Gómez, Emilio. 1968. ‘“Romancismos” de Ibn Quzman explicados por el
poeta’. Studia Islamica 28: 63–77.
García González, Javier. 2007. ‘Una perspectiva sociolingüística de los arabismos en
el español de la alta Edad Media (711–1300)’. In Inmaculada Delgado Cobos and
Alicia Puigvert Ocal (eds.) Ex Admiratione et Amicitia: Homenaje a Ramón
Santiago. Madrid: Ediciones del Orto, pp. 523–48.
—
—— 2008a. ‘Cuestiones pendientes en el estudio de los arabismos del español
medieval: Una nueva revisión crítica’. In Javier Elvira, Inés Fernández-Ordóñez
et al. (eds.), Lenguas, reinos y dialectos en la Edad Media ibérica: La construcción
de la identidad: Homenaje a Juan Ramón Lodares. Madrid: Iberoamericana and
Frankfurt: Vervuert, pp. 257–86.
—
—— 2008b. ‘Viejos problemas desde nuevos enfoques: Los arabismos en el español
medieval desde la perspectiva de la sociolingüística’. In J. L. Blas Arroyo et al.
(eds.), Discurso y sociedad II: Actas del III Congreso Lengua y Sociedad. Castellón
de la Plana: Universitat Jaume I, pp. 671–84.
García Macho, María Lourdes and Steven N. Dworkin. 1994. ‘Actitud de Nebrija
frente a los cultismos y neologismos utilizados por los escritores del siglo XV’. In
R. Escavy et al. (eds.), Actas del Congreso Internacional de Historiografía
Lingüística. Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, pp. 237–48.
García Sánchez, Jairo Javier. 2007. Atlas toponímico de España. Madrid: Arco/Libros.
García Valle, Adela. 1998. La variación nominal en los orígenes del español. Madrid:
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.
Garriga, Cecilio. 2004. ‘El Curso de Química general y la estandardización del léxico
químico a principios del siglo XIX’. In Victoria Alsina, Jenny Brumme, Cecilio
Garriga, Carsten Sinner (eds.), Traducción y estandardización: La incidencia de la
traducción en la historia de los lenguajes especializados. Frankfurt: Vervuert and
Madrid: Iberoamericana, pp. 127–41.
Garulo, Teresa. 1983. Los arabismos en el léxico andaluz según los datos del Atlas
Lingüístico y Etnográfico de Andalucía. Madrid: Instituto Hispano-Árabe de
Cultura.
Geckler, Horst. 2004. ‘Convergencias europeas en el léxico español’. In Jens Lüdtke
and Christian Schmitt (eds.), Historia del léxico español: Enfoques y aplicaciones:
250
References
Homenaje a Bodo Müller. Frankfurt: Vervuert and Madrid: Iberoamericana,
pp. 183–95.
Gemmingen, Barbara von. 1996. ‘Recherches sur les éléments italiens dans le Tesoro
de la lengua castellana o española de Sebastián de Covarrubias’. In Mirko Tavoni
(ed.), Italia ed Europa nella linguistica del Rinascimento: Confronti e relazioni/
Italy and Europe in Renaissance linguistics: Comparisons and relations, vol. 1:
L’Italia e il mondo romanzo/Italy and the Romance World. Ferrara: Franco
Cosimo Panini, pp. 403–15.
Gillet, Joseph E. 1949. Review of Terlingen 1943. Romance Philology 2: 246–52.
—
—— 1951. Propalladia and other works of Bartolomé de Torres Naharro, vol. 3: Notes.
Bryn Mawr: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Giménez-Eguibar, Patricia. 2011. ‘Arabismos en el campo semántico de los oficios:
De la competición a la pérdida lexica’. Dissertation, University of WisconsinMadison.
Giménez-Eguibar, Patricia and Daniel I. Wasserman Soler. Forthcoming. ‘La mala
algarabía: Church, monarchy and the Arabic language in 16th-century Spain’. To
appear in Medieval History Journal.
Goddard, K. A. 1969. ‘Loan-words and lexical borrowing in Romance’. Revue de
linguistique romane 33: 337–48.
—
—— 1977. ‘Some linguistic considerations affecting loan-words and lexical
borrowing in Romance’. Semasia 4: 101–14.
—
—— 1980. ‘Loan-words in Spanish: A reappraisal’. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies
57: 1–16.
Gómez Capuz, Juan. 2004. Los préstamos del español: Lengua y sociedad. Madrid:
Arco/Libros.
—
—— 2005. La inmigración léxica. Madrid: Arco/Libros.
Gómez Rabal, Ana. 2010. ‘Léxico y cronología: La primera documentación de las
voces catalanas: De Coromines al Glossarium Mediae Latinitatis Cataloniae’.
Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 126: 98–114.
González Monllor, Rosa María, and Magnolia Troya Déniz. 1997. ‘Tratamiento de los
nuevos anglicismos en el diccionario académico’. In Manuel Almeida and Josefa
Dorta (eds.), Contribuciones al estudio de la lingüística hispánica: Homenaje al
profesor Ramón Trujillo, vol. 2. Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Montesinos, pp. 145–54.
González Ollé, Fernando. 1976. ‘Contribución al estudio de los italianismos del
español en el siglo XVI’. Filología Moderna 16: 195–206.
—
—— 2004. ‘Navarra, Romania Emersa y ¿Romania Submersa?’. Aemilianense 1:
225–70.
Gorosch, Max. 1949–50. ‘Una etimología árabe: betamel, betalmez, betalmé, betamé’.
Studia Neophilologica 22: 208–10.
—
—— 1955. ‘Beticambra, baticambra y cámara, cambra “retrete, letrina”’. In
Miscelánea filológica dedicada a Mons. A. Griera, vol 1. Barcelona: Consejo
Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, pp. 317–33.
Granda Gutiérrez, Germán de. 1991. ‘Los préstamos lingüísticos procedentes del
francés y/o del créole de Haití en el español dominicano y sus contextos
References
251
sociohistóricos determinantes.’ In Germán de Granda Gutiérrez, El español en tres
mundos: Retenciones y contactos lingüísticos en Ámerica y África. Valladolid:
Universidad de Valladolid.
Green, D. H. 1998. Language and history in the early Germanic world. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Grijelmo, Alex. 1998. Defensa apasionada del idioma español. Madrid: Taurus.
Gútemberg Bohórquez, Jesús. 1984. Concepto de ‘Americanismo’ en la historia del
español: Punto de vista lexicológico y lexicográfico. Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo.
Gutiérrez, Belén. 1989. Estudio histórico-semántico de los dobletes múltiples en
español moderno. Colección Filológica, 33. Granada: Universidad de Granada,
Servicio de Publicaciones.
Gutiérrez Cuadrado, Juan. 2004. ‘Las traducciones francesas, mediadoras entre España
y Europa en la lengua técnica del siglo XIX’. In Victoria Alsina et al. (eds.),
Traducción y estandardización. La incidencia de la traducción en la historia de los
lenguajes especializados. Frankfurt: Vervuert and Madrid: Iberoamericana, pp. 35–60.
Haensch, Günther. 1981. ‘El vocabulario económico español, un problema de lenguas
en contacto’. In Wolfgang Pöckl (ed.) Europäische Mehrsprachigkeit: Festschrift
zum 70. Geburtstag von Mario Wandruszka. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, pp. 135–47.
—
—— 1995. ‘Anglicismos y galicismos en el español de Colombia’. In Klaus
Zimmermann (ed.) Lenguas en contacto en Hispanoamérica: Nuevos enfoques.
Frankfurt: Vervuert and Madrid: Iberoamericana, pp. 217–53.
Harris, M. Roy. 1972. ‘La etimología de barruntar, problema estructural’. In
Humberto López-Morales (ed.), Studia Hispanica in Honorem R. Lapesa, vol. 3.
Madrid: Gredos, pp. 267–74.
Harris, Tracy K. 2005. ‘What language did the Jews speak in pre-Expulsion Spain?’.
In George K. Zucker (ed.), Sephardic Identity: Essays on a vanishing Jewish culture.
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland and Company, pp. 99–111.
Harris-Northall, Ray. 1992–3. ‘Learnèd borrowings in Spanish in the 14th and 15th
centuries: The case of the descendants of FINGERE’. Journal of Hispanic Research 1:
289–313.
—
—— 1996. ‘Printed books and linguistic standardization in Spain: The 1503 Gran
Conquista de Ultramar’. Romance Philology 50: 123–46.
—
—— 1999. ‘Re-Latinization of Castilian lexis in the early sixteenth century’. Bulletin
of Hispanic Studies [Liverpool] 76: 1–12.
Hartman, Steven Lee. 1984. ‘On the history of Spanish macho’. Hispanic Linguistics 1:
97–114.
Harvey, L. P. 1971. ‘The Arabic dialect of Valencia in 1595’. Al-Andalus 36: 81–115.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2008. ‘Loanword typology: Steps toward a systematic crosslinguistic study of lexical borrowability’. In Thomas Stolz, Dik Bakker, and Rosa
Salas Palomo (eds.), Aspects of language contact: New theoretical, methodological
and empirical findings with special focus on Romancisation processes. Berlin and
New York: Mouton De Gruyter, pp. 43–62.
Haspelmath, Martin and Uri Tadmor (eds.). 2010. Loanwords in the world’s
languages: A comparative handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
252
References
Hasselrot, Bengt. 1941. ‘L’abricot: Les mots designant l’abricot dans les langues
romanes, surtout en Italie’. Studia Neophilologica 13: 45–78, 226–47.
Haugen, Einar. 1950. ‘The analysis of linguistic borrowing’. Language 26: 210–31.
Hernández, Esther. 2008. ‘Indigenismos en el Vocabulario de la lengua cakchiquel
atribuido a fray Domingo de Vico, MS. BNF R. 7507’. Revista de Filología Española
88: 67–88.
Herrera, María Teresa. 1996. Diccionario español de textos medicos antiguos. Madrid:
Arco/Libros.
Herrero Ingelmo, José Luis 1994–5. Cultismos renacentistas (cultismos léxicos y
semánticos en la poesía del siglo XVI). Madrid: Real Academia Española.
Hildebrandt, Martha. 1961. La lengua de Bolívar, vol. 1: Léxico. Caracas: Instituto de
Filología Andrés Bello.
Hilty, Gerold. 1995. ‘El arabismo alfaquim’. In Estudis de Lingüística i Filologia oferts
a A. M. Badia i Margarit, vol. 1. Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de
Montserrat, pp. 359–77. Reprinted in Hilty 2008: 273–91.
—
—— 2005a. ‘Los arabismos del Libro Conplido’. In Jordi Aguadé et al. (eds.), Sacrum
Arabo-Semiticum. Homenaje al professor Federico Corriente. Zaragoza: Instituto
de Estudios Islámicos, pp. 181–94.
—
—— 2005b. ‘La herencia visigótica en el léxico de la Península Ibérica’. In Sándor
Kiss, Luca Mondin and Giampolo Salvi (eds.), Latin et langues romanes. Études de
linguistique offertes à József Herman à l’occasion de son 80ème anniversaire.
Tübingen: Niemeyer, pp. 473–80. Reprinted in Hilty 2008: 85–93.
—
—— 2008. Íva·l con la edat el coraçón creçiendo: Estudios escogidos sobre problemas
de lengua y literature hispánicas. Frankfurt: Vervuert and Madrid: Iberoamericana.
Hope, T. E. 1962/63. ‘Loan-words as cultural and lexical symbols’. Archivum
Linguisticum 14: 111–21 and 15: 29–42.
—
—— 1971. Lexical borrowing in the Romance languages: A critical study of
Italianisms in French and Gallicisms in Italian from 1100 to 1900. 2 vols. New
York: New York University Press.
Hubschmid, Johannes. 1952. ‘Étymologies romanes: Le port. trôço “morceau” et sa
famille’. Revista Portuguesa de Filologia 5: 1–25.
—
—— 1955. Schläuche und Fässer: Wort und sachgeschichtliche Untersuchungen mit
besonderer Berücksichtigung des romanischen Sprachgutes in und ausserhalb der
Romania sowie der türkischen-europäischen und türkisch-kaukasisch-persischen
Lehnbeziehungen. Romanica Helvetica, 54. Bern: Francke.
—
—— 1959. ‘Die Stämme *kar(r)- und kurr- im Iberoromanischen, Basken und
Inselkeltischen’. Romance Philology 13: 31–49.
—
—— 1960a. ‘[Lenguas no indoeuropeas] Testimonios románicos’. In Enciclopedia
Lingüística Hispánica, vol. 1. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Científicas, pp. 26–66.
—
—— 1960b. ‘[Lenguas indoeuropeas] Testimonios románicos’. In Enciclopedia
Lingüística Hispánica, vol. 1. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Científicas, pp. 127–49.
—
—— 1962. ‘Virare: romanisch oder vorromanisch?’. Romance Philology 15: 245–53.
References
253
Hubschmid, Johannes. 1964. ‘Aspan., agaliz. busto “Weideland” und spätlat. bustar
“Ochsenstall”’. Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie 80: 102–119.
Iordan, Iorgu, John Orr, and Rebecca Posner. 1970. An introduction to Romance
linguistics, its schools and scholars. Revised with a supplement ‘Thirty Years On’ by
R. Posner. Oxford: Blackwell.
Iribarren Argaiz, Mary-Carmen. 1995. ‘Origen y desarrollo de la sufijación iberoromance en -rr-. Vinculaciones y contrastes con otras lenguas’. Dissertation,
University of Florida.
—
—— 2002. ‘Un caso de contacto vasco-castellano-gallego’. Anuario del Seminario de
Filología Vasca Julio de Urquijo 33: 463–92.
Jansen, Silke. 2005. Sprachliches Lehngut im world wide web: Neologismen in der
französischen und spanischen Internetterminologie. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.
Jiménez Ríos, Enrique. 1998. ‘Los galicismos en el Diccionario de Autoridades, en el
Diccionario de Terreros y en la primera edición del DRAE’. Anuario de Estudios
Filológicos 21: 141–59.
Jud, Jakob. 1925. ‘Problèmes de géographie linguistique romane: I. Problèmes
lexicologiques de l’hispano-roman’. Revue de Linguistique Romane 1: 181–91.
—
—— 1926. ‘Problèmes de géographie linguistique romane: II. S’éveiller dans les
langues romanes’. Revue de Linguistique Romane 2: 163–207.
Kahane, Henry. 1951. ‘The sea as a medium of linguistic diffusion’. Italica 28: 287–91.
Reprinted in Kahane and Kahane 1979: 235–9.
Kahane, Henry and Renée Kahane. 1958. ‘Two nautical terms of Greek origin:
typhoon and galley’. In Etymologica. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, pp. 417–39.
Reprinted in Kahane and Kahane 1979: 295–317.
—
—— 1959. ‘Italo-Byzantine etymologies V: avaria “average”’. Bollettino dell’ Atlante
Linguistico Mediterraneo 1: 211–14. Reprinted in Kahane and Kahane 1979: 249–55.
—
—— 1960. ‘Animalia Pyrricha’. Glotta 39: 133–45. Reprinted in Kahane and Kahane
1979: 45–57.
—
—— 1961. ‘Germanic derivations of Romance words’. Journal of English and
Germanic Philology 60: 460–76. Reprinted in Kahane and Kahane 1979: 59–75.
—
—— 1964. ‘Christian and un-Christian etymologies’. Harvard Theological Review 52:
25–38. Reprinted in Kahane and Kahane 1979: 421–36.
Kahane, Henry and Renée Kahane. 1968. ‘Risk’. In Helmut Stimm and Julius
Wilhelm (eds.), Verba et Vocabula. Munich: W. Fink, pp. 275–83. Reprinted in
Kahane and Kahane 1979: 483–91.
—
—— 1970–76. ‘Abendland und Byzanz: Sprache’. In P. Wirth (ed.), Reallexikon der
Byzantinistik, vol. 1. Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, cols. 345–640.
—
—— 1979. Graeca et Romanica Scripta Selecta, vol. 1: Romance and Mediterranean
lexicology. Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert.
Kahane, Henry, Renée Kahane and Angelina Pietrangeli. 1963. ‘Egyptian papyri as a
tool in Romance etymology’. Romance Philology 17: 310–19. Reprinted in Kahane
and Kahane 1979: 411–20.
254
References
Kahane, Henry, Renée Kahane and Andreas Tietze. 1953. ‘El término mediterráneo
faluca’. Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 7: 56–62. Reprinted in Kahane and
Kahane 1979: 249–55.
Kassis, Hannah. 1997. ‘The Arabicization and Islamization of the Christians of alAndalus: Evidence of their scriptures’. In Ross Brann (ed.) Languages of power in
Islamic Spain. Occasional Publications of the Department of Near Easterrn
Studies and the Program of Jewish Studies, Cornell University, 3. Bethesda, MD:
CDL Press, pp. 136–55.
Kasten, Lloyd A. and Florian Cody. 2001. Tentative dictionary of Medieval Spanish.
2nd edn. New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies.
Kasten, Lloyd A. and John Nitti. 2002. Diccionario de la prosa castellana de Alfonso
X. 3 vols. New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies.
Katz Levy, Anita. 1965. ‘Contrastive development in Hispano-Romance of borrowed
Gallo-Romance suffixes (I)’. Romance Philology 18: 399–429.
—
—— 1967. ‘Contrastive development in Hispano-Romance of borrowed GalloRomance suffixes (II)’. Romance Philology 20: 296–320.
Kiegel-Keicher, Yvonne. 2005. Iberoromanische Arabismen im Bereich Urbanismus
und Wohnkultur: Sprachliche und kulturhistorische Untersuchungen. Beihefte zur
Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 324. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
—
—— 2006. ‘Lexicología y contexto histórico-cultural: Los arabismos del español’. In
José Jesús de Bustos Tovar and José Luis Girón Alconchel (eds.), Actas del VI
Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Lengua Española Madrid, 29 de
setiembre–3 de octubre de 2003, vol 2. Madrid: Arco/Libros, pp. 1477–90.
Kiesler, Reinhard. 1992. ‘Die Arabismen in Katalanischen’. Zeitschrift für
Katalanistik/Revista d’Estudis Catalans 5: 79–105.
—
—— 1993a. ‘Arabismen in Portugieschischen’. In Dieter Messner et al. (eds.),
Studien zur portugieschischen Lexikologie: Akten des 2. Gemeinsames Kolloquium
der deutschsprachigen Lusitanistik und Katalanistik, vol. 3, pp. 11–33.
