que no dejó hacer baça a los demás aludiendo al juego de las baças. (s.v. basa). (‘Basas, in the game, are the cards won, which gradually become the base of the first [card], thence they took the name. When someone speaks out, without anybody around being able to speak their mind, it is commonly said that he did not make baça to the rest, thus alluding to the game of baças)

Note that the indistinctness of the grapheme occurs in the article itself: it begins with basa and ends with baça, a surprising swap, due to its late appearance. Indeed, Alonso (1947) claimed that in the sixteenth century, and even earlier, there are some vacillations of the s-z type. He exemplifies this with cases found by Menéndez Pidal in La leyenda de los infantes de Lara (‘The Legend of the Infants of Lara’), in the writing of a scribe from Toledo as well as some examples taken from Cuervo in the same rhyme in Castilian authors such as Juan Álvarez Gato from Madrid in the 15th century. On the other hand, Valdés, in his Diálogos, also gave an account of these exchanges (1969 [1535]: § 89), especially from some speakers of Castile. Alonso postulates that this type of confusion, in a moment when the paradigm continues to present phonemic pairs, implies exchanges between them, that is, between apicoalveolar, palatal and dental sibilants, always in the cases of isolated words (cf. 1947: 8). This is precisely the clue that we cannot ignore in this case: the possibility of finding sonority in the sibilant of this word.

2.1.4. Let’s continue with the collation in dictionaries from the Covarrubias era: Rosal (1992 [1611]) lemmatised basa and defined: “Basa en el naype, y fuera de él, es asiento o peana y grada en edificio, tomado del gr. basis; que tal forma representan las basas en el juego”. (“Basa in card games, and out of them, is a seat, or a step and plinth in a building, taken from the Greek basis; thus, this form is represented by the basas in the game”).

Therefore, we find both in Covarrubias and Rosal, the basa/baza graphic alternation, where baza, a word that refers to the cards, can be written as basa. The authors treat both terms as derived from the same sign, basa, with a semantic transition: the first card is the basa (base) of the rest in the game, from there it derives, in semantic transition, the name of the set of cards.

2.1.5. The multilingual lexicographical tradition also offers interesting clues. Most of these dictionaries lemmatise the word referring to the card game in the same lexicographic article of the “basis” or “foundation”, that is, in basa, like Covarrubias and Rosal. Thus, they continue to treat, rather than with a homonymy, with a polysemy. In other documents, we find that the word has variants: Palet (1604), in his bilingual French-Spanish dictionary, posits basa as well as baça with the same meaning. Oudin (1607), in his bilingual French-Spanish dictionary, like Palet has both baça and basa with the same meaning, while he also refers to vaza. Vittori (1609), in his trilingual French, Spanish and Italian dictionary, has basa and vaza too, like Oudin. Minsheu (1617), in his trilingual English, Spanish and Latin dictionary includes basa. Franciosini (1620), in his Spanish-Italian dictionary, out of basa, in another article lemmatises the two variants: baça and vaça. Mez de Braidenbach (1670), in his Spanish-German dictionary, lemmatises the two variants together: basa and baça; and Stevens (1706), in his Spanish-English dictionary has basa.

2.1.6. This multilingual panorama led us to think about a possible indistinction, especially supported by basas-baças in Covarrubias and basa in Rosal, something that continues with the multilingual lexicographic tradition, beginning little by little to opt for the use of the interdental sibilant baza, as we see in the later authors of bilingual dictionaries, such as Sobrino (1705), who in his Spanish-French dictionary only lemmatises the word in baça.