Indications of lexical-semantic changes in the Arabisms of the Kingdom of Granada (1493-1612): the lexical competition between almádena and martillo

Abstract

The objective of the present study is to analyze a couple of lexical items formed by an Arabism and a Romance voice (almadena and martillo) through a corpus of documents linked to the ancient Kingdom of Granada (i.e. the current provinces of Malaga, Almeria and Granada) in the late 15th century to 17th century. That documentation includes different types of texts as the correspondence of Hernando de Zafra or texts linked to the building construction at that time. Due to the historical, political, social and religious peculiarities of the Kingdom of Granada there is a persistence of lexicon of Arab origin over the above two centuries with regard to other Spanish-speaking territories. However, Arabic loanwords in Spanish lexicon are subjected to specialization processes or semantic restrictions, as exemplified in the case of almadena. This voice lexically competed with the Romance voice martillo, but, finally, the first one suffered a process of semantic restriction and it is actually cornered in some dialectal areas.