tú
30 Sep 2010 8 Comments
in language Tags: English language, etymology, poetry, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
Dialects can be fun, even when they’re not dialects of Spanish or English. Take gallego/Galician, which is spoken in the part of Spain that sticks out above Portugal and is a dialect of Portuguese. The most famous writer in that language—though she wrote in Spanish also—was Rosalía de Castro, who lived in the 1800s. One of her poems begins like this:
Nasín cand’ as prantas nasen,
No mes das froles nasín,
Nunha alborada mainiña,
Nunha alborada d’abril.
Por eso me chaman Rosa,
Mais á do triste sorrir,
Con espiñas para todos,
Sin ningunha para ti.
With a little help, a Spanish speaker can understand it:
Nací cuando las plantas nacen,
En el mes de las flores nací,
En una alborada mansita,
En una alborada de abril.
Por eso me llaman Rosa,
Mas la del triste sonreír,
Con espinas para todos,
Sin ninguna para tí.
(Those who would like to see the rest of the poem and an English translation of it can turn to A.Z. Foreman’s blog.)
The last word in the quoted portion, ti, brings us to the subject (or should I say object?) of today’s Spanish-English word connection: the second-person singular personal pronoun. As a subject, Spanish uses tú; as the direct or indirect object of a verb, te; as the object of a pronoun, tí. English now translates them all as you, which does double duty as a plural, but English once had the singular thou and thee, which are cognates of the Spanish forms. English speakers still encounter thou and thee in literature and old versions of the Bible, but may not know when to use each one: thou serves as a subject and thee as an object.
I hope thou hast enjoyed that. See thee next time.
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alma
29 Sep 2010 8 Comments
in language Tags: English language, etymology, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
“Como cada palabra tiene un alma…” (As every word has a soul…)
—Rubén Darío
Could there be a more appropriate quotation than that one for this column about word origins? To find the soul of Spanish alma, we begin with Latin anima, which meant ‘breath, breeze, wind’ and then metaphorically ‘breath of life, vital principle, soul.’ Just as many English speakers drop the weak middle syllable of decimal and end up pronouncing the word as desmal, the Romans must have begun to pronounce anima as *anma. Then, as a way of avoiding two nasal consonants in a row, came the modern Spanish alma. Spanish also reborrowed the Latin original, spelled ánima, in a religious context to mean ‘soul.’ Psychology has appropriated Latin anima to refer to ‘a person’s inner self,’ and Jungian psychology uses anima, which is of feminine gender, to represent ‘a man’s feminine side.’
People who quote the Rubén Darío line, which appeared in the Palabras liminares of Prosas profanas y otros poemas, often omit the first word and write the freestanding “Cada palabra tiene un alma.” That’s how the quotation appears on the home page of the Modern Languages and Literatures Department of the University of Dallas, for example. Giving equal time to German and French, that home page also notes: “Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiss nichts von seiner eigenen” (Anyone who doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing about his own) and “Apprendre une langue, c’est vivre de nouveau” (To learn a language is to live again). The German quotation is by Goethe, but I’ve been unable to find a source for the French adage, which has therefore lost a bit of its alma/soul.
©2010 Steven Schwartzman
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From man to maniquí
28 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in language Tags: English language, etymology, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
Probably the best-known lines in Alexander Pope’s famous “An Essay on Man,” published in 1734, are the ones that summarize the essay’s theme:
“Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of Mankind is Man.”
Yesterday in this column, which I hope you’ll concede is a proper study of etymology, we saw that the Germanic man appears in Spanish alemán as well as in normando/Norman and Normandía/Normandy. The French didn’t stop at Normandy but went on to borrow a Middle Dutch relative, the diminutive mennekijn ‘little man,’ as mannequin, which Spanish has further transformed to maniquí. English adopted French mannequin unchanged but also uses a modified version of the Dutch original, man(n)ikin. Regardless of spelling, there’s irony in the fact that the mannequins who, wraithlike, haunt the world of fashion modeling, and who are typically tall and slender women, should be described by a word that originally meant ‘little man.’ In a different line of development, Old High German mennisco, which corresponds to English man-ish, became Yiddish mensch, which has passed into English with the sense ‘a decent, responsible man; one who behaves as people expect a man to.’
©2010 Steven Schwartzman
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alemán
27 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in language Tags: English language, etymology, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
Siglo de Oro writer Mateo Alemán was Spanish, and politician Miguel Alemán rose to be president of Mexico, yet alemán in Spanish means ‘German,’ which is the translational truth, and closer to the etymological one as well. Spanish acquired alemán from Latin Alemannus, the singular of Alemanni, which was how the Romans Latinized the name of a certain Germanic tribe. With a flash of insight, all men and women who speak English, which is after all a Germanic language, may see that the members of the ancient Alemanni called themselves straightforwardly ‘all men,’ (where men had the general sense ‘people,’ as opposed to the narrower sense ‘male human beings’). Similarly, the normandos/Normans are ‘north men,’ people who lived and still live in the north of what is now France, in the region therefore called Normandía/Normandy.
