From Great Britain to the Spanish Philippines via British India… and back

Abstract

Abstract This research uncovers lexical contact between English and other languages in texts about the part of the Spanish Philippines under the control of the British East India Company from September 1762 to April 1764. Better known as the Manilha Consultations, the texts in English sent to, and received from, British India are scrutinised in search of the British East India Company’s vocabulary. That vocabulary partly consists of lexemes found in the English/British East India Company’s consultations worldwide but unrecorded in monolingual dictionaries and glossaries of major and/or minor varieties of English. The Manilha Consultations contain lexemes unrecorded in the Oxford English Dictionary, the Hobson-Jobson Glossary, and/or the Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. The 38 lexemes here considered instances of the British East India Company’s vocabulary might be included in those, and/or other, dictionaries and glossaries of British English, Indian English, and/or Philippine English if expansive criteria for lexeme inclusion were applied.