anfibología

An anfibología/amphibology, also called an amphiboly in English, is ‘a phrase or sentence that can be understood in two ways.’ A Spanish-language Wikipedia article on anfibología gives several examples, the first of which is:

Mi padre fue al pueblo de José en su coche.

The English version would be equally amphibolous:

My father went to José’s town in his car.

Did the traveling take place in the father’s car or in José’s car?

Here’s another Spanish example:

Autos usados en venta: ¿irá a cualquier otro lugar adonde lo engañarán? ¡Venga con nosotros primero!
Used cars for sale: why go somewhere else where they’ll cheat you? Come to us first!*

As is often the case, the Internet offers many more examples in English than in Spanish. You can see a bunch of good ones at Sandy LaFave’s website. One classic amphiboly not mentioned there is from the Marx Brothers’ movie Animal Crackers, in which Groucho says: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know.” From the same movie, but not as well known, is this amphiboly: “I was outside the cabin smoking some meat. There wasn’t a cigar store in the neighborhood!”

As for the origin of anfibología/amphibology, it comes from Late Latin amphibologia, from Latin amphibolia, from Greek amphibolos ‘ambiguous.’ The Greek adjective was a compound of amphi-, which meant ‘both’ or ‘on both sides,’ and the root of ballein ‘to throw.’ Figuratively speaking, when a phrase or statement is amphibolous, its meaning gets thrown to one side or the other.

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* This reminds me that a candidate for office in Austin some years ago adopted the unfortunate campaign slogan “For a little less corruption.”

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman

sumac

In my other blog I’ve occasionally showed pictures of flameleaf sumac, Rhus lanceolata, a small tree whose compound leaves turn yellow, orange, and red in the fall. The English word sumac is spelled two ways, the other being sumach, and pronounced two ways, with the first consonant sounded either /s/ or /∫/. The Spanish name—and one with a single pronunciation*—for trees in the genus Rhus is zumaque, clearly a cognate of English sumac(h). Both the English word (via Old French) and the Spanish word trace back to the Arabic name for a tree in this family, summaq, but its roots are even older. Arabic had taken the word from Aramaic, where it meant ‘dark red,’ based on a Semitic root meaning ‘red,’ “por el color de sus semillas,” “for the color of its seeds,” as the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española explains.

It turns out that the reddish fruits of the zumaque contain high amounts of tannin, so that the Spanish verb zumacar, used with reference to tanners and curriers, means ‘adobar las pieles con zumaque,’ ‘to tan hides with sumac.’ As far as I know, an English speaker can’t sumac anything (though if someone named Mac does you an injustice you can sue Mac).

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* In any given Spanish-speaking region everyone will pronounce zumaque the same way, but of course the pronunciation of z in Spain differs from that in other regions.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman

A singular plural

Not so long ago, when I was preparing to send off an invoice for a couple of articles I’d put together for a magazine, it occurred to me that invoice is what might be called a singular plural. The modern English noun invoice used to be written invoyes, from which spelling we can see that the old form was a plural. As happened to various other words taken from foreign languages, the original plural came to be construed as a singular (compare Latin data), and in this case it got respelled somewhat as well. The resulting new singular, invoice, has since generated its own regular plural, invoices. (Note that invoice can also function as a verb meaning ‘to send an invoice.’)

The obsolete invoyes had had as its singular the form invoy, which came into English from French envoi, literally ‘a sending.’ The corresponding French verb envoyer ‘to send’ is a cognate of Spanish enviar, from Late Latin inviare, etymologically ‘[to send] on [its] way.’ The resulting Spanish form has remained transparent, still revealing the elements en ‘in, on’ and vía ‘way, road.’ In fact the original Latin noun via, with its v pronounced like an English w, was a cognate of native English way.

French envoyer has as its past participle envoyé ‘sent,’ which came to be used as a noun meaning ‘person sent, messenger.’ English borrowed that noun but sent the ending on its merry way, with the result that an envoy is ‘a person sent to represent a government.’

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman

Traduttore traditore, part 2

In the last post and this one we’re looking at Spanish and English connections to the two words in the Italian aphorism that says “[A] translator [is a] betrayer.” Italian traditore corresponds closely to Latin traditor, the agent noun derived from the verb tradere. That Latin compound was made up of trans ‘across’ and dare ‘to give, the obvious ancestor of Spanish dar. Latin tradere had various meanings, the literal and neutral one being ‘to give over, deliver.’ From that came the meaning ‘to hand over,’ whether in the positive senses of ‘entrust, confide’ or the negative ones of  ‘to give up or surrender treacherously, to betray.’ In fact the -tray in English betray comes, via Old French trair, from that sense of Latin tradere. Also via French is traitor, the cognate of Italian traditore. Spanish likewise has its cognate, traidor. The corresponding abstract noun is traición ‘betrayal,’ and from that Spanish has created the new verb traicionar ‘to betray.’ Although modern French has trahir (with a silent h added to the spelling to indicate that the a and the are i in separate syllables), Spanish has lost what would have been *trair, probably because its conjugated forms would have been confused with those of the unrelated traer.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman

