The comrade Nominal Address Terms in the Diachrony of the Spanish Language (16th-20th Centuries): An Example of Social Egalitarian Deixis

In the present work a semantic and diachronic analysis of the term camarada ('comrade') is carried out, from its origin in the sixteenth century in military contexts with the meaning of 'soldier', to its current use as a title of treatment linked to the communist party. This form was exported through its various meanings as a loan to Europe with the empire of Charles I and, after a process of stable variation in our language, it returned to Spanish as a semantic loan with different meanings: as 'labourer' (end of the 19th Century) and as 'coreligionist' (at the beginnings of the 20th Century). We claim that camarada had two births in the history of the Spanish language, and, therefore, it would become part of the repertoire of lexical resurrections recorded in our language. This phenomenon has been categorized in the theory of lexical change as temporal polygenesis. Likewise, the variation of camarada is analysed as a form of nominal treatment linked to an egalitarian social deixis frame, that is, to a symmetrical and reciprocal use of the pronominal pattern within the solidarity dimension.