Cultismo

In the philological tradition of Castilian Spanish, a cultismo is a word of which the morphology strictly follows its Greek or Latin etymological origin, without undergoing the changes that the evolution of the Castilian language followed from its origins in Vulgar Latin. The same concept also exists in other Romance languages. Reintroduced into the language for cultural, literary, or scientific reasons, a cultismo only adapts its form to the orthographic and phonological conventions derived from linguistic evolution, but it avoids the transformations that roots and morphemes underwent during the development of the Romance language.

Cultismos are used to introduce technical or specialized terminology that, though present in the classical language, did not appear in the Romance language due to lack of use; this is the case for many literary, legal, and philosophical terms from classical culture, such as ataraxia (from the Greek ἀταραξία, "calm") or legislar ("to legislate", constructed from Latin legislator). They are used to form neologisms, such as the names of most scientific disciplines.

It is not uncommon for the recovered classical term to already exist in a transformed form within the linguistic heritage. This gives rise to doublets, consisting of one morphologically Hispanic word and one cultismo that was introduced later; for example, the Latin word fabrica gave rise to fragua, with the sound shaped by phonetic evolution, and also to the cultismo fábrica, invented in the 17th century with what was considered the correct pronunciation of Latin terms, and with a meaning that is both more restricted and more abstract than the original.

Some examples of cultismos in Spanish include: álbum (from Latin album), alien (from Latin alien), audio, campus, déficit, hábitat, fábula, fórum, ibídem, ídem, ítem, lapsus, lingua franca, médium, memorándum, ópera, superávit, tedeum, ultimátum, vídeo.

Many cultismos were introduced into the Spanish language during the Middle Ages (by Gonzalo de Berceo, for example, who had to create a literary language from scratch) and during the great poetic renewal carried out by Luis de Góngora and the so-called culteranismo of the 17th century.