Volume 135, Issue 1

The Old French word longuebart , with the meaning ‘inhabitant of Southern Italy’, is used in chronicles that deal with the war between the emperor Frederick II and the lords of Ibelin written in the Latin East. This article traces the history that lies behind this unexpected use of the term examining medieval French, Latin and Italian texts of various kinds.

Abstract  This paper offers a corpus study of two reflexive (semi-)copular verbs, viz. se trouver and se retrouver , which at first sight appear to be mere morphological variants. In a first stage, the study is devoted to the comparison of the reflexive copular construction with the object complement construction of trouver and retrouver . We show the observed differences between both constructions may be explained by a process of grammaticalization, which has attained a further stage in the case of the reflexive constructions which even admit semi-auxiliary uses. Next, we conduct a contrastive analysis of the syntax and the semantics (partially based on a collostructional analysis) of the copular constructions of se trouver and se retrouver . The analysis not only allows to describe the different meaning effects produced by the verbs, it also shows the close links with the locative uses. Moreover, it accounts for the role the morpheme « re- » plays in the reinforcement of the nuance of unexpectedness, and hence, of the detrimental inference.

Abstract  Francoprovençal has generally been viewed as an oral dialect group with a highly varied character (due to the mountainous regions of the Alps, the Jura and the Massif Central), and with no elaborated written textual tradition. The virtual absence of such a tradition may indeed be observed for the modern period (i.e. the second half of the second millennium). However, this is not the case for the medieval period, during which Francoprovençal underwent a process of elaboration similar to that of the neighbouring Romance languages, at first fragmentary and embedded in Latin. From these beginnings emerged a pure Romance scripta which remained in existence until the end of the 15th century, when it was replaced by French. This process remained incomplete, characterised by the continuous copresence of either Latin or French and essentially limited to legal and administrative documents. Nonetheless, the first half of the second millennium yields a complex written vernacular which displays both diatopic and diachronic variation, and which has never before undergone systematic analysis. The present contribution is based on a corpus of medieval documents from the Francoprovençal regions of France and Switzerland (approx. 700.000 words), digitised as part of the project Documents linguistiques galloromans and presented for the first time here. Taking one of the most salient and frequent phenomena as an example – the outcome of lat. /a/ in tonic free syllables ( ˈpratu > Frpr. pra vs Fr. pré ) – the authors assess the nature and extent of the presence of Francoprovençal in medieval scripturality, examining a total of 60.000 occurrences. The results thus obtained allow an interpretation of the historical development of Francoprovençal on the basis of entirely new evidence.

Most research works on language attitudes, which have been done within the Hispanic world, deal with issues where Spanish is usually confronted with other languages (American Indian languages, Catalan, Valencian, Galician, Equatorial Guinean languages, English, etc.), or about attitudes in some Spanish-speaking countries with respect to other varieties of Spanish, both in the Americas and Spain. However, a global, comprehensive study, which would include all Spanish speaking countries, and which would assess their attitudes, beliefs and prejudices equally, was missing, so that it would have been possible to count for a thorough and at the same time comparative study about how Spanish speakers evaluate not only their own speech, but the speech of others around them. The present study describes in broad strokes the most recent research and their new contributions in the Spanish-speaking world.

In this paper we analyze the religious ideology present in four dictionaries of Spanish published in the 19th century, specifically in the second half (1846 is the year for the publication of the first and 1895 for the last). To do this, we will refer to the context in which these works were published, and we will also refer to the ideology of the authors. On one hand, we will study the macrostructure of the dictionaries, particularly the prologues of the works and, on the other hand, the microstructure; in this respect we will select a series of lexicographical entries that reflect the ideology present in the dictionaries and we will check whether there is correspondence between the declaration of intentions of the prologues and the content of such entries.

The present paper deals with 82 words of possible African origin registered in Uruguay by Ildefonso Pereda Valdés and Rolando Laguarda Trías between 1937 and 1965. Many of the lexical items were probably introduced by enslaved Africans brought to the region during the 18th and 19th centuries. Evidence shows that most of the words are apparently shared with varieties of Spanish outside the Rio de la Plata region, and most of them also appear in neighboring Argentina and Brazil. Furthermore, the African-derived lexicon is often used to denominate the ‘other’ with respect to people and social behaviors, and most of these loanwords are nouns with possible origins in Bantu languages spoken in West-Central Africa, which corresponds to the available demographic data.

In the first part of this paper, an overview of the commonly adopted approaches to the study of technical vocabularies in Old Italian is provided: in particular, it is confirmed that traditionally, researchers exploit documents such as treatises, translations, and practical texts – mostly composed from the 15th century to the present – to gather new information on the Italian lexicon of art. In the second section, the author argues that it is possible to expand the research beyond these chronological and typological borders, and find occurrences of technical words in literary texts from the 13th and 14th centuries. Since many of these terms are also part of everyday vocabulary, their artistic meaning is hard – but not impossible – to identify. Thus, the examples of terra bianca (‘white soil’) and marmo cotto (‘cooked marble’) are introduced in order to show an alternative method of verifying the presence of semantic technicisms in old literary texts.

The purpose of this contribution is to give an etymology to two Occitan words regarded as of unknown origin by the FEW. Velay prounseau ‘a kind of thrush’ is a regular issue of Old Occitan proensal ‘of Provence’. The nasalized form prounsean is a phono-stylistic and zoolectal variant of prounseau .

Various hypotheses have been put forward to explain the etymology of Old It. (zucchero) caffettino ( Jaffa < Yāfā , cafis < qafīz , Caffa = Feodosia , caffa < qafaṣ , Haifa < Ḥayfā , Kafá < ?, coffa < quffa(h) ). All these proposals, however, are unsustainable for reasons of cultural-historical and/or semantic, phonetic and morphological incompatibilities. In reality the etymon is the Arabic nisba adjective of the name of the Egyptian city of Qifṭ ( qiftī ), which in Medieval times was highly renowned for its sugar production. The Arabic equivalent of zucchero caffettino is as-sukkar al-qiftī . The phonomorphological adaptation of caffettino is absolutely regular (anaptyctical e , gemination f > ff , initial ca - < qi -, final – ī > - ino ); the original type qiftī is still reflected by the ancient Italian and Romance variants chafethi , cafeti and cafati .