Reviews of Books

Abstract

MANUEL ALVAR, Estudios léxicos: segunda serie . Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies. 1992. 151pp. Manuel Alvar's Estudios léxicos: primera serie (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1984) collected twenty lexical studies previously published separately, although we were not told where, in alphabetical order of words studied. That cheerfully uninformative thoroughness is accentuated in this segunda serie of only twelve studies, of which at least some and perhaps all are available elsewhere, but we are not told which nor where. The order of printing seems to be a kind of alfabeto quebrado: campiña, montiña, cantiña; catarata; escudero; explotar and explosionar; aceñas, armella and argolla; alaju(r) and alfajor; gallete; gótico and románico; palometa; escorpa; jarcia and gánguil. The wide-ranging interests and knowledge of the research team are evident throughout. Sometimes the analytical emphasis is formal, as on the -iña suffix, originally traceable to a variation of campaña in Moslem Spain; sometimes it is semantic, as with the varied reference of the learned borrowing catarata, the distinction between the aceña and other water-driven devices, and the polysemy of argolla. Some analyses are the key to wider historical and cultural considerations, as with the change of the reference of escudero from hidalgos to the poor, or the specifically Spanish use of gótico in an architectural context. The other words studied are in origin borrowings; from Arabic, for the sweet now called alajú in Cuenca and Guadalajara, from Greek, for the ichthyonyms palometa (applied to piranhas in America) and escorpa or escórpora, and the sailing terms jarcia and gánguil; and two interesting cases in which the same French word was borrowed twice, once with a formal difference (explotar and explosionar, ‘explode’) and once without (galleta, ‘biscuit’, ‘container’). Each paper is a self-sufficient vignette of data; more general questions of lexical and semantic interest are left resolutely unexplored. ROGER WRIGHT University of Liverpool. FEDERICO CORRIENTE, Árabe andalusí y lenguas romances . Madrid: Editorial Mapfre. 1992. 270 pp. When in 1977 he published A Grammatical Sketch of the Spanish Arabic Dialect Bundle (Madrid: Instituto Hispano-Árabe de Cultura), Corriente put all Semiticists and everyone working on the languages of the medieval Iberian peninsula in his debt. Nothing comparable in scope or authority was, or is, available. True, the book laboured under the handicap of that unnecessarily modest title: had it been called plain Spanish Arabic, who would have objected? As it is, we and the author have by now got used to abbreviating it to Sketch, an inappropriate name for such a densely-packed even if not over-long work. Corriente, who has taught in the United States, wrote it in English, the better to communicate with linguists at large. For reasons I have never understood, it appeared without a table of contents (at least, none of the copies I have seen has one), and I have never regretted the time I spent constructing my own, for that unlocked the potential of a major work of reference.