—
—— 1993b. ‘La tipología de los préstamos lingüísticos: No sólo un problema de
terminología’. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 109: 505–25.
—
—— 1994. Kleines vergleichendes Wörterbuch der Arabismen im Iberoromanischen
und Italienischen. Tübingen and Basel: Francke.
Köbler, Gerhard. 1989. Gotisches Wörterbuch. Leiden: Brill.
Kontzi, Reinhold. 1970. ‘Ist die aragonische präposition enta ein Arabismus?’.
Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 86: 372–81.
Kremer, Dieter. 2004. ‘El elemento germánico y su influencia en la historia
lingüística peninsular’. In Cano 2004, pp. 133–48.
Krohmer, Ulrich. 1967. ‘Gallizismen in der spanischen Zeitungssprache’.
Dissertation, University of Tübingen.
Krotkoff, George. 1963. ‘A possible Arabic ingredient in the history of Spanish usted’.
Romance Philology 17: 328–32.
Krüger, Fritz. 1956. Problemas etimológicos: Las raíces car-, carr- y corr- en los
dialectos peninsulares. Madrid: Centro de Estudios de Etnología Peninsular.
References
255
Lang, Mervyn F. 1990. Spanish word formation: Productive derivational morphology
in the modern lexis. London and New York: Routledge.
Lapesa, Rafael. 1957. La obra literaria del Marqués de Santillana. Madrid: Ínsula.
—
—— 1972. ‘El cultismo semántico en la poesía de Garcilaso’. Revista de Estudios
Hispánicos 2: 33–45. Reprinted in Lapesa 1983, pp. 239–54.
—
—— 1980. Historia de la lengua española. 8th edn. Madrid: Gredos.
—
—— 1983. La trayectoria poética de Garcilaso. Madrid: Istmo.
—
—— 1992. Léxico e historia, vol. 1: Palabras. Madrid: Istmo.
Lapesa, Rafael, Constantino García, and Manuel Seco. 2003. Léxico hispánico
primitivo (siglos VIII al XII): Versión primitiva del “Glosario del primitivo léxico
iberorrománico”. Madrid: Fundación Ramón Menéndez Pidal and Real Academia
Española.
Lebsanft, Franz. 1990. Spanien und seine Sprachen in den “Cartas al Director” von El
Pais (1976–1987): Einführung und analytische Bibliographie. Tübingen: Gunter
Narr.
—
—— 1997. Spanische Sprachkultur: Studien zur Bewertung und Pflege des öffentlichen
Sprachgebrauchs im heutigen Spanien. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische
Philologie, 282. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
Lépinette, Brigitte. 2003. ‘À propos du Diccionario de galicismos de R. M. Baralt
(Madrid, 1855)’. In María Teresa Echenique Elizondo and Juan Sánchez Méndez
(eds.), Lexicografía y lexicología en Europa y América: Homenaje a Günther
Haensch. Madrid: Gredos, pp. 365–84.
Lerner, Isaías. 1974. Arcaismos léxicos del español de América. Madrid: Ínsula.
Lida de Malkiel, María Rosa. 1953. Juan de Mena, poeta del prerrenacimiento español.
Mexico, D.F.: El Colegio de México.
Lleal, Coloma. 1995. ‘El secretario, el nuncio y la difusión del latinismo en el siglo
XV’. Lletres Asturianes 56: 19–34.
—
—— 1997. El castellano del siglo XV en la Corona de Aragón. Zaragoza: Instituto
“Fernando el Católico”.
Lliteras, Margarita. 1992. ‘Procesos evolutivos del subsistema latino de preposiciones
de movimiento’. In Gerold Hilty et al. (eds.), Actes du XXème Congrès
International de Linguistique et Philologie Romanes, Université de Zurich (6–11
avril 1992), vol. 2. Bern: Francke, pp. 417–30.
Lloyd, Paul. 1987. From Latin to Spanish, vol. 1: Historical phonology and morphology
of the Spanish language. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.
Lombard, Alf. 1936. ‘Die Bedeutungsentwicklung zweier ibero-romanischer Verba’.
Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 56: 637–43.
Lope Blanch, Juan. 1977a. ‘Los indoamericanismos en el Tesoro de Covarrubias’.
Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 26: 296–315.
—
—— 1977b. ‘Sebastián de Covarrubias y el elemento germánico del español’.
Anuario de Letras 15: 249–57.
—
—— 1999. ‘Americanismos en el Vocabulario de fray Alonso de Molina’. In Amparo
Morales et al. (eds.), Estudios de lingüística hispánica: Homenaje a María Vaquero.
Rio Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, pp. 335–47.
256
References
López Bascuñana, María Isabel. 1978. ‘Los italianismos en la lengua del Marqués de
Santillana’. Boletín de la Real Academia Española 58: 545–54.
López García, Ángel. 1985. El rumor de los desarraigados: Conflicto de lenguas en la
Peninsula Ibérica. Barcelona: Anagrama.
López Morillas, Consuelo. 2000. ‘Language’. In María Rosa Menocal et al. (eds.), The
Literature in al-Andalus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 33–59.
López Vallejo, María Ángeles. 2006. ‘Italianismos militares en el Renacimiento: La
palabra centinela, un ejemplo’. In J. Rodríguez and D. Sáez (eds.), Diacronía,
lengua española y lingüística: Actas del IV Congreso Nacional de la Asociación de
Jóvenes Investigadores de Historiografía e Historia de la Lengua Española. Madrid:
Síntesis, pp. 355–68.
—
—— 2008. ‘Dificultades en la determinación de la procedencia de algunos términos
militares en el español clásico: las voces cartucho y revellín’. In José María Becerra
Hiraldo and Francisco Torres Montes (eds.), Homenaje al profesor D. José María
Chamorro Martínez. Granada: Universidad de Granada, pp. 235–46.
—
—— 2010. ‘¿Italianismos o galicismos? Tecnicismos militares de origen incierto’. In
María Teresa Encinas Manterola et al. (eds.), Ars Longa: Diez años de la AJIHLE,
vol. 1. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Voces del Sur, pp. 307–22.
Lorenzo, Emilio. 1996. Anglicismos hispánicos. Madrid: Gredos.
Lüdtke, Helmut. 1974. Historia del léxico románico. Transl. Marcos Martín
Hernández. Madrid: Gredos (German original 1968).
Machado, José Pedro. 1967. Dicionário da lingua portuguesa; con a mais antiga
documentação escrita e conhecida de muitos dos vocablos estudados. 2 vols.
Lisbon: Confluência.
Mackenzie, Jean Gilkison. 1984. A lexicon of the 14th century Aragonese manuscripts
of Juan Fernández de Heredia. Madison, WI: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval
Studies.
Maíllo Salgado, Felipe. 1983. Los arabismos del castellano en la Baja Edad Media
(consideraciones históricas y filológicas). Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de
Salamanca and Instituto Hispano-Árabe de Cultura.
Malkiel, Yakov. 1944. ‘Three Spanish–Portuguese Etymologies: pendencia,
primencia, fimencia’. Romanic Review 35: 307–23.
—
—— 1945. ‘The etymology of Hispanic que(i)xar’. Language 21: 142–83.
—
—— 1946. ‘Castilian albricias and its Ibero-Romance congeners’. Studies in
Philology 43: 498–521.
—
—— 1948a. Hispanic “algu(i)en” and related formations: A study of the stratification
of the Romance lexicon in the Iberian Peninsula. University of California
Publications in Linguistics, 1: 9. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press 357–442.
—
—— 1948b. ‘Hispano-Arabic marrano and its Hispano-Latin homophone’. Journal
of the American Oriental Society 68: 175–84.
—
—— 1949a. ‘Italian ciarlatano and its Romance offshoots’. Romance Philology 2: 317–26.
—
—— 1949b. ‘Lexical notes on the Western Leónese dialect of La Cabrera Alta’.
Language 25: 437–46.
References
257
Malkiel, Yakov. 1950a. ‘The etymology of Hispanic destroçar and troço’. Philological
Quarterly 29: 151–71.
—
—— 1950b. ‘Old Spanish fazaña, pa(s)traña and past(r)ija’. Hispanic Review 18:
135–57, 244–59.
—
—— 1954a. Studies in the reconstruction of Hispano-Latin word families. University
of California Publications in Linguistics, 11. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press.
—
—— 1954b. Review of Rodríguez Castellano 1952. Language 30: 128–53.
—
—— 1954–55. ‘Cundir: historia de una palabra y de un problema etimológico’.
Boletín de Filología de la Universidad de Chile 8: 247–64.
—
—— 1955. Review of Wagner 1953. Romance Philology 9: 50–68.
—
—— 1956. ‘Antiguo español y gallegoportugués trocir “pasar”’. Nueva Revista de
Filología Hispánica 10: 385–95.
—
—— 1957a. ‘A postscript to It. ciarlatano, Sp. charlatán’. Romance Philology 10:
39–40.
—
—— 1957b. ‘Préstamos y cultismos’. Revue de Linguistique Romane 21: 1–61.
—
—— 1958. ‘Los interfijos hispánicos: Problema de lingüística estructural e histórica’.
In Diego Catalán (ed.), Estructuralismo e historia: Miscelánea-homenaje a André
Martinet, vol. 2. La Laguna: Universidad de La Laguna, pp. 107–99.
—
—— 1961. ‘Etimología y cambio fonético débil: Trayectoria iberorrománica de
MEDICUS, MEDICAMEN, MEDICINA’. Ibérida 6: 127–71.
—
—— 1962. Review of Hubschmid 1955, 1961. Language 38: 149–85.
—
—— 1972. ‘The Pan-European suffix -esco, -esque in stratigraphic projection’. In
Albert Valdman (ed.), Papers in linguistics and phonetics to the memory of Pierre
Delattre. The Hague: Mouton, pp. 357–87.
—
—— 1975a. ‘Deux cas d’étymologies “intéressantes”’. Revue de Linguistique Romane
39: 255–95.
—
—— 1975b. ‘En torno al cultismo medieval: Los descendientes hispánicos de DULCIS’.
Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 24: 24–45.
—
—— 1976a. ‘Contacts between BLASPHEMARE and AESTIMARE (with an excursus on the
etymology of Hisp. tomar)’. Romance Philology 30: 102–17.
—
—— 1976b. ‘In search of “penultimate” causes of language change: Studies in the
avoidance of /ž/ in Proto-Spanish.’ In Marta Luján and Fritz Hensey (eds.),
Current studies in Romance linguistics. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown
University Press, pp. 27–36.
—
—— 1977. ‘The analysis of lexical doublets: The Romanists’ earliest contribution to
general linguistics’. In David M. Feldman (ed.), Homenaje a Robert A. Hall, Jr.:
Ensayos lingüísticos y filológicos para su sexagésimo aniversario. Madrid: Playor,
pp. 191–6.
—
—— 1981. The Old Spanish and Old Galician–Portuguese adjective ledo, archaic
Spanish liedo’. La corónica 9: 95–106.
—
—— 1983. ‘A revisionist view of the etymology of OSp., OGal.–Ptg. trocir “pass”’, La
corónica 12: 92–106.
258
References
Malkiel, Yakov. 1984. ‘CRUMENA, a Latin lexical isolate, and its survival in HispanoRomance (Sp. colmena, dial. cormena “beehive”)’. Glotta 62: 106–23.
Malkiel, Yakov. 1985. ‘Para el marco histórico de comborça/combrueça “concubina”’.
In Homenaje a Álvaro Galmés de Fuentes, vol. 1. Madrid: Gredos, pp. 245–64.
—
—— 1986a. ‘An aberrant style of etymological research [a propos Meier 1984]’,
Romance Philology 40: 181–99.
—
—— 1986b. ‘Designations of the cupbearer in older Hispano-Romance’. Studies in
Philology 83: 286–302.
—
—— 1989a. ‘La etimología de corro y corral (a la luz del fonosimbolismo y de la
primera oleada de helenismos)’. Anuario de Letras 27: 5–62.
—
—— 1989b. ‘The Old Spanish Verbs contir/cuntir and cundir’. In Miscellanea di
studi in onore di Aurelio Roncaglia a cinquant’anni dalla sua laurea. Modena:
Mucchi Editore, pp. 761–71.
—
—— 1990a. ‘Les avatars de l’explication étymologique de (esp., port.) tomar’. Revue
de linguistique romane 54: 33–59.
—
—— 1990b. ‘In search of northwest Tyrrhenian Latinity: The spread of Medieval
Catalan ávol < HABILE across the Iberian Peninsula’. General Linguistics 30: 53–74.
—
—— 1990c. ‘Las vicisitudes etimológicas de rincón’. Revista de Filología Española 70:
5–44.
—
—— 1991. ‘Dubious, pseudo-, hybrid and mock-Orientalisms in Romance’. In Alan
S. Kaye (ed.), Semitic studies in honor of Wolf Leslau on the occasion of his eightyfifth birthday, November 14, 1991, vol. 2. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz,
pp. 991–1003.
—
—— 1992. ‘The secret of the etymology of Old Spanish poridad’. In E. Michael Gerli
and Harvey L. Sharrer (eds.), Hispanic medieval studies in honor of Samuel G.
Armistead. Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, pp. 211–20.
Malkiel, Yakov, Steven N. Dworkin, Charles Faulhaber, J.F. Levy, and J.K. Walsh.
1978. ‘AEQUUS versus (in)GENUUS: Etymological studies in Old Spanish (y)engo
“free”, (y)e(n)guedad “freedom”’. Romance Philology 32: 49–64.
Marcos-Marín, Francisco A. 1985. ‘Mañero, mañería: Problema etimológico.’ In
Philologica Hispaniensia in Honorem Manuel Alvar, vol. 2: Lingüística. Madrid:
Gredos, pp. 431–44.
—
—— 2009. ‘Palabras americanas en la ciencia europea del XVI’. In Luis Luque
Toro (ed.), Léxico Español Actual, vol. 2. Venice: Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina,
pp. 145–54.
Martín-Gamero, Sofía. 1963. La enseñanza del inglés en España (desde la Edad Media
hasta el siglo XIX). Madrid: Gredos.
Meier, Harri. 1950. ‘Esp. loza, lozano, loco; port. loiça, alouça, loução, louco, tolo’.
Revista de Filología Española 34: 184–94.
—
—— 1960. ‘Lateinisch-Romanisches, II’. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 11: 289–309.
—
—— 1975. Primäre und sekundäre Onomatopöien und andere Untersuchungen zur
romanischen Etymologie. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.
References
259
Meier, Harri. 1984. Notas críticas al “DECH” de Corominas/Pascual: Verba, Anuario
Galego de Filoloxía, suppl. 24. Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago
de Compostela.
—
—— 1985. Prinzipien der etymologischen Forschung: Romanistische Einblicke.
Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.
—
—— 1988. Etymologische Aufzeichnungen: Anstösse und Anstössiges. Romanistische
Versuche und Vorarbeiten, 54. Bonn.
Méndez Santos, María del Carmen. 2011. ‘Sobre -gate: Origen, significado y
comportamiento morfolóogico’. Cuadernos del Instituto Historia de la Lengua
6: 23–43.
Menéndez Pidal, Ramón. 1941. Manual de gramática histórica española. 6th edn.
Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.
Menocal, María Rosa. 1982. ‘The etymology of Old Provençal trobar, trobador: A
return to the “third solution” (with an editoral post-script by Y[akov] M[alkiel])’.
Romance Philology 36: 137–53.
—
—— 1983. ‘The mysteries of the Orient: Special problems in Romance etymology’. In
Phillip Baldi (ed.) Papers from the XIIth Linguistic Symposium on Romance
Languages. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 501–15.
Meo Zilio, Giovanni. 1989. Estudios hispanoamericanos: Temas lingüísticos. Rome:
Bulzoni.
Messner, Dieter. 1974. Chronologisch-etymologische Studien zu den iberoromanischen
Sprachen und zum Französischen. Tübinger Beiträge zur Linguistik, 49. Tübingen:
Gunter Narr.
—
—— 1979. Geschichte des spanischen Wortschatzes. Heidelberg: Carl Winter
Universitätsverlag.
—
—— 1990. História do léxico português. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.
—
—— 2004. ‘La traducción de textos de especialidad a las lenguas iberorrománicas en
el siglo XVIII’. In Victoria Alsina et al. (eds.), Traducción y estandardización: La
incidencia de la traducción en la historia de los lenguajes especializados. Frankfurt:
Vervuert and Madrid: Iberoamericana, pp. 19–33.
Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm. 1935. Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. 3rd edn.
Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag. First edn. 1911.
Michaëlis de Vasconcelos, Carolina. 1886. ‘Studien zur hispanischen Wortdeutung’.
In In Memoria di Napoleone Caix e Ugo Angelo Canello: Miscellanea di filologia
e linguistica. Florence: Successori Le Monnier, pp. 113–66.
—
—— 1893–94. ‘Fragmentos etimológicos’. Revista Lusitana 3: 129–90.
Miller, Elaine. 2000. Jewish multiglossia: Hebrew, Arabic, and Castilian in medieval
Spain. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta.
Mondéjar, José. 1983. ‘“Advenedizo” frente a “castizo” (los italianismos en la lengua
literaria del XVI)’. In Emilio Alarcos Llorach (ed.), Serta Philologica F. Lázaro
Carreter Natalem Diem Sexagesimum Celebranti Dictata, vol. 1: Estudios de
lingüística y lengua literaria. Madrid: Cátedra, pp. 413–39.
Montaner Frutos, Alberto. 2005. ‘Arabismos y hebraismos del Cancionero de burlas
provocantes a risa’. In Jordi Aguadé et al. (eds.), Sacrum Arabo-Semiticum:
260
References
Homenaje al profesor Federico Corriente en su 65 aniversario. Madrid: Instituto de
Estudios Islámicos y del Oriente Próximo, pp. 301–32.
Montero Curiel, Pilar and María Luisa Montero Curiel. 2005. El léxico animal del
Cancionero de Baena. Frankfurt: Vervuert and Madrid: Iberoamericana.
Moreno de Alba, José G. 1996. ‘Indigenismos en las Décadas del Nuevo Mundo de
Pedro Mártir de Anglería’. Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 44: 1–26.
—
—— 2009. ‘Americanismos léxicos en Cervantes’. Revista de Estudios Cervantinos
11: 1–8.
Morínigo, Marcos A. 1959. Programa de filología hispánica. Buenos Aires: Editorial
Nova.
Morreale, Margherita. 1955. ‘El superlativo en “íssimo” y la version castellana del
Cortesano’. Revista de Filología Española 39: 46–60.
