New data on the use of words of traditional Hispanic origin in 16th-century American texts

Abstract

Spanish texts from the 16th century included some explanatory notes accompanying words of traditional Hispanic origin. These annotations indicate that indigenous people or Spaniards living in the first American cities employed a lexicon unfamiliar or unknown to the annotators' inherited traditional Spanish vocabulary. The annotators mainly involved in these cases were civil servants as well as some journalists with a puristic attitude towards vocabulary. Analyses of under researched examples of the lexicon in question reveal that these words are of Arabic or Portuguese origin, which are the product of semantic changes, or derivatives with meanings very distant from those of the original phrases. This transformation indicates a first-level separation between the lexicon employed in America and the one that was used in Peninsular Spain