1. Medical Cultismos in Contemporary Spanish Dissemination and embedding of medical cultismos in Spanish
Isabel García Ortiz
PhD student at Queen Mary, University of London
Research questions
How did these words, originally restricted to certain social groups (a privileged group of society with access to learning and knowledge), come to rank among the most common words in Spanish (Davies, 2017)?
To what extent can we determine the social and linguistic embedding of medical cultismos in the language?
To what extent can we determine the changes that these words developed as a consequence of their embedding in the language?
What does the uneven spread across registers tell us about the degree of vocabulary knowledge that speakers of Spanish possess in relation to medical terminology?
How can we investigate the degree of vocabulary knowledge that speakers of Spanish possess in relation to medical cultismos?
Are existing methods to measure the degree of vocabulary knowledge actually valid to measure it? How can these methods be improved?
Methodology
How to investigate the process of dissemination of cultismos
Online corpora: CORDE, CDE
Dictionaries: specialized dictionaries (DTM) and general dictionaries (DCECH, DRAE)
Online databases: BDH
How to investigate the degree of vocabulary knowledge
Vocabulary tests
Lexical availability measures
Defining cultismos
They are generally coined
All languages borrow cultismos. This phenomenon is particularly evident in scientific discourse, to the point that some authors have already suggested a tendency towards its universality. As an example, consider the following table:
Dissemination and embedding of medical cultismos
Cultismos are typically coined by an élite educated group of society and are generally introduced in the written form. For these reasons, the date of first attestation of a cultismo is not sufficient to claim its embedding in the language. Rather, we can say that a word is part of the language when its usage spreads to other linguistic groups, thus ceasing to be restricted to the élite community within which it originated, and it starts being used in other registers. In other words, the process of embedding of cultismos rests on two phenomena, namely a) growth in frequency and b) spread across registers. Take the following examples:
‘Learnèd’ borrowings (also mots savants in French or cultismos in Spanish) are words borrowed directly or indirectly from the languages of classical Antiquity (Greek and Latin) or coined on the basis of classical roots.
1. To cover terminological gaps
2. To establish semantic distinctions
A sample of growth in frequency of medical cultismos (CDE)
What makes the borrowing of cultismos in the Romance languages interesting is the fact that these languages derive from Latin and, therefore, a large proportion of their vocabularies are made up of words of Latin origin. For this reason, linguists make a distinction between direct inheritance (these are usually referred to as ‘popular’ words, Sp. vulgarismos) and direct or indirect borrowing (‘learnéd’ borrowings, Sp. cultismos).
BDH = Biblioteca Nacional de España, Biblioteca Digital Hispánica. Available online.
CDE = Mark Davies, Corpus del Español: 100 million words, 1200s-1900s. Available online.
CORDE = Real Academia Española. Corpus Diacrónico del Español. Available online.
DCECH = Corominas, Joan & Pascual, José Antonio, Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico (Madrid: Gredos).
DRAE = Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua española, 23rd ed. (Madrid: Espasa). Available online.
DTM = Real Academia de Medicina, Diccionario de términos médicos (Madrid: Panamericana). Available online.
Davies, Mark, 2017 [2006]. A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish. Core Vocabulary for Learners. London: Routledge.
A sample of medical cultismos across registers (CDE)
Bustos Tovar, José Jesús, Contribución al estudio del cultismo léxico medieval. Madrid: Real Academia Española.
Clavería Nadal, Gloria, El latinismo en español. Barcelona: Departament de Filologia Espanyola, Facultat de Lletres, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Martín Camacho, José Carlos, El vocabulario del discurso tecnocientífico. Madrid: Arco Libros.
Pountain, Christopher, ‘Learned borrowing as a transnational phenomenon’, Transnational Modern Languages (not published).
Labov, William, 2006 [1996]. The Social Stratification of English in New York City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Pountain, Christopher, ‘How ‘learnèd’ words become popular’. Cardiff: AHGBI Conference (not published).
Pountain, Christopher, ‘The statistics of learnèd borrowings’, Forty-sixth Cambridge Romance Linguistics Seminar (not published).