—
—— 1959. Castiglione y Boscan: El ideal cortesano del Renacimiento español. 2 vols.
Suppl. 1, Boletín de la Real Academia Española. Madrid: Real Academia Española.
Müller, Bodo. 1987–. Diccionario del español medieval. Heidelberg: Carl Winter
Universitätsverlag [26 fascicules published prior to suspension].
—
—— 2005. ‘La “guerra” lexicológicamente’. Cuadernos del CEMYR 13: 41–52.
Munteanu Colán, Dan. 2008. La posición del catalán en la Romania según su léxico
latino patrimonial. Stuttgart: Ibidem.
Muñoz Armijo, Laura. 2010. ‘La historia de los derivados en “-ismo” e “-ista” en el
español moderno’. Dissertation, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona.
Myers-Scotton, Carol. 2002. Contact linguistics: Bilingual encounters and
grammatical outcomes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Neuvonen, Eero K. 1941. Los arabismos del español en el siglo XIII. Helsinki: Societas
Orientalis Fennica.
Niederehe, Hans-Josef. 1998. ‘El español en contacto con el francés’. In Claudio
García Turza et al., Actas del IV Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Lengua
Española, vol. 1. Logroño: Universidad de la Rioja, pp. 103–25.
Nieto Ballester, Emilio. 2003. ‘L’expression de la notion “pierre” en latin tardif de
Hispania. Cast. berrueco: Les données de la toponymie’. In Heilli Solin et al. (eds.),
Latin vulgaire – latin tardif VI. Actes du VIème colloque international sur le latin
vulgaire et tardif, Helsinki, 29 août–2 septembre 2000. Hildesheim, Zurich, and
New York: Olms-Weidmann, pp. 387–99.
Nieto Jiménez, Lidio and Manuel Álvar Ezquerra. 2007. Nuevo tesoro lexicográfico
del español (s. XIV–1726). 11 vols. Madrid: Arco/Libros.
Noll, Volker. 1997. ‘Anmerkungen zur spanischen Toponymie: Andalucia’. In
Günter Holtus, Johannes Kramer, and Wolfgang Schweikard (eds.), Italica et
Romanica: Festschrift für Max Pfister zum 65. Geburtstag. Tübingen: Max
Niemeyer, pp. 199–210.
—
—— 2004. ‘El origen de esp. criollo, port. crioulo’. In Jens Lüdtke and Christian
Schmitt (eds.), Historia del léxico español: Enfoques y aplicaciones: Homenaje a
Bodo Müller. Frankfurt: Vervuert and Madrid: Iberoamericana, pp. 257–64.
References
261
Nomdedeu, Antoní. 2009. Diccionario del fútbol. Suppl. 11 to the Revista de
Lexicografía. La Coruña.
Nord, Christiane. 1983. Neuste Entwicklungen im spanischen Wortschatz.
Rheinfelden: Schäuble.
Norton, Marcy. 2008. Sacred gifts, profane pleasures: A history of tobacco and
chocolate in the Atlantic world. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Oñederra, Miren Lourdes. 2004. ‘El español en contacto con otras lenguas: Españolvasco’. In Cano 2004, pp. 1103–15.
Oliver Pérez, Dolores. 2004. ‘Los arabismos dentro de la historia del español: Estudio
diacrónico de su incorporación’. In Escritos dedicados a José María Fernández
Catón, vol. 2. León: Centro de Estudios e Investigación “San Isidoro”, pp.1073–95.
Oroz, Francisco J. 1996. ‘Sobre palabras prerromanas en escritores latinos: A
propósito de una reciente edición del libro XXXIII de la Historia Naturalis de
Plinio’. In Francisco Villar and José D’Encarnação (eds.), La Hispania
prerromana: Actas del VI Coloquio sobre lenguas y culturas prerromanas de la
Península Ibérica (Coimbra, 13–15 de octubre de 1994). Salamanca: Ediciones
Universidad de Salamanca, pp. 207–15.
—
—— 2007. ‘Quandoque bonus dormitat Corominas: Sobre arruga, laude, matar’.
Zeitschrift für Katalanistik 20: 63–82.
Páramo García, Félix. 2003. Anglicismos léxicos en traducciones ingles – español
(1750–1800). León: Universidad de León.
Pascual, José Antonio. 1974. La traducción de la “Divina Commedia” atribuida a D.
Enrique de Aragón: Estudio y edición del “Infierno”. Salamanca: Universidad de
Salamanca.
Pastoureau, Michèle. 2001. Blue: The history of a color. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Pato, Enrique. 2009. ‘Notas aclaratorias sobre la historia del indefinido alguien: Una
aplicación directa del uso de corpus diacrónicos’. In Andrés Enrique Arias (ed.),
Diacronía de las lenguas iberorrománicas: Nuevas aportaciones desde la lingüística
de corpus. Madrid: Iberoamericana and Frankfurt: Vervuert, pp. 401–16.
—
—— 2010. ‘Algo más sobre la historia del posesivo lur’. Archivo de Filología
Aragonesa 66: 13–32.
Pellen, René. 1997. ‘El cultismo léxico en los “Milagros” de Berceo.’ Cuadernos de
Historia de España 74: 285–321.
Penny, Ralph J. 1999. ‘Standard versus dialect: Linguistic (dis)continuity in the
Iberian Peninsula’. In Robert J. Blake et al. (eds.), Essays in Hispanic linguistics
dedicated to Paul M. Lloyd. Newark, DE.: Juan de la Cuesta, pp. 43–55.
—
—— 2002. History of the Spanish Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. First edn. 1991.
Pensado, José Luis. 1961. ‘Un germanismo olvidado: Gallego escá “medida para
granos”’. In Studia Philologica: Homenaje a Dámaso Alonso, vol. 2. Madrid:
Gredos, pp. 577–89.
Pera Isern, Joaquim. 2005. ‘Pervivencia de la lengua ibérica en el siglo I AC: El
ejemplo de la ciudad romana de Iesso (Guissona, Lleida)’. In Acta Palaeohispanica
262
References
IX: Coloquio sobre lenguas y culturas paleohispánicas, Barcelona 20–24 de octubre
de 2004. Published as Paleohispanica: Revista sobre lenguas y culturas de Hispania
Antiqua 5: 315–31.
Pfändler, Otto. 1954. Wortschatz der Sportsprache Spaniens mit besonderer
Berücksichtigung der Ballsportarten. Romanica Helvetica, 47. Bern: Francke.
Pharies, David. 1977. ‘A new etymology for Spanish zutano’. Romance Philology
31: 211–20.
—
—— 1990. The origin and development of the Ibero-Romance -nc-/-ng- suffixes.
Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 228. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
—
—— 1994. Bibliography of Latin and Ibero-Romance suffixation. Madison, WI:
Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies.
—
—— 2002. Diccionario etimológico de los sufijos españoles y de otros elementos
finales. Madrid: Gredos.
Pichardo Tapia, Esteban. 1836. Diccionario provincial de voces cubanas. Havana.
Piel, Joseph M. 1953. Miscelânea de etimologia portuguesa y galega. Coimbra:
Universidade.
Piel, Joseph M. and Dieter Kremer. 1976. Hispano-gotisches Namenbuch: Der
Niederschlag des Westgotischen in den alten und heutigen Personen- und
Ortsnamen der Iberischen Halbinsel. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.
Polomé, Edgar. 1983. ‘The linguistic situation in the western provinces of the Roman
Empire’. In Wolfgang Haase (ed.), Aufstieg und Niedergang der romanischen Welt,
vol. 29: 2 Principat. Sprache und Literatur. Berlin and New York: Walter de
Gruyter, pp. 509–53.
Pottier, Bernard. 1967. ‘Galicismos’. In Enciclopedia Lingüística Hispánica, vol. 2.
Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, pp. 127–51.
Prat Sabater, Marta. 2003. Préstamos del catalán en el léxico español. Dissertation,
Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona.
—
—— 2005. ‘La influencia del català sobre el lèxic castellà: Visió diacrónica’. Llengua
& Literatura 16: 363–87.
Pratt, Christopher J. 1980. El anglicismo en el español peninsular contemporáneo.
Madrid: Gredos.
—
—— 1986. ‘Anglicisms in contemporary European Spanish’. In Wolfgang Vierck
and Wolf-Dietrich Bald (eds.), English in contact with other languages: Studies in
honour of Broder Carstensen on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Budapest:
Akadémiai Kiadó, pp. 345–67.
Prósper, Blanca María. 2002. Lenguas y religiones prerromanas del occidente de la
Península Ibérica. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca.
Quilis, Antonio. 1983. ‘Galicismos en la lengua española hablada en Madrid’. In
Philologica Hispaniensia in Honorem Manuel Alvar, vol. 1: Dialectología. Madrid:
Gredos, pp. 537–47.
—
—— 1984. ‘Anglicismos en el español de Madrid’. In A. Bernabé et al. (eds.), Athlon
Satura Grammatica in Honorem Francisci R. Adrados, vol. 1. Madrid: Gredos,
pp. 413–22.
References
263
—
—— 1985. ‘Arabismos en la lengua española hablada en Madrid’, Archivo de
Filología Aragonesa 36–7: 127–35.
Rainer, Franz. 1993. Spanische Wortbildungslehre. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Reinheimer Rîpeanu, Sanda. 2004a. Dictionnaire des emprunts latins dans les langues
romanes. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Române.
—
—— 2004b. Les emprunts latins dans les langues romanes. Bucharest: Editura
Universiţătii din Bucureşti.
Rey, Alain. 1998. Dictionnaire historique de la langue française. 3 vols. Paris:
Dictionnaires Le Robert.
Rice, Carlton C. 1935. ‘The etymology of Spanish corral, loco and mozo. Hispanic
Review 3: 162–3.
Richardson, J. S. 1996. The Romans in Spain. Oxford: Blackwell.
Rifón, Antonio. 2009. ‘-oide: Un sufijo cosmopolita’. Cuadernos del Instituto Historia
de la Lengua 2: 81–114.
Rivarola, José Luis. 1985. ‘Albaquía – baquía – baquiano: Notas sobre el origen de un
americanismo’. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 101: 45–51.
—
—— 1988. ‘De nuevo sobre el origen de baquía y baquiano’. Zeitschrift für
romanische Philologie 104: 419–28.
—
—— 2004. ‘La difusión del español en el Nuevo Mundo’. In Cano 2004, pp. 799–823.
Rodríguez González, Félix. 1994. ‘Remarques sur le glisssement de sens dans l’argot
de la drogue: Les anglicismes en espagnol’. Cahiers de Lexicologie 64: 147–54.
—
—— 2002. ‘Spanish’. In Manfred Görlach (ed.), English in Europe. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 128–50.
—
—— 2003. ‘Orientaciones generales en torno a la elaboración de un corpus de
anglicismos’. In María Teresa Echenique Elizondo and Juan Sánchez Méndez
(eds.), Lexicografía y lexicología en Europa y América: Homenaje a Günther
Haensch. Madrid: Gredos, pp. 559–75.
—
—— 2008a. ‘Anglicisms in Spanish male homosexual terminology’. In Roswitha
Fischer and Hanna Pulaczewska (eds.), Anglicisms in Europe: Linguistic diversity
in a global context. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, pp. 247–72.
—
—— 2008b. Diccionario gay-lésbico. Madrid: Gredos.
Rodríguez González, Félix and Antonio Lillo Buades. 1997. Nuevo diccionario de
anglicismos. Madrid: Gredos.
Rodríguez Segura, Delia. 1999. Panorama del anglicismo en español: Presencia y uso
en los medios. Almería: Universidad de Almería.
Rohlfs, Gerhard. 1979. Estudios sobre el léxico románico: Reelaboración parcial y
notas de Manuel Alvar. Madrid: Gredos.
Rojo, Guillermo. 2004. ‘El español de Galicia’. In Cano 2004, pp. 1087–101.
Romero, María Victoria. 1992. ‘Indigenismos en dos diccionarios españoles:
Autoridades y Terreros’. In Las Indias (América) en la literatura del Siglo de
Oro: Homenaje a Jesús Cañedo. Kassel: Editions Reichenberger, pp. 265–83.
Rubio, Antonio. 1937. La crítica del galicismo en España. Mexico City: Ediciones
Universidad Nacional.
264
References
Rueda Rueda, Mercedes. 1997. Los términos negativos en español: Aproximación
diacrónica. León: Universidad de León.
Sá Nogueira, Rodrigo de. 1947. ‘Crítica etimológica’. Boletim de Filologia 8: 1–56,
185–236, 357–64.
Sachs, Georg. 1932. Die germanischen Ortsnamen in Spanien und Portugal. Berliner
Beiträge zur romanischen Philologie, 2: 4. Jena: W. Gronau.
Sala, Marius. 1998. Lenguas en contacto. Madrid: Gredos.
Sala, Marius (ed.). 1982. El español de América, vol. 1: Léxico, primera parte. Bogotá:
Instituto Caro y Cuervo.
Salvador, Gregorio. 1967. ‘Lusismos’. In Enciclopedia Lingüística Hispánica, vol. 2.
Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, pp. 239–61. Reprinted in
Salvador 1985, pp. 161–80.
—
—— 1985. Semántica y lexicología del español: Estudios y lecciones. Madrid:
Paraninfo.
Salverda de Grave, J. J. 1906. De Franse woorden in het Nederlands. Verhandelingen
van der Kon. Ak. van Wetenschappen, Afd. Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks, Deel VII.
Amsterdam: Müller.
—
—— 1907. ‘Quelques observations sur les mots d’emprunts’. In Mélanges
Chabaneau, Erlangen: Fr. Lange, pp. 145–53.
—
—— 1913. L’influence de la langue française en Hollande d’après les mots empruntés.
Paris: Champion.
Sánchez Mendez, Juan. 2010. ‘Hablar indiano durante los Siglos de Oro’. In Rosa
Maria Castañer Martín and Vicente Lagüens Gracia (eds.), De moneda nunca
usada: Estudios filológicos dedicados a José María Enguita Utrilla. Zaragoza:
Institución “Fernando el Católico”.
Schallman, Lázaro. 1952. Diccionario de hebraísmos y voces afines. Buenos Aires:
Editorial Israel.
Schmitt, Christian. 2005. ‘Zum Anglizismus im heutigen Spanisch: Die “Libros de
estilo” und das Problem der Entlehnung’. In Wolfgang Dahmen et al. (eds.),
Englisch und Romanisch: Romanistisches Kolloquium XVIII. Tübingen: Gunter
Narr, pp. 79–175.
Schmoll, U. 1959. Die Sprachen der vorkeltischen Indogermanen Hispaniens und das
Keltiberische. Wiesbaden: Steiner.
Schulte, Kim. 2010. ‘Loanwords in Romanian’. In Haspelmath and Tadmor 2010:
230–59.
Sinner, Carsten. 2004. ‘El castellano de Cataluña: Estudio empírico de aspectos
léxicos, morfosintácticos, pragmáticos y metalingüísticos’. Suppl. 320 to the
Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
Skelton, R. B. 1971. ‘Spanish baldar and Islamic penology’. Romance Philology
25: 173–82.
Sofer, Johann. 1930. Lateinisches und Romanisches aus den Etymologiae des Isidorus
von Sevilla: Untersuchungen zur lateinischen und romanischen Wortkunde.
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
References
265
Söhrman, Ingmar. 2009. ‘La influencia goda en el español según Bernardo José de
Aldrete’. Paper read at the VIII Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Lengua
Española (Santiago de Compostela, September 2009).
Solà-Solé, Josep. M. 1968. ‘El artículo al- en los arabismos del iberorrománico’.
Romance Philology 21: 275–85.
—
—— 1983. ‘El árabe y los arabismos en Cervantes’. In Josep M. Solà-Solé, Sobre
árabes, judíos y marranos y su impacto en la lengua y literature españolas.
Barcelona: Puvill, pp. 87–103. Originally published in J. M. Solà-Solé (ed.),
Estudios literarios de hispanistas norteamericanos dedicados a Helmut Hatzfeld
con motivo de su 80 aniversario. Barcelona: Puvill, 1977.
Spence, Nicol. 2004. ‘Le français véhicule des emprunts à l’anglais’. Revue de
linguistique romane 68: 95–103.
Spitzer, Leo. 1921. Lexikalisches aus dem Katalanischen und den übrigen
iberoromanischen Sprachen. Geneva: L. S. Olschki.
—
—— 1946. ‘Anc. prov. aib – anc. esp. aleve’. Modern Language Notes 61: 419–23.
—
—— 1963. ‘Adrede “deliberately, purposely”’. In Studia Philologica: Homenjae
ofrecido a Dámaso Alonso por sus amigos y discípulos con ocasión de su 60º
aniversario. Madrid: Gredos, pp. 459–61.
Stammerjohann, Harro et al. 2008. Dizionario di italianismi in francese, inglese,
tedesco. Florence: Accademia della Crusca.
Stefenelli, Arnulf. 2011. ‘Lexical Stability’. In Martin Maiden et al. (eds.), The
Cambridge history of the Romance languages, vol. 1: Structures. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 564–84.
Steiger, Arnald. 1932. ‘Contribución a la fonética del hispano-árabe y de los
arabismos en el ibero-románico y el siciliano’. Revista de Filología Española,
suppl. 17. Madrid: Hernando. Reprinted 1991, Madrid: Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Científicas.
—
—— 1948/49. ‘Aufmarschstrassen des morgenländischen Sprachgut’. Vox Romanica
10: 1–62.
—
—— 1967. ‘Arabismos’. In Enciclopedia Lingüística Hispánica, vol. 2. Madrid:
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, pp. 93–126.
Stone, Howard. 1957. ‘Los anglicismos en España y su papel en la lengua oral’. Revista
de Filología Española 41: 141–60.
Szemerényi, Oswald. 1963. ‘On reconstructing the Mediterranean substrata’.
Romance Philology 17: 404–18.
Tejedo Herrero, Fernando. 2008. ‘The metalinguistics of the term latín in HispanoRomance (13th–16th centuries)’. In Roger Wright (ed.), Latin vulgaire–latin tardif
VIII. Hildesheim, Zurich, and New York: Georg Olms, pp. 581–90.
—
—— 2009. ‘Algunas reflexiones en torno al término latín en la documentación
alfonsí’. Romance Quarterly 56: 4–12.
Tejedo Herrero, Fernando and Francisco Gago Jover. 2006. ‘El Diccionario militar de
Raimundo Sanz en el contexto de la lexicografía especializada del siglo XVIII’.
Dieciocho 29: 85–106.
