Historical Semantics of Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Treasury of Castilian or Spanish Language by Covarrubias

• Main Author: Nina Kremmel
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Universidad de Navarra 2018-11-01
• Series: Memoria y Civilización
• Subjects: covarrubias; diccionario; etimología; semántica histórica; embarazo; parto; madre; hijo
• Online Access: https://www.unav.edu/publicaciones/revistas/index.php/myc/article/view/31183

The way we name things reflects how we perceive the world. Proceeding from this assumption, this article is going to analyze Castilian terms concerning pregnancy and childbirth which were common during the Spanish Golden Age. Also, the child and the mother will be another important subject of this study, in which etymological origins and semantic changes of those expressions will be demonstrated based on the dictionary entries in Sebastián de Covarrubias famous Tesoro de la lengua castellana and on other sources from this period. The text is divided into three parts which deal with pregnancy, the child, and the mother, respectively. The objective is to formulate, inter alia, which social esteem they might have received (or not) by drawing conclusions from the suggested definitions by Covarrubias, complemented with passages from literary works, medical treatises, legal texts, dictionaries, and modern scientific sources.