Innovation and tradition in the lexicon of medieval Spanish biblical translations: learned and vernacular words in fifteenth-century bibles

Abstract

This paper analyses the variation in the use of learned vocabulary as well as other lexical and morphological innovations in four Spanish medieval translations of the Hebrew Bible composed during the fifteenth century. In order to do so, we analyze a selection of Hebrew lemmas and their corresponding Spanish translations, as well as the distribution of a number of derivational morphology phenomena. Our goal is to determine, through a quantitative and qualitative comparison of the Romance variants used by the translators, the distribution of traditional vernacular lexicon and learned innovations. Our results show that while the Arragel Bible and the Bible of the Marques de Santillana are immersed in the early fifteenth century trend of incorporating learned and latinate structures, other traditional texts, such as the Bible E3, do not use such words. The Bible E5/E7, on the other hand, lays somewhere between those two types as it exhibits some of the traditional lexical options, as the E3 translation, but also incorporates a small number of learned words, although to a lesser extent than the Arragel and Santillana Bibles.