266
References
Terlingen, Johannes H. 1943. Los italianismos en español desde la formación del
idioma hasta principios del siglo XVII. Amsterdam: N. v. Noord-hollandsche
Uitgevers Maatschappij.
—
—— 1967. ‘Italianismos’. In Enciclopedia Lingüística Hispánica, vol. 2. Madrid:
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, pp. 263–305.
Thibault, André. 2004. ‘Évolution sémantique et emprunts: Les gallicismes de
l’espagnol’. In Franz Lebsanft and Martin-Dietrich Glessgen (eds.) Historische
Semantik in den romanischen Sprachen. Linguistische Arbeiten, 483. Tübingen:
Niemeyer, pp. 103–15.
—
—— 2009. ‘Le traitement des gallicismes dans le Diccionaro de la lengua española de
la Real Academia Española’. In André Thibault (ed.), Gallicismes et théorie de
l’emprunt linguistique. Paris: Harmattan, pp. 107–31.
Thibault, André and Martin-Dietrich Glessgen. 2003. ‘El tratamiento lexicográfico
de los galicismos en español’. Revue de linguistique romane 67: 5–54.
Thomason, Sarah Grey. 2001. Language contact. Washington: Georgetown
University Press.
—
—— 2003. ‘Contact as a source of language change’. In Brian D. Joseph and Richard
D. Janda (eds.), The handbook of historical linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell,
pp. 687–712.
—
—— 2004.‘Determining language contact effects in ancient contact situations’. In
Pedro Bádenas de la Peña et al. (eds.), Lenguas de contacto: El testimonio escrito.
Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, pp. 1–14.
—
—— 2007. ‘Language contact and deliberate change’. Journal of Language Contact
1: 41–62.
Thomason, Sarah Grey and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language contact, creolization,
and genetic linguistics. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Thomason, Sarah Grey and Daniel L. Everett. 2005. ‘Pronoun borrowing’.
Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 27: 305–15.
Thompson, E.A. 1969. The Goths in Spain. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Tovar, Antonio. 1968a. Latín de Hispania: Aspectos léxicos de la romanización:
Discurso leído el día 31 de marzo de 1968 en su recepción pública. Madrid: Real
Academia Española.
—
—— 1968b. ‘Séneca y el latín de España (APTARE, SUBITANEUS, MANCIPIUM, PRAVUS)’. In
Serta Romanica: Festschrift für Gerhard Rohlfs. Tübingen: Niemeyer, pp. 133–39.
—
—— 1969a. ‘Catón y el latín de Hispania’. In Wolf-Dieter Lange and Heinz Jürgen
Wolf (eds.), Philologische Studien für Joseph Piel. Heidelberg: Carl Winter
Universitätsverlag, pp. 201–8.
—
—— 1969b. ‘Lucilio y el latín de España’. In Studi linguistici in onore de Vittore
Pisani, vol. 2. Brescia: Paideia, 1019–31.
Trask, Robert Lawrence. 1997. The history of Basque. London and New York:
Routledge.
Tuttle, Edwin H. 1923. ‘Romanic etymologies’. Modern Language Review 18: 474–76.
Untermann, Jürgen. 1975–2000. Monumenta Linguarum Hispanicarum. 5 vols.
Wiesbaden: L. Reichert.
References
267
Untermann, Jürgen. 1980. ‘Hispania’. In G. Neumann and Jürgen Untermann, (eds.),
Die Sprachen im Römischen Reich der Kaiserzeit. Bonn and Cologne: Rheinland
and Rudolph Habelt, pp. 1–17.
—
—— 1983. ‘Die althispanischen Sprachen’. In Wolfgang Haase (ed.), Aufstieg und
Niedergang der romanischne Welt, vol. 29: 2. Principat. Sprache und Literatur.
Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 791–818.
Vaan, Michiel de. 2008. Etymological dictionary of Latin and the other Italic
languages. Leiden: Brill.
Väänänen, Veikko. 1987. Le journal-épître d’Égérie (Itinerarium Egeriae): Étude
linguistique. Helsinki: Suomalainen.
Vallejo Arroniz, Pilar. 1986a. ‘Contribución al estudio de préstamos léxicos:
Galicismos en el español del siglo XVIII’. Boletín de la Academia Puertorriqueña
de la Lengua Española 14: 179–205.
—
—— 1986b. ‘El préstamo semántico: Algunos problemas’. Anuario de Lingüística
Hispánica 2: 261–76.
Vangehucten, Lieve. 2004. ‘¿Qué canta y baila, corta y vuela, y viene del norte a la
vez? El flamenco: Un complejo problema de homonimia/polisemia’. Revista de
Dialectolgía y Tradiciones Populares 59: 127–43.
Vázquez de Benito, María Concepción and María Teresa Herrera Hernández. 1989.
Los arabismos de los textos médicos latinos y castellanos de la Edad Media y de la
Modernidad. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.
Vázquez Ruiz, José. 1962. ‘Sobre la etimología de la palabra guapo’. Revista de
Filología Española 45: 299–303.
Velázquez Soriano, Isabel. 1984. ‘Innovaciones léxicas de origen griego en las
Etimologias de Isidoro de Sevilla’. In A. Bernabé et al. (eds.), Athlon Satura
Grammatica in Honorem Francisci R. Adrados, vol. 1. Madrid: Gredos, pp. 509–17.
—
—— 2004. Las pizarras visigodas (Entre el latín y su disgregación. La lengua hablada
en Hispania, siglos VI–VIII). Valladolid: Fundación Instituto Castellano y Leonés
de la Lengua and Madrid: Real Academia Española.
Vennemann (gen. Nierfeld), Theo and Patrizia Noel Aziz Hanna (ed.). 2003. Europa
Vasconica – Europa-Semitica. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Verdonk, Robert. 1979. ‘Contribución al estudio de la lexicografía española en
Flandes en el siglo XVII (1599–1705)’. Boletín de la Real Academia Española
59: 289–369.
—
—— 1980. La lengua española en Flandes en el siglo XVII: Contribución al estudio de
las interferencias léxicas y de su proyección en el español general. Madrid: Ínsula.
—
—— 2002. ‘El español del Siglo de Oro en contacto con el francés y el neerlandés:
Interferencias léxicas y préstamos en la obra de Antonio Carnero y de otros
autores españoles de Flandes (1567–1650)’. In María Teresa Echenique Elizondo
and Juan Sánchez Méndez (eds.), Actas del V Congreso Internacional de Historia
de la Lengua Española, Valencia 31 de enero – 4 de febrero de 2000, vol.2. Madrid:
Gredos, pp. 1845–56.
—
—— 2004. ‘Cambios en el léxico del español durante la época de los Austria’. In
Cano 2004, pp. 895–916.
268
References
Victorio, Juan (ed.). 1991. Poema de Alfonso Onceno. Madrid: Cátedra.
Vidos, B. E. 1965. Prestito, espansione e migrazione dei termini tecnici nelle lingue
romanze e non romanze: Problemi, metodi e risultati. Biblioteca dell’Archivum
Romanicum Serie II: Linguistica, 31. Florence: Leo S. Olschki.
—
—— 1972. ‘Relaciones antiguas entre España y los Países Bajos y problemas de los
préstamos holandeses (flamencos) en castellano’. Revista de Filología Española
55: 233–42.
Villar, Francisco. 1999. ‘Joan Coromines y los sustratos prerromanos de la Península
Ibérica’. In Joan Solà (ed.), L’obra de Joan Coromines: Cicle d’estudi i homenatge.
Sabadell: Fundació Caixa de Sabadell, pp. 53–65.
—
—— 2000. Indoeuropeos y no indoeuropeos en la Hispania prerromana: Las
poblaciones y las lenguas prerromanas de Andalucía, Cataluña y Aragón según la
información que nos proprciona la toponimia. Salamaca: Ediciones Universidad de
Salamanca.
Vincent, Bernard. 1993–94. ‘Reflexión documentada sobre el uso del árabe y de las
lenguas románicas en la España de los moriscos (ss. XVI–XVII)’. Sharq AlAndalus Estudios Árabes 10–11: 731–48 (=Homenaje/Homatge a María Jesús
Rubiera Mata).
Vose, Robin. 2009. Dominicans, Muslims and Jews in the medieval Crown of Aragón.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wagner, Max Leopold. 1953. ‘Etymologische Randbemerkungen zu neueren
iberoromanischen Dialektarbeiten und Wörterbüchern’. Zeitschrift für
romanische Philologie 49: 347–91.
—
—— 1960–64. Dizionario etimologico sardo. 3 vols. Heidelberg: Carl Winter
Universitätsverlag.
Walsh, John K. 1967. ‘The loss of Arabisms in the Spanish lexicon’. Dissertation,
University of Virginia.
Walsh, Thomas J. 1982. ‘Near-homonymy as a determinant of lexical retention and
loss: The case of Hispano-Romance despejar’. In Monica Macaulay et al. (eds.),
Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 13–15
February 1982. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society, pp. 127–34.
—
—— 1987. ‘Etimología del cast. ordeñar/gall.- port. ordenhar’. Romanische
Forschungen 99: 43–7.
—
—— 1997. ‘The Etymology of bostezar’. La corónica 26: 179–81.
Wartburg, Walther von. 1922–. Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch: Eine
Darstellung des galloromanischen Sprachschatzes. Bonn, later Berlin, and Basle:
various publishers.
—
—— 1952. ‘Die griechische Kolonisation in Südgallien und ihre sprachlichen Zeugen
im Westromanischen’. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 68: 1–48.
Webber, Edwin J. 1962. ‘A Spanish linguistic treatise of the fifteenth century’.
Romance Philology 16: 32–40.
Weinreich, Uriel. 1953. Languages in contact: Findings and problems. New York:
Linguistics Circle of New York.
References
269
Winet, Monika. 2006. El artículo árabe en las lenguas iberorrománicas (aspectos
fonéticos, morfológicos y semánticos de la transferencia léxica). Córdoba: Studia
Semitica.
Winford, Don. 2005. ‘Contact-induced changes: Classification and processes’.
Diachronica 22: 373–427.
Winter, Esme. 2005. ‘Zum Verhältnis sprachkontaktinduzierter Innovationen,
lexikalischer Entlehnung und fremder Wörter – zugleich ein Beitrag zu
“Lehnschöpfung” und “Scheinenentlehnung”’. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 56: 31–62.
Winter-Froemel, Esme. 2008. ‘Unpleasant, unnecessary, unintelligible? Cognitive
and communicative criteria for evaluating borrowings and alternative strategies’.
In Roswitha Fischer and Hanna Pulaczewska (eds.), Anglicisms in Europe:
Linguistic diversity in a global context. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 16–41.
Wise, Hilary. 1997. The vocabulary of modern French: Origins, structure and function.
London: Routledge.
Wodtko, Dagmar S. 2000. Wörterbuch der keltiberischen Inschriften. Vol. 5 of
Monumenta Linguarum Hispanicarum, ed. Jürgen Untermann. Wiesbaden:
Dr. Ludwig Reichert.
Wohlgemuth, Jan. 2009. A typology of verbal borrowings. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Woll, Dieter. 1997. ‘Esp. criollo y port. crioulo: Volviendo a la cuestión del origen y la
historia de las dos palabras’. In Annegret Bollé and Johannes Kramer (eds.),
Latinitas et Romanitas: Festschrift für Hans Dieter Bork zum 65. Geburtstag.
Bonn: Romanistischer Verlag, pp. 517–35.
Wright, Roger. 1982. Late Latin and early Romance in Spain and Carolingian France.
Liverpool: F. Cairns.
—
—— 1993. ‘Complex monolingualism in early Romance’. In William J. Ashby et al.
(eds.), Linguistic perspectives on the Romance Languages: Selected papers from the
XXI Symposium on Romance Languages. Amsterdam and Philadelphia:
Benjamins, pp. 377–88. Reprinted in Wright 1994, pp. 1–11.
—
—— 1994. Early Ibero-Romance: Twenty-one studies on language and texts from the
Iberian Peninsula between the Roman empire and the thirteenth century. Newark,
DE: Juan de la Cuesta.
—
—— forthcoming. ‘Late and vulgar Latin in Muslim Spain: The African connection’.
To appear in F. Biville (ed.), Latin vulgaire-latin tardif IX.
Zaccaria, Enrico. 1927. L’elemento iberico nella lingua italiana. Bologna: Cappelli.
Zolli, Paolo. 1975. Le parole straniere. Bologna: Zanichelli.
This page intentionally left blank
Index
Spanish (medieval and modern)
abadengo 77
abandonado 150
abarca 31
abedul 31
aberzale 41
abés/avés (OSp) 103
abigarrado 128
abiqueceti 83
abitar 163
abnue (OSp) 83
abogar 171
abolengo 77
abotonarse 134
absolución 163
abstracto 167fn
abuso 165
acafelar 107
acampar 150
acantilado 190
access point 226
accidental 163
acción 175
account manager 222
accrued interest 222
acechar 46
aceite 84, 95, 112
aceituna 96, 112
acelga 112
acémila 84
acero 105
achacar 102
achiote 207
acicate 97
acollar 197
acoquinar 128
acorrer 171
actitud 151
activismo 132
activista 132
activo 167fn
acto 175
acuarela 151
acuareloide 180fn
acuerdo sorpresa 222
acuidad 132
adalid 84
adaptable 221
adedre (OSp) 75
ademán 91
adherencia 222
adhesión 222
administración 165
administrador 226
admitir 171
adobe 84, 112
adolescente 167fn
adolescentoide 180fn
adorar 161, 169
adorra 90
adozir (OSp) 171
adquirir 170
adrede 75
a(d)ta (OSp) 103
adulterio 163
adversario 163
aerobic 220
afán 91
afeitar 124, 183
afeite 183
aficionado 134
afirmar 163
afligir 171
agacharse 151
agalla 31
agasajar 71
272
Index
ágil 175
agnosticoide 180fn
agobiado 221
agorar (OSp) 37
agua 107
aguacate 203, 207
aguachil 205
aguanafa (OSp) 106–7
aguantar 147
ahorrar 102, 112
aína (OSp) 123, 173
airbag 221
aire 152
aisa/aise (OSp) 126
ajedrez 84
ajenabe 82
ajeno 46
ajes 204
ají 201, 205, 206
ají boniato 208
ajonjolí 112
al(ch)az 90
alabarda 128
alacena 112
alacrán 98
alamán (OSp) 124
alambique 82
álamo 14, 29, 31, 32, 72, 73
alarife (OSp) 100, 110
alazán 100
albañil 112
albará(n)/alvará(n)/albalá(n)/alvalá(n)
(OSp) 84, 98–9
albaricoque 82, 84
albedi/albedin (OSp) 114
albéitar/albeitaría 90, 100, 110
albérchigo 82
alberengena (OSp) 108
albergar 69
albergue 69
albisra (OSp) 106
albíxera (OSp) 106
albogues 108
albornoz 84, 112
albricia 106
albriciar/albriciador (OSp) 106fn
albricias 106
albudeca 104
alcaçar (OSp) 108
alcacel (OSp) 108
alcahuete 84, 104
alcalde 83, 107, 109, 112
alcaldesa 83
alcaldía 83, 112
alcancía 108
alcanfor 82
alcántara 98, 108
alcantarilla 112
alcázar 82
alcoba 97, 112
alcohol 112
alcorasci 90
alcurnia 105
aldayra 107
aldea 84
aldisco 41
alemán 124
alerta 152
aleve 14, 75, 92
alevosía 75fn
alevoso 75fn
alface/alfaça (OSp) 97
alfageme (OSp) 99
alfaquim (OSp) 99, 110
alfayate (OSp) 99–100, 110, 195
alfejeme (OSp) 110
alfeñique 84
alférez 109
alfilel (OSp) 108
alfiler 84, 108, 112
alfombra 112
alfonsí/alfonsino 108
alforria (OSp) 111fn
algacel (OSp) 108
algarabía 104
algarivo (OSp) 100
algebra 82fn
algodón 84, 90, 107, 112, 132
Index
alguacil 108
alguien 184, 198, 234
alguién (OSp) 184
alhajero 100
