Naming Of America: The New World in dictionaries since 1550 to 1750 Cover Image

Nazywanie Ameryki: Nowy Świat w słownikach w latach 1550–1750
Naming Of America: The New World in dictionaries since 1550 to 1750

Author(s): Adam Elbanowski
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies
Published by: Wydział Polonistyki Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: leksyka; poznawanie Ameryki; słowniki historyczne; stereotypy; vocabulary; knowledge of America; historical dictionaries; stereotypes

Summary/Abstract: This article aims at presenting an image of the New World included in dictionaries and lexicons since the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-eighteenth century. This is an issue which, apart from random publications, has not been so far examined in Latin-American studies. The overview of the New World themes and topics in dictionary entries is divided into two parts. Firstly, the content of selected dictionaries – Latin, French, English, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese – is discussed chronologically, according to the date of publication. The corpus includes almost 100 publications. A more detailed presentation of selected (most frequently occurring) entries follows, it includes also associations and stereotypes of the New World. The most important element of the analysis consists in capturing the presence of Americanisms (americanismos) in multilingual dictionaries, both Native American words (or indoamericanismos) incorporated into the Spanish language (as well as other national languages), and the words that originated in the New World, generally derived from Spanish, according to the morphology of the language, and referring to the American reality.

  • Issue Year: 64/2013
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 065-098
  • Page Count: 34
  • Language: Polish