Formal variation in the toponymy of the oldest Romance documents from the monastery of Sahagún

Abstract

This paper offers a reflection on the way in which place names found in medieval texts are represented graphically. It is now clear that one must maintain a cautious scepticism regarding the fidelity of written representations to the oral tradition. This article analyses the relationships between orality and writing found in 329 place names obtained from 28 texts from the first half of the 13th century belonging to the Documentary Corpus of the Monastery of Sahagún (CODOMOSA); this corpus consists exclusively of original notarial documents drawn up in Sahagún and its wider surroundings, which are being transcribed according to the CHARTA criteria as part of a national research project. The place names collected exhibit a degree of formal variation depending on the greater or lesser number of mentions and also on their graphic composition, although the most frequent pattern is that of a place name offering two or three variants and being cited an average of three times; the place name Sahagún is certainly special, holding the record for both mentions (43) and variants (22). The formal variation observed is due to various factors, specifically: the greater or lesser influence of Latin, sometimes etymological and at other times the result of analogical reconstruction; the use or non-use of abbreviation and the application of different abbreviation methods; the use of upper- or lower-case initial letters; the spelling of compounds as separate words or as a single word; the doubling or non-doubling of certain consonants in initial and intervocalic positions; and the alternation of the spellings i/j/y, u/v/b, c/ç/z and g/j/x. A section is devoted to each type of variation, and in each case it is examined whether the variants correspond exclusively to the written form or whether they extend to the spoken form: some of them clearly stem from orthographic or palaeographic reasons (castiela/castiella, medina/medjna), others plausibly correspond to phonetic differences (uilla orege / uilla orex), whilst in a third group of cases it is difficult to state categorically whether the orthographic discrepancy also affects pronunciation (Galiçia/Galliçia). Some of these variations are, moreover, of great dialectological interest, as they bear witness to the coexistence of Asturian-Leonese and Castilian orthographic (and perhaps also phonetic) forms in a border area between the two linguistic domains: this is the case, for example, with the spellings g<ra>yar/graiar for the groups -/lj, k’l, t’l/-. To some extent, the palatalisation of the endings -as > -es also occurred in this area, as evidenced by the medieval forms roges (Rojas), Vastes (Abastas) and modern forms such as Miñanes. Finally, the place names xaniello and saldanha are worth noting: the former reflects the adoption of a spelling very typical of the city of León for the results of /pl-, kl-, fl-/, without this implying that the [ʃ] pronunciation was also widespread in Sahagún; the second shows the influence of the Occitan orthographic tradition that penetrated the Sahagún region through the large population of Frank origin.