Nautical Borrowings in Early Modern English: The Case Study of Richard Hakluyt's <i>The Principall Nauigations</i> (1589)

Abstract

The development of the British naval power during the Elizabethan period was rooted in the navigational knowledge acquired from overseas nations, which led to the transmission of foreign nautical words into the English language. This study evaluates the incorporation of nautical lexical borrowings in Early Modern English by analysing their inclusion in the most relevant travel collection at the time, Richard Hakluyt's The Principall Nauigations (1589). To accomplish this, the nautical borrowings present in Hakluyt's work have been identified and classified taking into account word classes and lexical fields affected by their entrance. Additionally, this study aimed to determine the donor languages that contributed to this borrowing process. The results reveal a total of 79 nautical borrowings, distributed into 4 grammatical categories and 21 lexical fields, which were transmitted through 8 donor languages, among which French and Spanish stand out.