Fonètica històrica versus història lèxica. El cas de "saloma" < kéleusma `cant dels mariners

Abstract

The Greek word kéleusma, "the sailor's chant", passed to Italy under various forms, such as: celoma, scialoma, cialoma, etc. They can be found from the XIV Century onwards and all of them have a palatal consonant at the beginning of the word. The Catalan word saloma and the verb salomar (1435) are not surely native, but imported from the Italian. On the other hand, it is difficult to locate the origin of the Spanish word çaloma (that appears at the end of the XVI Century; afterwards zaloma). From the phonetic point of view, it cannot be a direct loan either from Italian or from Catalan. Nevertheless, the lexical history of the Iberian words (Catalan saloma, Castilian and Portuguese zaloma) contradicts what the phonetic rules require: so these nautical terms -generally submitted to the fluctuations of the "lingua franca" - should not be studied by strict linguistic criteria. Study of the collected examples allows us to say that the origin of the Spanish word could be found in Catalonia. However, the philological data derived from the written and spoken examples demonstrate the complexity of the problem.