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  • Aspectos de la neología en el Siglo de Oro: Lengua general y lenguajes especializados
  • Steven N. Dworkin
Verdonk, Robert and María Jesús Mancho Duque, eds. Aspectos de la neología en el Siglo de Oro: Lengua general y lenguajes especializados. Foro Hispánico 41. Amsterdam and New York, 2010. 349 pp.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mark a time of major change in the history of the Spanish language. In addition to the ongoing phonological and morphosyntactic shifts that mark the transition from medieval to modern Spanish, this period also witnessed enrichment of the Spanish lexicon through the incorporation of numerous neologisms in the form of lexical and semantic borrowings from living and dead languages with which Spanish was in contact, as well as through the coining of new words by means of its various derivational resources.

This volume contains thirteen essays on neologisms in the general language and in the specialized technolects of early modern Spain. The emphasis in these papers falls more on the presentation of data rather than discussion of broad theoretical and methodological issues raised by the creation of neologisms. The two editors are recognized authorities in these areas. Robert Verdonk has studied Flemish influence on the Spanish spoken in the Low Countries and in Spain itself. María Jesús Mancho Duque is the Director of the Diccionario de la Ciencia y de la Técnica del Renacimiento (DICTER), and has published extensively on the genesis and incorporation of scientific terminology in Golden Age Spain (see the respective entries in the Bibliography at the end of this volume). Their “Introducción y presentación”(7–20), surveys the various categories of neologisms and summarizes each of the essays.

The first eight contributions appear under the general heading “Neología en los tecnolectos en el Siglo de Oro”. José Ramón Carriazo and Patricia Giménez-Eguibar, “Procesos de sustitución léxica en el tecnolecto naval del Siglo de Oro: neología frente a obsolescencia” (23–39), examine methodological problems posed by the interplay of lexical loss and borrowings in the history of naval technical terminology. They illustrate the relevant general issues with a discussion of the replacement of the set marear/mareante by the Latinisms navegar/navegante and the rivalry between native cuaderna ‘frame of [End Page 145] the hull’and such borrowings as estemenara, (short-lived) orenga, and varenga. Bertha M. Gutiérrez Rodilla, “La antineología de la medicina renacentista en castellano: los textos instructivos y de divulgación” (41–56), demonstrates that medical texts written for the lower ranks of medical practitioners or the non-specialist reader tended to avoid, insofar as possible, the use of Latin and Greek technical neologisms in favor of the terminology employed in everyday speech. Francisco M. Carriscondo Esquivel, ‘Algunos neologismos y primeras ocurrencias de préstamos léxicos en la astronomía y la cosmografía del Quinientos” (57–80), examines twenty-two lexical items pertaining to the fields of astronomy and cosmography first attested in sixteenth-century Spanish texts. Some of these items have entered the general language, e.g., apogeo, dicótomo. Several of the Hellenisms entered Spanish directly from Greek written sources rather than through Latin. Rafael García Pérez, “Neologismos jurídico-penales en los Siglos de Oro: procedimientos por derivación sobre bases cultas” (81–92), describes and exemplifies the creation of judicial neologisms coined through the addition to Latin bases already present in the language of prefixes or suffixes, e.g., reincidir, criminalidad, complicidad. Josefa Gómez de Enterría, “El vocabulario español de las finanzas en una obra del siglo xvii” (93–109), describes the various neological processes observable in the technical vocabulary of finance found in José de la Vega’s treatise Confusión de Confusiones (Amsterdam 1668), the first known European treatise dealing with the workings of a stock market. María Lourdes García Macho, “El neologismo en el léxico de la navegación del Siglo de Oro” (111–130), comments on neologisms pertaining to types of vessels and to meteorological and other maritime-related phenomena in five sixteenth-century treatises on navigation. The majority of such...

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