Overview

"""New worlds for old words / Mundos nuevos para viejas palabras"" is a collection of chapters on the theme of lexical borrowing in the languages of Western Europe with particular focus on borrowing from Latin, or from Greek via Latin, into Spanish. Such cultured, or ""learnèd"" borrowing-as it has sometimes been designated-, is an especially intriguing feature of the Romance languages, since they also derive from Latin. It is also of particular interest to historical linguists since it is an example of what has been called ""change from above"" innovation first evidenced in the written usage of the culturally élite which then diffuses into more general acceptance, with the result that some cultured borrowings (e.g. problem/problema, social, program(me)/programa) are now amongst the most common words in the modern languages. Despite their enormous influence on such major languages as English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian, the mechanisms by which these borrowings become established in their host languages have to date been relatively little studied. This book seeks to make a contribution to this question and revive interest in what has become a neglected area of historical linguistics and contains contributions both by internationally respected scholars and new researchers in the field. This bilingual collection will appeal to academics, scholars, and postgraduate students of Hispanic Studies, Cultural History, and particularly Historical Linguistics and Romance Linguistics. ""New worlds for old words / Mundos nuevos para viejas palabras"" es una colección sobre los préstamos léxicos en los idiomas de Europa occidental, centrándose sobre todo en los préstamos del latín, o del griego a través del latín, al español. Los cultismos son un rasgo especialmente interesante de las lenguas romances, ya que ellos mismos proceden del latín. También es de gran interés para la lingüística histórica dado que es un ejemplo de lo que se conoce como ""cambio desde arriba"" cambios atestiguados primero en la lengua escrita de la élite cultural que luego comienza a tener un uso más generalizado, y cuyo resultado es que algunos de estos cultismos (por ejemplo ""problema"", ""social"", ""programa"") se encuentran entre las palabras más comunes en los idiomas modernos. A pesar de su enorme influencia en lenguas tan importantes como el inglés, el español, el portugués, el francés o el italiano, los mecanismos por los que estos préstamos se establecen en los idiomas de acogida se han estudiado relativamente poco hasta ahora. Este volumen es una contribución a esta cuestión y su objetivo es reavivar el interés en lo que se ha convertido en un área olvidada de la lingüística diacrónica. Se incluyen capítulos de académicos conocidos internacionalmente y de investigadores noveles. Esta colección bilingüe será de gran utilidad para académicos, investigadores y alumnos de posgrado en estudios hispánicos, estudios culturales, y particularmente lingüística histórica y lingüística de las lenguas romances."

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9781648893865

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This volume contains an introduction by the editors and thirteen scholarly studies, half of them in English, half of them in Spanish. The common topic concerns the adoption of words from the past into a later context. The source language is usually Latin, the more modern language is usually Spanish. The contributors include both established and younger scholars. Steven Dworkin, Gloria Claveria Nadal and Christopher Pountain are among the best-known scholars in this field, and their chapters are comprehensive and wide-ranging: Steven Dworkin concentrates on fifteenth-century borrowings from Latin that came to replace synonymous inherited words; Gloria Claveria considers how such words have been treated in Academy dictionaries; Christopher Pountain shows how mass borrowings of verbs in the -ir conjugation affected the morphological nature of that conjugation itself. There are historical studies of individual words, including sintoma and a couple of Arabisms which survived in Granada (almofia, 'a shallow cooking vessel', and tarquin, 'mud'); of the use of Latinisms by the sixteenth-century author Delicado; and there are studies based in the present day, including two on newspaper journalism (Latinisms in sports headlines, often invariant, such as in Los alter ego de Rafa Nadal, and the use of neological compounds such as necroturismo, 'graveyard tourism') and a report from a modern classroom. There is one study of Italian noun-noun compounds, concerning changes over time in the order of the constituents, and one Europe-wide discussion on the survival of ancient words for 'magic' and 'magician'. The book is consistently scholarly and informative, often original, and at times entertaining. Gloria Claveria Nadal hits the nail on the head as to why the topic is of interest: Old words have actually become the most natural way for modern languages to name these new worlds created on a daily basis (p.29), most obviously, but not only, in non-linguistic fields such as science and medicine. Thus this book will make clear why 'cultured borrowings' should not be dismissed as irrelevant, as they have tended to be in the past. Roger Wright Emeritus Professor of Spanish University of Liverpool The book is a collection of 13 original contributions on cultural borrowing. The languages of the book are English and Spanish (6 contributions), and the languages treated are in first place Spanish and other Romance languages (Italian). Several of the contributors are well-known scholars and authorities in the field of historical lexicology. The issue - what traditionally used to be called learned borrowing - is an important one also in the light of more recent theoretical contributions that consider language dynamics not just as a homogeneous process of evolution but rather as a differentiated composite history of discursive traditions between immediacy and distance (a view explicitly mentioned in several of the contributions). The contact of modern European languages (mainly Spanish, but also other European languages) with classical languages via cultural contact and translation is treated in this volume from a wide range of perspectives: from medieval to contemporary borrowings, from philological, psycholinguistic to didactic approaches and including not only purely lexical, but also morphological aspects. The book is particularly of interest for advanced students and scholars in Romance linguistics. Dr. Johannes Kabatek University of Zurich

