My post on Horror and Boredom in Castile motivated an email from John Lawler.
Thanks for the piece on Pountain's paper. I'm glad to get it. In return, let me point you at the most useful book I've ever seen for a linguist with an interest in Spanish: Batchelor & Pountain's Using Spanish: A Guide to Contemporary Usage (Cambridge 1992).
It's full of little semantic graphs like the one you reproduce (though not with the historical garnish), and has word lists that you just can't find elsewhere in one place, like all the Spanish words for places worldwide and people who come from them, all the gender-changing words and their semantic differences, etc. A veritable Pandora's box of semantic foofaraw, with everything classified by region and register.
Keep up the good work on Language Log.
Thanks, John! I'm sure that we can expect to see your blurb ("A veritable Pandora's box of semantic foofaraw") added to the advertising for the next edition :-).
Posted by Mark Liberman at October 24, 2004 03:18 PM