Volume 134, Issue 1

Gustav Gröber (1844–1911), Professor of Romance Philology at the Universities of Zurich, Breslau (Wrocław) and Strasbourg, went down in the annals of his discipline for the founding of the «Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie» (1877), which exists still today. Gröber’s merits have been appreciated by the writers of his obituaries, but as he has destroyed his personal papers prior to his death, we know little about his professional environment. The present article evaluates more than six-hundred letters which Gröber wrote to certain peers and traces back the period of time the «Zeitschrift» needed to consolidate and gain international reputation.

This paper aims to get a better insight into the material, literary and historical context surrounding two important, but neglected or unknown, evidences of the dissemination of Castillan literature in the French literature at the end of the Middle Ages. The French translations of Diego de Valera’s Crónica abreviada de España o Valeriana , on the one part, and of Pero López de Ayala’s Crónicas , on the other part, were both achieved between 1504–1506 for the last « Duke of Burgundy » Philip the Fair. Through the investigation of the surviving manuscripts, of the paratext and of the content of these two French texts, will be argued that Vasco de Lucena or Fernando de Lucena are two ideal candidates for their attribution. Moreover, the paper will offer a new perspective on a major evidence of the History of the Castillan language : the Epistola latina et hispanica .

The Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula possess a second person plural subject pronoun that induces verb and pronoun agreement in 2pl. While standard Catalan chooses us / vos as unstressed pronouns, Portuguese selects vos and Spanish, os . Nevertheless, the data taken from linguistic atlases of the 20th century point out the great quantity of 2pl allomorphs in unstressed pronouns: tos , sos , sus , los and se . In this article, I aim to account for the linguistic geography of 2pl allomorphs and their possible linguistic factors.

The present study focusses on the Spanish suffixes denoting ‘baby animal’ (‑ ato , ‑ ezno , ‑ ino , ‑ ón , ‑ ucho , etc.), although it also takes into account the simple substantives belonging to the same lexical field (e.g. potro ‘colt’). Since there are no previous studies which either enumerate or analyse suffixes on this kind, our initial goal is to identify them. In order to do so, we have drawn on the Diccionario de la lengua española (2014), which may be considered the linguistic work containing the greatest number of zoonyms. Then, once the corpus has been established, we describe the characteristics of some suffixes: productivity rate, patterns of formation, receptive bases of the suffixes, nouns which two or three alternative suffixes, relations of synonymy, and potential pragmatic and non-linguistic causes of the lexical diversity and morphological particularities of suffixes.

The objective of this work is analysing absolute interrogative sentences from the Spanish of San Antonio de Texas using three corpus featuring different levels of spontaneity (formal ad hoc , situational and conversational), and uttered by native speakers with superior studies. The choice of these corpus and their acoustic analyses have been performed according to the methodology established by the international project AMPER ( Atlas Multimédia Prosodique de l’Espace Roman ). Furthermore, we have undertaken the phonetic-phonological labelling of the boundary tones and of initial and nuclear pitch accents within the framework of the autosegmental-metrical model. This study has been carried out with the aim of contributing to the knowledge of Texan intonation, in order to make comparisons with other varieties of Spanish language as well as to include it in the international Atlas AMPER. We hypothesize that interrogatives from the informants considered follow the patterns described for Mexican interrogatives (Sosa, 1999; Ávila, 2003; Martín Butragueño, 2004, among others), taking into account the geographical location of San Antonio de Texas in relation to Mexico and the influence of Mexican immigration, which has a strong presence in San Antonio. Results provide evidence of such influence, particularly in the final ascent of the F0.

Despite the relative abundance of written records from the late 19 th century of interactions in Chinese pidgin Spanish (a modified form of Spanish used in business transactions between Chinese merchants in Manila and their customers), few of these texts have made it into the hands ―or research― of Creole experts. Up to now, Chinese pidgin Spanish has been largely dismissed by creolists as an unstable jargon unworthy of their attention. However, the presence and use of stereotypes among the local population, as evidenced by the substantial corpus of surviving documents from this period, demonstrates a certain degree of stability in at least some aspects of the pidgin. The recent discovery of a short dialogue in Chinese pidgin Spanish dating from the early 18th century has pushed the timeline for the language back much further. This article examines the main linguistic features of the dialogue and compares them with those from a century and a half later. The results indicate the prolonged stability of the stereotypes over a period of at least 150 years. The analysis also explores the possible origins of these linguistic forms and how they spread.

