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VII. LATIN-AMERICAN STUDIES

LANGUAGE AMERICAN SPANISH

By D. J. GIFFORD, Director of the Centre for Latin-American Linguistic Studies in the University of St Andrews

I. LEXICOGRAPHY As always, a number of Latin-American words and meanings find their way into the ranks of acceptances by the Real Aca• demia (BRAE, 47-65; 225-4I), some interesting cases ofwhich come from Santo Domingo. A coherent series of arts of lin• guistic interest are gathered together in El Castellano en nuestros labios, by A. Ruben Turi, Santa Fe (). These deal with the little-explored Spanish of the province of Entre Rfos (between the r. Parana and ) and treats of vocabulary (e.g. argelar, ababatar) and such subjects as gender usage (e.g. 95). Although the whole might be regarded as a piece of enlightened journalism, it would be unwise to dismiss the book as trivial, when so much of value has been reached through the efforts of local investigators. One often looks to Argentine sources for the most enterprising studies of vocabulary, as for instance in the case of El elemento italiano en el habla de y , by G. Zilio and E. Rossi, F, 1970. This, achieved through the co-operation of the Academia portefia del , divides Italianisms regionally (north and south Italy) as well as from the point of view of register and other categories (e.g. slang, surnames, pseudoitalianisms - i.e. Spanish phrases translated into Italian such as buon giorno per la matina), with final sections on syntactic and phonetic trans• ferences and spelling and pronunciation. The term is revealed as a neapolitanism. From , C. Ramirez follows up his study, 'El telar indfgena o huitral en la provincia de Cautfn', RDTP, 26, I970: 275-96, with two new important arts: 'La forma del habla rural de la provincia de Cautfn', Estudios Filol6gicos, 7; and 'El lexica rural de la provincia de Cautfn', RD TP, 27: 307-44. The province in question lies just north of Valdivia in southern Chile and is of especial Latin-American Studies interest because of the large numbers of -speaking Indians in the vicinity. The second art. concerns itself exclusively with agricultural terms, which are now being much affected by modern technical words. All three arts are of great value to the student of southern Chilean Spanish, and do credit to the work of the lnstituto de Filologfa in the Univ. Austral de Chile (Valdivia). Further north, BACol, 21: 76-93 and 235-47 produces short arts and comments on such new words or expressions in as pie de imprenta, grill-room, bar, plasti-bags, lonche, sylvapen and maxi. H. Lopez, Estudios sobre el espanol de Cuba, N. York, is anticipated in his art. in *RFE, 51, 1968 (1970): III-37·

2. DIALECT AND CREOLE/PIDGIN STUDIES In these fields by far the most important paper is K. Whin• nom, 'Linguistic hybridization and the "special case" of pidgins and creoles', read to the SSRC Conference on Pidginiza• tion and Creolization held at the UWI,Jamaica, 1968, publ. in the Proceedings, ed. Dell Hymes, CUP, 1971, p. 91-115. In it he clarifies definitions which have long tended to embarrassing woolliness in Creole studies. What makes his study even more valuable for the Hispanist is that many examples are based on Spanish-American. Taking the four 'barriers' to linguistic hybridization, he successfully delimits (and brings into far clearer focus) the problem of what actually constitutes a pidgin language. Such barriers are ( r) ecological (e.g. political factors, geographical contacts) ; ( 2) ethological (e.g. emotional attitudes towards language); (3) mechanical (e.g. influence of writing systems on phonological borrowings); and (4) conceptual (e.g. difficulty of one-to-one transference of word/ concept to another linguistic system). W. then takes the 'pre• pidgin' situation of Argentine cocoliche and subjects it to scrutiny from these four viewpoints. The wide experience of W. in both the East and West has the effect of pinpointing his evidence in a most relevant way. Also valuable is his assertion that hybridizing dialects should figure in the histories of language: linguistic hybridization is not the exception but the rule. Another art. in the Proceedings is D. Lawton, 'The question of creolization in ', (pp. 193-4). L.