Le substantif 'hidalgo' à travers sa propre histoire et celle dont il a fait l’objet

Abstract

Words don’t design only extralinguistic realities, they also say something about themselves. That make them micro-discourses often snowed under many other discourses which conceal the primitive meaning. It’s the case of the Spanish noun hidalgo the meaning of which is well known thanks to Don Quixote’s popular figure but not its origin. Such a situation is caused by the wide circulation of etymologic explanations which paradoxically concealed its provenience. This paper will try to clarify this problem by putting in context the discourses of those explanations and finding the origin of the linguistic content elaborated by the Spanish language and then adapted to the new social conditions between the 12^th and 13^th centuries.