Metonymies and acoustic equivalences: porcelana and borcelana in the history of the Spanish lexicon

Abstract

The word porcelana shows in current Spanish a series of meanings that are based on the definition provided by Sebastián de Covarrubias in his Tesoro de la lengua castellana (1611), referring to a type of clay created in China that arrived in Europe in century XVI. This noun, over time, has been assimilating new nuances, reflected in the latest edition of the Diccionario de la Lengua Española of the Royal Academy (2014). One of them is the one that associates porcelain with 'porcelain vessel or figure', by virtue of a metonymic procedure that has allowed the development of the borcelana variant to name objects such as the 'basin', the 'basin' or the 'urinal', with a striking polymorphism (borzolana, bolsolana, vorsolana) very well represented until today in the Spanish of the Canary Islands and in that of Mexico. The study of the porcelana - borcelana confluence, and the analysis of the semantic specialization of its variants, will allow us, with the help of the Spanish language dictionaries and the available lexical databases, to reconstruct the history of a loan from Italian that it took the language of Castile to designate a new material and the products made with it, and that it settled in its texts in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance to maintain all its semantic possibilities until today.