La «guerra», lexicológicamente

Abstract

The Latin word bellum has been replaced in eight of the nine romance languages by words of the Spanish lexical type guerra («war» in English) and we can only find some differences in pronunciation among them when comparing the Eastern and the Western sides. The explanations about its etymology have been various, but the most widely accepted hypothesis, defended by Corominas, holds that this word is Germanic and was borrowed by Vulgar Latin before the 5th century. Therefore, he ascribes it to the oldest stage of Germanic loanwords. Nevertheless, the development of new studies and the evidence of the phonetic reality have taken the author to refute this hypothesis and arrive at the conclusion that the Spanish form guerra does not go back to either Vulgar Latin or to the Spanish domain, but it should have emerged after the year 600 and got to Spanish via Old French. The first appearance of guerra in a Spanish text can then be dated back to c. 1140, and in a Spanish text written in Latin to 1017.