Criminal slang terms in the second edition of Diccionario de autoridades (DA2)
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In Spanish lexicography, "germanía" is a well-known but highly imprecise and polysemous term. It has its origins in 16th century Spanish history, when it referred to an association of artisan guilds in Valencia that rebelled against the rule of Charles V. Very soon, however, the meaning of the word shifted to the urban poor, organised crime and their slang, which has survived in a highly literary form, the authenticity of which is disputed. Over time, it came to refer to criminal slang in general and beyond the Spanish Golden Age. When the volumes of the first edition of the Diccionario de autoridades were published between 1726 and 1739, “germanía” referred to the criminal slang of the Spanish Renaissance and Baroque, but the second edition of the first volume of the dictionary in 1770 (A-B) and the manuscripts of the other letters of the alphabet, which were worked on until the middle of the second decade of the 19th century, might already reflect this shift in meaning of the term. In our paper we will focus on the new entries and subwords that bear the label Germ. (germanía). We will be interested in what texts the editors of the dictionary drew from and whether we can observe an evolution between the lexicon labelled “germanía” in the first edition of the Diccionario de autoridades and the extant torso of the second edition. On the one hand, we might expect a certain degree of continuity that would only further exploit lexicographical and literary sources from the Golden Age as in the first edition of the Diccionario de autoridades, but on the other hand, we wonder if we can really document a shift in the primary sources used and in the type of vocabulary captured, i.e. if the “germanía” of the forthcoming second edition of the Diccionario de autoridades anticipates a conception of argot that departs from its historical background to its more general but modern meaning. |
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