Galician Lexicon and Medieval Songbooks: Patrimonial Words, Semicultisms and Cultisms

Medieval Galician-Portuguese Songbooks

Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional (Colocci-Brancuti)

Also preserved in Lisbon, this codex was copied in Italy in the 16th century. It is the most voluminous, containing around 1,700 compositions of all genres.

Cancioneiro da Vaticana

Its origin is Italian. It is a 16th-century copy and transmits some 1,200 compositions.

Pergamiño Vindel

This is a folla voante (loose leaf). In the case of this parchment, six of its items appear accompanied by the corresponding musical transcription.

Pergamiño Sharrer

It transmits the lyrics of seven and the music of six cantigas by King D. Denis of Portugal.

Lexical Formation in Galician

Patrimonial Words (Voces patrimoniais)

All of them underwent the phonetic evolutions characteristic of the passage from Latin to Galician:

• -KT- → -it- (nocte → noite)
• Intervocalic -N- (luna → lúa)
• Intervocalic -L- (volare → voar)
• P-, -T-, -K- → b-, d-, g- (lupu → lobo)
• PL-, FL-, CL- → ch- (flamma → chama)

Semicultisms (Semicultismos)

They stand between patrimonial words and cultisms, and their evolution was never completed (platea → praza).

Cultisms (Cultismos)

These are words taken from Latin or Greek and incorporated late, which did not undergo the characteristic evolutions of Galician because they arrived at a time when some of those changes had already ceased. The word keeps the same form it had in the source language or shows the minimal alteration needed to fit the phonological structure of the language.

Lexical Doublets (Pares léxicos)

A single Latin etymon yields two or even three different solutions after its evolution, sometimes with different meanings depending on whether they are patrimonial words, semicultisms or cultisms.