Author Information

"Christopher J. Pountain is Emeritus Professor of Spanish Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London and a Life Fellow of Queens' College Cambridge. He has an extensive publication record of articles and chapters on a wide range of Romance linguistic themes and is the author of two major books on Spanish, A History of the Spanish Language through Texts (Routledge) and Exploring the Spanish Language (Routledge). He currently leads the 'Loaded Meanings' research strand on the 'Language Acts and Worldmaking' project based at King's College London. He has worked on the phenomenon of Latin influence on the Romance languages for many years and is author of the reference essay 'Latin and the Structure of Written Romance' included in Cambridge History of the Romance Languages (Cambridge University Press). Christopher J. Pountain es profesor emérito de lingüística española en la Queen Mary University de Londres y miembro vitalicio del Queens' College, Cambridge. Ha publicado numerosos artículos y capítulos sobre una variedad de temas de lingüística romance, y ha escrito dos libros de gran importancia sobre el español: A History of the Spanish Language Through Texts y Exploring the Spanish Language (ambos de Routledge). En la actualidad, lidera la línea de investigación ""Loaded Meanings"" en el proyecto ""Language Acts and Worldmaking"" del King's College, Londres. Ha estudiado el fenómeno de la influencia del latín en las lenguas romances durante años, y es el autor del ensayo de referencia ""Latin and the Structure of Written Romance"" incluido en Cambridge History of the Romance Languages (Cambridge University Press). Bozena Wislocka Breit is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Queen Mary University of London, working on the impact of cultured borrowings on Spanish. She is a graduate of the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, and the Complutense University, Madrid. She holds a PhD in Linguistics and a postgraduate Diploma in Translation. She has taught at the Jagiellonian University, the Technical University of Madrid, and the Instituto Universitario de Lenguas Modernas y Traductores of the Complutense University of Madrid. She has published papers on a wide range of topics, such as the history of Polish translations into Spanish, Spanish and English oenological language, and the language of sensory perception in the 16th-century Spanish. Bozena Wislocka Breit es investigadora post-doctoral en la Queen Mary Unviersity, Londres, y estudia el impacto de los cultismos en el español. Cursó estudios en la Universidad Jaguelónica, Cracovia, y la Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Tiene un doctorado en lingüística y una diplomatura en traducción. Ha sido profesora en la Universidad Jaguelónica, en la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, y el Instituto Universitario de Lenguas Modernas y Traductores de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Ha publicado artículos sobre diversos temas, como la historia de las traducciones del polaco al español, el lenguaje enológico en español e inglés, y el lenguaje de las percepciones sensoriales en el español del siglo XVI."

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