©2010 Steven Schwartzman
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loco
26 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in language Tags: English language, etymology, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
In the issue of the journal The Friend dated “Fifth-Day, Sixth Month 16, 1910,” there appeared an unsigned story entitled “Blossom and the Crazy Weed.” Here’s a passage from it:
Blossom was sick, and nobody could tell what was the matter. Everyone had a remedy to suggest, however. “Maybe she’s been lying in the wet grass and taken cold. Let’s soak her feet in hot water and give her some ginger tea,” said Lena.
“More likely she’s been eating too much,” said Bob, remembering the usual cause of his aches and pains. “Better put her on short rations for a while.”
“Give her a pill, one with sugar all over it,” suggested Baby Jean. “That will make Blossom all well.”
When the Mitchells sold their city home and went to live on a Western ranch, Papa Mitchell gave his four little children a share in the live-stock: A lamb, a half dozen Plymouth Rock chickens, two pigs, and Blossom, the beautiful brown and white Jersey, but of none of these possessions were they as fond as of Blossom.
“She does such queer things, papa,” Roger, the eldest boy, explained to his father. “Sometimes she acts so stupid and then she will cut up the funniest antics as if she didn’t know what she was doing.”
“Well, if she isn’t better by to-morrow,” said Papa Mitchell, “we’ll have to send for Neighbor Dickinson. They say he’s the best horse and cow doctor in the county.”
That evening as Roger sat reading the farm paper his father took, he suddenly exclaimed, “Sounds amazingly like it.” When his brother asked him what he meant, he said, laughingly, “That’s a secret only good enough for one.” He went early to bed that evening, and the next morning before anybody except the sun was up, he was on his way to the lower range, where Blossom and the other cattle pastured. For a full half hour he hunted all over the big pasture. Suddenly he heard a sharp rattle. It sounded very much like a rattlesnake, but it proved to be only the rattling of seeds in the dried pod of a plant. “That’s it,” he cried, when he had looked at the weed. “It’s exactly like the description in the paper.” He picked some of it and hurried homeward. The family were eating breakfast when he arrived.
“You needn’t bother to send for a doctor to find out what is the matter with Blossom,” he said to his father. “I’ve found out the trouble. Blossom’s ‘plumb locoed,’ as the cowboys say. See! I found this in the pasture.” And he held up the weed he had brought with him.
Woolly locoweed in west Texas
His father examined the plant carefully. “You’re right, my son. It’s the dangerous loco weed.” Roger, you have probably saved us hundred of dollars by this discovery.”
“Is it poison? Mustn’t we touch it?” inquired the younger children eagerly.
“To horses and cattle it is a slow poison, like cigarettes or drink made of alcohol to human beings. ‘Loco’ weed is really the Spanish for ‘crazy’ weed.”
…
The father in the story was of course correct, and one early English use of loco was, as we see here, in locoweed. The fact that these leguminous plants grow natively in the Southwest of the United States, where Spanish had long been the lingua franca, explains why the plant’s English name locoweed has a Spanish word in it. A century after the story in the magazine, which happens to be this very year, we find English speakers using loco by itself as a lighthearted way of saying ‘crazy.’
In every language there are common words whose origins aren’t clear, and Spanish loco is one of them. A plausible hypothesis is that it came from the Arabic feminine adjective lawqa’, which meant ‘foolish.’ Whatever the origin of loco, it has given rise in Spanish to the noun locura ‘craziness’ and the verb enloquecer ‘to go crazy,’ which is what happens to animals that eat locoweed.
©2010 Steven Schwartzman
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vaca
25 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in language Tags: English language, etymology, Latin, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
Yesterday we talked about the way English transformed Spanish vaquero ‘cowboy’ into the colloquial buckaroo. Vaquero itself came from Spanish vaca ‘cow,’ which developed from the synonymous Latin vacca. The Latin adjective vaccinus ‘having to do with cows’ has become English vaccine; the connection is that in the 1700s Edward Jenner discovered that germs from cowpox, a mild affliction of milkmaids, could be used to vaccinate people against the deadly disease smallpox. In a similar way, the Spanish adjective vacuno ‘pertaining to bovine cattle’ has led to the noun vacuna ‘vaccine,’ with matching verb vacunar ‘vaccinate.’ English vaccinia means ‘cowpox’ or ‘the [usually mild] reaction that a person vaccinated against smallpox may experience.’
© 2010 Steven Schwartzman
buckaroo
24 Sep 2010 2 Comments
in language Tags: English language, etymology, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
Yesterday in an e-mail a friend wrote “Will do, buckaroo.” A Spanish speaker may recognize that the colloquial buckaroo, which entered English in the 1800s, is just an Anglicized version of vaquero ‘cowboy,’ with the b of buckaroo doing a good job in representing the Spanish pronunciation of v. Although Spanish vaquero and English cowboy both refer to the cattle that the workers herded, the men actually rode horses. That may explain the reshaping of the first part of vaquero, with the vowel a, to English buck, which is what an unbroken horse often does when a cowboy first tries to ride it. We also note that the middle-syllable stress of the Spanish original has been bucked onto the last syllable of the English version.