alhanía (OSp) 97fn
alhombra 108
alhonbra (OSp) 107
alhucema 84, 108
aliaje 127
alicatar 112
alien 221
alienígena 221
alioli 197
aliso 14, 31, 32
aljibe 84
aljófar 84, 98
alma 32, 163
almacábar 98
almacabra 98
almacén 84, 108
almacenaje 127
almadía 201fn
almeja 10fn, 188
almena 10fn, 108
almendra 108
almirante 90, 94
almirez 83fn
almjheres (OSp) 108
almocáber 98
almofalla 98
almofalla (OSp) 168fn
almogaza 108
almohada 84, 96
almorzar 108
almoxaba (OSp) 106fn
almoxarife (OSp) 111
almuctén (OSp) 90
almud 107
almuerzo 10fn
alogar (OSp) 122, 147
alojar 146, 147, 192
alondra 28
alpaca 203
alquilar 112, 122
alquilé (OSp) 122
alquimia 82
alta costura 135
alta prioridad 222
alta sociedad 135
altabaca 208
altayde 107
altivo 178
alto 152
alto rango 135
altruismo 132
alucinante 167fn, 226
alucinar 226
alucine 226
alud 30
alumaje 127
alviçra (OSp) 106
alvizrar/alvizrador (OSp) 106fn
alvistra (OSp) 106
alvizra (OSp) 106
alvo (OSp) 70, 123
alzacuellos 135
amainar 72, 74, 190
amanecer 105
amante 141
amarillo 58, 173
amarrar 79, 124
amateur 133, 134
amateurismo 132
ambigú 132
amelga 29
amén de 150
(a)mena (OSp) 108
americano 217
americanoide 180fn
amotinar 128
amparar 124
análisis 179
anarquía 179
anchoa 28
ancilla 176
anciroide 179
añel (OSp) 57, 122
anfetamina 220
273
274
Index
angazo 73
angelical 178
angosto 52
angra 190
ánima 163
animalesco 155
animoso 177
añino 57fn
anís 197
anjico 191
año luz 222
anochecer 105
anorak 227
añorar 60, 196, 197
ánsar 76
ansí (OSp) 126
antagonismo 131
ante 112
anticipar 221
antiguo 173
antimonopolio 221
antitrust 221
anual 165
aorar (OSp) 169
arávigo (OSp) 133fn
apagar 55
apañar 190
aparcar 227
apartamento 132
apenas si 135
apóstol/apostólico/apostóligo 163
apoyar 146
apreciar 163
aprendizaje 127
aprés (OSp) 126
ara 206
arabesco 155
arácnido 173fn
arancel 95
arándano 31, 34
arcabuco 206
arcabuz 128, 152
archivo adjunto 226
arcipreste 134
ardido 192
ardido/fardido/faldrido (OSp) 123
ardilla 31
areito 203
arena 52
arenga 70
argáneo 128
argent (OSp) 122
argolla 84
aria 152
árido 173
arienzo (OSp) 122
arisco 186
arlequín 152
armariado 225
armariazarse 225
armariazo 225
armario/armaria 225
armarismo 225
armarización 225
armarizante 225
armento 177
armonía 167fn
aro 31
arquitecto 100, 110
arrancar 38
arrastrar 226
arrecife 84
arrefezarse (OSp) 107
arrehén (OSp) 108
arribista 132
arrivista 131
arroba 112
arroyo 23
arroz 84, 107, 112
artejo 158
artículo 158, 163
artillería 152
asalto 149
asamblea 128
asar 46
asaute 149
asaz (OSp) 126
asedio 150
Index
aserción 165
asesinar 150
asmar (OSp) 50, 124, 170
aspirar 150
assechar (OSp) 46
assí (OSp) 126
asterismo 179
atacanar 115
atacar/ataque 128, 145
atahorma 87fn
atalaya (OSp) 111
atamar 102
atamor (OSp) 108
atar 46, 49
atarea (OSp) 108
ataúd 84, 112
ataviar 71, 72, 73
atención 167fn
aterrizaje de emergencia 222
aterrizaje forzoso 222
aterrizar 134
atollar 37
atracar 102, 112
atropellar 124–5
atún 82, 84
audiencia 163, 221
auditar 220
auditorio 221
auténtico 163
automóvil 180
autopista de la información 226
autostop 133, 220, 224
(auto)stopista 224
avançar 151
avance 221
avanzar 128
ave 46
avellanate 197
avena 177
avenate 197
avenida 130
aver/ser (OSp) 173
avería 93–4, 152, 193
avés/abés (OSp) 103
ávido 173, 174
avilantez 197
avión 132
avioneta 134
aviónica 220
avocar 171
avol (OSp) 62, 197
avoleza 197
axataba (OSp) 83
axí 205
ayatola 112
ayo 72
azafata 109, 112, 219
azafrán 83fn
azagaya 87fn, 98
azar 84
azcona 28
azeitera/o (OSp) 95fn
azogue 98
azote 84
azotea 112
azúcar 82, 84, 107
azucarero 112
azucena 112
azul 11, 82, 101, 112
azur (OSp) 101
babucha 133
baby sitter 221
back 218
background 221
badea 104
bádminton 220
baffle 220
bagaje 127, 128
bagasa 192
bailar 124
baile 151
bajel 192
bajo 152
baladí 101
balance 165, 197
balcón 151
baldaquín 151
275
276
Index
baldar 107fn
balde 190
ballener (OSp) 214
balompié 219, 227
baloncesto 221
banalidad 132
bancarrota 152
banco 152
bando 71
bank rate 222
banquero 152
banquete 128
banquisa 80
baquiano 208
bar 227
barahá 116
baratar 37
barato 37
barbacoa 203, 208–9
barbaresco 155
barbecho 48
barbero 99, 110
barbitaheño (OSp) 107
barman 227
barra 30
barraca 197
barragán 71
barranco 30
barrer 46
barricada 128
barrio 84, 112
barro 30
barrunte/varrunte (OSp) 72, 148fn
básquetbol/basquetbol 220, 221, 224
basquiña 189
bastardo 127
batalla 121
batallón 152
batata 203, 204, 205
batatas 206
batazo 224
bate 224, 227
batea 205, 207, 208
bateador 224
batear 224, 227
batelón 191
bateo 224
batería 134
batey 205
baticambra/beticambra (OSp) 106
batifondo 156
batuta 152
baúl 134
bautizar 161
bayoneta 128
bear market 221
bebé 132, 133
becerro 28, 31
behaviorismo 220, 222
beicon 220
beirutense 108
beirutí 108
béisbol/beisbol 224, 227
beisbolero 224
beisbolista 224
beisbolístico 224
bejuco 205, 206
bel (OSp) 176
bela 156
beldat/beldad (OSp) 141fn
beleño 29, 31
belesa 29
belígero (OSp) 176, 177
belipotente (OSp) 177
belleza 141
bello 55, 77, 122, 176
bellota 84, 96, 108
beneficiar 163
berberisco 154
berenjena 108
bergante 197
berlina 132
berro 29, 31
berrueco 30
bestia 158
best-seller 220, 221
bestsellerista 224
betamel (OSp) 106fn
Index
bicha 158
bichoco 191
bicicleta 134
bienestar 131
bifteq 217
bigote 77–8
bigudí 132
bikini 227
billete 128, 134
billete de ferrocarril 217
birome 220
bisagra 112
bisoño 151, 152
bistec 216, 217, 227
bisturí 132
bisututería 132
bizarro 28, 144–5
biznaga 96fn
bla(v)o (OSp) 123
blanca 226
blanca dama 226
blanco 69, 123
blandir 125
blandusco 40
bla(v)o (OSp) 102
blinda/blinde 130
blister 220
block 227
bloguero/bloguera 226
bloque 217
bloquear 128
blu(e)sista 224
blues 220
bluff 216
boby 216
bocadillogate 224
bocezar (OSp) 52
bochar 156
bochorno 49
bocina 227
bodega 227
boga 132
bohío 201, 204
boina 28, 41
boiserie 133
boite 133
bojar 197
bol 197
bolapié 219
boletín 152
bolindre 190
bolopié 219
bolsa de aire/seguridad 221
bolsista 131
bombarda 152
bombardear 152
bombón 132
bonança (OSp) 142
bonanza 142fn
boniato 208
boñigo 31
borona 31
borracha 31
borrasca 145
borrego 31
boscaje 127
bosque 192, 195
bostezar 52
bote 128, 214, 217
botella 132
botón 134
boxeador 224, 227
boxear 217, 224, 227
boxeo 224, 227
boxer 220
boya 79
boyscout 216
braguetagate 224
bramar 70, 73
brandi 217
brandy 220
bravo 186
bregar 70
breña 29, 30, 31
breva 49
breve 163
277
278
Index
brigada 132
brigadier 130
brillante 167fn
brindis 78
brinquiño 189
brío 34
brocha 134
brodo 156
bronce 193
brotar/brote 70
browning 216
browser 226
broza 73
brozno (OSp) 76
bruchar 156
bruja 34
brujas (OSp) 79fn
bruno 123
brusco 36
bruxa (OSp) 34
buceta 191
bucólico 167fn
budefa (OSp) 104
budín 217
buen gusto 131
buflista/blufista 216
bufón 152
bufonesco 155
buhío 205
buido 197
buitre 200fn
bujía 84
bul-dog 217
bungaló 220
buque factoría 222
burdel 192
burgués 128, 130
burguesía 130
burlesco 155
buró 132
buscar 38, 233
buster 220
busto (OSp) 31
butaca 209
butifarra 197
buzo 190
caballo 226
cabaña 24
cabeça (OSp) 54
cabero (OSp) 172
cabeza 46, 54
cabila 112fn
cabildo 158
cabo 54
cacahuete 203, 209
cacao 205, 206, 207, 209
cachimbo 191
cachorro 27fn, 33fn
cacicazgo 205
cacique 201, 205, 206, 209
caciquero 205
caciquillo 205
caçurro (OSp) 35
cadáver 167fn
cadete 128, 130
cadi 220
café 128, 134
cafetera 132
cafetería 227
çaguero (OSp) 173
cagul 227
çahorar (OSp) 102fn
caimán 200fn, 206, 208
caja 197
calaboço (OSp) 97fn
calabozo 97
calamaco 207
calamar 197
calandria 62
calientaplatos 222
callao 190
calle 41
callos 46
calote 191
calpul 205
cama 24, 25, 31, 38, 59
cámara 106
Index
camarero 227
cambija 29, 31
cambio 152
cambra (OSp) 106
camión 132, 134
camisa 28
camisola 197
camotes 205
campañagate 224
camping 133
campus 220
camuflaje 127
can 38–9
canal de televisión 227
canalla 154
canallesco 155
canapé 132
cáncer 98
cancha 203, 209
cancilleresco 155
canción protesta 222
cancioneros 197
cándido 173, 174
candio (OSp) 174fn
canguro 221
canguroide 180fn
caníbal 203
caníbales 204
cánido 173fn
canoa 8, 201–2, 204, 205, 209
canoero 205
canohuela 205
canoílla 205
canónigo 163
cantil 190
canuto 226
caoba 207
caona 201
capelo 156
capiango 191
capital 158
capitel 151
capítulo 158, 163
capo 156
capricho 152
capucho 140
capulín 205
cara 62
carabela 190
caramesia 79
cárcel 97
carey 207
caribe 201, 206
caricatura 151
cariño 184
carnavalesco 155
carné/carnet 132
caro 184
carrasca 31
carro 28
carruaje 127fn, 197
carta 195fn
cartel 192
cartón 151
cartoonista 224
cartucho 146, 152
casa 105
casamata 152
caser 115–16
cassette 221
casta 71, 72
castiello (OSp) 55fn
castillo 55fn
catalufa 150
catástrofe 179
cátedra 163
caudal 158
caudillaje 127
causa 163
cazabe 201, 204
cazatalentos 220
cazurro 28, 35
çedaca 116
ceder 167fn
cédula 99
cegajo 31
ceiba 207
celeste 102
279
280
Index
celestial 178
cello 220
cementoide 180fn
cencerro 27fn, 31
ceñir 171
ceniza 58
centeno 46
centilumíneo 178
centinela 111, 152
cerraja 46
certificar 163
cervantesco 155
cerveza 28
cháchara 153
chachu 41
chalé 132
chaleco 112
chamada 187
chamarasca 187
chamariz 187
chamiza 187
chamorro 28, 35
champaña 132
champiñón 132
champú 227
chamuscar 187
chantaje 127
chanza/chancha 153
chaparro 28, 31
chapela 41
chapetón 206
charco 30
charcutería 132
charla 226
charlar 153
charlatán 153
charlatanesco 155
charme 133
charter 220
chat/chatear 226
chatarra 27fn
chato 187
chauvinismo 131
chaval 227
cheirar 190fn
chelín 217
cheque 216, 217, 227
chequear 217, 220
chequeo 217
chian 205
chicle 203, 209
chilaba 112fn
chile 205
chimenea 134
chimerino 178
chinchilla 203
chinchín 220
chinchua 41
chip 220
chiquibuite 205
chiricar 41
chirimiri 41
chirlar/chillar 153
chisme 93
chistu 41
chistulari 41
chivo 156
chocar 227
chocolate 203, 206, 207, 209
chocolatero 207
chófer 132
chopo 187
choque 227
chorua 41
choza 187
chubasco 40, 188
chubasquero 227
chucuna 41
chulesco 155
churrigueresco 155
chut 224
chutar 224, 227
chutarse 224, 226
chute 224
cicatero 104
ciclón 227
çidur (OSp) 116
ciego 55
Index
cien por cien 135
cieno 46
cigarra 31, 208
cigarro 208
cingaro 151
cingir (OSp) 171
cinta 221
circuncigido 177
circuncingir 176
circunloquio 167fn
ciruela 59
cirujano 99
citano (OSp) 104
ciudad dormitorio 222
ciudadela 152
civilización 131
cladio 178
clamar 163
claraboya 128
clarífico 176
claro 163
clavel 196
claxon 227
clientela 176
clip 220, 227
closet 220
clown 220
club/clube 215, 216, 223, 227
clubista 224
clubman 216
coa 205
coca 203, 207
coche 227
coche bomba 222
coche cama 135
cóctel 227
coctelero 227
codornizgate 224
cognac 132
cohena 115
cohete 197
coita (OSp) 183–4
coitado (OSp) 183–4
coitar (OSp) 183–4
coitino 178
cojo 46
colchón de aire 221
colibrí 209
colifato 156
coliflor 192
coliseo 152
collaço (OSp) 46–7
collazo 46–7
colle (OSp) 176
colmena 33, 51
colo 190fn
colodra 31, 61
colorido 151
comblueça (OSp) 33, 50
comborça (OSp) 50
combrueça (OSp) 50
comedia 152
comedio 178
comer 47
comer 59
cometer 171
comic 220
comilón 47fn
comodidad 150
cómodo 150
comodoro 217
companaje 127fn
compañía 152
cómplice 165
complot 132
compositor 152
compota 132
comradeship 216
conborça (OSp) 33
concepto 175
concreto 220
condir (OSp) 74
cóndor 203, 209
conducir 171, 177
conductismo 222
conejo 24
confitar 197
congoja 197
281
282
Index
congreso 217
conoide 179
conquerir (OSp) 170
conquistar 170–71
consejero 122
consiller (OSp) 122
consomé 132
constituir 171
construir 171
continuo 173
contorno 151
contracultura 220
contrainteligencia 220
contrario 163
controversia 163
conuco 204
convención 227
conversar 170
convertir 171
convertirse 177
convite 197
convoy 130
cookie 226
coolie 216
copa 96
copal 205
coqueta 132
coraje (OSp) 126–7
corazón 58
corbata 132, 134
cordero 57, 122
córner 220, 224
cornisa 151
coronel 148
corpiño 189
corporación 217
corral 33
corregir 170, 171
correlativo 167fn
correo 226
correo basura 226
correr 105, 171
corretage (OSp) 127
corro 33
corromper 171
corrupto 175
corso 151
cortacésped 222
cortafuegos 226
cortejar 143
cortejo 143
cortesano 143, 192
corusco 176
cosa 163
coscojo 31
cos(s)o (OSp) 169
cotejo 197
cotidiano 173
coto 30
cotón 132
coyote 203, 205, 209
cras (OSp) 56
crawl 227
crédito 152, 167fn
crema 128
cremallera 134
criar 187fn
criollo 187
criptogay 225
criterio 131
crítica 131
croqueta 132
cross 220
cruasán/croissant 132
crucificar 163
cruz 158, 177
cuáquero 214
cuarentena 175
cuartel 197
cuarto 174
cubismo 132
cuer (OSp) 58
cuérrago 24
cueto 30
cuita 183
cuitar 183
culebra 200fn
culturismo/culturista 132
Index
cundir 72, 74
cuqui 226
çurdo (OSp) 35
curman 216
cursi 93
curso 169
çutano (OSp) 104
dadaísmo/dadaísta 132
dançar (OSp) 124
dancing 216
dandy 216
danza 92
danzar 92, 124
dardo 98
dátil 197
de balde 107
de-/diciplo (OSp) 163
debacle 132
débil 123, 165, 172, 175
débile (OSp) 166fn
debilidad 132
débito 152
debutante 220
década 221
décimo 163, 175
décimo cuarto 175
décimo quinto 175
décimo tercero 175
declinar 177
decorar 163
decreto 163
deducir 171
defensa 218
defensivo 178
defraudar 167fn
degredo 191
delfinario 220
deltoide 179
demás 48
denostar 47
departamento 132
departir (OSp) 170
deporte (OSp) 223
derbi 220
derradero (OSp) 173
derrota (OSp) 134
derviche 133
descharchar 220
descolorido 173
desmán 80
desmantelar 146
(d)esmarrido (OSp) 123, 144
desmayar 125
desmazalado (OSp) 114
despachar 125
despavorido (OSp) 54
despejado 188
despejar 188
(d)espertar 55
destacar 146
destroçar (OSp) 192fn
destrozar 192fn
detalle 130, 132
determinismo 131
devaluación 227
diabetoide 180fn
dialecto 179
dicótomo 179
diezmo 163, 175
diferenciar 170
difícil 165, 172
difícile (OSp) 166fn
digitaloide 180fn
digno 175
dintel 128
diploide 179
dique 79
directo 161
director de cuentas 222
dirigir 165, 170
dirigismo 132
disc jockey 221
discapacitado 220
discípulo 163
discreto 156
discurrir 150, 171
discurso 150
283
284
Index
diseñar 151
diseño 151