Traduttore traditore

The title of this post is an Italian aphorism that says “[A] translator [is a] betrayer.” The idea, of course, is that any translation from one language into another is bound to change features of the original: the nuance and cultural connotation of a word, the idiomatic sense of a phrase, the way lines of poetry rhyme, etc. In this post and the next, let’s look at some of the connections that traduttore and traditore have to Spanish and English.

Italian traduttore corresponds to Latin traductor, the agent noun derived from the verb traducere, which Spanish speakers recognize as the ancestor of the little-changed traducir. The Latin verb was a compound of trans ‘across’ and ducere ‘to lead,’ so a translator metaphorically leads a text across from one language to another.

The Romans often used traducere literally and neutrally, but they also added a cluster of negative senses: ‘to lead along, exhibit as a spectacle, make a show of, expose to public ridicule, dishonor, disgrace, degrade.’ When English first “traduced” traducere into traduce, it retained the various meanings of the original, including ‘to translate,’ but that sense has been lost, so only negative ones survive. In modern English, traduce means ‘to expose to contempt or shame; to represent as blamable; to calumniate; to vilify; to defame.’ With Spanish traducir things are reversed, and the senses stray only as far from ‘translate’ as ‘convert’ and ‘interpret.’

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman

cola

In a post on my other blog today I showed a picture of a butterfly with the scientific name Chioides catillus. People in the United States call it a white-striped longtail, both of which characteristics the photograph in that other post clearly reveals. When I did a little research on the butterfly, which I don’t think I’d ever seen till this spring, I learned that Central Texas, where I am, is in the northern fringe of the butterfly’s territory. More surprising to me was that the butterfly ranges all the way south to Argentina. That got me wondering about the Spanish name for the species, so I did some searching and found a site from Argentina that refers to it as coludo chaqeuño, whose second word is a reference to el Gran Chaco, a region that includes parts of Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina. In a Mexican book I found the butterfly called coluda catillus, a combination of a common name and a scientific name. What the Argentinian and Mexican names share is coludo ‘having a tail, tailed,’ the adjective formed from cola ‘tail.’ (The feminine coluda in the Mexican book agrees with the implied noun mariposa ‘butterfly,’ but I don’t know what masculine noun the Argentinian coludo implicitly refers to.)

Spanish cola—and this where entomology leaves off and etymology begins—developed from the synonymous Latin cauda, later coda, with a change from d to l along the way. (That consonant transformation isn’t unusual, and a good Spanish example in the opposite direction is dejar, which started out as Latin laxare). From the New Latin adjective corresponding to cauda, caudalis, Spanish and English have caudal ‘forming or relating to a tail.’

Latin coda passed unchanged into Italian, where musicians began to use the term metaphorically to designate ‘the “tail end,” i.e. final section, of a piece of music.’ Spanish and English have borrowed Italian coda in that sense. Along another line of development, Latin coda evolved to Old French cue, which lives on in English as a name for ‘the stick used to hit a ball in billiards and pool.’ Such a stick must have reminded people of a long, straight, slender tail. Old French cue developed to modern French queue, which still has the literal meaning ‘tail.’ In the 1700s English began using French queue to mean ‘a pony tail.’ In the 1800s, and even farther removed metaphorically, English queue came to refer to ‘a “tail,”, i.e. line, of people waiting for something.’

Where English has borrowed heavily from French, Spanish has occasionally borrowed from Catalan. One example is capicúa, which contains another descendant of Latin coda. As a coda to today’s post, you can queue up to read more details about that word in a post from the early days of this blog.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman

expatiate

In a book review in the New York Times on August 31, 2012, I found this howler (which remains uncorrected in the online version): “Wharton’s wild affair, in middle age, with the American expatiate journalist Morton Fullerton — wild on her part, that is, but routine on his — is well documented in the passionate and pathetic letters she wrote to him.” Morton Fullerton, an American who spent years in Europe, was clearly an expatriate, but no one can be an expatiate, because that word is a verb, and the only element it has in common with expatriate is the prefix ex-.

Here are the two definitions of expatiate from V2 Vocabulary Building Dictionary:

1. to enlarge and add details in conversation or writing;

2. to expound at length on an account or idea, without restraint.

Neither of those gives a clue to the word’s origin, but the first definition in Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language did:

To open at large; to rove without prescribed limits; to wander in space without restraint.