Giovanni Antonio Battaglia was a notary and a secular priest of the diocese of Aquileia. He was active between the late fifteenth and the first four decades of the sixteenth century in Gemona, his place of birth, in the castle of Porcia and the city of Udine. A register he compiled (Udine, Archivio notarile antico, n. 2247), contains two documents which are worthy of attention. The first one is a funeral lauda in Italian vernacular which completes the rather short list of the religious laude repertoire of the Friulian region between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The second document is the text Dolce Regina, dona la tua pace . This work can be placed within the framework of the brotherhoods of the Battuti , which Battaglia served as a priest and as a teacher. A rather composite Latin text also appears on the same page of the notarial register. It includes an invocation to the Magi , a quote from the Scriptures and an adapted liturgical oration. The presence of this exorcism, unusual if compared to the local context of traditional beliefs and therapeutic practices, requires wide-ranging comparisons. The figure of Battaglia himself also deserves further analysis especially in order to understand his cultural background as well as clarifying his relationship with the humanists whom he was corresponding with.

Some influential studies about medieval northern Italian dialects argue that if a subject pronoun occupies the first position in a sentence it should not be regarded as clitic, because of the Tobler Mussafia law. However, evidence suggests that Tobler Mussafia law did not apply to subject clitic pronouns, but only to object ones. It is therefore worth inquiring when a subject pronoun may be seen as clitic in medieval northern Italian dialects: four criteria are set forth.

The article focusses on the fate of Sovietisms in modern Romanian, i.e. the situation of words or phrases borrowed from Russian in the period of Soviet control over Eastern Europe (1945–1989). The borrowings reflect relevant concepts of Soviet-Communist economics, culture, politics and propaganda. Romanian received the largest number of Sovietisms of all Romance languages, mainly because of its close political relationship with the URSS. The use of terms which implicated a critical attitude towards the Soviet-Communist dictatorship ( samizdat ‘samizdat’, aparatcic ‘apparatchik’, gulag ‘goulag’, etc.) was forbidden both in the URSS and in socialist Romania, but they passed into Russian and Romanian through western radio broadcasts, mainly Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Today, most of those Sovietisms are no longer in use in Romanian.

Italian caviaro / caviale ʻsturgeon roeʼ is a borrowing from Greek χαβιάρι . The Greek term, which dates back to the 9th century, does not derive from Turkish, as has often been assumed so far. The chronology of the historical records clearly shows that, on the contrary, Turkish havyar , which does not appear before the 14th century, is a borrowing from Greek. The merchandise and the term became known in Italy in the 13th/14th centuries in the wake of Black Sea trade. The type caviale appears mainly in Genoese documents, whereas caviaro is tipical for Venetian sources. As far as Tuscan caviale is concerned, it cannot be decided with certainty if it was modelled on Genoese caviale or if it is the result of an independent development. Whatever the case, in the course of the 16th/17th centuries Tuscan caviale made its way as the Italian standard variant. On the basis of the Venetian type caviaro , from the 15th century onwards, the term has spread all over Europe (Sp. caviar , Fr. caviar , Germ. Kaviar , etc.).

This paper presents the Waaren-Lexicon in zwölf Sprachen der Hamburgischen Commerz-Deputation zugeeignet (‘Vocabulary of Merchandise in twelve languages dedicated to the Chamber of Commerce of Hamburg’) as well as the figure of its author Philipp Andreas Nemnich (1764–1822), German encyclopaedist and journalist. It is a little-known multilingual lexicographic work, published in 1797 in Hamburg, which furnishes a collection of names of various kinds of merchandise such as food, plants, animals, tissues, minerals, precious stones, etc., and is designed for the practical use of tradesmen from different countries. The main purpose of the paper is to point out the characteristics of the Portuguese material included in the dictionary. It also provides evidence of the Waaren-Lexicon ’s importance in supplying general knowledge about the European material culture at the end of the 18th century.