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Cheese, Brother?
Mar. 19th, 2013 07:23 amLately I've been reading Ralph Penny's A History of the Spanish Language. I'm only about a dozen pages in, but I've already run into a couple of interesting items, in the discussion of the variety of Latin spoken in Iberia.
a) Penny comments that the peripheral regions of the Roman Empire - here, Iberia and Romania - preserved some conservative features, including vocabulary, even after they had been superseded in the core areas (Gaul, Italy). One example he cites is Latin caseu, "cheese", surviving in Spanish as queso as opposed to French fromage, Italian formaggio. This set me to wondering about English cheese, which looks as if it's derived from caseu. I assumed it was a borrowing from Norman French; perhaps Normandy was "peripheral enough" to have preserved the older form? I should have been tipped off by the German cognate Käse; it turns out that the West Germanic ancestor of English, Dutch, and German borrowed caseu from Latin very early, and the current English and German words are descended from that.
b) Iberian Latin also featured some innovations of its own. One led to Spanish hermano, "brother". Latin frater is recognizable in Italian fratello and more dimly in French frère. The Spanish originated in the Latin phrase fratre germanu, "true brother" - i.e., a brother who shares both parents, as opposed to a half-brother or adopted brother. The first word was trimmed, and the second is the direct ancestor of hermano. The English phrase cousin german, for the child of one's aunt or uncle, is cut from the same cloth, and so is our germane, a metaphoric extension from literal "closely related".
This book looks like it'll be fun.
a) Penny comments that the peripheral regions of the Roman Empire - here, Iberia and Romania - preserved some conservative features, including vocabulary, even after they had been superseded in the core areas (Gaul, Italy). One example he cites is Latin caseu, "cheese", surviving in Spanish as queso as opposed to French fromage, Italian formaggio. This set me to wondering about English cheese, which looks as if it's derived from caseu. I assumed it was a borrowing from Norman French; perhaps Normandy was "peripheral enough" to have preserved the older form? I should have been tipped off by the German cognate Käse; it turns out that the West Germanic ancestor of English, Dutch, and German borrowed caseu from Latin very early, and the current English and German words are descended from that.
b) Iberian Latin also featured some innovations of its own. One led to Spanish hermano, "brother". Latin frater is recognizable in Italian fratello and more dimly in French frère. The Spanish originated in the Latin phrase fratre germanu, "true brother" - i.e., a brother who shares both parents, as opposed to a half-brother or adopted brother. The first word was trimmed, and the second is the direct ancestor of hermano. The English phrase cousin german, for the child of one's aunt or uncle, is cut from the same cloth, and so is our germane, a metaphoric extension from literal "closely related".
This book looks like it'll be fun.
