Collected Name Resources from LoARs (2010-present)

Articles from Juliana de Luna, Lillia de Vaux, and Alys Mackyntoich

January 2011 - Juliana de Luna Link to LoAR Cover Letter

We've talked about online dictionaries for English, Old Norse, and French. Unfortunately, there is not an equivalent online dictionary for Spanish. What there is, however, is almost as useful (if you can read a little Spanish). The Real Academia Española has a collection of historical documents, which form a database of historical usage. It's called CORDE (Corpus Diacrónico del Español) and is found at http://corpus.rae.es/cordenet.html.

The word that you want to find goes in the search box labeled Consulta. Put 1600 (or 1650) in the second space in the second of the two boxes labeled Cronológico (which limits the citations to before that date). Click Buscar. That will bring up a group of cases (the number is listed as casos under Resultado). To get the actual examples (for context), click on the button labeled Recuperar. If the number is under 1,000 or so, the system defaults to giving the sentence from the original document, listed as Concordancias.

If there are too many examples, you can't get to the Concordancias directly. Instead, the system will bring up a list of documents. You have to select documents (you can select several at a time), then change the drop-down box from Documentos to Concordancias and click Recuperar to get the citations.

You'll need to include the information you get here with any submission, as the search doesn't generate a permanent URL. For example, a search on Leonor gives 253 cases in 27 documents before 1650. A 1553 document describes los dichos liçençiado Çerbantes e doña leonor de torreblanca ('the said licenciado Cervantes and Doña Leonor de Torreblanca').