disputar 163
distinguir 170, 171
diverso 177
dividir 170
diziseteno (OSp) 175
doblaje 127, 132
doblar 132
dobletes 158
doç(e) (OSp) 177fn
docena 175
dock 216
doctor(r) 175
dogmatismo 131
dogo 214
dolama 93
dólar 227
domage (OSp) 127
domar 60
dominio 226
dopar 220
dormilón 47fn
dormitorio 97
doz (OSp) 173
dozeno (OSp) 175
dragcuin 225
dravidiano 220
drogadicción 220
duchar 135
ducial 178
dúctil 175
dulce 173, 177
duna 79
duodécimo 175
duro 159
dutriz 177
echán 74
echar (de) menos 185
eclipse 163
ecualizar 220
edificar 161
editar 221
editor 217, 227
edredón 80, 134
efecto 175
eficacia 165
efundir (OSp) 171
egídeo 178
ejército 98, 165, 168
elección 163, 170
electo 170
elegíano 178
elegir 170
elemento 163
elíptico 130
élite 132
e-mail/emilio 226
embaxada (OSp) 148
embaxador (OSp) 151
embixar 205
emboscada 152
emboscar 152
emédido 173fn
emer (OSp) 169
emergencia 165, 221
emitir 171
empachar 125, 151
emplear 125
emprenta (OSp) 194
émulo 167fn
en balde 107
en poridad (OSp) 105
en puridad 105
(e)nagua(s) 203, 205, 207, 209
enaziado (OSp) 106
encaramar 107
encarnación 151, 163
encobar (OSp) 51
encontrar 125
encuentro 218
enderezar (OSp) 170
enfadar 186
enfeñir (OSp) 170
engaño 112
(en)gorar (OSp) 37
enhestar 171
Index
enjambrar 171
enjertar 171
enojar 125
enrolar 227
ensamblar 128
entender 54
entercar 36
enternegar 36
entremés 197
entretener 150
entrevista 221
episodio 179
equilibrista 131
equipaje 128, 134
esbelteza 151
esbelto 151
esbornia 156
escachar 190fn
escaecer (OSp) 60
escancianero (OSp) 71
escanciar 71
escanciar (OSp) 72
escancio 74
escancio (OSp) 72
escándalo 163
escansafatiga 156
escaparate 79
escaramuza 152
escaramuzar 152
escarlatina 112
escarpe 150
escarpín 151
escartacho/escartocho/escartazo 146
escatimar 71
escayola 193
escepticismo 131
escéptico 131
esclusa 128
escolta 152
escopeta 152
escorpión/escurpión 98
escrúpulo 167fn
escuadra/escuadrón 152
escuálido 173
escudete 192
escultismo 220
esdrújulo 11fn, 152
esdrúxulo 151
esgrimir 125
eslabón 72
eslálom 80
esleer (OSp) 170
eslogan 220
esmagar 190fn
esmalte 192
esmar (OSp) 50
esmoquin 133, 227
esnifada 226
esnifador 226
esnifar 220, 226
esnife 226
esnifota 226
esnó 226
(e)snob 133, 220
espacio 163
espagueti(s) 153fn
español 124
españon (OSp) 124
esparavel 197
esparto 62
espaviento 150
espectáculo 221
espectador 130
esperpentoide 180fn
espeto 70
espeto 71
espía 148, 226
espíagate 224
espilocho 151
espinaca 82, 85, 112
espit 226
espitar 226
espito 71, 72
espitoso 226
esplín 217
espontón 130
(e)spray 221
espuela 71, 97
285
286
Index
esquiar 80
esquife 193, 197
esquijama 227
esquilar 71, 72
esquina 70
estación de servicio 227
estafador 154
estafar 151, 154
estanza 152
este 213
estela 190
estéril 173, 175
esterquera/esterquero 190
estimar 50, 124, 170
estío 56, 59
estoria (OSp) 169
estrambote 148
estrangular 176
estresado 221
estribo 70
estrilar/estrilo 156
estri(m)bote (OSp) 148
estringa 150
estropeado 151
estrumento (OSp) 169
estuco/estuque 151
estudio 177
estúpido 174
etiquetaje 127
examinar 171
éxito 221
experiencia 221
explorador 226
expresivo 178
exprimelimones 222
extracción 165
extraditar 220
extraterrestre 221
fablar (OSp) 47
fabricar 158, 171
fachada 151
fácil 102, 172, 175
fácile (OSp) 166fn
facilidad 165
facilitar 150
façoleto 151
façuerelo (OSp) 96
faena 196, 197
falda 192
fallar (OSp) 52
fallar menos (OSp) 185
falso amigo 135
falúa 94
faluca 93, 94
fanega 83fn
fantasía 150, 152
farniente 156
farsa 128
fase 179
fashionable 216
fa(s)ta (OSp) 103
fatal 167fn
fauvismo/fovismo 132
favor 167fn
favorido 123fn
fazaña (OSp) 106
fazer (OSp) 106fn
fazienda (OSp) 121, 196
feble (OSp) 123, 172, 198
fecha límite 222
fedayín 112
federación 217
félido 173fn
feliz 177
femenina 163
femenismo 132
fenomenoide 180fn
feo 47, 122
fermoso (OSp) 52
fértil 165, 175
fervir (OSp) 52
festejar 196, 197
festín 149
festino (OSp) 173
fianco 149
fichero 135
ficto 176
Index
fideos 152–3
figurar 163
fila 128
film/filme 223
filosofía/filósofo 163
finanzas 132
fingir 170
fiordo 80
firewall 226
físico 99
flácido 174
flaco 172
flamenco/flamenques 79–80
flámine 177
flanco 149
flas 220
flash 226
flecha 121
flipante 226
flipar 226
flipe 226
flipero 226
flipeta 226
flojo 172
flor 121
fodro 150
fogaje 190
fol (OSp) 123
fólder 220
follaje 197
follía 197
fonología 180
fonsada (OSp) 168fn
fonta (OSp) 121
footing 10, 133, 224
forastero 192, 195, 197
formaje 127fn
formalismo 131
formulista 131
fornido 123
foro 226
forra 35fn
forro (OSp) 123
fortuna 142
foso 150, 152
fotografía 180
frac 133
fracasar 149
frágil 175
fraguar 158, 171
frailengo 77
franco 102, 123
franela 132
frazada 197
fresa 134
fresco 69, 151
fresqueza 141fn
frígido 174
friolengo 77
fruir (OSp) 171, 176
fruto 161
fuessa (OSp) 152
fugitivo 167fn
fulano 103–4
fumar 128
fumista 132
furbo 156
furiente 176
fusil 132
fusión 131
fútbol 216, 219, 224, 227
futbol(o)mania 224
futbolero 224
futbolín 224
futbolista 224
futbolístico 224
gabarra 27fn
gabinete 128
gafo (OSp) 101, 102, 111
gaidad 225
gaita 71, 73
galápago 31
galardón 71
galea/galera (OSp) 141–2
galería 130, 151
galimatías 132
gallardo 127
287
288
Index
galleta 226
gallo 190
gana 71, 72
gancho 29
gándara 24
gangster 220
ganso 71, 72, 76
ganta 68
gante (OSp) 79fn
garaje 127
garantía 128
garrido 122
garúa 190
garza 29
gas 131
gasa 112
gasoline 227
gavilán 72
gay 225
gay(h)etero 225
gayby 225
gayesa 225
gayez 225
gayicidad 225
gayismo 225
géiser 80
gemibundo 177
gemir 127, 169
gendarme/gendarmería 130
geno 176
genta (OSp) 122
gente 121, 127, 169
gentil 122
gentleman 216
gigante 167fn
gigantesco 155
giorno 150
gloria 163
glorieta 134
glycol 220
gobernanta 132
gol(es) 224, 227
golazo 224
goleada 224
goleador 224
golear 224
golf 133
goliardo 127
golpe de estado 135
gomia 48
gordo 24
gorguz 87fn
gorra 31
grabadora 221
gracia 163
gramófono 227
gramola 227
grima 72
grave (OSp) 172
gris 123
grogui 220
groom 216
grotesco 151
grupo 226
gruta 141
guadaña 71, 93
guadañar 71
guadapero 71
guafe 217
guajolote 203, 208
guanin 201
guante 71, 147
guapo 128
guardacostas 222
guardar 69
guardián 71
guarecer 69
guarir (OSp) 69, 70
guateque 209
guay 75–6
guaya 76
guayaba 209
guayaco 206
guayar 76
güero 37
guerra 69
guezará 116
guijarro 28
Index
guinea 217
guión 221
guipil 205
guitarra 112
gulpeja (OSp) 39
g(u)rumelo 190
gusano 39–40
gusanoide 180fn
habí 90
hábil 173, 175
hablar 47, 59
hablar indiano 204
hablista 131
hacer caso omiso de 220–21
hacer el amor 134
hacker 226
halagar 84, 102
hallar 52, 125, 185
halón 179
haloque 214
haloque (OSp) 94
hamaca 201, 206, 209
hamalau 41
hamaquero 205
hamaquilla 205
hamburguesa 220
haragán 101
harén 133
hasta 15, 84, 90, 103, 116, 234
hat trick 224
hata (OSp) 103
hato 72
hazaña 106
hazino (OSp) 101, 102, 111
hechura 41
heder 47
hedo (OSp) 122
heñir 170
herborista 131
hermano/hermana 56
hermoso 52, 77
hermosura 141fn
hervir 52
heterogay 225
hidalgo 105
hidrógeno 131
hijodalgo (OSp) 105
(h)istoria 161, 169
historial 221
hojeador 226
hola 93
hombre rana 222
hombro 52
homenage (OSp) 127
homepage 226
homezillo (OSp) 169
homicidio 169
homosexual 225fn
honta (OSp) 121
hora punta 222
hormaza 47
hormazo 47
horóscopo 167fn
horro (OSp) 101, 102, 111, 123
hucha 129
huero 37
huerta/huerto 121
hueste (OSp) 98, 168
humanidad 131
húmido 174
huracán 203, 205, 206, 209
idiota 163
ídolo 163
ignorar 220
iguana 200fn, 204, 209
ikurriña 41–2
ilustración 131
ilustrar 131
imagen 163
imaginativo 178
impéritoignaro (OSp) 177
impervio 177
imposible 165
imprenta 197
impresionismo/impresionista 132
incómodo 150
289
290
Index
incurrir 171
indicar 167fn
infante 105
(in)felice (OSp) 166fn
infestar 171
inflación 227
influción 177
influir 171
inmunología 180
inquirir 170
inquísitos 177
insertar 171
insigne 175
instrumento 169
interés acumulado 222
interesante 132
interese (OSp) 166fn
injertar 171
internet 226
interrogar 161
interrumpir 171
interview 217, 221
interviú 220
intriga 132
introducir 171
invasión 219
invectivo 167fn
ir con toda la haka 112fn
iraquí/iraqués 108
irse a keli 112fn
itxura 41
izar 125, 129
izquierdo 27, 34, 35fn
jabón 68fn
jaguar 200fn, 208, 209
jai laif 216
jaima 112fn
jalapa 206
jalfnajalf 217
jaloque 150
jamás 15, 125–6, 127, 138, 234
jamón 121, 127, 134
jaquemate 50
jarabe 84
jardín 121, 127
jarro/jarra 108, 112
jazmín 112
jazz-band 216
jeep 227
jefe 129
jícara 206, 207
jockey 227
jogar (OSp) 126fn
join 226
joint/yoin 226
jota 124
joya 127
joyería 134
joyero 100
juego 126fn
juegos 227
juez 126fn
jugar un papel 135
junglista 224
junio 126fn
junto 126fn
kaletarra 41
kif 112fn
kilometraje 127
kilómetro 131
knockout 227
krill 220
lacio 174
ladino (OSp) 124
ladronesco 155
lagarto 200fn, 208
laidamiento (OSp) 123
laideza (OSp) 123
laido (OSp) 122–3
laidura (OSp) 123
laja 190
lama 30
lamer 47
lampiño 189
lampista 132
Index
lande (OSp) 96
landre 96
lánguido 173, 174
lanzacohetes 222
lanzallamas 222
lastar 71, 72
látigo 71
latín 124
laudar 169
laurel 121
laya 28
lebrillo 48
lección 163
lecho 25, 38
lechuga 96
léder 225
lederón/lederona/lederina 225
ledo (OSp) 122, 185
légamo 29
legión 163
legítimo 163
legui 220
lejos 47
lenguage (OSp) 127
lenguaje 127fn, 192
león 200fn, 208
leproso 102
levantar 154
levantisco 154
leve 123
liberal 131
libra esterlina 217
librar una batalla 135
libre 102, 123
licopeno 220
lid 121
líder 133, 223, 227
liedo (OSp) 185
lieve (OSp) 123
ligero 123, 172, 173
limón 84, 112
limonero 112
limpiaparabrisas 222, 227
límpido 174
limpio 174
linage (OSp) 127
lindar 47
lindeza 141fn
lindo 163
lingüista 131
linier 220, 224
linotipista 227
líquido 174
liria 29
lirial 178
lisa 197
lista 226
lithoide 179
litro 131
liviano 123
llama 187, 207
llamar 163, 187
lleco 31
llevar 148
Lloredo 120
llover 188
lluvia 188
loar (OSp) 169
locanía (OSp) 141fn
loco 14, 92, 101, 123, 233
locoide 180fn
locutor 218
loguer (OSp) 122
lonche 229
longevo 176, 177
longincuidad 177
lonja 146, 197
loro 206, 209
losa 30
lotería 129, 130
loza 47, 74
lozano 72, 74, 76
lúa (OSp) 71
lúcido 174
lucio 174
luco 176
lungo 156
lupa 132
291
292
Index
lur 126
luteranismo 131
lu(v)a (OSp) 71
luxuria 163
macabre 93
maçana (OSp) 57
macanero 205
macegual 205
macho 188–9
maço (OSp) 189fn
madera 48
madre patria 222
madrigal 152
madrugar 47
madurgar (OSp) 47
magacín 220
magnetostricción 220
maguer(a) (OSp) 63
magüey 204, 205
mail 226
mail-coach 216
maíz 203, 204, 205, 206, 209
maizal 205
maleta 134
malfatana 90
maligno 175
malsín 114
malsinar 114
malsindad/malsinería 114
mamá 132
manager de carretera 222
mañana 56, 59
mancebo 49
máncer 115
manejar 150
manejo 150
mañero (OSp) 37, 173
manifestar 161
maniquí 129
manjar 192, 197
manteca 31
manteo 129
mantequilla 31
manzana 57
maqueto 42
marchar 129, 146
mareaje 127
marejada 190
marguyón 190
maricón/marica 225
maridaje (OSp) 127
marine 220
marketing 220, 221
marrano 92
marta 72
martinete (OSp) 135
máscara 193
maslo (OSp) 188–9
máster 216
mata 31
matar 14, 50–51, 103, 233
match 218, 221
matina 156
matoides 179
mayorengo 77
mazmorra 97
mecal 205
mecapal 205
medalla 151
medicina 169
médico 99, 110
medir 47
meldar (OSp) 114
melena 91
melezina (OSp) 169
mella 37
mellar 37
menaje 127
me(ne)ster (OSp) 173
menestra 151, 153
mengano 104
menge/metge (OSp) 99, 192
mensaje 127
menú 132
mercadante (OSp) 140
mercadantesco 155fn
mercadeo 221
Index
mercado 98
mercado bajista 221
mercadotecnia 221
mercante 152
mercantesco 155fn
mercurio 98
mesa 52
mesquí 104
mester (OSp) 122
meteoro 179
meter 171
metro 131
México 206fn
mezquino 101, 104
Michoacán/Mechoacán 206fn
mico 206
microscopio 131
miedo 54
miel 169fn
milieu 133
millón 152
milpa 205
milpería 205
minarete 133
ministerio 167fn
misa 163
misántropo 131
misión rescate 222
misivo 167fn
mitin 133, 223
modelo 151
modo 177
modorro 27fn
mogote 28, 30
molinaje 127
momento clave 222
monengo 77
monoide 179
monopolista 131
monte de piedad 152
monumento 163
mórbido 151, 173
morfema 180
morisco 154
moro (OSp) 133fn
morro 30
mortadela 153fn
morueco 31
mosaico 152
moscatel 193
mosquete 152
mostachón 48
mota 31
móvil 175
mozlemo (OSp) 133fn
mucronio 178
muedo (OSp) 177
muelle 197
mufti 112
mujer fatal 135
mujerengo 77
mulcir 177
mulo macho 189
multiplicar 161
mundial 176
mundo 163
murices 176, 177
musal 178
music-hall 216
musulmán 112, 133
muyahadín 112
naboria 204–5
nación 131
nada 57
naguas 206
naipe(s) 92–3
nao 186–7
naranja 11, 82, 84, 112
nariz 58
narval 80
naso 156
natura 163
naturalismo 131
nava 28
navegador 226
neblí 75
necesario 173
293
294
Index
negrusco 40
nepalí/nepalés/nepalense 108
neutro 167fn
nicar 102
nicho 152
nidio (OSp) 174
nieto 59
nieve 226
niñera 221
nítido 173, 174
nivel 192, 197
nodrir (OSp) 169
nominar 221
nono 175
noque 197
norte 213–14
norteamericano 217
nostalgia 130
notar 163
novel (OSp) 141
novela(s) 141, 150, 152
novelar 150
novelesco 155
noveno 175
nubífero 176, 177
nuca 83fn, 112
nuçay 201
nuevas 105
nunca 126
nutrir 169–70
obraje 127fn
obsistir (OSp) 177
obsoleto 223
obstáculo 167fn
obús 132
ocasión 163
occidente 163
ochavo 175
ocote 205
octavo 175
ocupacional 220
ocurrir 171
odio 163
odre 98
oeste 213
oficio 163, 177
oír 54
ojalá 15
ojo 95fn
olé 93
óleo 95
oliar (OSp) 95fn
olio (OSp) 95
olioso (OSp) 95fn
olivo 96
onzeno (OSp) 175
opaco 167fn
opcional 221
ópera 152
opinión 163
optativo 221
oraje 127fn
orate 197
ordenador 135
ordeñar 58, 189
órgano 163
orgullo/orgulloso 74, 197
oriella (OSp) 198
orinque 79
otaboca (OSp) 208
overbooking 221
oxígeno 131
paco 156
paella 197
paes 150
página web 226
pájaro 55, 59
pajaroide 180fn
palabra 54
palabra clave 135
palco 152
palenque 192
pálido 173
palo 227
pandillaje 127
panorama 179
Index
panselionos 179
pantalia 196
pantalla 196–7
pantalón 132, 134
pantis 227
papá 132
papel 195, 197, 217
paper (OSp) 195
papita 205
paquebot 132
paquebote 217
paquete 129, 134
para(n)gón 150, 152
