New worlds for old words / Mundos nuevos para viejas palabras

This volume contains an introduction by the editors and thirteen scholarly studies, half of them in English, half of them in Spanish. The common topic concerns the adoption of words from the past into a later context. The source language is usually Latin, the more modern language is usually Spanish. The contributors include both established and younger scholars. Steven Dworkin, Gloria Claveria Nadal and Christopher Pountain are among the best-known scholars in this field, and their chapters are comprehensive and wide-ranging: Steven Dworkin concentrates on fifteenth-century borrowings from Latin that came to replace synonymous inherited words; Gloria Claveria considers how such words have been treated in Academy dictionaries; Christopher Pountain shows how mass borrowings of verbs in the -ir conjugation affected the morphological nature of that conjugation itself. There are historical studies of individual words, including sintoma and a couple of Arabisms which survived in Granada (almofia, 'a shallow cooking vessel', and tarquin, 'mud'); of the use of Latinisms by the sixteenth-century author Delicado; and there are studies based in the present day, including two on newspaper journalism (Latinisms in sports headlines, often invariant, such as in Los alter ego de Rafa Nadal, and the use of neological compounds such as necroturismo, 'graveyard tourism') and a report from a modern classroom. There is one study of Italian noun-noun compounds, concerning changes over time in the order of the constituents, and one Europe-wide discussion on the survival of ancient words for 'magic' and 'magician'. The book is consistently scholarly and informative, often original, and at times entertaining. Gloria Claveria Nadal hits the nail on the head as to why the topic is of interest: Old words have actually become the most natural way for modern languages to name these new worlds created on a daily basis (p.29), most obviously, but not only, in non-linguistic fields such as science and medicine. Thus this book will make clear why 'cultured borrowings' should not be dismissed as irrelevant, as they have tended to be in the past. Roger Wright Emeritus Professor of Spanish University of Liverpool The book is a collection of 13 original contributions on cultural borrowing. The languages of the book are English and Spanish (6 contributions), and the languages treated are in first place Spanish and other Romance languages (Italian). Several of the contributors are well-known scholars and authorities in the field of historical lexicology. The issue - what traditionally used to be called learned borrowing - is an important one also in the light of more recent theoretical contributions that consider language dynamics not just as a homogeneous process of evolution but rather as a differentiated composite history of discursive traditions between immediacy and distance (a view explicitly mentioned in several of the contributions). The contact of modern European languages (mainly Spanish, but also other European languages) with classical languages via cultural contact and translation is treated in this volume from a wide range of perspectives: from medieval to contemporary borrowings, from philological, psycholinguistic to didactic approaches and including not only purely lexical, but also morphological aspects. The book is particularly of interest for advanced students and scholars in Romance linguistics. Dr. Johannes Kabatek University of Zurich