It turns out that expatiate comes from the Latin verb expatiari, a compound of ex- ‘out’ and the root of spatium, the forerunner of espacio/space. The Latin verb gave rise in Spanish to espaciar, on which Span¡shD!ct expatiates:

1. To extend, to dilate, to spread.

2. To space, to separate the lines in writing or printing.

3. To stagger (horas de trabajo).

verb reflexive

4. To expand (en escritura y hablado).

• Espaciarse en un tema -> to enlarge on a subject

5. To amuse oneself.

I hope you’ve all amused yourselves and haven’t spaced out in the process.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman

curt

In Alain de Botton’s novel The Romantic Movement, I came across this sentence: “‘Actually, I was just wondering why we’d be needing three sets of knives and forks,’ replied Alice curtly.” That last word is the adverb made from curt, whose curt definition in Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language was ‘Short,’ though he lengthened it with the observation that the word was “rarely used, and not elegant.” I’d say Webster’s attitude was too curt, as the word is indeed used more than rarely, or at least has come to be in the intervening two centuries. Definitions from some current dictionaries include: ‘rudely blunt and brief; abrupt; short or concise; using few words in a way that shows you are impatient or angry; rude as a result of being very quick; marked by rude or peremptory shortness.’ And so we’re back to ‘short,’ which we know is corto in Spanish. English curt goes back to Anglo-Norman, where it had evolved from the same Latin curtus that gave rise to Spanish corto. Unsurprisingly, Lewis and Short’s A Latin Dictionary defined curtus as ‘shortened, mutilated, broken, short,’ but it went on to add examples showing the euphemistic meanings ‘circumcised’ and even ‘castrated,’ which ought to bring us up short. From curtus came the Latin verb curtāre, the ancestor of the familiar Spanish cortar that means ‘to cut short, shorten, cut off.’ The Spanish compound recortar has the sense ‘to cut out,’ as for example an article in a newspaper or a pattern on a piece of material. It can also mean ‘to trim,’ whether something physical like a beard or something abstract like a budget.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman

see

There are two words see in English. Hugely the more common is the verb that means ‘to perceive with the eyes.’ The other, a noun, got to see its usage surge in February and March of 2013 after Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation. That see, for which the Spanish cognate is sede, means ‘the seat or jurisdiction of a bishop.’ More specifically, the Santa Sede/Holy See is ‘the seat or jurisdiction of the Pope.’ Spanish sede derives from the Latin noun sēdēs, which meant the same as its native English relative seat; the Latin noun came from the same root as the Latin verb sedēre, whose synonymous English cognate is, not surprisingly, the verb sit. In contrast, English borrowed see from Old French se, which came not from classical Latin sēdēs but from the noun that Vulgar Latin had recast it as, *sedem.

Now that the question of the new pope has been settled and Francis the First has been seated, we can add that a relative of the Latin verb sedēre was the similar sēdāre, literally ‘to settle‘ (another native English cognate). More loosely, Latin sēdāre took on the sense ‘to calm,’ as we see in our borrowed verb sedar/sedate and its derivative sedativo/sedative, which was originally an adjective but which now also functions as a noun.

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman

umpire

A recent post entitled “Oddments“ on the blog The Task at Hand led me to comment there that “the obsolete term oddwoman once meant ‘a female umpire; an arbitress.’ I explained the semantics by pointing out that when two parties are having a dispute, it takes a third person to act as umpire. Three, of course, is an odd number, one more than the two of the disputing pair. It so happens that the English word umpire expresses the same concept, but phonetic changes have obscured the connection. What is now the phrase an umpire was once a noumpere. The change occurred after English speakers started segmenting the phrase incorrectly, as if the n at the beginning of noumpere were instead the ending of the indefinite article an. For something comparable, imagine that people today began turning a needle into an eedle. That may seem strange, but the fact that a noumpere became an umpire shows that such reinterpretations do happen.

As for the noun noumpere, English took it from Old French nonper, a compound of non ‘not’ and Old French per, whose modern form pair English speakers recognize because that word has passed into English as well. The Latin original, which Spanish has inherited, was par, and it meant ‘equal.’ From that meaning came the arithmetical sense of ‘a twosome of “equal” (i.e. similar) things.’

While we’re on the subject of odds and evens, notice that Spanish par in the arithmetical sense of ‘even’ has as its opposite impar ‘odd.’ Spanish used to have the synonymous phrase non par, with the old Latin-style form of no, but modern Spanish has simplified that to non, thereby keeping the phrase’s obsolete word and dropping the one that is still current. As odd as that may seem, the result is that non means the same as impar. The expression de nones means ‘without a partner,’ and with reference to a person andar de nones means ‘not to have a fixed occupation or position; to be at loose ends.’

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman