La influencia e importancia del léxico comercial del español de los Países Bajos a partir de un corpus de cartas del siglo XVII

Abstract

This article analyzes a corpus of seventeenth-century letters that four Dutch merchants from Amsterdam wrote in Spanish language. The investigation reports on four words found in the above corpus that not only stand as the earliest (paquetboot) or latest (entrepresa) known attestations of these words in Spanish language, but they also evidence the diffusion of lexical borrowings from Dutch to French, and from French to Spanish (paca, flete). These findings also demonstrate that commercial correspondence is reflective of merchants’ micro-migrational movements, offering a rich opportunity to investigate linguistic change over time.