Medieval inheritance and neologism in the chromatic lexicon of historiographic texts in the Golden Age according to the Diachronic Corpus of Spanish

The main objective of this investigation is to examine with textual support the use of the vocabulary of color during the Golden Period through the investigation that it is a medieval heritage or a neologism. This chromatic terminology was little used during the thirteenth century and in the following centuries its use is multiplied by the communication needs of a society that demands descriptive information on many social, cultural and economic issues, as happens with historiographic documents. To this end, a quantitative investigation has been designed in three phases: (a) search for chromatic voices that designate six selected colors; (b) determination of the first documentation of this group of voices; and (c) quantitative analysis to find a trend regarding the silver duality. For the search of these empirical references, the Diachronic Corpus of Spanish has been used as a data bank to collect textual examples on the chromatic vocabulary extracted from different historiographic sources. The result is the presentation of 100 terms with their respective empirical testimonies that reflect the continuity of the medieval heritage in the colors white, black and red, while formal neologisms are very frequent for the rest.