parachutista 132
paralaje/paralaxis 179
páramo 23
parapeto 152
parar 227
parche 134
pardal 190
pardusco 40
parentesco 154
parking 10, 133
parlar 125, 192
parlar (OSp) 54
parque 129, 215
parra 28
parrilla 209
parsec 220
partido 221
partner 216
parvada 190fn
pasa 48–9
pasaje 127
pasarela 226
pasayeta 156
paso (OSp) 48
pasquín 149
pasticho 156
pastraña (OSp) 106fn
pata 92
pataca 93
patata 203, 206
paternal 178
pato 91
patrulla 130
pauperismo 131
pavo 4, 200fn, 208, 233
pavo real 233
pavor (OSp) 54
payaso 152
payengo 77
peaje 127, 192
pecudro 178
pedante 150
pedazo 62
pedestal 152
pedir 52
pelea 121
pelota 134
peluca/peluquero 132, 134
pemmican 216
penalti 220
penalty 224, 227
peñasco 40
penatígero 177
pendencia 185
pendorada 190
penique 217
perexil 121
perfecto 175
pérfido 174
periferia 179
perigeo 179
perimetre 216fn
perla 98
perriello/perriella (OSp) 39
perro/perra 16fn, 25, 28, 31, 33, 38–9, 62
perro guardián 222
Perú 206fn
perulero 206
pescudar (OSp) 47
pesimista 131
pestilencial 178
petaca 205, 209
petaquilla 205
petardo 149
petatetamal 205
295
296
Index
picaresco 155
pick-pocket 216
pick-up 227
piebalón 219
piélago 62
pierna 47
pieza 134
pigro (OSp) 176
pijama 133, 227
pilastra 152
pillaje 150
pillar 149–50
pilotaje 127
pincel 192, 197
pinchadiscos 221
ping-pong 227
pingüino 214
pintoresco 155
piolet 220
pipermín 220
pireo 178
pistola 152
pita 206, 207
pito 203
pizarra 28, 31
pizza 153fn
placa 129
plaga 219
plancha 134
planta 152
plata 105, 122
plataforma 146, 150, 152
pleamar 190
plomo 24
pocho 190fn, 207
pocillo 48
podio 152
podre 190fn
polipoide 180fn
póliza 152
poltrón 154
polvo 226
polyester 220
poma 57
pomares 57
ponche 214
poncho 207
po(n)çoña (OSp) 169
ponerse alto 226
pop 220
popa 190
porción 167fn
porfía 47
pórfido 169, 174
poridad (OSp) 105, 168–9
porro 226
portaaviones 222
portátil 175
pórtico 152
portogalés (OSp) 183
portugués 183
positivismo 131
positivo 167fn
póster 220
postrero (OSp) 173
postrimero (OSp) 173
poyo 146
precio 177
predicar 161, 162, 169, 177
preguntar 47
preguntar 59
preigar (OSp) 169
prejuicio 131
prender 59
prensa 194, 197
presbiteroide 180
presto (OSp) 173
prever 221
prez (OSp) 177fn
prieto (OSp) 60
primavera 56fn
primo/primero 59, 174, 175
prioridad máxima 222
privado (OSp) 173
pro (OSp) 173
producir 171
proletario 130, 176
prometer 171
Index
promover 165
prorrumpir 171
protectorado 217
proveedor 226
próximo 173
prueba sorpresa 222
público 221
puente 98
puesto en escena 135
pugna 163
pugnar 175
pulcro 167fn
pulsar 220
pulverizador 221
puma 200fn, 203, 208
pungitivo 178
punir 125
punnar (OSp) 163
punto 227
puridad 105
puro 159, 173
pútrido 173
putsa 156
puzzle 220
puzzling 216
quadrigésimo 175
quadrivista 178
quadrupedal 178
quark 220
quásar 220
quemar 47
querer 59, 170
queso 52
quexumbre (OSp) 185
quijote 197
quin 225
quinto 174
quitar 125, 221
quitojesco 155
rábido 173
rabio/rabdo/raudo (OSp) 174
rabiza 190
rabo 39
racha 85
racionalismo 131
rafez/refez, rahez/rehez (OSp) 101, 102,
107, 111
ramaje 127fn
ráncido 174
rancio 174
ra(n)cón (OSp) 92
rapar 69
rape 197
rápido 123, 158, 173, 174
raposa 39
raqueta 93
rascacielos 222
ratón 226
raudo 158
razia 133
realengo 77
realista 131
recamar 102
receso 217
recio 174
recíproco 167fn
recitar 169
recluta 130
récord 220
recorrer 171
recruta 130
rectitud 165
recto 175
recudir 47
recurrir 171
redactar 221
redingote 134
redrar (OSp) 75
reducción 167fn
reducir 171, 177
refranesco 155fn
refugio 165
reglamento 221
regulación 221
rehén 108
rehilar 71
297
298
Index
relax 220
relieve (OSp) 148
religiosoide 180fn
reloj 195, 197
remitir 171
remover 221
re(n)cón (OSp) 92
reno 80
reo 47
reojo 197
reparar 170
reportaje 127
repórter/reporter/reportero 217, 223, 227
repoyar 171
repoyar (OSp) 170
repoyo (OSp) 170fn
repudiar 170, 171
requerir 171
reserva 221
resucitar 163
retablo 197
retaguardia 111
retaliación 217
retreta 132
reunión cumbre 222
revelación 225
revólver 216
rez(d)ar (OSp) 59, 169
rico 69
riel 197, 215
riesco (OSp) 94fn
riesgo 91, 93–4
rifer 226
rifle 216, 217
rígido 174
rimel 227
rincón 92
ring 227
ripia 71
risco 94fn
roano 71
robar 69
rock duro 222
rockista 224
rodaballo 29
rogar 52
romanticoide 180
romeraje 127fn
romper 171
rompilón 47fn
ron 214, 227
ropa 69fn
ropaje 127
roquero 224
roquete 192
rosmar 190fn
rostro 47, 48
rozagante 197
rufianesco 155
ruin 102
ruiseñor 151
runner 216
ruta 132
sabadear 116
sabana 203, 205
sabio 123
sable 132
sabotaje 127
sacar 73
sacrilegio 167fn
saeta 121
sage (OSp) 123
saibor 217
salamaleque 105
salchicha 153
salir del armario 225
saltimbanco 152
salva 146
salvaje 127fn, 192
sandía 85, 112
sandío (OSp) 102fn
sandwich 216, 220
sangrador 99
sapo 28, 31
saque de esquina 224
Index
sarna/serna 24, 28
sarraceno (OSp) 133fn
sarrio 28
sarro 28, 31
sartén 59
sastre 99–100, 110, 195–6
satén 132
sayón 71
scalae 97fn
scarpi 150
script 221
secretario 217fn
secreto 105fn, 168–9
sector agricultura 222
seducir 165, 171
séfer 116
segundo 174
sel 29
semáfora 179
senado 217fn
sentimentalismo 131
sentir 54
separar 170
séptimo 163, 175
serna 29, 31
serranisco 154
server 226
servidor 226
servilleta 134
servitud 150
seso 47
sesto (OSp) 174
set 227
seta 61, 62
seteno (OSp) 163
sexto 175
sexualoide 180fn
sezeno/dizeseseno (OSp) 175
show 221
sicsaques 130
sida 220
siella (OSp) 55fn
siesta 175
sietmo 174
siglo de las luces 135
signo 163
silicona 220
silla 55fn
silo 29
sincero 159, 173
sinfonía 179
siniestro (OSp) 35
siricar 41
sirria 31
site 226
sitio 226
sivuelqual (OSp) 58
sivuelquando (OSp) 58
sivuelque (OSp) 58
skipper 216
slip 227
slogan 216
smart 216
smoking/esmoquin 224
snob/esnob 223
soberbio 178
sobreventa 221
sobrino 59
socarra 37
socarrar 37
social 130
socorrer 171
sofá 132
solacio 150
soldadesco 155
soldado 152
solercia 177
sólido 173
someter 171
soneto 152
soprano 152
sórdido 174
sotador(a) (OSp) 124
sotar (OSp) 124
speaker 134, 218
speech 216
sport 223
sportinguista 224
299
300
Index
sportsman 216
square 216
stewardess 219
stocks 221
stopista 224
stress/estrés 223
subir 226
substituir 165
subvención 165
subvertir 171
sud 213
suero 31
suéter 227
superchería 154
superior 167fn
supermercado 227
superno 176
supósito 177
suramericano 217
surtir 192
suspense 220
tabaco 207–8
tabaquero 207
taberna 227
tabernero 227
tabor 112fn
taça (OSp) 96
tacaná 115
tacaño 101, 114, 142–3
tachismo 132
tafur/tahur (OSp) 105
tafurea 193
tagarote 87fn
talco 226
talento 163
talibán 112
taligay 225
taller 134
talón 227
támara 31
tambor 108, 112
tameme 205
tamil 220
tanque 190
tanto 224, 227
tapa 72
taquilla 112
tarde 59
tarea 108
targún 116
tarifa 95, 112, 193, 197
tascar 37, 72
taxi 134
taxímetro 131
taza 85, 90, 96, 108
té 215
tecla 93
telegrama 180
teletexto 220
televisión 180, 227
televisor 227
ténder 217
tener el mono 226
tener una sartara 41
tenis 227
tenis de mesa 222
tenor 152
Teotihuacán 206fn
terceto 152
tercio/tercero 174
terco 29, 35–6
terraplén 149
terrapleno/terripleno (OSp) 149
terremoto 140–1
tesorero 111
test 220
testaferro 149
testimonio 161, 163
thug 216
tiburón 201, 206
tiesta (OSp) 54
tigre 200fn, 208
timador 112
tímido 167fn
timo 112
tinajera 225
tío/tía 62
Index
tipo de descuento 222
tiquete 217
tisú 132
tiza 209
toast 216
toca 31
tocadiscos 222, 227
toldo 72, 74
tolear 190fn
tollo 37
tomar 49–50, 50fn, 59
tomar posición 135
tomate 203, 205, 206, 209
top diez 222
topar 215fn
tope 215
torbellino 132
torbillón 132
tory 216
tosco 36–7
tóssigo (OSp) 169
toste (OSp) 126, 173, 192
tóxico 169
trabucar 125
tradeunionista 224
traducir 166fn, 171
tragacete 87fn
trailer 220, 221
trajín/trajinar 197
tranca 29
transfocador 220
transistor 227
transmitir 171
tranzar 29, 37
trapallada 190fn
trapiche 48
trasero (OSp) 173
trasfondo 221
trasladar 166fn
trébol 62
trefe 115–16
treffa (OSp) 115
tregua 70
trémulo 167fn
tren 214–15
trenteno (OSp) 175
trezeno (OSp) 175
trial 220
tributo 161
trigésimo 175
trigo 47, 49
trincar 78
trip/tripi 226
tripante 226
tripar 226
triposo 226
trobar (OSp) 54, 125
trocha 31
trocir (OSp) 74, 166fn
troço (OSp) 192fn
trolebús 227
tropa 152
trozo 192
truck/troc/troque 223, 229
truque 197
trust 216
tubo 216
tuna 203
tunecí/tunecino 108
túnel 216, 227
tuob 201
túrbido 174
turbio 174
turf 216
turista 216, 223
ufano 74
último 165, 172
ultimo grito 135
ultraje (OSp) 127
ultriz 177
uma 90
undécimo 175
único 172
urgente 165
usage (OSp) 127
usaje (OSp) 127fn
usted 104
301
302
Index
útil 173, 175
útile (OSp) 166fn
vacío 47
vago 151
vagón 227
vagueza 151
válido 165, 167fn
vaníloco 176
vassallaje (OSp) 127
váter 220
vega 28, 31
velludo 150
veneno 169
ventalla 196
ventana 226
verano 56, 59
vergel 121
vergüença/vergüeña (OSp) 122
vergüenza 122
versatile 221
verso 161, 169
verter 171
veterinaria 100
veterinario(s) 100, 110
veynteno 175
veza 197
viaje 127, 197
víctima 167fn
vicuña 206, 207
vierme (OSp) 40
viéspera (OSp) 59
viesso (OSp) 169
vietnamí/vietnamés/vietnamita/
vietnameño 108
vigésimo 175
vigía 190
vil 102
villarengo 77
vinagre 197
vinatero 227
viperoso 176
virar 37, 190
virazón 37fn
virtos (OSp) 168fn
víspera 59
vitela 150
víveres 130
volcán 186
volunter/volonter (OSp) 192
vulpeja (OSp) 39
vulto 176
warrantista 224
webmaster 226
website 226
whist 216
windsurfista 224
wisky 227
xabón (OSp) 68fn
xeta (OSp) 61
xícara 205
xiloco 150
xorguina (OSp) 34fn
xota (OSp) 124
ya 125fn
yarda 217
yazer (OSp) 125fn
yegua 52
yelmo 32, 69
yengo (OSp) 123
yente (OSp) 121, 169
ypre (OSp) 79fn
yuca 203, 209
yuca boniata 208
yurar (OSp) 125fn
zafio 101
zaga 111
zaguán 82, 97, 112
zahón 91
zahorar 102
zaíno 101
zalama 105
zamarra 27fn
zambo 101
Index
zanahoria 83fn, 84, 96, 112
Zapaterogate 224
zapato 93
zaque 98
zaratán 98
zarco 84, 101
zarria 31
zarza 28, 31
zigzag 130
zoco 98
zopilote 200fn
zorrar 39fn
zorro/zorra 28, 31, 39
zozobra/zozobrar 197
zurdo 35
zurra 37
zurrar 37
zutano 104
Suffixes
-áceo 172
-ada 172fn
-adgo (OSp) 126
-ado 106, 172fn
-aico 172fn
-aina 172fn
-aje 11, 126, 127, 138, 192
-ajo 172fn
-alla 196
-án 104, 106
-aña (OSp) 106fn
-áneo 172
-ano 104, 106
-año 172
-ante 171
-anza 172fn
-ardo 127
-ario 172
-arro/-arra 40
-asco/-asca 40
-ático 172
-aza 172fn
-azgo 126, 127, 172
-azo 172
-d(u)ero 172
-dumbre 172fn
-dura 172fn
-edo 172fn
-ejo 172fn
-el 108, 127, 192, 196
-ença (OSp) 172fn
-encia 185
-engo 77
-eño 172fn
-eno 174, 175
-er 170
-ero 172
-esa 172fn
-esco 11, 154, 155
-ete 192
-ez 172fn
-eza 106, 172fn
-gate 224
-í 11, 75, 108, 127
-icia 106
-icias 106
-ico 172
-idad 132
-ido 172, 173, 174
-iente 171
-ín 106
-ino 106, 108
-iño 184
-io 172, 174
-ío 172fn
-ir 170, 171
-isco 40fn, 154
-ísimo 155, 172
-ismo 12, 131–2
-ista 12, 131–2, 224
-izo 172fn
-miento 172fn
-oide 179–80
-orro/-orra 35, 40
-torio 172
-udo 172fn
303
304
Index
zutano (cont.)
-urro/-urra 35, 40
-usco/-usca 40
-zón 172fn
Spanish regional dialects
Alavés
cacarro 41
tapurras 41
tirritarra 41
txangarro 41
zaborra 41
Riojan
achurra 41
bildur 27
çatico 27
Andalusian
Santanderine
ahorrar 102fn
horra 102
jorro 101fn
cabarra 41
Aragonese
alfaneya (OArag) 97fn
cabarra 41
cariñar 184
concieto 47fn
cremar 47
enta (OArag) 103
muçlim(a)/muçlimes 133fn
troa (OArag) 103
trobar menos (OArag) 185
Asturian
borrina 145
cabarra 41
cormena 51
cuelmo 60
dimir 47fn
Judeo-Spanish
concieto 47fn
tacaná 115
Navarese
abarra 41
aborral 41
apurra 41
banabarra 41
biarra 41
biscarro 41
cancarro 41
cimurro 41
Galician-Portuguese (medieval
and modern)
acém 84
achar 52
achar menos 185
açúcar 84
adelo 84
adobe 84
adro 60
agarimar 73
álamo 32
albergue 69fn
alcaiote 84
alcaralfaquí 97
aldeia 84
alecrim 84
aleive 75
alface 96
alfaiate 99
alfazema 84
alfenim 84
alfinete 84
algema 84
algodão 84
alguém 184
alheio 46
aljôfar 84
almece 84
almofada 84
alvíçara (OPtg) 106
Index
alvíssara/alvíssera (OPtg) 106
alvíxara (OPtg) 106
alvo (OPtg) 70, 123
amainar (OPtg) 190
amanhã 56
amarelo 58
amêijoa 188
ameixa 59
angosto 52
anho 57fn
año 57fn
apagar 55
areia 52
areísco 186
argola 84
armazêm 84
arrincar 38
arroz 84
asomade/asemade 60
assar 46
asseitar 46
assi(m) (OPtg) 126
ataúde 84
até 84, 103, 234
atum 84
ave 46
azeite 84, 95
azeitona 96
azinhaga 84
azul 101
bairro 84
baraço 84
barbeito 48
barinel 214
beltrano 104
bisnaga/bisnaca 96fn
bolota 84, 96
bonaça (OPtg) 142
bramar 70
branco 69, 123
bravo 186
brétema 73
brigar 70
britar 73
bruxa 34
bugia 84
cabeça 46
caçurro 35
calhandra 62
cama 59
cara 62
carta 195fn
cego 55
ceifa 84
cenoura 84, 96
centeio 46
chama 187
chamar 187
charlatão 153
chor (OPtg) 120
chover 188
chué 84
churdo 35
churro 35
chuva 188
chuveiro 188
chuvisco 188
cinza 58
colmeia 33, 51
colmo 60
comer 47, 59
comilão 47fn
con 60
coração 58
cordeiro 57
coxo 46
cras (OPtg) 56
crioulo 187
debalde 107
demais 48
derrancar 38
desenfadado (OPtg) 186fn
desenfadamento (OPtg) 186fn
305
306
Index
desenfadar (OPtg) 186fn
desmazalado (OPtg) 114
(d)espertar 55
doce 173, 177
domear 60
égoa 52
eido 60
eiva 75fn
embalde 107
esbuxar 60
escá 73
esparto 62
esquecer 60
esquerdo 27–8, 34
estribo 70
falar 47, 59
feder 47
feio 47
ferver 52
fona 73
formoso 52
forniço (OPtg) 60
fornigar (OPtg) 60
forro 101fn
fresco 69fn
fulano 104
guardar 69fn
guarir (OPtg) 70
guerra 69fn
irmão/irmã 56
lamber 47
laranja 84
laverca 73
leito 25
leituga 96fn
limão 84
lindar 47
loça 47
loução 74
louco 233
luva 71
macã 57
madeira 48
madrugar 47
malado (OPtg) 73
mancebo 49
manhã 59
maninho 37
mao xurda 35
matar 50–51, 103
medo 54
meezinha (OPtg) 169fn
mesa 52
muacho (OPtg) 189
nada 57
nariz 58
nau (OPtg) 187
neto 59
noitibó 60
ombro 52
ordenhar 58
ordinhar (OPtg) 189
osmar (OPtg) 50
ouvir 54
pássaro 55, 59
pedaço 62
pedir 52
peendença (OPtg) 185
pego 62
perguntar 47, 59
perna 47
pombo 24
preço 177
prender 59
preto 60
primo 59
queijo 52
queimar 47
Index
querer 59
queyxume (OPtg) 185
rapar 69fn
raposo 39
recife 84
rezar 59
rico 69fn
