Lexical Borrowings in Richard Hakluyt’s The Principall Nauigations (1589): A Focus on Spanish and Amerindian Influences

Abstract

This doctoral thesis explores the presence of Spanish, Amerindian and nautical lexical borrowings in the third volume of Richard Hakluyt’s The Principall Nauigations (1589). Framed within a period marked by sociocultural and political change, the expansion of vocabulary that characterises Early Modern English emerges as a result of the elevation of the vernacular as a language of prestige and the consequent need to resort to lexical borrowing in order to fill conceptual gaps. In this context, expeditions to the American territories for the purposes of exploration and colonisation provided fertile ground for the incorporation of loanwords. Accordingly, nautical terminology was acquired in the process of learning the art of navigation from naval powers of the Age of Discovery, such as Spain. Once in the New World, a range of Amerindian and Spanish words entered English to name unfamiliar realities, e.g. cannibal and hurricane, or alcalde and mosquito. Travel literature and, in particular, Hakluyt’s compilation, played a crucial role in the introduction and dissemination of these lexical borrowings. Therefore, The Principall Nauigations was not only the first major collection of travel texts written in English, but also a highly valuable source for lexical study, due to the faithful reproductions of first-hand narratives it contains. With the aim of conducting this study, six objectives have been established: (i) to identify and compile the Spanish and Amerindian terms present in the corpus; (ii) to determine which types of Spanish and Amerindian terms were most likely to be introduced; (iii) to analyse the strategies used by the authors of the corpus to explain the meaning of the Amerindian and Spanish words to the readers; (iv) to study the similarities between the strategies employed by the authors of the corpus to explain the meaning of Amerindian words and those used by lexicographers from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries; (v) to determine if the boom of borrowed nautical terms that took place during the Early Modern English period is clearly reflected in The Principall Nauigations (1589); and (vi) to evaluate the role of Spanish in the transmission of Spanish and Amerindian nautical terms into English, as reflected in Hakluyt’s work. The results are presented through three academic publications. The first one focuses on Hispanicisms, identifying 90 terms grouped by lexical fields and describing six strategies employed by the English navigators to render the meaning of these new lexical items. The second article examines the 25 Amerindian loanwords found in the corpus, outlining five explanatory strategies, some of which overlap with those used by lexicographers. The third publication presents 79 lexical borrowings, mainly of French and Spanish origin, and highlights the significant contribution of Spanish naval terminology within the context of Anglo-Spanish maritime interaction. Finally, two detailed glossaries of Spanish and Amerindian terms identified in the corpus are included in the appendices.