Léxico Hispanoamericano (1493-1993) (review)

Reviews261 Boyd-Bowman, Peter. Léxico Hispanoamericano (1493-1993). Eds. Ray Harris-Northall andJohn Nitti. CD-ROM. Hispanic Seminary ofMedieval Studies, 2003. ISBN 0900411287. Introduction The Léxico Hispanoamericano (LHA) CD-ROM provides information on the frequency, distribution, and use of tens of thousands of lexical items in Latin America in different geographic regions and in different historical periods from 1493 to 1993. This database is the end product of work that was carried out by Peter Boyd-Bowman from the 1960s through the 1980s. Since 1967, Boyd-Bowman had collected, on citation slips, entries for thousands ofwords from several million words oftext. These citation slips formed the basis for a microfilm edition of the LHA which was subsequently released by the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies. Five sets of microfiche were produced between 1982 and 1994 covering each of the centuries from the 1500s to the 1900s. Although the microfilm editions were quite valuable in their own right, it was suggested that the material would be more accessible in searchable electronic form. In 1994 the National Endowment for the Humanities provided funding for such a project, and the current CD-ROM is the result of this effort. Technical information In terms of system requirements and installation information, it should be noted that the CD-ROM runs only on the Windows platform, but can be installed under any Windows operating system from Windows 95 to Windows XP. The database requires approximately 750 MB of hard drive space, and in our experience the installation program worked very well, on both a Windows 2000 Server and Windows XP Pro machine. In tenus of technical issues, there is one fairly serious bug in the program. On both machines, the First time the program attempted to export a report to MS Word, it caused a problem with one of the registry values for Microsoft Office (in both versions, XP and 2003). Subsequently, each time Word, Excel, or any MS Office program was run or we attempted to Copy or Paste text, there was a 5-10 second delay as the program searched for a missing file. Once Word was re-registered, however, ([winword /r] from the Command Prompt), the problem disappeared. La corónica 33.1 (Fall, 2004): 261-66 262ReviewsLa coránica 33.1, 2004 The database The citation slips which form the basis for the database come from 387 texts in approximately 105 locations, ranging from Arequipa and Asunción to the Yucatán and Zacatecas. A detailed bibliographic listing ofall the source texts can be obtained from the Indexes/Sources entry on the main menu, and a simple listing of all of the localities can be obtained via Indexes/Locations. As noted, all of the citations come from texts from 1493-1993, and a listing of all of the dates can be found under Indexes/Chronologies. One basic piece of information regarding the database that is lacking is the overall size of the textual corpus from which it was compiled. With the appearance of more and more large corpora of historical Spanish, it would be useful to have a general idea of the overall size of the LHA corpus, so that the same query in different corpora allows us to compare "apples to apples". Yet by using some simple ratios of word frequency in comparable corpora, such as CORDE from the Real Academia Española (www.rae.es), we can estimate the size of the LHA corpus. While the ratio of frequencies with different words provides differing results, we can estimate that the textual corpus was probably somewhere between one and ten million words in size. More specific information is also lacking regarding the distribution of the corpus between different texts, locations, and historical periods. For example, what it the size of the corpus from Perú or from Chile, and how many words are there from the 1600s or the 1800s? In the original BoydBowman introductions for each of the five volumes for the 1500s through the 1900s, there is some indication of the number of pages that were consulted for each of the historical periods, but this is not translated into number of words. Without knowing the relative size of...