摘要：We present lexical studies conducted by a Japanese research team over the past twenty years, focusing on examples of a verb, botar (‘throw’), and two nouns, auto and coche (‘car’). These forms along with their synonyms are found in historical documents throughout the Hispanic world. Our purpose is to present an overview of change rather than reducing the data to simplified contrastive schemata. Our hypothesis is that linguistic variation has the characteristic of a continuum with certain notable trends at each time and place, which nevertheless maintain a certain homogeneity across space and time to ensure communication between speakers of the same language. To test this hypothesis we chose these examples: a verbal concept, rooted in medieval tradition, with a regional distribution; and a noun designating an invention of modern civilization with a global distribution. We draw attention to the need to study both planes, the synchronic and the diachronic, at the same time in order to gain insight into linguistic variation.
