Abstract

El Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española of Covarrubias covers up another treasure: a basic grammar of Arabic spread over the two hundred Arabic etymologies provided by the prominent Arabist, contemporary of the lexicographer, Diego de Urrea.Such is the subject of our study that will be devoted, thanks to linguistic analysis, to highlight in this corpus the explicit and implicit presence of numerous grammatical data that refer to fundamental rules of Arabic grammar such as the derivation system and the morphonology of the verb. The presentation of this data in the Tesoro is made by an original terminology that can only be understood in the context of Arabic grammar and which is a true innovation in the field of Arab grammars composed by contemporary European Arabists. On the other hand, Urrea’s etymologies support the new “verbal root theory” introduced by Erpenius in his Grammatica Arabica, and therefore suggest his involvement in contemporary arabism. This study shed new light on the place of the Arabic language in the Tesoro of Covarrubias, a place that had remained, since the first modern reissue of the Tesoro in 1943, completely unnoticed by the research. It invites to see in the Tesoro an innovative work in the context of the new scientific interests that, from the end of the 16th century, would be directed towards the emergence of a new science: Orientalism.