New conference of the AIFRS group on the Romance Languages at UiB

Today, 17th March from 12:15 CET, David Porcel Bueno, professor at the Department of Philology: Romance, Italian, Galician-Portuguese and Catalan of the University of Granada, will be giving a lecture to the students of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Bergen in the framework of the Arqus International Forum on Romance Studies (AIFRS).

David Porcel, invited by the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Bergen, will present the conference: “Lexical items with Arabic and Hebrew etymology in the history of Portuguese and Spanish: new approaches and perspectives“.

The main objective of the lecture is to analyse the influence that the Arabic language, and to a lesser extent, the Hebrew language, had on the formation of the Spanish and Portuguese lexicon.

The contact between the Late Latin/Early Ibero-Romance and the Arabic and Berber dialects imported by the Muslim conquerors gave rise to two new dialects on the Iberian Peninsula, the “Romandalusí” and the “Árabe Andalusí”, which are essential in order to understand the influence of Arabic on the medieval Iberian languages. In this regard, two factors must be taken into account when studying Spanish and Portuguese words of Arabic origin: the chronology of Arabisms and their geographical distribution on the Iberian Peninsula.

Finally, the talk will introduce the topic about the importance that both the Hebrew Bible and the Latin text of the Vulgate had in the formation of some hebraisms from Spanish and Portuguese, as well as the crucial role played by the Jewish translators in the Middle Ages.