The Lexical Continuum in the Northwest of the Iberian Peninsula: Galician and Leonese Words in Medieval Bercian Documentation

This paper is dedicated to the study of the common vocabulary between Galician and Asturian-Leonese, and also Castilian, during the Middle Ages, with the aim of showing the existence of the linguistic continuum in the northwest of the Peninsula at the lexical level. We focus on two very specific semantic fields: the units of measurement and containers, on the one hand, and the rural areas on the other. In our study, we used a corpus comprising more than 160 documents written throughout the 15(th) century in Vega de Espinareda and other towns in El Bierzo, preserved in the National Historical Archive of Spain. We analyze the etymology of each word selected, its geographical extension, and its first documentation in both Asturian-Leonese and Galician as well as in other Peninsular romances. To this purpose, we use various online dictionaries as well as other online lexicographic repertoires and linguistic corpora.