Defining Amerindian terms in Richard Hakluyt’s The Principall Nauigations (1589) or when the explorers became lexicographers

Abstract

This paper deals with the incorporation of Amerindian loanwords in Early Modern English through travel literature, a genre that made essential contributions to the Age Discovery. Specifically, it focuses on those texts included in the third volume of Richard Hakluyt’s The Principall Nauigations (1589), the first great travel compilation written in English, which comprises the reports of the American expeditions and, thus, the descriptions of a foreign environment full of unknown elements whose indigenous names were adopted and reproduced in the adventurers’ narratives.

A previous work on this matter has revealed the presence of 25 Amerindian loanwords in the corpus. But what kind of words are these? In order to find an answer, this research aims to classify the Amerindian terms according to the lexical fields they refer to. Thereafter, the analysis of these borrowings in their contexts determines the strategies used by the English travellers to explain their meaning to the readers. Finally, this study explores the similarities between the aforesaid strategies and the defining practices provided by 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century dictionaries, establishing the relevance of English travel writers as active agents in the definition of Amerindian loanwords at the moment of their entrance into the English language.