rogar 52
rosto 47
roubar 69fn
roupa 69fn
rubi(a)r/arrubir 60
sabão 68fn
sartã 59
sẽestro (OPtg) 28, 35
sicrano/seclano 104
siso 47
sobrinho 59
surro 35
tacanho 142
tarde 59
tío/tía 62
tomar 49, 59
traduzir 166fn
tregoa 70
trevo 62
trigar (OPtg) 73
troço 192fn
vazio 47
verão 56, 59
verme 40
viração 37fn
virar 37–8
volcão 186
xadrez 84
xarope 84
zarco 84
zoina 84
Suffixes
-inho 184
Catalan (medieval and modern)
adalil 84
adret 75
adretscient 75fn
afalagar 84
aglà 96
albarda 84
albaroc 84
alberg 69fn
alberginia 108
albixera/albixeres (OCat) 106
albricies 106
aljub 84
allotjar 147
anyell 57
apagar 55
apaivagar 60
arrencar 38
arros 84
assud 84
atzar 84
atzembla 84
au (OCat) 46
àvol 197
balener 214
barnús 84
barri 84
bisnaga 96fn
bosc 195
bruixa 34
cadarn 60
calandra 62
cara 62
clavell 196fn
confegir 60
conjuminar 60
corder 57
cosí 59
cremar 47
307
308
Index
debades 107
deler 60
demanar 59
demés 48
egua 52
elm 69fn
emprempta 194
en bades (OCat) 107
enagar 60
enta (OCat) 103
enterch 35–6
enyorar 60, 196
espart 62
espinac 85
esquena 70
esquerre 35
estacar (OCat) 146
estiu 56, 59
estrep 70
feina/faena/feyna 196
festejar 196
flamenc 80
flamench (OCat) 80
foraster 195
formatge 127fn
forro 101fn
ganta 68fn
germà/germana 56
gla 96
gos 33fn
guant 71fn
guardar 69fn
guarir 69fn
lleig 122
llit 25, 59
llontja (Valencian) 147
llotja 147
magatzem 84
matí 59
menjar 54, 59
nariu 58
nau 186
nebot 59
ocell 59
orat 197
orb 55
paella 59
pámpol 196
pantalla 197
parlar 59
pastanaga 96
pedas 62
pèlag 62
poma 57
pregar 59
premsa 194
prender 59
pruna 59
qualsevol 58
racó 92
rapar 69fn
ratcha 85
rebutjar 60
relotge 195
ric 69fn
robar 69fn
sartre 99–100
síndria 85
sucre 84
tacany 142
tardaó 60
tassa 85
tosc 36
traduir 166fn
troa (OCat) 103
trobar menys 185
tros 192fn
ujar 60
Index
verm 40
vespre 59
voldre/voler 58, 59
Suffixes
-enc 77
Gallo-Romance
French (medieval and modern)
afaitier (OFr) 124, 183
agneau 57
ainsi 126
aise (OFr) 126
amaisnier (OFr) 74
ambassade 148fn
appuyer 146
armée 168fn
asmer (OFr) 50, 124
attacher 145
attaquer 145
aubergine 108
aune 32–3
auqueton (OFr) 107fn
aure (OFr) 198
avancer 128fn
avenue 130
aveugle 55
beau/belle 55
bigot 78
blanc 69, 123
bleu 101
bonace (OFr) 142
bonasse 142
bot (OFr) 214fn
bouée 79fn
bourrasque 145
brandir 125
braon (OFr) 68
bru 68
brusque 36
canaille 154
carte 195fn
cartouche 146
cendre 58
charlatan 153
cheval 226
chière (OFr) 62
coeur 58
coitier (OFr) 184
coulonnel/colonel 148
courtisan 143fn
cousin 59
croix 158, 177
danser (OFr) 124
demain 56
demander 59
déroute 134
détacher 146
déterminisme 132
doucher 135
doux/douce 173, 177
duire (OFr) 171
échine 70
e(i)nsi (OFr) 126
empleier (OFr) 125
entendre 54
eschançon (OFr) 74
esmer (OFr) 50
est 214fn
estachier (OFr) 145
estrieu (OFr) 70
été 56, 59
étrier 70
éveiller 55
faible 198
faire l’amour 134
favori 123fn
féminisme 132
festin 149
fichier 135
flèche 121
foible (OFr) 198
formalisme 132
309
310
Index
forni (OFr) 123
frais 69fn
frère 56
fromage 127fn
g(u)arir (OFr) 70
garni (OFr) 122
gauche 35
gauchir (OFr) 35
gent (OFr) 121, 169fn
gourd 24
gratte-ciel 222
guarder 69fn
guérir 69fn, 70
guerre 69fn
halluciner 226
hardi (OFr) 123
heaume (OFr) 69fn
hisser 125
ieve (OFr) 52
jambon 121
jante (OFr) 68fn
jusque 103
lait/laid (OFr) 122
legier (OFr) 123
lit 25, 59
loge 147
loger 147
lutéranisme 132
manger 54, 59
marcher 146
marri (OFr) 123
mat (OFr) 50
mater (OFr) 50
martinet 135
matin 59
menestier (OFr) 122fn
meschin/meschine (OFr) 101fn
mesquin 101fn
mestier (OFr) 122fn
moise 52fn
naïf(s) (OFr) 93
naturalisme 132
neveu 59
nieble (OFr) 75
niquer 102fn
nord 214fn
nouvelles (OFr) 141
oie 76fn
oïr (OFr) 54
oiseau 55, 59
ordinateur 135
ore (OFr) 198
orin 79
ost (OFr) 168fn
ouest 214fn
paillasse 152fn
papier 195
parc 129fn
parler 54, 59
pasquin 149
paveil (OFr) 195fn
persil (OFr) 121
peur 54
pillage 150
piller 150
piolet 220fn
plomb 24
poêle 59
prêcher 177
prendre 59
prier 52, 59
prix 177
prune 59
quitt(i)er (OFr) 125
rang 38
recoin 92
Index
relief 148
renc (OFr) 38
reng (OFr) 38
riche 69fn
rober (OFr) 69fn
rover (OFr) 52
sa(i)ete (OFr) 121fn
sage (OFr) 123
savon 68fn
senestre (OFr) 35
soeur 56
sud 214fn
table 52
taquehan/taquehein (OFr) 143
taquin 142–3
tête 54
top (OFr) 215
tost (OFr)/tôt 126
traduire 166fn
train 215
trouver 54
vêpres 59
ver 40
virer 37
vouloir 59
wape/gape (OFr) 129fn
Suffixes
-age (OFr) 126
-ité 132
Old Provençal
agnel 57
a(i)p 75fn
ais 126
alcoton 107fn
amainà 74
ambaissada 148fn
atropellar 125
aurat 198
balar 124
batalha 121
brazon 68
breicha 34
briu 34
broucha 34
bruèis(sa) 34
cabreto 71
cara 62
clavel 196fn
coitar 184
despachar 125
desrancar 38
duire 171
duzir 171
empachar 125
emparar 124
enojar 125
esgremir 125
esmaiar 125
esquina 70
estacar 146
estreup/estrieu 70
estribote 148
faular 47fn
feble 198
ganta 68fn
gent 121
laydar 123
menestier 122fn
mesqui/mesquina 101fn
pabil 195fn
parlar 125
peiresilh 121
peleg 62
311
312
Index
renc 38
ric 69fn
trabucar 125
trotz/tros 192fn
Suffixes
-atge 126
-enc 77
Gascon
bot 214fn
brouche 34
broucho 34
nau 187
pèrriu 39fn
Béarnese
terc 36
Italo-Romance
Italian (Medieval and Modern Standard)
a men di 150
accampare 150
agguantare 147
agnello 57
albergo 69fn
ambasciata/imbasciata 148
appoggiare 146
azzurro 101
barba 63
bello 55
bianco 69fn, 123
bizzarro 145
blú 101
bonaccia 142
borrasca 145
brusco 36
canaglia 154
carta 195fn
cenere 58
ciarlare 153
ciarlatano/cerretano/ciaratanto/ciarratane 153
colonello 148
corteggiano 143
cotone 107
croce 158, 177
cuore 58
distaccare 146
dolce 173, 177
domani 56
durre (OIt) 171
elmo 69fn
estate 56
favorito 123fn
festino 149
fino 103
fracassare 149
fratello 56
fresco 69fn
ghianda 96
grottesco 154
guai 76
guaiare 76
guaio 76
guardare 69fn
guarire 69fn
guerra 69fn
letto 25
loggia 147
lontro 202
macari (dial) 63
magari 63
mamzero 115
mancai (dial) 63
mane (OIt) 56
mangiare 54
manicare (OIt) 54
marciare 146
matto 50
melo 57
meschino 101fn
Index
narice 58
nibbio 75
novella 141
oca 76fn
parlare 54
pasquino 149
paura 54
petardo 149
pigliare 150
piombo 24
pioppo 187
poggio 146
prezzo 177
rapare 69fn
ricco 69fn
rilievo 148
rischio 93
riso 107
rubare 69fn
sapone 68fn
scartoccio 146
schiena 70
sentire 54
sorella 56
spagn(u)olo 124fn
staccare 146
staffare 154
strambotto 148
svegliare 55
taccagno 142–3
tavola 52
terchio 36
testa 54
tirchio 36
tonto 149
tradurre 166fn
trincare 78fn
trovare 54
uccello 55
udire 54
vanga 68fn
verme 40
zio/zia 62
zucchero 107
Suffixes
-esco 155
Italian Regional Dialects
casu 52
cordesco 57fn
cordisk 57fn
curdascu 57fn
fablança 47fn
ka 62
krai 56
meza 52fn
orbo 55
smazal 114
smazallato 114
trapiche 48
trus 192fn
Sardinian
ae 46
barvattu 48
casu 52
kalavóyu 97fn
kolovóyu 97fn
kras 56
làmbere 47
medire 47fn
mela 57
merka 68fn
mesurai 47fn
mesurare 47fn
meza 52fn
tiu 63
ziu 63
Łiu 63
313
314
Index
Rumanian
afla 52
arina 52
çai 76
caş 52
fierbe 52
frumos 52
iapă 52
îngust 52
măcar 63
masă 52
miel 57
mîine 56
peți 52
ruga 52
umăr 52
uşta 52
vierme 40
Latin (including late and medieval)
ab oculis 55
ad ista 103
*ad vix 103
aditus 60
adorare 169
advocare 171
aestatem 56
aestimare 50
aestivus 59
aestumare 50, 51
affactare/affectare 183
afflare 52, 54
agnellus 57
agnus 57
agnus cordus 56–7
albus 33
alces 68
algebra 82fn
alienus 46
alnus 32
amarellus 58
amarus 58
amita 63
amygdala 108
angustus 52
apitascudis 23
aptare 46, 49
*aptativus 73
aptus 73
arena 52
arrugia 23
articulus 158
asperare 33
assare 46
*assectare 46
assectari 46
atrium 60
auca 76fn
audire 54
aura 198
*auratus 197–8
autumare 49
avicellus 55
avis 46, 55
avis *noctivola 60
avunculus 62–3
barba 63fn
barbarus 186
bellus 55, 122
bestia 158
bifera 49
*bonacia 142
bonus 55, 208
bradonis 68
brido 68
brutes/bruta 68
caecus 55
caenum 46
caerulus 101, 102
*calafodium 97fn
*calandria 62
callum 46
canis 25
capanna 24
capitalis 158
Index
capitia 46, 54
capitulum 158
caput 54
carota 96
caseus 52
castellum 55fn
castrum 82
catarrhus 60
centenum 46
charta 195fn
choralis 33
chorus 33
cicada 208
cinis 58
*cinisia 58
clamare 187
*coctare 184
collacteus 47
comedere 47, 54
comedo 47fn
conceptus 47fn
condire 74
configere 60
congeminare 60
conus 60
conversare 34
convertere 33
convortere 33
*convortia 33, 50
cor 58
*cordarius 57
cordus 57fn
corrugus 23
coxus 46
cras 56
cremare 47
crumena 33, 51
crux 158–9
culmus 60
cuniculus 24
*dehonestare 47
delirium 60
demagis 48
demere 47fn
*destructiare 192fn
domare 60
dominare 60
ducere 171
durus 159
eligere 170
equa 52
examinare 171
excitare 55
expergisci 55
*expertare 55
expertus 55
expulsare 60
extinguere 55
exvigilare 55
f(o)etere 47
fabricare 158, 171
fabulare 54
fabulari 47
facienda 196
fervere 52
fini 103
flamma 80, 187
flebilis 198
florem 120
floretum 120
flos/floris 120
foedus 47
formaceus 47
formosus 52, 55
fornicare 60
fornicium 60
framea 68
frater germanus 56
frater 56
gamba 121
gangadia 23
ganta 68fn
gemere 169
gens 121
315
316
Index
germanus/germana 56
germoniae 97fn
glans 96
gl(a)esum 68
gumia 48
gurdus 24
habilis 197
*hamica 73
horologium 195
humerus 52
iam magis 125
ignorare 60
incubare 51
indagare 60
infestare 171
infingere 170
insertare 171
inta 103
intendere 54
internecare 36
intro ad 103
intus 103
invenire 54
jocare 126fn
jocus 126fn
judex 126fn
junctus 126fn
junius 126fn
labrum 48
lactuca 96
laetus 185
lambere 47
*lascum 47fn
latinum 124
laudare 169
lautia 47
laxus 47
lectus 25, 38
*leviarius 123
limitare 47
mactare 50–51
mala 57
mala mat(t)iana 57
malacia 142
malum persicum 82
mancipium 49
manducare 54–5
mane 56
*maneana 56
*mannuarius 37
mannus 37
marculus 189fn
masculus 188–9
materia 48
mattare 51
mat(t)us 51
*maturicare 47
maturus 47
mela 57
melca 68
meletare 114
melka 68fn
mensa 52
metire 47
metiri 47
metus 54
mina 108
monoxylum 201
mulgere 189
mustaceus 48
napigium 93
naricae 58
nas 58
nepos 59
no(c)tigina 34fn
(non) nata res 57
nucha 83fn
nunquam 126
nutrire 169
oculum 95fn
odiare 60
oleum 95
Index
orbus 55
*ordiniare 58
ordo 58
oscitare 52
pacare 55
pacificare 60
palagae 23
pandere 48
papyrus 195
parabola 54
parabolare 54
passer 55
passus 48
pastinaca 96
pavor 54
pelagus 62
percuntare 47
perfidia 47
perna 47
perscrutare 47
perscrutari 47
petere 52
pit(t)acium 62
*platta 105
plattus 187
plovere 187
plumbum 24
pluttea 187
pluvia 187
pocillum 48
podium 146
poma 57
populus 187
*ploppus 187
praecoquus 82
praedicare 169
praehendere 59
pretium 177fn
primus/primarius 174
puritas 105
purus 159
quaerere 57
quartus 174
quietare 125
quintus 174
rapidus 158
recitare 169
recutere 47
reperire 54
repudiare 60, 171
repudium 170fn
reus 47
rogare 52
rostrum 47, 48
rupes 60
saccare 73
saccus 73
sagitta 121
saltare 124
sapo 68
sarralia 46
scorpio 98
secundus 174
segutillum 23
sella 55fn
sentire 54
septimus 174
sextus 174
sinapis 82
sincerus 159
sinister 35
socerio/suecerio 68
sodinga 68
soror 56
spartum 62
striges 23
suecerio 68
summatim 60
surdus 35
symphonia 179
tabula 52
talut(at)ium 23
*tardatione 60
tasconium 23
(tempus) veranum 56
(tempus) aestivum 56
317
318
Index
tenus 103
ternagus 23
tertius/tertiarius 174
testa 54
thieldones 23
thius/thia 62, 63
thunnus 82
traducere 74, 166fn
trapetum 48
tricae 36
*tric(c)ulare 36
*tricare 36
triticum 47, 49
tropare 54
*tumare 50
tuscus 36
uligo 61
unicus 172
urium 23
usque 103
uter 98
vacivus 47
vae 76
vagire 73
*vagitare 73
vanga 68
velle 57
vermis 40
verrere 46
verres 33, 92
*versiare 34
vertere 50
vervactum 48
vespera 59
volere 57
vortere 50, 51
*vosiare 34
vulpecula 39
vulturnus 49
Suffixes
-aceus 172
-acia 172fn
-aculus 172fn
-agine 172fn
-aicus 172fn
-aneus 172
-antia 172fn
-arius 172
-ata 172fn
-aticus 126, 172
-atus 172fn
-entia 172fn
-enus 174
-ére 170
-etum 172fn
-icius 172fn
-iculus 172fn
-icus 172
-idus 172, 173
-iksos 154
-ina 189
-ineus 172fn
-inus 189
-issa 172fn
-issimus 172
-itia 106, 172fn
-itie 172fn
-ivus 172fn
-mentum 172fn
-tione 172fn
-torius 172
-tudine 172fn
-tura 172fn
-utus 172fn
Arabic (including Hispano-Arabic)
aljabr 82fn
amîr 94
bait 106
burkan 186fn
hattá 103
házz 72fn
‘inda 103fn
karamah 107
mat 50
nafha 107
nuxas 83fn
Index
qafr 107
rizq 91
takfur 105
ustad 104
way 76
zanati 87fn
Celtic
Basque
boot 214fn
oorring 79
abayza 27
aberzale 41
alkate 83fn
almaiz 83fn
anderaza 27
anderazo 27
anega 83fn
arra 83fn
azafrai 83fn
barruntar 37
boina 41
chapela 41
chirimiri 41
chistu 41
chistulari 41
erraz 102fn
ezquer 35
gutun 83fn
ikurriña 41–2
itxura 41
jaunso 27
kale 41
kutun 83fn
maqueto 42
muino 27
ozoa 27
toska 37
tsapar 31
txakur 33fn
zainhori 83fn
zur/zurrun 35
Suffixes
-ar 40
-(k)or 40
-ur/-urru 40
atollar 37
*combortia/combrottia 50
*tercos 36
Dutch
Engadine
maisa 52fn
English
bat 224
checkmate 50
hallucinate 226
horse 226
hulc (OEng) 94
obsolete 223
park 215
powder 226
sideboard 217
snow 226
sport(s) 223
talcum 226
wharf 217
white 226
white lady 226
paper 195
sky-blue 102
so and so 104
teenager 225
to make love 134
Frankish
*alira 33
rîki 69fn
German
Bockpfeife 71
319
320
Index
Erle 33
himmelblau 102
Papier 195
Wehe 76
Suffixes
-ing 80
-ingôs 77
marthus 72
rauda 71
reiks 69fn
reiran 71
ribjo 71
af-maginôn 72
*alisi 32
*alms 33
alms 72
at *reds 75
attaujan 72
*sagjis 71
sakan 73
skagkja 71
skagkjan 71
skairan 71
*skattjan 71
snôbô 72
spaúra 71
*spitus 71
stringes 66
bandwô 71
barrika(ns) 71
bar-rûnittôn 72
brikan 76
*brukeins 76
tappa 72
taskôn 72
taujan 73fn
*thrukkjan 74
tuld 72
esca 66
wai 76
waithaneis 71
walthupaírs 71
wardja 71
withralaun 71
Gothic
fata 72
flautjan 72, 74
gabila 72
gaits 71, 73
ganô 71
gans 71
grimms 72
hagja 72
*kasts 71
kundjan 72
laistjan 71
laithtug 71
lêwjan 75
lôfa 71
Greek
bareîa 94
makarie 63
makarios 63
rhododendron 34
septá 61
Hebrew
bet din 114
mamzer 115
mazzal 114
taqqanah 114
Index
Lombardic
Turkish
rîhhi 69fn
balta 107fn
Middle Irish
Welsh
terc 36
taerc 36
321