Inheritance and innovation in the Diccionario militar portátil (1822) of Fernandez Mancheño

Abstract

In this paper we propose to locate the trace of Raimundo Sanz’s Diccionario militar (1749)— the first example in Spanish language of this special lexicographical variety—in the Diccionario militar portátil (1822) of José Fernández Mancheño, composed in the next century, in order to find out how much of its terminology meets inheritances rather than own innovations. Our objective is also to verify the mutual semantic influences, in addition to those concerning lexicographical marks, which are used to restrict the words. Thanks to our contrastive analysis, several conclusions can be drawed. The most important are, first, that innovation in Fernandez Mancheño with respect to its direct predecessor, curiously, is to have recourse to military terminology of the past and, second, that the marks and the definitions are the microstructural elements where the progress reached by Fernández Mancheño compared to Sanz is more obvious.