Acceso usuarios
Santiago de Compostela, España
The chartulary of the Monastery of Santa Maria de Fiães consists of documentation dating mostly back to the 12th century which concerns the process of constitution of the land patrimony of the Benedictine abbey located on the Galician-Portuguese border. This documentary source offers several interesting aspects for linguistic research. In particular, it is worth highlighting the fact that this source contains some of the earliest records (or even, in some cases, the only ones) available for the analysis of a significant number of place-names in the extensive geographic area (the Portuguese Minho land as well as the southern and southwestern regions of Galicia) in which the monastery had a greater number of properties. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore this line of research, by collecting the records in the chartulary for a micro-corpus of four place-names (one being Portuguese and three Galician) and by using them to identify both their etymon and their formal and semantic evolution. Moreover, we will establish, when necessary, their possible relations with other toponymic items, finally analyzing certain dynamics and phenomena (essentially phonetic ones). Their research interest stems from their relatively rare nature in the context of Galician-Portuguese toponymy.
