The working method of Menéndez Pidal. The linguistics sheets of the <em>History of the spanish language</em> archive (drawers 1 & 2)

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present Menéndez Pidal’s working method through the description of the first two drawers of his History of the Spanish Language archive. This archive is made up of several cabinets that house thousands of records written by Menéndez Pidal with the help of his assistants. The records served to develop most of Pidal’s linguistic studies, but mainly to support the culminating study of Spanish language, the History of the Spanish Language. The first cabinet in the archive begins with drawers 1 & 2, dedicated to the periods prior to the birth of the Castilian language: the pre-Roman peoples and the indigenous substrate, on the one hand, and Roman Hispania and Vulgar Latin, on the other.