The use of buck as a verb, which comes from the noun buck that means ‘a male animal,’ also goes back to the cowboy days of the 1800s. Writing to you from Texas, I can’t resist quoting what Farmer and Henley said about that usage in their famous Slang and Its Analogues, which appeared in seven volumes from 1890–1904:
“This term, as applied to horses, consists in plunging forward and throwing the head to the ground in an effort to unseat the rider—a motion of which probably no domesticated beast is capable, aside from the Texan miserable and treacherous species of horse. A raw hand thus relates his experience:—‘When I was told how hard he could buck, I only laughed, my impression being that no pony standing on four legs could throw me off. I mounted my new horse, and waving my brand new hat about my head, galloped away in a dignified style. Suddenly the horse stopped. His ears went back, and his hind legs went between his front. The motion was a curious one. But I did not fall. Realizing that the man on his back could ride a little bit, the pony got right down to business. My stomach seemed to fly up into my mouth and millions of stars floated about my head. I am not prepared to state what kind of hold the pony got on me, but I went sprawling on the ground, my nose making an irrigating ditch. It was all done not more than one hundred yards from where my girl was standing. I stuck on well, however, as the saddle, blanket, gun and bridle came off with me. The wild yell that greeted my exploit nearly drove me mad. While I spit the dirt and curses out of my mouth, I thought that if I had that pony back I’d break him in or break my head. It ran out on the prairie and joined the Government herd. When an old-timer tried to fix things for me in front of my girl by saying, “It’s no disgrace, pardner, that horse can buck off a porous plaster,” I thanked him from the bottom of my heart.’”
© 2010 Steven Schwartzman
vida
23 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in language Tags: English language, etymology, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
Corresponding to Latin vivere, the ancestor of Spanish vivir ‘to live,’ was the noun vita ‘life,’ which has become Spanish vida. My wife, who is from the Philippines, and whose native language of Cebuano absorbed hundreds and hundreds of Spanish words during the centuries when Spain controlled the Philippines, sometimes uses the expression kontrabida. With reference to a story, drama, or movie, it means ‘a bad guy, a person who causes trouble.’ The word is obviously from Spanish contra + vida, yet I don’t find contravida in any of my Spanish dictionaries, including the one published by the Real Academia Española. The word seems to have fallen out of use in Spanish, but if any native Spanish speaker who reads this does use the term or has heard it being used, please let us know. Maybe we can start a campaign to revive this useful expression.
Based on Latin vita, Spanish and English have the adjectives vital and viable ‘capable of sustaining life.’ Most people are surprised to learn that our familiar word vitamina/vitamin goes back no farther than 1920, when Polish biochemist Casimir Funk coin the term based on what proved to be the false assumption that vitamins contain amino acids.
© Steven Schwartzman
A quickie—but not so fast
22 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in language Tags: English language, etymology, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
Not only people learning English, but even native English speakers, who know quick primarily as a synonym of fast, may find it hard to understand why a statement like “The slow, methodical, unrelentingly negative review cut him to the quick” means what it does. Encarta® defines the noun quick as ‘somebody’s deepest feelings or most private emotions.’ The Macmillan Dictionary explains that the quick is ‘the sensitive skin under your fingernails and toenails.’ That dictionary also notes that the archaic phrase the quick and the dead means ‘the living and the dead,’ an explanation that cuts to the quick of the matter, etymologically speaking. Old English cwicu, the ancestor of quick, meant ‘living, alive.’ From ‘alive’ came the sense ‘lively,’ and then the ‘fast’ that is the main modern meaning of quick. Etymologists have traced Old English cwicu back to the Indo-European root *gwei-, which indeed meant ‘to live.’ Whereas the guttural element of the original gw- survived in Old English cwicu and the modern quick, a suffixed version of the root *gwei- gave rise to the Latin verb for ‘to live,’ vivere, whose two v’s the Romans pronounced as a w sound. Latin vivere in turn developed to the Spanish vivir that was the subject of yesterday’s posting—as I’ll be quick to point out.
© 2010 Steven Schwartzman
vivir
21 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in language Tags: English language, etymology, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
Sometimes, even though Spanish and English share compounds and derivatives of a word, English lacks a basic version of the word. That’s the way it is with vivir ‘to live’ and vivo ‘alive’: there is no matching English *vive, but both languages have revivir/revive, sobrevivir/survive, and vivificar/vivify ‘to make come alive,’ along with the adjectives vívido/vivid and vivaz/vivacious. We’ve borrowed Latin vivarium ‘a place for live game, a fish pond, a preserve’ as vivario/vivarium ‘an indoor enclosure for studying animals in semi-natural conditions’; by natural development Spanish has the doublet vivero ‘a fish farm, plant nursery.’ With Latin parere ‘to bring forth,’ the parent of Spanish parir, we have vivíparo/viviparous ‘bearing live young.’ A similar Latin vivipera got contracted to vipera, which was ‘a type of venomous snake believed to bear live young rather than lay eggs’; that is the source of víbora/viper. And expectant human parents who look up the origins of names may choose Viviana/Vivian for a baby girl that they hope will grow up to be lively.
© Steven Schwartzman
