Los arabismos del léxico hispánico primitivo

Abstract

The editorial board of the recently issued Léxico Hispánico Primitivo, an indeed impressive first-rate tool for the study of the Early Hispanic lexicon, has chosen not to reproduce or update the etyma, often suggested by the initial authors and extant in their previous drafts, for a significant number of Arabic loanwords and technical terms found in their sources. Such a decision, taken in view of the difficulties met upon handling of this second ingredient of Hispanic Romance languages, must be respected as wise and preferable to taking unnecessary risks on shaky grounds, were angels fear treading. However, the absence of Arabic scholarship and expertise in this project has taken a certain toll of inaccuracies, namely, wrong attribution of borrowings in both ways, i.e., labelling as Arabic loanwords some terms of another origin (e.g., alcor, alpe, bufunaria, fatel and gardunio), and omitting to do so rightly in other instances (e.g., albar, alhodera, atursihala, bocren, cafal bafal, facenzal, mascul, etc.) or, which is worse, missing the correct meaning of not a few passages of those early documents (e.g., alfada, alguecale, alhiçem, almandra, artarfa azaguaria, azaquia, heite, hotege, oveite, racua, saibi, zamor, etc.) in the lack of access to the semantics of Arabic items. The same shortcomings are at times noticed in the case of Andalusi or Southern Romance items (e.g., armolaita, lahtag, parsair, patín, poplina[ria] and ribel). As a tribute to the memory of tihose great scholars who concerned themselves with gathering and explaining the lexical wealth of our Hispanic languages since their very beginnings, the present writer has tried to contribute a number of remarks that might fill some of those gaps.