Las voces matemáticas en el Diccionario de autoridades

Abstract

The advances in science and technology are the main factors that promote the enrichment of the lexical patrimony of languages. In recent decades, several linguistic researches have been carried out aimed at characterizing the specialized languages of different fields of knowledge in Spanish. The objective of this paper is know the mathematical terminology which exists in the Spanish language in the first decades of the eighteenth century, that is, in the historical period when the foundation of the Real Academia Española took place. Under this premise, we analyse the lexicographic material in the Diccionario de autoridades (1726-1739) to compose a corpus with mathematical words which there are in it. Considering the concept of mathematics in the 18th century, we make the global computation of these expressions and specify the number of terms which were assigned to each field of sphere of mathematics in the eighteenth century: arithmetic and algebra, geometry, astronomy, physics, optics and chemistry. Our research makes it posible to approach the mathematics state at the beginning of the Enlightenment. The dictionary with which the Spanish Academy began its activities and represented the renewal for Spanish lexicography marked the course of future lexicographical publications. In addition to being a source of semantic and orthographic information, its lexicographic material helps in diachronic studies and specialty languages.