Anotaciones sobre el léxico relativo al paisaje en documentos altomedievales navarros

Abstract

This paper focuses on the vocabulary referring to the landscape within the earliest diplomata of the monasteries of Leire and lrache and the Pamplona Cathedral Archive. From a sociolinguistic standpoint, the early charters of medieval Navarre are of great interest to philologists and historians given the complexity of the oral linguistic situation. On the other hand, as proven by well-known medievalists, such vocabulary constitutes a fundamental means to understand the social arrangement of that area. Therefore, based on the distinction between "inner space" (an inhabited area with buildings and cultivated lands) and "outer space" (uninhabited pasturelands), we have listed and discussed key Latin and vernacular terms as well as their usual meanings. With respect to loanwords, we have specified the contexts and uses of terms common in Navarre and Aragon, such as bustale, cubilar, pardina, garrica, landa, ruga, muga, or freça. Furthermore, we have confirmed preference for the use of Latin terms to refer to the arrangement of space in the "inner circle", i.e. to designate the waif properties granted for the benefit of monasteries or individual seniores. Scribes used lexical or semantic neologisms such as honor, radix, sigillum, alodium, passibiles or erentia, whose meanings and uses are not always easy to determine. A secondary aim of this paper is to highlight some linguistic resources that have been conditioned by the social background of medieval Navarre. Specifically, we have examined the great abundance of diminutives such as monasteriolum or villula, or the most sporadic terms hereditatula, ortulo, possessiuncula or defensiola. This linguistic resource has proven to be useful in showing the reduced area of monastic and seigniorial domains, as well as the diverse nature of monasteria, which frequently seem to designate churches instead of monasteries. In this vein, we have also emphasized a phonetic trait, i.e. the prosthetic vowel before the rolled consonant. The frequency of doublets with and without prostheses can be interpreted as a graphic feature that shows the influence of Basque, one of the languages spoken in that area. Finally, aside from the vocabulary designating landscape, we have mentioned some descriptions of boundaries, which are related to the grant or transfer of a piece of land. In such descriptions, the influence of the spoken language is evident, as shown by the use of syntactic and morphosyntactic interferences, i.e. vernacular utterances expressed by Latin words.